This week, Andrew Moore talks with Frederick “Suizo” Mendler, co-founder of TrueAbility.
The San Antonio-based startup, founded by four former Rackspace employees, known as Rackers, has created an online testing and assessment system for technical job candidates. The TrueAbility test gives recruiters and employers an accurate view of a job candidate’s technical skills.
TrueAbility, which recently raised $750,000, is also part of the TechStars Cloud program taking place at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio. And it’s one of the finalists in the South by Southwest Accelerator program.
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Focusing on H1-B Visas, patent reform and broadband spectrum access are the big issues concerning the technology industry this year, said Michael McGeary, co-founder and senior strategist with Engine Advocacy.
McGeary spoke with more than 100 people gathered on the rooftop of the Rattle Inn Wednesday night in downtown Austin.
He flew in for the event, hosted by Google, from San Francisco. He’s visiting other tech hubs around the country to spread the word about the need for startups to get involved in federal, state and local legislation governing high tech issues.
“I’ve been in Austin more than any other entrepreneurial community outside of San Francisco,” he said. “The energy here is really different than just about anywhere else.”
Engine Advocacy, a nonprofit organization, seeks to educate policy makers about the impact of the startup community and to help shape laws that govern it.
One of the hottest issues concerns H1-B Visas, which allows people from other countries to work in the U.S. under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Right now, the federal government restricts how many H1-B Visas get issued every year.
The Startup Act 3.0 is federal legislation that seeks to create “75,000 new “entrepreneur visas” every year to founders who raise $100,000 for new ventures that hire at least two employees within a year and at least five in the following three years,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
In addition, the legislation would create “50,000 visas per year for foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, and spend at least five years pursuing careers in those fields,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Some in the technology industry argue that restrictions on H1-B Visas keep out the best and brightest from the U.S. economy and instead sends graduate-level college educated workers back to their native countries to compete against the United States.
The Austin event was about creating a dialogue with technology companies about issues important to them in growing their companies.
“This event is about getting tech companies involved in the process,” said Claire England, founder of RISE Austin, a nonprofit organization, which puts on a free annual entrepreneurial conference.
“It’s really critical for entrepreneurs and startups to get involved in the process,” England said. “That’s how they can exact change.”
For example, entrepreneurs and startups helped change the crowdfunding laws to allow companies to seek funding from unaccredited investors. The law passed last year as part of the JOBS Act, which President Obama signed into law last April. The equity-based crowdfunding is still being held up though because the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission must issues new rules to ensure consumers are protected in the process.
“The Google Austin office, along with Engine Advocacy, the Austin Technology Council, and RISE Global, sponsored this event because the tech sector is a very important part of our economy here in Texas,” Gerardo Interiano, said in a news statement. “We wanted to gather together with the tech community in a fun and social way and share what we believe are our key issues and challenges and opportunities for 2013.”
The Austin Technology Council isn’t advocating any particular issues at present, said Grover Bynum, senior advisor to council.
“We are advocating for Austin Technology and we’re here to support innovation.”
Well that didn’t last long.
One minute, Heyride is making all this noise in Austin and disrupting the taxi industry there.
And the next, it’s swallowed whole by SideCar, a competitor, based in Silicon Valley.
On Thursday, SideCar, a ridesharing startup, announced it acquired the assets of Heyride.
SideCar has a free app for smart phones that hooks people who need rides up with pre-screened drivers.
SideCar is making the acquisition just in time for SXSW. That’s where Josh Huck, the founder and CEO of Heyride, got the idea to create Heyride in 2012. He noticed a shortage of cabs and wished there was a better way to get from place to place than taking a traditional taxi.
While Heyride was only available in Austin, SideCar offers its services in San Francisco and Seattle and has already provided people with more than 100,000 rides. The company will expand its service to Philadelphia, Austin and Los Angeles this weekend and is actively recruiting drivers in New York, Chicago, Washington, DC and Boston.
“We’ve heard from people across the country and around the world that they want the SideCar community to take root in their cities and towns,” Sunil Paul, CEO of SideCar, said in a news release. “Heyride’s talented team has developed a unique design and experience that will help take the rideshare movement we started here in San Francisco nationwide. We are thrilled to welcome Heyride to the SideCar family.”
Heyride had five full time employees. They will join the SideCar staff. Silicon Hills News did this interview with Huck last November.
SideCar has raised $10 million from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Google Ventures, Spring Ventures, Huron River Ventures, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures and others.
Heyride raised $400,000 from Silverton Partners in Austin.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The ridesharing industry is beginning to take off despite some early regulatory troubles. In addition to the traditional taxi cabs, Sidecar faces competition from startups Uber and Lyft.
This week, We Are Austin Tech, the weekly video site highlighting local movers and shakers in the technology industry, has put the spotlight on Erica Douglass, founder of Whoosh Traffic.
Douglass moved to Austin last year from Silicon Valley. Susan Lahey wrote this profile of her last year.
“Erica started a web hosting and development company in 2001, at age 20,” according to We Are Austin Tech. “Over the next 6 years, she turned the business into one of Silicon Valley’s most well-known web hosting companies, hosting sites for hundreds of the Valley’s most successful startups.”
She sold her company in 2007 for $1.1 million and a few years later launched a popular blog called Erica.biz and then Whoosh Traffic.
Rackspace and Dell are among more than 70 big companies vying to win the best video in the Center for Corporate Citizenship’s annual Film Festival.
The competition allows companies to showcase their video skills to communicate how they give back to the communities they serve.
Voting kicked off today and runs through March 1. Only one vote per person. The ten finalists will be reviewed by a panel of judges who will choose the winner.
The winner will be announced during the 2013 International Corporate Citizenship Conference April 21 through 23 in Boston.
So for, Rackspace is in the lead with 14 percent of the votes cast.
Dell is in second place with 11 percent of the votes.
BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Patti Rogers, founder of Rallyhood
“We have all these different ways to keep track of the projects at work and our kids’ soccer teams and the boards we’re on and the second grade class activities. It’s in all these different silos. But that’s not how we live our lives,” says Rallyhood founder Patti Rogers.
Rallyhood provides private dashboards for any kind of group to communicate over issues, share photos, build a community calendar, sign up volunteers, collect RSVPs and dues and more. It can replace giant streams of email, Facebook and Yahoo group pages, Google shared calendars, Evites and Paypal accounts, all in one application. And that doesn’t include the customization the company can do for groups with premium services.
Plus, you can build a “Rally” around anything, from a company project to a youth sports team to your parents’ anniversary party. And if you have multiple “Rallies” you can get a daily schedule that incorporates all your group activities and deadlines, right in your inbox. The calendar can be exported to other sites like Google and Outlook. It even has integrated maps so you don’t have to look up where you’re supposed to be.
Kevin Embree, CEO of Online Persona, used to run his online marketing company on Base Camp. But there were issues. Techies related comfortably to Base Camp, but clients who weren’t particularly tech savvy, including many of the non-profits the company works for, didn’t want to mess with it.
“They were wondering ‘What is this I’ve been invited to? How am I going to use this?’” Embree said. Clients who rejected Base Camp stuck to emailing, which required tens of emails back and forth every day and made communication a chore. That resulted in lower client satisfaction rates.
With Rallyhood, Online Persona could maintain running conversations on the dashboard, download screenshots of social media and other campaigns, and divide information according to who needed access. One of his clients, YMCA, became so enamored of the tool it started using it nationwide to keep track of all of its offices.Plus, Embree says, he keeps track of his daughter’s volleyball. It’s right there on the dashboard with his work stuff, which is a pretty snazzy marketing strategy on Rallyhood’s part. Each person who is won over converts others, because it makes his or her life easier.
This might prove a giant coup in the case of some of Rallyhood’s customers, like the Girl Scouts of Central Texas which includes 22,000 scouts and 13,000 adults, all of whom are converting to Rallyhood for Girl Scout related communications over the next two years. Lolis Garcia-Babb, Director of Marketing and Communications says some members have fallen in love with the application while others are putting off learning it as long as possible.
The organization has 85 service units, each overseeing 60 troops. It puts out a magazine twice a year. But quickly communicating something important–like when a Central Texas girl was named among only 15 recipients of a national award–is an emailing nightmare. With Rallyhood, it’s put on a central Rally and everyone gets the news. More importantly for the organization, it gets the news privately. Girl Scouts is extremely cautious what information the public has access to. When they used Yahoo Groups, too much information was accessible.
Rogers is thrilled about groups like the Girl Scouts and its talking to other regions. But that’s not what she had in mind when she first envisioned Rallyhood. In fact, in many ways the company started the day Rogers found out she had breast cancer. She was 41.
“I was merging into traffic, wearing a Bat Girl suit because we were having a big ol’ Halloween party and I was planning to pick up my kids dressed as Bat Girl,” she recalls. “And they called and said ‘We wanted to let you know you have breast cancer….’ My first thought was ‘No, this is Patti ROGERS…R-O-G-E-R-S, not Roberts….’ I kept it together and at the end of the evening we kicked out the last few neighbors and unplugged the margarita machine and I told my husband.”
The next many months would bring surgeries and chemo and a hugely supportive community that was a full-time job to manage. Many people wanted to help, but didn’t know how. People wanted to bring meals but didn’t know what. Rogers’ sister tried to orchestrate the tremendous outpouring but it involved a jillion emails and phone calls that ate up her time. And that’s what sparked Rogers’ idea. When she recovered, she considered how great it would be to have a central place where people can go to get information, sign up to help in an organized way, without having to bother the family or lamely offer “If there’s anything I can do….”
If someone uses Rallyhood for support around a sick friend or family member, people can sign up for meals on a calendar. They can see, without having to ask, if the family is gluten free or vegetarian or really hates broccoli. They can make sure that not everyone brings lasagna or offer to help carpool, if that’s what’s needed instead.
But Rogers wanted to make the tool “group agnostic” so it wouldn’t create just another silo. She wanted it to be something that schools and organizations, businesses and families or really any group could use and incorporate other groups. One of the first groups she took it to was a school that had not only classrooms, but teams, organizations, teacher groups, parent groups, boosters and more. The key was getting rid of clutter and chaos. So when the date for a meeting has to change, the site administrator can change it on the calendar and the word will go out to all the group members, rather than having to send a mass email.
Another organization that uses it is Komen Austin. While it’s a small office, when it comes to organizing committees and volunteers, say for Race for the Cure, they needed a tool that could encompass a crowd.
“I love it,” said Christy Casey-Moore, Executive Director. “I can’t be involved in all the nitty-gritty of the committees but I’m on all the rallies and I can go to rally, click on it, and there’s everything.”
Rogers has a web design background. Her husband is in IT in software. They bootstrapped the company in 2010 when she recovered from her cancer and began to wireframe the new site. In 2011 they raised $500,000 of angel seed funding with an additional $1.3 million injected by a group of professional angels led by Tom Meredith and Calendars.com. The company has nine employees at its downtown offices and several engineers off site. As a team, they not only provide the basic Rallyhood services but a high level of customization, said Garcia-Babb.
“I’ve been told I am a good listener,” Rogers said. “I’m eager to find out what isn’t working and fix it in the marketing and design before we build it. Then we measure and iterate. What is it about that feature that is slowing up adoption, making it difficult for leaders to use?” At first, for example, she focused n making the application easier to use in terms of membership lists and data but that left something to be desired in engagement. So then that piece needed attention.
Her real focus is building community and reducing chaos and clutter. That, she said, leads to a happy life.
A Rallyhood account is free and small groups can use it without cost. But there are premium services offered to large organizations based on the scope of services required. Those services include customization of the dashboard, advanced branding solutions and community-specific templates and advanced analytics and products. Enterprise services include gray and white labeling for organizations who want to create their own branded communities with Rallyhood’s feature set.
Now it’s just a matter of making it the go-to in the world of social communication and organization.
As Garcia-Babb said: “If you can capture the imagination of your audience, and if they feel like they’re getting left out, that’s what’s going to drive them there.”
Quiller has a cure for writer’s block.
The new iPad daily journal app provides inspiring quotes and other prompts written by experts to get you to put the words into your journal.
“I developed Quiller in response to a need,” Amy Randolph, creator of Quiller, based in Austin, said in a news release. “Many people want to write about their lives but don’t know how to get started or keep the momentum. Quiller is about accessing complex emotions that can be difficult to describe. Quiller provides direction, encouragement, even insight, to help users capture their experiences in ways that can have a healthy, productive impact on their lives.”
This is definitely not your grandma’s journal. This app includes unique designs, a layout like a book, photo uploading, Facebook sharing, downloads into PDF or text files and iCloud sync ability.
It’s available at the Apple App store for $1.99 and includes five writing categories and more than 200 prompts. Additional writing categories and prompts are available at an additional charge.
“The additional categories aren’t just there to help journalers address a variety of life’s challenges and personal growth opportunities,” according to Randolph. “We want to put an end to writer’s block once and for all.”
CardioNet of Philadelphia and AirStrip Technologies of San Antonio are partnering to develop and market new mobile solutions for patient monitoring.
AirStrip’s mobile app will provide live patient data from CardioNet’s Mobile Cardiac Outpatient Telemetry directly to doctors and other hospital workers’ mobile phones and tablet computers.
The integrated technologies aim to improve patient monitoring and the delivery of healthcare services by doctors.
“This partnership is the foundation for a powerful end-to-end cardiac care package that promises to have a game changing impact on 30-day readmissions for heart failure,” Alan Portela, AirStrip CEO said in a news release. “Our pioneering mobility solution delivers critical patient data to physicians anywhere across the care continuum to encourage better decision-making and improve both the timeliness and quality of care.
Details of the partnership were not disclosed. The companies expect to release its product by mid-year.
“This collaboration is one of the most exciting initiatives CardioNet has embarked on to date,” Joseph H. Capper, CardioNet’s President and CEO said in a news release. “As the leader in the mobile cardiac telemetry market, we are always looking for avenues to expand the utilization of our data. The AirStrip solution is the leading FDA-cleared technology for the transmission of virtual, live ECG waveforms to a healthcare provider’s mobile device. This solution is rapidly transforming the way clinical data is delivered and
integrated in a point of care setting.”
Xeris Pharmaceuticals of Austin has raised an additional $6 million.
The pharmaceutical company has developed injectable treatments for diabetes, epilepsy and other diseases.
Xeris raised its money from private foundations, federal government research grants, commercialization funds and private investors.
It has received funds from the National Institutes of Health and Small Business Innovation Research grants and private foundation funds from the Epilepsy Therapy Project and the Helmsley Trust.
“Collaboration with an academic group that is recognized as a leader in the field of research adds another level of credibility to our efforts which is very powerful,” Yash Sabharwal, COO and CFO of Xeris, said in a news release. “Since 2009, Xeris has raised over $3M in non-dilutive grant funding with another $2M in applications still pending.”
The company has also raised more than $5 million from angel investors.
It has also received $1.9 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.
The company will continue to raise funds and is looking for a Series B round of investment.
Toshiba Corp. has purchased Consert Inc., a privately-held company in San Antonio.
Consert is an energy management company that makes smart meters for homes and small businesses.
Consert is working with CPS Energy in San Antonio. It estimates its energy efficiency savings from 140,000 homes generates 250 megawatts that it supplies to the utility. The rollout started in mid-2012.
Under the terms of the acquisition, Consert is now a subsidiary of Toshiba.
“Operations in North America will be integrated with Landis+Gyr, the leading global provider of integrated energy management products and a Toshiba Group company,” according to the company.
“Consert is an ideal fit with Toshiba, a global leader in power generation, and the acquisition will add a new level of technology to our smart community business” Takeshi Yokota, Toshiba Cor. Executive Officer and Corporate Vice President said in a news release. “Smart community is a fundamental solution that includes energy management on both the demand and supply sides, along with management of transportation, water and in the medical field. Consert adds significantly to our smart community portfolio and advances our ability to propose industry-leading solutions in power supply and demand. We are now better positioned to support major utilities in generating and delivering stable power supply and to ensure end-user environments that optimize energy use and maximize energy savings”
Roy Moore, Consert’s Co-founder and Chief Development Officer said in a statement: “This step by Toshiba and Landis+Gyr is a huge milestone for our employees, partners and owners. It validates what our customers already know about the VPP—it is a solution designed to create and leverage a smarter grid.”
“Consert moved its headquarters from Raleigh, N.C., to San Antonio in 2011 as part of a deal that it signed with CPS to sell the city-owned utility its system,” according to the San Antonio Express-News.
The company has about 60 employees in San Antonio, the Express-News reports.
