The Texas Ventures Labs Investment Competition will be held at the AT&T Executive Education Center in downtown Austin starting next Thursday.
The annual event is a business plan competition featuring 25 University of Texas at Austin graduate student teams.
Those teams are vying for prizes worth a total of $135,000.
The two-day event starts with the semi-finals on Thursday at 5:30 p.m. The top five teams will then advance to the final round on Friday starting at 6:30 p.m. The winner will be announced later that evening at a reception at Gabriel’s Cafe.
The public may attend, but registration is required.
There’s also a TVL Scholarship Competition held on Feb. 9th.

Eleven startups will join the Spring 2013 Accelerator put on by the Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs at the University of Texas at Austin.
Half of the companies focus on the software industry with the remaining companies working on hardware, biotechnology, consumer goods and healthcare.
“I am excited to see what the students and entrepreneurs in the program can produce this semester,” Sid Allen, CEO of Escapaide and Accenture Venture Partner for TVL, said in a news release. “I have high expectations as, across-the-board, this is the best group of companies TVL has ever worked with.”

From Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs, here’s the list of companies with a description of each one provided by TVL:

Cellular Machines designs and manufactures a $399 monitoring device that uses the cell phone network to send text message alarms and continuously send reports to a Cloud Server. Installation takes five minutes and no IT skills are needed. While still a start-up company, Cellular Machines has installed over 170 products as part of a test marketing program through the www.refrigerationmonitor.com website. Twenty percent of the customers have reordered. All of the software and circuit designs were done in-house. The success of the test marketing effort prompted the company to redesign the product to achieve 35% less cost and add a line of wireless temperature sensors. The TVL analysis will include recommendations of what markets to concentrate on and possible funding or merger opportunities.

Admittance Technologies is committed to improving the quality of life of patients with heart disease through innovative electrical engineering solutions. We provide a platform technology compatible with all existing pacemakers to determine heart volume in real time. CardioVol™, our flagship product, is ahead of the curve in three areas by providing: 1) the only device which can determine the hemodynamic stability of ventricular tachycardia, 2) an automatic therapy to tune the timing of pacemakers previously implanted in these patients, 3) the earliest detection of impending heart failure, and 4) technology that requires no additional surgery because we are piggybacking into devices already indicated in all patients with weakened hearts. We are currently working on a completely new platform with Texas Venture Labs involving tissue viability that will be valuable in markets such as kidney tumor surgery, organ transplant, and ablation surgery for arrhythmias.

Altogen Labs is a Good Laboratory Practice (GLP)-compliant laboratory that provides innovative biotechnology research services for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions worldwide. Our scientists have years of experience and expertise that includes all types of pre-clinical CRO studies, cell and molecular biology research and development. Altogen Labs recently developed a bioremediation technology based on an approach using the most potent oil-degrading bacteria found at multiple oil spill sites in Texas. This technology allows remediation of large amounts of hydrocarbon-contaminated liquids or soil. We have completed laboratory and field tests, performed genome characterization, secured IP, and are focused on commercialization of this technology.

StatusPath is an online platform for recurring employee status reports. Our customized status report templates and status report samples, intuitive user interfaces, and built-in collaborative tools enable our customers to write and read better status reports more quickly. We love status reports, so you can too.

Moniker Guitars gives you the ability to design and purchase custom electric guitars online. Choose colors, shapes, and parts and even add text and graphics to make your new guitar truly unique. All our guitars are built in Austin, TX and shipped to your door. Design yours at MonikerGuitars.com

Inifinite io is a stealth-mode IT systems company developing disruptive technology for the data storage market. Our game changing new technology combines Flash memory with Cloud storage to help data center managers gain control of exploding data storage costs. It’s an accepted fact that eighty percent or more of all data is written once and never accessed again and that inactive data in the typical data center doubles every twenty four months or less. Infinite io is developing technology to automatically control and manage the massive growth of inactive data that assumes the majority of most IT storage budgets while dramatically increasing the access performance of data that is actively used.

Vampire Labs was founded in Austin, TX, by a handful of eclectic, pioneering talents focused on ending vampire energy loss with innovations designed to save energy on a massive scale at minimal cost. To date, Vampire Labs has a dozen issued or pending patents for technology that eliminates vampire energy loss in mobile device battery chargers, external power supplies, and microprocessor cores.

AuManil assists the $40B (2015) online games market to reduce whale churn, increase whale conversion, improve whale acquisition and manage whales across a portfolio of games. Our team of data scientists analyze an individual player’s financial and game play behavior to profile each player in order to predict lifetime value, churn risk and life-cycle patterns. The patterns let our customers engage their players with personal messaging or offers to support that player’s competitive or bulk purchasing or Sunday-church-avoiding nature.

Carnegie Design Systems provides chip design services to the semiconductor industry in the processor, audio, communication, power and consumer electronic space. Carnegie Design System has developed a class of encryption algorithms based on correction codes for the data security space.

IncentTo is a SaaS Sales Incentive Management and Marketing Program Management company designed to simplify and automate sales incentives and marketing campaigns. It is specially designed to improve the performance of sales and marketing organizations through a web based system that quickly, efficiently, and consistently designs, deploys, procures, distributes and reports on sales incentive programs.

Kin Valley is the social network that provides the best way to Connect with Kin. Kin are the people who are most important to you…your family, your best friends, and your family support system — teachers, coaches, teammates, troop leaders, etc. Kin Valley also happens to be the only multi-generational social network where kids (including children under 13) and adults can interact freely. Only Kin Valley is “Safe for adults” and “Super-Safe for kids.” This makes Kin Valley the social network of choice for parents as well as many organizations including schools, sports leagues, and the Girl Scouts.

Every once in a while, startup entrepreneurs need a “Pep Talk” well here it is from Rainn Wilson’s SoulPancake and a 9-year-old kid from Tennessee known as Kid President.

This week, We Are Austin Tech features an interview with Josh Rubin, who can often be found covering startup events throughout the city for CNN.
Rubin runs the CNN Express Bus, a broadcast-ready mobile news bureau.
During his interview, Rubin discusses the coverage of technology in Austin and says it’s not where he thinks it should be. We couldn’t agree more at Silicon Hills News. That’s why we’re working to close the gap and bring more startup news to the Austin and San Antonio region.
That’s why organizations like We Are Austin Tech are vital to shining a spotlight on the innovators in the technology industry locally.
“I think there is over emphasis in America on the tech scenes of New York and Silicon Valley,” Rubin says in the interview. “I understand why it is, I understand that’s where the critical mass is. I’m not interested that. I think there is more fire in the middle of the country right now.”
Rubin also talks about how difficult it is for a startup to get national press and how the best stories bubble up through a network. That’s also why social media is so important in keeping an audience informed of a startup’s activities and progress. It’s easy to get buried in a fox hole and code, code, code until the cows come home. But it’s equally as important to go to the coffee machine and talk to other like minded individuals. Attend a few of the high tech happy hours and schmooze with other startups. You never know who you might meet and how they might positively impact your business.
Rubin also mentions Geekdom, which shows the cross-pollination going on among the two largest cities that make up this thriving technology region.
“The best piece of advice I was ever given for new ideas and for startups was… I was reporting… I was down at Geekdom, which is an incubator down in San Antonio.And I walk in there and I’m meeting all of these different companies, and I walk in and this one company is telling absolutely everything about their business: who they’re funded by, who their competitors are, what they do, how they do it. And I pause for a second and I say “Guys, thank you, but aren’t you concerned about intellectual property, aren’t you concerned about piracy?” Rubin says in the interview. “And they said no, flat out. Piracy is not the issue in startups. Obscurity is the issue in startups. You need to tell people what you do, you need to tell everybody what you do and you need to be telling them that all the time.”

It’s never too early to start thinking about South by Southwest.
The mammoth technology, music and film conference kicks off in March. Last year’s event attracted a record-breaking crowd of more than 20,000 people just for the Interactive part of the festival.
With that many in geeks in one place, it just makes sense to throw a job fair. At least it did to Chris Sherman, founder of Engage Digital. He created the first Austin Tech Career Expo last year as a matchmaker for job seekers and companies looking for tech savvy workers.
Already, 36 companies advertising more than 2,600 jobs have signed up to participate in the 2013 event, which is not affiliated with SXSW. The second annual Austin Tech Career Expo takes place March 8-9. It’s free and open to the public.
“Once again, this year’s event will highlight Austin’s unique quality of life while providing the local business community with a compelling solution addressing the region’s tech talent shortage,” Sherman said.
The Tech Career Expo takes place in the heart of downtown Austin from 11 am to 5pm on Friday, March 8th and Saturday, March 9th at Rivals Steakhouse on the corner of 5th street and Trinity street.
While more than half of the companies attending Tech Career Expo will be looking to fill positions located in Austin, many companies like Groupon, Inc. will also be searching for talent to send to offices all over the country and even in other parts of the world. Other positions are located in Denver, Boston, Silicon Valley, Portland, Paris, Berlin and many more cities all over the U.S. and the world.
Jobseekers should register to attend the free event.
The first 36 announced companies to participate in Tech Career Expo are: WhaleShark Media (RetailMeNot.com); Groupon, Inc.; Quantcast; Advisory Board Company; ARC; athenahealth; CSID; Dell; eBay Inc.; Pandora; Reddwerks; Volusion; CompassLearning; Data Foundry; Enova; Evernote; Gemalto; Intel; ISIS Mobile Commerce; Amazon Music; Luna Data Solutions, Inc.; MapMyFitness, Inc.; Patient Conversation Media; SailPoint; Samsung Austin Semiconductor; SendGrid; Sparefoot.com; Spredfast; SurveyMonkey; T3; United Airlines; Visa; Viacom; Yelp; Yodle and Zoosk.

The startup team at SpareFoot has got a lot of spirit.
They always participate in all the startup events in Austin including placing in the top stops at Startup Olympics.
But now the 60-person company, started four years ago by Chuck Gordon and Mario Feghali, have really started thinking outside the box – that is the packing boxes that sit in storage lockers everywhere.
SpareFoot is the first local startup (that I know of anyway – correct me if I’m wrong) to release its own 2013 firefighter-style pinup calendar featuring its staff posed in supermodel silly shots at an Austin storage facility.
“We turn working in an unsexy niche industry on its head, showing off our chiseled, champagne-filled bodies frolicking in packing peanuts,” according to Matt Schexnayder with SpareFoot. “While some may associate self-storage with the chore of moving, this professionally photographed calendar aims to show that a successful move is cause for celebration.”
The calendar is titled “Bust A Move-In” and $1 of each sale goes to Kure It, a non-profit dedicated to cancer research. You can order the calendar through LuLu for $20.
Sparefoot has a slideshow of the calendar on its site. Be sure to check out the month of October featuring SpareFoot’s Albert Hood recreating the cover photo of American Beauty with packing peanuts.

Next One’s On Me has hired two new executives and closed on $570,000 of a $1 million founding round.
NOOM hired Ben Calder as Chief Technology Officer and Paul O’Brien as Chief Marketing Officer. They’ll join co-founders Sara Rodell and Jeffrey Schwartz.
With NOOM’s mobile app, a person can send a coupon for a drink, treat or meal, which can be redeemed at one of NOOM’s more than 60 partner merchants in Austin and Houston.
“Launching NOOM in Austin was important to us, Jeffrey and I moved here from New York City and LA because we felt so strongly about the entrepreneurial community here,” Rodell, CEO of NOOM, said in a news release. “Ben Calder’s experience with payment technologies and scalable mobile platforms will serve us as we rapidly expand in other markets. Paul O’Brien’s extensive work with consumer technology startups will help us establish the right foundation and scale within the ideal channels allowing NOOM to change the way we treat friends and coworkers.”
Calder previously worked at Rev Worldwide in Austin. He helped launch technology that enables small businesses to accept credit card payments with their smartphone. He also founded Shiftt and Axee, both mobile payment companies.
O’Brien relocated to Austin from California where he worked with Yahoo!, HP, and he helped launch Zvents and Outright.com. In Austin, he founded Cospace, a search engine for coworking spaces. His focus at NOOM will be to expand its service nationwide and to create an offering for corporate gifting.
“Since launching the native iOS app in late summer, 2012, we have been overwhelmed by the ways people want to use NOOM,” Schwartz, NOOM co-founder, said in a news release.