Rackspace claimed the 34th spot on Fortune’s annual list of the 100 best companies to work for in the United States.
Rackspace has quickly grown from a startup web hosting company founded in 1999 to a $1 billion cloud computing company with more than 4,500 employees, the bulk of which occupy a refurbished old mall which serves as its headquarters on the Northeast side of San Antonio.
“The IT cloud company’s stock jumped from $43 to $74 in 2012—good news for employees, all of whom get stock options upon being hired. The company also rewards top sales performers with free weekend trips,” according to the article. Last year, Rackspace claimed the 74th spot.
National Instruments, founded by a UT engineering graduate students James Truchard, Bill Nowlin and Jeff Kodoskyin a garage in Austin in 1976, has also grown into a $1 billion company with 6,200 employees. The company makes testing equipment and software. It ranked 35th on Fortune’s list.
“This developer of test and measurement tools enjoy its sense of equality and collaboration. “My cubicle is bigger than the CEO’s,” gloats one. The company gym offers 16 classes a week and two sand volleyball courts,” according to the article. Last year, National Instruments claimed the 45th spot.
Other San Antonio companies on the list included NuStar Energy, 38 and USAA, 40. Whole Foods Market in Austin claimed the 71st spot.
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Shake off those winter blues and get rid of that winter flab because it’s nearly time for Austin Startup Olympics 2013.
The winter games are set for Feb. 16th at Austin City Music Hall.
This will be the third Austin Startup Olympics event.
In the past, Adlucent, Boundless Network, Build-a-Sign, Mass Relevance, SpareFoot, Spredfast, uShip, and WhaleShark Media have competed in the games.
A year ago, uShip hosted the first-ever Austin Startup Olympics at its headquarters downtown. uShip also won the games held on Jan. 21 featuring teams competing in 10 grueling activities including an inflatable obstacle course, ping pong, foosball, darts and trivia. You can find full coverage of that event on Silicon Hills News.
Next, BuildASign won the Startup Olympics Summer Games, which really did put the teams athleticism to the test with 100 yard dashes, relay teams, software ball, kickball, tetherball and more.
Tango Health, a provider of Health Savings Account management software, announced it has closed on a $1 million follow-on round to its Series B funding from industry veterans and company management.
The Austin-based company plans to use the funds to add more sales, marketing and customer service staff.
“Tango has a unique solution in a high growth market and the industry is taking notice,” Brian R. Smith, Managing Director at S3 Ventures, said in a news statement. “We believe their growth will continue to accelerate given the robust CDH market and strength of their value proposition that is in high demand from employees, employers and partners alike.”
Tango Health also reported its annual revenue rose 800 percent last year as demand for its software and services continue to climb as more companies adopt consumer directed health plans to save costs and provide quality healthcare.
“Tango is growing quickly because our solution addresses a key pain point for employee benefit professionals: driving education and adoption of consumer-directed plans and HSAs. The increased participation we enable leads to tax savings, lower health benefit costs, and higher satisfaction for both employees and companies,” Duncan Van Dusen, Co-Founder and CEO of Tango Health, said in a news release.
We Are Austin Tech, a weekly video segment featuring Austin’s technology industry movers and shakers, has released its latest video featuring VolunteerSpot Founder and CEO Karen Bantuveris.
Bantuveris founded VolunteerSpot, which creates tools for moms, nonprofit organizers and others to coordinate volunteers, in 2009.
Last summer, VolunteerSpot raised $1.5 million from ff Venture Capital of New York along with the Central Texas Angel Network, Nebraska Angel network, Angel List and Baylor Angel Network.
The Austin-based startup currently has more than 2 million users.
Greenling in Austin has raised $5.2 million in venture capital, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The Austin Business Journal first reported the news on Tuesday.
Today, Lori Hawkins at the Austin American-Statesman has this story on Greenling’s expansion reporting the company plans to use the money to move into the Houston market.
Greenling is a start-up organic grocery delivery service which allows customers to shop for produce, meats, dairy, prepared foods and other products online and have those groceries delivered to their homes or workplaces up to four times per week.
“Dallas has gone extremely well, so now we’re taking the model that started in Austin and we’re going to replicate what we’re doing all over,” Mason Arnold, Greenling co-founder and CEO told the Statesman. “Our buyers have spent months in Houston getting to know farmers and building a local supply chain that includes 30 farms.”
Greenling has 90 employees, 10,000 customers and has previously raised $3 million, according to the article.
Pat Condon, co-founder of Rackspace in San Antonio, is one of the chief investors in the company along with Josh Baer, co-founder of Capital Factory.
San Antonio has made Forbes’ list of the top hot emerging tech spots in the country based on the growth of science, technology, engineering and math jobs.
The list’s data comes from an analysis done by the Praxis Strategy Group.
“Mark Schill of Praxis Strategy Group crunched the numbers for us to determine the changes in STEM employment from 2001 to 2012 in the 51 largest metropolitan statistical areas,” according to the Forbes article. “Notably absent from our list of the 10 metro areas that enjoyed the strongest growth over that period: the country’s largest cities. Chicago, New York and Los Angeles all lost tech jobs over the past 11 years. Silicon Valley? For all the buzz over Facebook and other hot social media companies, the San Jose area has 12.6% fewer tech jobs today than in 2001.”
While STEM employment stayed flat in San Francisco and Boston from 2001 to 2012, San Jose saw nearly a 13 percent decline in STEM jobs. Chicago, New York and Los Angeles also lost STEM jobs during that time.
“In contrast, double-digit rate expansions of tech employment have occurred in lower-density metro areas such as Austin, Texas; Raleigh, N.C.; Columbus, Ohio; Houston and Salt Lake City,” according to the article. “Indeed, among the larger established tech regions, the only real winners have been Seattle, with its diversified and heavily suburbanized economy, and greater Washington, D.C., the parasitical beneficiary of an ever-expanding federal power, where the number of STEM jobs grew 21% from 2001 to 2012, better than any other of the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan statistical areas over that period.”
The Washington, D.C. area claimed the number one spot on Forbes’ list, followed by the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif area, and San Antonio-New Braunfels with 18.3 percent growth in STEM employment.
The other cities included Baltimore-Towson, Maryland, Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina, Las Vegas-Paradise, Nevada, Salt Lake City, Utah, Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Washington and Jacksonville, Florida.
MeetMeTix has partnered with Red Carpet Tickets of Austin to provide people with last minute tickets to sporting and other events.
Red Carpet Tickets, founded in 2004, currently offers tickets to more than 56,000 events and will meet or beat any published price for a secondary market event ticket.
MeetMeTix offers Fan-to-Fan ticket resale technology for the last miles and last hours around major sporting events where bandwidth is often too limited for apps and other mobile solutions.
After listing tickets for sale or reserving tickets to buy via web or mobile web, ticket hand-off and payment are rapidly, easily, and securely handled by text messaging anywhere around the venue. With its new linkage with Red Carpet Tickets, MeetMeTix buyers can also view and purchase in advance from a large selection of dealer ticket inventory.
MeetMeTix launched at major college football venues in the fall of 2012 and, with the new integration with Red Carpet Tickets, has added a host of new features. The company is based in Austin with operations in Atlanta.
Silvercar, a new car rental startup based in Austin, launched today at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
The startup rents just one type of car: the 2013 Audi A4, in silver.
A privately held company, Silvercar is initially funded by $11.2 million in venture capital investment, led by Austin Ventures and including CrunchFund, SV Angel, and tech industry success-spotters Chris Dixon and Dave Morin.
Silvercar lets a customer handle the entire rental transaction using their smartphone. That means they don’t have to wait in line or at counters when renting a Silvercar.
The Silvercar app, available for download from the Apple App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android, lets customers book reservations from their phone.
“We’re thrilled to launch the Silvercar experience with DFW as our flagship airport,” Silvercar CEO Luke Schneider said in a news release. “We anticipate that our unique model will resonate with the connected business travelers who frequent DFW. Our vision is to deliver a consistently better car rental experience, in a consistently better car, each and every time customers rent with Silvercar.”
The Silvercar customers ride a DFW shuttle to the rental car area, but then they handle everything with their smartphone including selecting and unlocking a vehicle with a QR code. The even receive their receipt on their phone.
“Silvercar was born out of one too many frustrating travel experiences at the car rental counter — the long waits and failure to receive a vehicle that fulfills your needs are irritations most travelers can relate to,” Silvercar Co-Founder and executive chairman Bill Diffenderffer said in a news release.
Innovation is needed in the car rental industry, Schneider said.
“We’re mindful of the fact that Silvercar is entering a large incumbent market, dominated by a handful of well-established companies,” he said. “We’re energized by the opportunity to make a measurable impact on the industry by introducing a unique and refreshing experience.”
TrueAbility, a technology recruiting startup in San Antonio, has landed $750,000 in seed stage funding.
Rackspace Co-Founder Pat Condon and Graham Weston, Co-Founder and Chairman of Rackspace led the funding round.
TrueAbility, based at Geekdom, launched last year with its flagship product AbilityScreen, a cloud-based assessment service used by companies to evaluate the technical skills of job candidates. On Oct. 13th, the startup launched its invitation-only private beta testing of its product. In the first quarter of this year, TrueAbility plans to launch an open beta testing of its products in which a variety of companies can start screening companies. The product allows “hiring managers and recruiters to measure a job candidate’s abilities on a variety of technologies, platforms, vendor certifications and industry standards that their company uses today or plans to use,” according to a news release.
Currently, companies evaluate a job candidate’s abilities through interviews and other tests. But TrueAbility’s product puts the job candidate in a situation similar to what they would encounter in the workplace to demonstrate their expertise. And since the product resides in the cloud, recruiters can test job candidates anywhere in the world.
TrueAbility’s AbilityScreen can test a “candidate’s ability to think critically and leverage resouces, and how well he or she will adapte to learning new things on the fly,” according to the release.
“The demand for qualified technical expertise in the enterprise has changed, but the way we screen and hire these candidates has not,” Graham Weston said in a news release. “TrueAbility can evolve this space much to the benefit of companies everywhere.”
Qualified technical talent worldwide is in demand and employers spend billions of dollars to find them and hire them every year.
This funding will allow TrueAbility to hire additional employees, said Luke Owen, the company’s CEO.
“The big things we are focusing on is hiring additional developers and engineers,” Owen said. That will allow the company to expand the technologies it can test for using its AbilityScreen product.
TrueAbility will also focus on developing a solid sales model to sell into the enterprise and small business marketplaces, Owen said.
TrueAbility’s team is made up of Owen, Frederick “Suizo” Mendler, Marcus Robertson and Dusty Jones. Last summer, TrueAbility won the San Antonio Startup Weekend competition. The company was recently selected to participate in TechStars Cloud, which kicked off today in San Antonio. The team will spend the next three months working on its product, building its team and will showcase its progress at TechStars Cloud Demo Day in April.
At the Crowdfund Texas Conference, the organizers conducted a survey accessible by text message on a cell phone.
The organizers didn’t say how many of the 235 people attending the conference responded to the survey.
Crowdfunding is legal if the site simply solicits donations from people and not investments. But that will change soon thanks to a new law called Jumpstart Our Business Startups or JOBS Act, which Congress passed and President Obama signed into law last April. The industry is simply awaiting investment rules from the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission, which missed its Congressional mandated deadline to deliver those rules by the end of 2012. Industry speculators think it could be as early as April or as late as September before the new laws are enacted and equity-based crowdfunding can begin.
But at Tuesday’s Crowdfund Texas Conference, held at the Omni Hotel in downtown Austin in partnership with the Crowdfunding Professional Association and Startup Texas, almost everyone or 97 percent said they would be very likely or somewhat likely to invest in a Crowdfunded company of a trusted person in their network.
The crowd at the Crowdfund conference also thought the “digital media, games, IT and creative” sectors as the best suited to equity Crowdfunding.
“Additionally, the majority (66 percent) believes that equity- and debt-based Crowdfunding will forge ahead despite unfounded speculation about fraud and abuse.” according to the survey.
“One of our key objectives was simply to educate the audience about what equity Crowdfunding is and isn’t,” Chris Camillo, an angel investor and event organizer, said in a news statement. “The survey results make it clear that once people hear the facts about issues like safeguards in place for investors and how equity Crowdfunding is already working in other parts of the world, they are very receptive to and optimistic about what this revolution in the capital markets has to offer.”
The survey also found that 80 percent of the attendees didn’t believe the media, elected officials and the general public are well informed about crowdfunding to support entrepreneurs and innovators.
