BY IAN PANCHEVRE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

MetroHi.com , a San Antonio based startup in the review management space, started with humble beginnings but is now picking up momentum, and it’s all thanks to a unique approach to an enduring problem.
Radu Istrate, the founder and CEO of MetroHi and a Boston College graduate, first came to San Antonio in 2006 to start a viral marketing company with his sister, a Trinity University grad. His experience with the promotional aspects of online marketing got him thinking broadly about analytics, reviews and reputation management. And he spotted an opportunity.
At the time that MetroHi was founded – in the ever-so-distant era of early 2011 – a wave of interest and excitement was building in the social media analytics space. But the review analytics space was still relatively nascent, and thus afforded an abundance of opportunities for growth and disruption.
“Now there are a lot of ‘Reputation Management Companies’,” explains Istrate. “But a lot of those companies don’t have a technology, they make claims about managing reviews, but they don’t have an application or any…” Istrate pauses to search for the right term, “technical gravitas.”
MetroHi, on the other hand, has plenty of gravitas, both technical and otherwise.
In pursuit of a core mission to provide local businesses an easy and convenient solution for reputation management, MetroHi offers several key services. The first, Review Site Placement, gets a business placed on all the top review sites. The second, Review Boost, drives new reviews for the business from existing customers. Additionally, MetroHi offers a review aggregator dashboard that allows businesses to monitor activity across a number of different review sites, while generating regular reports that capture broad trends.
Despite building an impressive engine for reputation management, MetroHi believes its role transcends the web and includes offline approaches to building reputation.
“MetroHi boosts reviews through a process that combines online approaches with physical materials and in-store promotions,” Istrate elaborates. By producing and distributing materials (e.g. cards and display stands that contain QR codes, which in turn link to a custom landing page) MetroHi makes it easy for customers to post reviews on behalf of brick-and-mortar businesses.
Wait a minute, a review management company that encourages more reviews? This approach may seem counter-intuitive because it cuts against the grain of most reputation management companies, which promote their business by spreading fear of negative reviews.
But MetroHi doesn’t see it that way.
“If you give your customers an easy and convenient way to post a review, the people that will most likely post are your satisfied customers” notes Istrate. Seen another way, if it’s inconvenient to post a review, only the unsatisfied customers will go out of their way to post about their experience.
“By addressing the convenience issue, you give a voice to the satisfied customers and impact the broader conception of the business.”
In turn, MetroHi has adopted a philosophy that values feedback and embraces public chatter. And it just so happens that the lone, disgruntled customer has his voice drowned out by a chorus of overwhelmingly satisfied customers. This contrasts with the approach of traditional reputation management companies, which are more reactive in nature, offering after the fact solutions for businesses once negative reviews appear.
And it seems that MetroHi’s approach is working shockingly well.
Gina Umana, a Financial Advisor at Waddell & Reed, initially engaged MetroHi in the fall for review site placement but ended up subscribing for additional services. The results? “We weren’t even on the sixth page of Google and now the website shows up right away!” proclaims Umana. “We’ve received at least one client who said she was searching online, found our website, and decided to come in and do business.”
Ah, behold! The marvels of the web, and the accomplishment of a local reputation management company that managed to double its client’s monthly web traffic. Yes, gravitas is something MetroHi does not appear to lack. And this non-traditional approach towards review management may no longer be so counter-intuitive, now that it has had endured and proven itself.

Xtreme Power has raised $5.7 million of a $10 million offering, according to papers on file with the Securities and Exchange Commision.
The Austin-based company, founded in 2004, designs, manufactures and installs batteries and power management systems for utility companies. It has 100 employees, according to the Austin Business Journal.
Since launching, Xtreme Power has received $36 million from investors, the Austin Business Journal reports.

National Instruments, once a startup created by University of Texas graduate students, plans to create 1,000 new jobs and spend $80 million expanding its Austin campus.
National Instruments will also receive $4.4 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund and other incentives from the City of Austin.
“Central Texas’ flourishing high tech industry is further strengthened by National Instruments’ expansion, which will create 1,000 technical and engineering jobs and bolster Austin’s status as a hub for research, development and innovation,” Gov. Rick Perry said in a news statement.
National Instruments, which makes test equipment and software including LabVIEW, a graphical development program, plans to build a 300,000 square foot building next to its current site in North Austin.
“National Instruments was founded in Austin over 35 years ago and has grown to a global company, supplying tools to scientists and engineers around the world to accelerate productivity, innovation, and discovery,” National Instruments Chief Operating Officer Alex Davern said in a news statement.
The Austin American Statesmen has more on the announcement in this story by Kirk Ladendorf.

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Five weeks into its 13 week program, the startups in the TechStars Cloud program, based at Geekdom in San Antonio, had a chance to blow off some steam with some special, and helpful, guests – the alumni of last year’s first program. The alumni startups, which have been successful since exiting the program last April, returned to Geekdom to share beers and stories with the new TechStar Cloud startups at a series of informal hang outs around San Antonio.
Up to this point, the new startups had been meeting mostly with a torrent of highly experienced mentors who gave them advice on how to shape their business ideas and do their market research. Each new startup will meet with around 100 mentors throughout the TechStar Cloud program – as many as three a day in some cases. After the hectic pace of the first five weeks, hanging out with peers and eating barbecue was a welcome change.
TechStar Cloud Managing Director Jason Seats says that talking to alumni startups can be just as valuable as talking to big time mentors like the chairman of Rackspace Hosting, because the experiences of the year one teams hit much closer to home.
“Talking to a team that literally nine months ago was just at Demo Day makes it a lot easier to see the steps that those guys went through,” says Seats.
Currently, in the TechStars Cloud program, some of the fledgling startups are just now ironing out their business models after constant suggestions from mentors. Some still have a long way to go before they finish their prototype product and get ready to pitch to investors. Seats says that it’s important to give the new startups a sense that they aren’t alone in their experience of starting a company.
“This is a hard thing to do and the only people who know what you’re going through are the people who have done it,” says Seats. “It’s really hard
when you’re in the moment to take a step back and look at the big picture. Talking to someone who has walked that path and is a little bit ahead of you is really useful for that perspective.”
In addition to just hanging out and sharing personal stories, the alumni startups gave a few presentations. Andrew Cronk, co-founder and CEO of TempoDB, gave a presentation about his experience in changing from an engineer to a sales person as his new business grew.
“The first thing you have to overcome in your startup is the obscurity gap. No one has ever heard of you,” says Cronk. “You’re product is not going to sell itself. If you build it, they won’t come.”
Cronk says that selling his technology was a major learning experience. Explaining a highly technical product to a non-engineer was not a skill he possessed when he started the company.
“Convincing other people to spend a lot of money to buy new software from someone they’ve never heard of is an art,” says Cronk.
The new startups will get a lot of practice presenting their products in the next few weeks. Richard Grundy, co-founder of alumni startup Flomio, says that the process of explaining your ideas to a constant stream of mentors really helps a startup refine their sales pitch.
“CEOs and CTOs of successful startups, as well as formal companies, come through and vet your ideas and just ask you really hard questions. So it forces you to think about pretty much everything. By the time you’re pitching to an investor, who are very much like these people, it’s like second nature,” says Grundy.
Many of the returning companies also stressed the incredible importance of Demo Day, which is at the end of the whole program where the new startups pitch their idea to a theater full of potential investors. The startups will get eight minutes on stage at the downtown Charline McCombs Empire Theater to impress investors and secure funding for the future of their company.
“They are literally focusing a light on you at the end,” says Cronk. “So if you want to raise money, then raise money. If you want to do a big press release and do a product announcement, do that. But do something when you are on that stage.”
The new startups will practice their Demo Day presentations every other day after about the midpoint of the program. Mentors will watch and critique every aspect of the presentations from the presenter’s slides to their word choice.
Although the alumni weekend was much more of a hang-out time than a weekend of presentations, both Seats and the returning alumni companies view the social aspects of the TechStars Cloud progam as being central to the success of the participating startups.
“So much of TechStars is about shared personal experience that keeps you from making the mistakes that someone else made,” says Seats.
“There is a lot of cross-pollination of ideas, and that happens with the social component,” says Grundy.
“Something that I really appreciated about the program was really building those personal relationships – because that has, in several cases, allowed me to address issues that I was encountering with my business.”
The San Antonio TechStars Cloud incubator is only one of six TechStars programs across the country.
It focuses on cloud technology with one of the key sponsors being Rackspace Hosting. Twelve companies were chosen for the San Antonio program out of several hundred applicants. Managing Director Seats sometimes refers to the Cloud companies as the “plumbers of the internet” – providing technical services to address the needs of much bigger companies.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

BY LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Just in time for South by Southwest, there is a new way to network with a digital business card called Icon.
Icon is the brainchild of Kent Savage and Matt Hovis, technology startup veterans in Austin, who grew tired of having wads of crumpled business cards at the bottom of their briefcases after a business trip.
In the digital age, they thought there had to be a better way to network. So they created one that provides a slick digital image with critical contact information along with all of a person’s social streams.
Icon helps establish and package an individual’s brand just like Coke and Pepsi and Miller Lite brand their beverages. Last week, Savage and Hovis took time out of their busy schedules to answer a few questions about their new startup.

Q. What is Icon?

A. Matt: It is a digital business card system. We think of it as a wicked smart one. It does some things beyond sharing our contact information. Instead of going through a briefcase and digging for paper business cards, we created a system that allows us to have it on our smartphone so it’s with us wherever we go. At its simplest form it’s a wicked smart business card with a rich dynamic profile.
Kent: Think of it as turbo-charging your LinkedIn page and your Twitter feed. It provides a shareable view of who you are as an individual.

Q. What problem are you trying to solve?

A. Matt: It’s the whole art of engagement. What it takes to make a great first impression and present your brand. Companies hire advertising agencies to build their brand. We, as professionals in this increasingly self-serve digital landscape, need to take our personal brand seriously and we need the tools to build our own network and brand in the industry. Crafty people have found ways to do that on their own through e-cards, email signatures and their own Web pages. Building a complete turnkey system is hard, but Icon makes it easy.

Q. Why are you two the best people to tackle this problem?

A. Kent: I’ve been part of multiple startups since 1996 in Austin from sales and marketing to CEO. I know what it takes to build businesses and build brands. How best to engage in the form of email. Matt has been on the digital production and creative agency side building brands for clients. We put our heart and soul and capital into making Icon the best it can be.
Matt: We think of this as personal brand building. We’re professional brands. Those of us who do a better job of managing our brand do better in business. We think about making consistent good impressions across all of our touchpoints. We don’t think there’s a good tool out there like this.

Q. What’s wrong with paper business cards?

A. Kent: We kind of galvanize our whole business around the business card. We thought things had gotten kind of sloppy around the art of engagement. We love business cards but they are obsolete in the way we exchange information today. With a smartphone, I can share my Icon with you. I can send you my digital business card mobile to mobile right there on the spot. I can be invited into your contact network. I don’t lose that spontaneity.
Matt: At the bottom of my briefcase is a crumpled wad of business cards.

Q. How do you plan to acquire customers?

A. Kent: SXSW is right around the corner and this is really your survival kit. You’d be crazy to show up at SXSW without an Icon. It’s purely coincidental with when we are launching Icon. By doing a good job with our customers we expect to spread the word about Icon. We launched a private Beta starting Jan. 1st. Some of those featured Icons are in our gallery. By virtue of what Icon is and how it gets used there is a viral loop that occurs. You can add it to your phone. When someone receives it via text or email there is a button to sign up for Icon. And then secondly, there is simply a way to add this as your email signature. We’ve created this container of your personal content in the form of your Icon that recipients will be compelled to click on. We think by building a great product and service and by satisfying customers, we will grow. We literally turned on our Icon Pro version today that provides users the ability to brand their Icon with their businesses colors and logo and also provides you with your very own analytics telling you who is viewing, sharing and downloading your contact information and content. So now businesses can provide their employees with Icons rather than business cards. Icons are more affordable, always up to date and you never run out. So that’s how Icon will be adopted.

Q. How does it work?

A. Kent: You can share your Icon through the web, email, in person or via mobile. With our optimized mobile you can have your Icon on any smartphone platform. You can send your Icon via SMS or to an email address.
Matt: This brings back that dignity that business cards once had. They represented you. They formed an important barrier.

Q. How did you come up with idea?

Kent: It really just goes back to our experiences of trying to get our arms around multiple points of engagement. I have all these different contact points and social media properties. I have friends and family members on Facebook and then my LinkedIn, which is really nothing more than my resume, and then Twitter came on the scene as a celebrity and news outlet. I had my business card, mobile phone number and business addresses. We created a better way to organize all of these contact points and present yourself in the art of doing business across all of the ways we communicate in business. We also created Icon pro that allows you to brand with your color scheme and it comes with your own personal analytics dashboard to provide a command center so you can see who is viewing, sharing your Icon as well as downloading your contact information. We also aggregate across all your social media friends, followers and connections to let you gauge your reach and brand power.

Q. How does Icon make money?

A. Kent: It’s a freemium model. We have a totally functional solution that is free with Icon. Then we offer the Icon Pro version that is $4.99 per month. You can upgrade or downgrade. We also will be unveiling our Icon business for enterprises.

Q. Why did Icon launch in Austin?

A. Kent: Because it’s our home. We created our livelihood and we live our lifestyle and we’re committed to Austin. We’ve been here since 1996 building digital centric business and we didn’t have to go to Silicon Valley to make that happen. I was at a venture summit at Silicon Valley in December and you’d be amazed at how many of those people were talking about moving to Austin.
Matt: It’s ended up being an ideal place to grow a business like this. It’s sort of an ideal place we’ve ended up in.
Kent: We are also seeing the blending of Austin and San Antonio by connecting not only for lifestyle but also through economic development and business. It’s like what I saw with the telecom corridor in the ’80s and early ’90s in Dallas and Richardson, which provided a huge economic boost to the DFW area. We’re going to see similar opportunity through economic development efforts here.

Q. Who’s your competition?

A. Matt: Maybe the traditional business card. The way we’ve combined some critical components in a digital form. We don’t see there’s a lot competition looking to solve the problems.

Q. How is Icon financed?

A. Kent: It’s privately finance by angels – high networth angels. We initially raised $500,000 and as part of this launch we will start series A discussions.

Q. What are your plans for the company during the next year and the next few years?

A. Matt: We’ve got a defined roadmap of features we’d like to get started on. We charted several of those. Likely develop a mobile app version as well. Learning from customers initial use. We’ve got some dials to use. Look at the way Icon users integrate the product into their lives.

Q. Who makes up your team?

A. Kent: Matt and I are the co-founders. Then we have a great group of product development and strategists that work along side with us to put the dedication and brainpower into making Icon what you see today.

Q. What’s your favorite local startup resource?

A. Kent: My boat dock. That’s where Matt and I brainstorm these ideas. Matt: The espresso trailer: Patika that’s helped fuel these ideas.

Q. Where can I get my own Icon?

A. Go to Icon.me to create your own wicked-smart digital business card.

TSYS announced plans to acquire Austin-based NetSpend for $1.4 billion.
Netspend, founded in 1999, sells prepaid debit cards and other financial services to customers without bank accountants in the United States.
The deal calls for TSYS, based in Columbus, Georgia, to pay $16 in cash for each share of NetSpend common stock.
NetSpend, which sells its prepaid debit cards at more than 62,000 retail locations, is also a leading provider of corporate payroll card solutions, and has a direct distribution channel to reach consumers through online, mobile and direct marketing sources. It has more than 2.4 million accounts.
“The NetSpend acquisition is truly a transformational event for TSYS and consumers alike. It enables us to meet our strategic goals of diversifying our business, being a more innovative payment solutions provider and expanding our role within an area of payments that is expected to grow at a 20% annual rate over the next four years*. The acquisition also complements our already strong presence in the prepaid processing space,” Philip W. Tomlinson, chairman of the board and chief executive officer, TSYS said in a statement. “By acquiring NetSpend, we gain a leadership team with deep prepaid experience, a company with scalable technology and a differentiated product offering customized for the partners and channels they serve. NetSpend’s mission is to empower consumers with the convenience, security and freedom to be self-banked, and this promise aligns with TSYS’ people-centered payments approach that is expected to add significant capabilities in terms of future revenue growth for our companies.”
“With the strength and resources of TSYS, our opportunities are endless,” Dan Henry, chief executive officer of NetSpend, who will join the TSYS executive team, said in a statement. “I can’t think of a better, more strongly positioned industry leader who can help us take NetSpend to the next level. We bring a meaningful, fast-growing business to TSYS, and we will be able to offer our unique products and services to the unbanked consumer faster than ever before. We have built such an amazing team here at NetSpend, and we are excited to be the newest addition to TSYS.”
The transaction is expected to close in mid-2013, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval.

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The way advisory board member Sherry Lowry remembers it, Austin Women in Technology used to be the one place in Austin where women with the audacity to infiltrate the Old Geeks network—and women intrigued by technology—could converge. When it started, in 2002, it was fueled by the kind of camaraderie found in pioneering groups that are breaking new ground.
“We would support each other,” said AWT brand director Laurie Viault. “There was a networking and mentorship aspect, career development and leadership, counseling. We’d bounce ideas off each other. There were software and hardware engineers, sales and marketing people, a variety of women doing different things. Some women didn’t work in technology, they were just interested.”
The organization worked with local corporations like Microsoft, Intel and Dell so that whenever a female tech bigwig came to town, they’d nab her for an evening meeting and women converged to hear her speak.
But, as often happens, the seeds to the group’s demise were lodged in its success. As more women broke into the tech field, said Viault, splinter groups formed: Moms in tech, C-level executives in tech, solopreneurs in tech…. By the time the group reached its 10-year anniversary last year, it had lost focus and steam.
New President Carrie Lewis said the group had lost a lot of credibility as a source for cutting edge tech information. They had a website that looked “very 1982.” They used paper, rather than an online system for matching mentors and mentees, and their meeting topics strayed away from tech.
“We had a reputation for being very powder puff,” Lewis said. But she and the directors brought in for the 2012-2014 board session, intend to change all that around their new mission statement:
Austin Women in Technology’s mission is to cultivate a community of women interested in technology and to foster their personal and professional success by providing opportunities to connect, learn, grow, and lead.
The organization is rebranding with the help of Steel Branding and looking for organizational sponsors. They’ll continue their Intelligent Conversations series, formerly held every other month, but now they’ll only hold them quarterly and the conversations will be much more tech focused.
“We want to focus more on virtualization and cloud computing… gaming, really getting into the nitty-gritty of high tech things rather than leadership or business,” Viault says. Their 2013 topics include:
March 19th: The Hybrid approach to IT; a new model (IT acting as both provider and broker to all IT services. Important for SaaS models, enables IT to better serve the business by scalable services and provide adequate security).

June: Technology Legislation; an update from Texas 83rd Legislative Session. Speakers include Karen Robinson, CIO State of Texas and Deborah Giles: Founder, Texas Technology Consortium.

August 27th: With automation, robotics, 3D printing and Artificial Intelligence, where will the IT jobs of the future come from? (also tie into the new Digital executive role)

November 5th: Fireside Chat with a female IT leader.

In addition, the organization is planning two philanthropic events. The first will be a speed mentoring event with clients of Dress For Success, an organization that helps disadvantaged women achieve economic independence. And in the fall, the organization will hold a fundraiser for Girlstart, which provides STEM education programs for girls K-12.
And instead of having their own conference—the last was in 2011–they’ve partnered with Innotech for the Women of IT conference in October.
Also, they recently launched a mentorship pilot that starts in February and goes until the end of August. Participants will range from junior mentees to senior level IT executives looking to get to the next level in their careers. Valentine’s day was about matching the mentors and mentees.
And the group is split from some subgroups, notably the Women’s Executive Forum. AWT had struggled with disparate cultures between the two. Viault said the forum had a much heavier emphasis on policy and procedure than the rest of the group.
“People wanted to do stuff, not document stuff.”
Darby Armont, president of the Women’s Executive Forum, said that group decided it had enough members to strike out on its own, set its own course and have more control over its bylaws.
“Our culture, moving forward, is for women executives at the decision-making place in their organizations. AWT is a little bit broader,” Armont said.
When AWT started, the number of women in the decision-making place was, no doubt, much smaller. As Sherry Lowry recalls, women tried to emulate men in the industry while they were finding their place in it, making their connections at UT games and on the golf course, whether they wanted to or not—because that’s how men did it.
Coalescence happened around women’s sense of disenfranchisement in a male dominated world. According to a study by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, in the year 2000, women only held 24 percent of U.S. STEM jobs. Ironically, while the number of STEM jobs increased by nearly eight percent between 2000 and 2009, women’s share of them didn’t.
Still, women in tech are no longer an oddity. Christina Trevino, who works as a leadership coach with members of AWT said she’s seen a definite shift in acceptance of women in technology. But when people no longer need solidarity to survive, solidarity sometimes suffers. And the magnetic power that fueled the group has dissipated.
“There was a need to have a vision that was energetic, making sure this was a vital organization,” she said. “Connection and learning something new are some of our core goals,”
“We’re not the only game in town anymore,” Viault said. “But we offer openness for some people who aren’t necessarily in technology, but interested in it, to join the group. Let’s face it, we’re inundated with technology no matter where we go. Sometimes people who aren’t in tech feel uncomfortable in tech groups. We want inclusive types of meetings where people can mingle, talk to somebody new and meet new people.”

SpareFoot took home gold in the third Austin Startup Games on Saturday.
“Last year in the winter games we took home bronze and then last summer we took home silver,” said Chuck Gordon, SpareFoot co-founder and CEO. “So it was our destiny today to get gold.”
SpareFoot competed against 15 other startup teams in game such as Ping Pong, Foosball, Flip Cup, Pop-a-Shot, Darts, Shuffleboard, Connect Four and Trivia. The mystery event was bull riding.
About 800 people including athletes and spectators turned out for the day-long event held at Austin City Limits downtown. The event raised money for a variety of charities and canned goods for the Capital the Capital Area Food Bank.
U-Ship claimed Silver and Spiceworks got the Bronze.
SpareFoot will receive $30,000 to donate to its charity, Kure It Cancer Research. uShip will receive $15,000 for Communities in Schools and Spiceworks will receive $3,000 for the ALS Association. Each startup receives a donation to give to their charity, said Gillian Wilson, president of the Austin Startup Games, which is a 501-C3 nonprofit organization.
This is the third time the Startup Games has been held and it’s doubled in size from the first games last year, Wilson said.
“The whole idea startup up because we love Ping Pong, we love playing beer pong and we wanted to see if other startups did too,” said Wilson, who works at uShip.