Andi Gillentine is the co-founder and COO of Austin-based Whit.Li, the site analyzes words people post on social media sites like Facebook to determine their personality traits.
Whit.Li is the only Austin company selected to pitch at the highly selective Women 2.0 conference. Gillentine will compete Wednesday against nine other women-run startups from across the country in a day-long competition. The other startups include ActivityHero, Alike, Citizen Made, Clear Returns, EatDrinkJobs, LightningBuy, Maternova, NewlyWish and The Daily Muse.
The winning startup at Pitch NYC 2012 will receive a meeting with Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a one-year hosting service to Rackspace, an automatic finalist interview for TechStars NYC Winter 2013 class and a L’Oreal Women in Digital grant of $25,000 in cash.
Whit.Li has specialized natural language processing technology that gives businesses a better understanding of who their fans and followers are online.
“It took nearly a year to get the core technology built and tested. We initially focused on Facebook data as a source. To gather our first data to test our algorithms, we used a Facebook app where we provided a personality analysis based on a user answering a Big 5 personality inventory and authenticating that we could look at their posts,” Gillentine wrote in this post on the Women 2.0 site. “We used that data, anonymously, to refine our algorithms to provide personality, demographic and interest analysis. In keeping with our original inspiration, we released the technology via API so that companies could build it into their sites directly. We launched our API at SXSW 2012. Initially, we thought that collaborative consumption companies would be very heavy users of this technology. At, SXSW we learned that brands – big, enterprise brands – were even more interested in it. That was an eye-opening experience for us.”
Whit.Li now has 200 companies using its technology and another 200 waiting for the next version, according to Gillentine.

By L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Graeme Cloughley, founder of Rawtrax.co, shows off the company’s app

Ricardo Sanchez, creator of Austin Co-Founders Meetup

Greg Russell marketing his new site, FindCarlos at Austin Co-Founders Meetup

By DAVE MICHAELS
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

The Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs hosted its Venture Expo last week, the capstone in its accelerator program.
The accelerator program pairs participating startups with UT graduate students and Accenture employees across various disciplines to validate the market need and business model, as well as refining the marketing strategy and product itself. According to Director Dr. Rob Adams, the design of thoroughly addressing all pertinent questions facilitates (and accelerates) the investment decision process.

The event, which took place Thursday at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, featured 15 companies, spanning a range of industries and stages, pitched to prospective investors, partners, and the larger entrepreneurial community. Four companies are profiled below with the complete list at the end of the article.

NOOM

While NOOM Cofounder Sara Rodell was working round the clock in New York, time was in short supply and a generous network of friends and neighbors helped her with a host of errands. She wanted to say thank you, but with time scarce, couldn’t take them all out to lunch.
In the gift spectrum, an email thank you may not be meaningful enough whereas a traditional gift may not be appropriate. In between is buying someone a drink or lunch. With limited time and larger social networks, it’s not always possible to say thank you in person. An opportunity has developed in the middle of this spectrum.
NOOM works by allowing people to purchase thank you’s in 3 categories—treats, beer, or bar & bites—delivered virtually that recipients can redeem at a variety of restaurants, bars, etc. NOOM is currently accepted at 42 venues in Austin and 18 venues in Houston.
They are finishing up a successful Beta test of their service where they have validated the need and identified business professionals as the segment that critically needs this service. Venues have also been very receptive to participating. Ms. Rodell says that their sales meetings typically get to “why wouldn’t we do this?” because it really helps them increase the volume of their business.
NOOM has already raised $545,000 and is looking to close the round at $1 million to start the next phase of product development.

Admittance Technologies (CardioVol)

Pacemakers regulate rate and rhythm of the heartbeat in a complex operation that needs to be constantly monitored for complications. To help correct an irregular heartbeat, many pacemakers are coupled with implantable defibrillators. Assessments are made by an imperfect algorithm that consistently leads to unnecessary shocking of patients’ hearts. The resulting trauma increases mortality rates.
Chief Scientific Officer Dr. John Porterfield characterizes Admittance Technologies as a think tank that utilizes patient experience from its founder Dr. Marc Feldman to identify problems in cardiology to then determine if a feasible solution is possible. CardioVol is their first product, software that works with the existing pacemaker and defibrillator hardware. It significantly reduces the problem of inappropriate shocking by measuring blood volume in the heart to inform a more reliable algorithm.
Four large US players and heavy competition has essentially commoditized the pacemaker. Companies differentiate themselves by adding features. For every feature, a company typically gains one to four percent market share, roughly $30 million to $50million. CardioVol’s software enables three separate features which could dramatically add market share for one of the four companies.
Admittance Technologies received a state of Texas grant for $2 million and is looking to raise $2 million during the next 30 months. CardioVol has been successfully tested in animals and is ramping for an additional study with chronic animals during a period of six to twelve months to further prove out the concept. At the end of the study, they are considering an exclusive deal with one of the pacemaker companies, supporting them through human trial and integration.

RideScout

As traffic continues to worsen, people are realizing things have to change or sit in traffic longer. In the words of Ride Scout Founder and CEO, Joseph Kopser, “We’re faced the situation where transportation is an inhibitor to our lives.” An estimated 4.8 billion hours are lost each year in traffic.
New solutions such as ride sharing, as well as existing public transportation options are available but larger participation rates are needed. Some modes of transportation have apps that alert potential riders of up to the minute route schedules. However, no app currently advises riders of all options at once.
RideScout dubs itself the “Kayak of ground transportation” and works by aggregating data from various modes of transportation, including social data from Facebook, to provide users a dashboard. Each option includes the time and cost to allow for informed decisions.
Millennials are the first target customer segment. Research has revealed them to be actively interested in the possibility of being car-free, being much more protective of their smart phones and highly active on social media. RideScout will make its money through referral fees that increase business to taxis and other publicly available transportation options, an industry generating $63 billion/year in revenue. Additionally with millions of rides anticipated to be going through the system, valuable travel pattern data can be packaged for marketers, planners, and others.
RideScout is in the process of launching its minimal viable viable (product) focused on ride sharing and taxis in the Austin market. It has currently raised $350,000 and is looking for an additional $400,000 to continue building out its app to make it more robust in anticipation of moving into new markets and additional modes of transportation.

Skyonic

Climate change is driving the need to deal effectively with carbon dioxide emissions. The most established and talked about approaches tend to treat carbon capture and storage strategies exclusively as a cost to industrial processes which will ultimately increase prices.
Skyonics has developed a process that transforms decarbonation from a cost center to a profit center. CFO Scott Gardner said that President and CEO Joe Jones had been thinking on idea for years, originally in the context of space travel and decarbonating crew cabins, but as climate change took hold, the larger market spurred action on the problem.
Skyonic locates its chemical plant next to an industrial operation and as the carbon and other pollutants are captured, they are treated as feed stocks to create three finished products: hydrochloric acid, bleach, and baking soda, all high demand chemicals. By contracting Skyonic, plants can make money by selling these products and depending on government action can also receive carbon credits.
Skyonic has already successfully built a demonstration plant and secured several high profile strategic partners such as Conoco Philips and BP for market expertise and investment. They are into their series C totaling $35 million, the first tranche of $9 million already completed, needing another $6 million in the second tranche to begin construction of the first commercial plant in San Antonio.

Participating companies:
Paybook
RideScout
Escapaide
Next One’s On Me
Rockify
Health Information Associates
TeVido Biodevices
Admittance Technologies
eyeQ
AdBm
Skyonic
Nuventix
Unique Influence
Aunt Bertha
Akimbo

By L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Within five years, General Motors plans to shift from being 70 percent operations focused to 70 percent innovation focused, said Timothy Cox, its executive director of IT.
That means GM’s 15,000 engineers will create new software products to make the auto manufacturer a leaner, speedier and more efficient company, Cox said.
“The better we can create these applications the better we can do for our business,” he said.
Cox gave the keynote speech Thursday morning to kick off InnoTech Austin, a daylong technology conference at the Austin Convention Center.
Overall, GM is shifting its focus from outsourcing its information technology needs to creating them itself and its new Austin center is part of that strategy.
“We want to be able to do more,” Cox said.
And there’s lots of room for innovation. GM, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and received a federal government bailout of $51 billion, recently opened an Austin Innovation Center. It’s one of four planned around the country. The Austin location will have 500 employees.
“We’re investing in ourselves to become more competitive and more successful,” Cox said. GM will shift from using almost 90 percent of its software from outside vendors to producing 90 percent itself.
“We’re hiring thousands of skilled IT professionals,” Cox said. And most of those workers are in the U.S., he said.
Specialized software to analyze fuel spray and combustion is just one of the ways that GM uses technology in its operations, Cox said. By 2025, federal standards require new cars to operate at 54.5 miles per gallon, Cox said. GM uses simulation and design tools to create cars that can meet those standards, he said.
Every vehicle has about 5,000 parts and the manufacturing lines produce 20 vehicles per hour on an assembly line. That presents plenty of opportunity for innovation in the global supply chain, Cox said.
GM’s IT operations support 5 global technology centers and plants around the world.
On the consumer side, GM offers OnStar and other ownership applications.
“We’re just scratching the surface on these innovative new tools for customers,” Cox said.
He pointed to the GM’s electric car, the Chevrolet Volt, as an example of a car that has unprecedented connectivity.
As part of its technology transformation, GM also plans to close 26 data centers around the world and open two new data centers in Michigan.
“We’re taking one of the biggest companies in the world and creating something special,” Cox said.
GM isn’t trying to create the cheapest IT operations in the world, Cox said.
“The whole transformation is predicated on value,” he said.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Getting involved in philanthropic causes can give you a career boost, widen your network and let you contribute to something your passionate about, all things that make it worth finding the time, according to an InnoTech Women of IT Summit Panel entitled “Discovering the Power of Philanthropic Involvement.”
Tamara Hudgins, Executive Director of Girlstart, Heather McKissick, CEO of Leadership Austin and Carrie Lewis, President of Austin Women in Technology were on the panel moderated by Amanda Justice, Chair of the Women of IT Summit.
This was the first year InnoTech has held a special summit just for women in IT.
All the panelists agreed that women seeking to plug in to a philanthropic cause should find one they care deeply enough about to happily make the time for. If the word “should” enters the equation, they haven’t found it yet. Hudgins, who started Georgetown’s backpack program to feed hungry area children, had to fight a local misconception that there were no hungry children in Georgetown, Texas. Initially, her efforts did not endear her to the community. Now, she said “I know everyone in Georgetown. It takes me an hour and half to get through a shopping trip at HEB.” Her passion for her cause drove her to act and the results were a wider network.
Lewis is not only leading a major overhaul of Austin Women in Technology, she dedicates a lot of her time to Starry, an organization that provides emergency shelter for children and teens. She and her husband hope to become adoptive parents soon.
McKissick found that she wasn’t more passionate about one cause, than any other. She was, however, passionate about the process of leadership development which brought her not only to Leadership Austin but to co-founding ATXEquation, an organization that seeks to identify and capitalize on what makes Austin Austin.
“If it feels like it hurts, you’re probably doing the wrong thing,” said Hudgins. “If it energizes you as much or more than the energy you’re putting in, you are doing the right thing.”
The panel agreed there is a tendency to aim for a key seat on the board of directors, but that’s not always the way to go. Sometimes it’s better to get a sense of the organization just by giving at a smaller level.
“Many IT people come to us and say ‘I don’t want to do anything connected to IT’ and that’s fine. You can paint a wall, you can give an afternoon,” Hudgins said.
People who are thinking of serving on boards should talk first to the executive director and other board members to get a sense of the time commitment as well as the financial contribution expected of board members. Someone who jumps in blindly with good intentions may have to bail, and that’s not good for the organization or the person. One way to learn about local organizations is Greenlights’ board summit the organization holds in the spring like a job fair for nonprofit boards, McKissick said. “It’s just a great, fun time with cocktails” where potential board members can check out organizations. McKissick herself said she has no time to serve on other boards but is on three advisory boards where she can show up once a quarter, give her opinion and leave.
Serving on a committee is another option. McKissick talked about a young man she knew who had been passed over for promotion twice because of his lack of budgeting experience. He took a position on a finance committee of a nonprofit board and that experience was enough to push him past that hurdle.
Justice interjected that serving on nonprofit boards had taught her to present in front of groups.
Finally, the group said, writing a check is not a bad way to contribute.
“Let’s be honest,” Hudgins said, “I can’t pay my staff or the electricity bill with your time.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
As an angel investor, CTAN’s Gary Forni has formed a clear list of what he looks for before he puts skin in the game with a startup.

1. It has to be disruptive. Whatever the product or service is, it has to be compelling enough to change the way people function. He listens for the words 10X. “If you tell me it’s 10x better, faster, cheaper, smaller, that it’s going to change how industry works…I listen for that. Every entrepreneur is wrong about how much money it’s going to take. But if you think it’s 10X you can be wrong and still be okay.”

2. It has to have the right kind of team. That means they not only have the technical knowhow, they have to have the sales ability. Plus, they have to be willing to listen and take advice.

3. They have to be in a market that has the potential to be $1 billion or greater.

4. They have to be looking at a return of at least 15X. “If I put in $100,000 I want to get $1.5 million out. I might put in the seed money and my investment is going to be diluted as we go along on this path. There needs to be a very high ROI.”

5. The competition needs to be fragmented. “If they say ‘We don’t have any competition,’ then we don’t need to talk anymore,” Forni explained. “If they say ‘We’re competing head-to-head with Microsoft, Intel, Apple….’ my response is… you want to be competing with somebody who has 80 percent of the market space? Really? Those are the guys who, when you get on their radar screen, will squish you. It’s best if the competition is fragmented without anyone having a dominant position in the market.”

6. They have to have credibility. Customers are credibility. Even if they’re just a few validation customers. Other credibility points including winning business pitch awards and partnership agreements with other companies that do have credibility.

7. Making Progress on their plan: “They have to be able to articulate a set of milestones in terms of running the company and show they’re moving down that path: In six months we will be here and in a year, here. Are they on the path to making those come true or are they flying by the seat of their pants?”

8. A believable marketing strategy: How do they plan to engage customers in a way that meets the customer’s needs. What is the customer problem being solved by this product? Are you satisfying an unmet need better than the existing entrenched players?

As he writes these criteria on a whiteboard in a Spartan office at Austin Technology Incubator, it’s clear that Forni is still excited about a good idea, though he sees hundreds of deals every year. Forni, who moved to here in 2006, spent 22 years at Intel, came to Austin to work at Marvell, and has devoted most of the last two years to mentoring and funding startups at ATI as well as Incubation Station which incubates consumer packaged goods companies. He spends a lot of time helping young companies understand how to navigate the hurdles ahead of them.
One deal, for example, was a good idea, a disruptive idea in a large market. But it would require building a whole ecosystem around it to make it work, what the investment world calls a greenfield.
“These were three juniors in college. They weren’t going to make that happen. But it was a really good idea. The market exists…the idea exists…maybe in a different industry…. Then they had this ‘Aha!’ moment. Take that idea and apply it to this market and it would completely change how the market operates. It was huge….” while he explains, Forni’s hands move the invisible idea through the air.
Ultimately, however, there were still snags. “This was three engineers looking at starting a business as three engineers. They had a great technical skill set but they didn’t bring the business skill set. That’s a huge hole.”
They didn’t know how to do business development, put together contracts, vet the product with alpha customers. It’s a problem he sees a lot in the university system. Not only are the engineers short on business skills, they are sometimes so impressed with their own skills, they don’t respect those of a business person.
“The ones I shake my head at are the ones who say ‘This product is so good people will come to us to buy it’” he said. “Not in the real world. That doesn’t happen. If you divide the stress and risk of starting a company into halves, the business side is the harder half, because it deals with people. And people don’t follow the same rules as software or physics.”
Sometimes, when he feels the need to get his hands dirty, he accepts the role of CEO on startups that impress him and brings his business expertise. That’s what he did with Heat Genie, a local startup whose technology turns product packaging into a heat source for items like soup.
“He came on when we were at a really early stage,” said Brendan Coffey, founder. “This is the first company I have ever founded and he had a business background that was really helpful.” At the time Coffey said, he had a concept on paper but also had interested potential customers. Forni built relationships with customers as well as angel investors. “He was good guy to work with,” Coffey said. “Very ethical, very mature. We had some transition stuff to go through. I’m type A and he’s type B. But he was very stabilizing in terms of the environment.”
That relationship lasted from 2010 to 2011 and it introduced Forni to the Central Texas Angel Network. He’d already been an angel investor in California, but meeting CTAN was a revelation for him.
“Having been at Intel during the 80s and the 90s, I did well. Money wasn’t an issue. I had done angel investing in San Jose. I would see interesting companies and would invest. I was a classic new angel investor. I didn’t do proper due diligence. I invested too much money early on. I didn’t have a mentor. I wasn’t part of a community. In those days investing was easy. You could throw a dart and think you were awesome.”
“When I met the Central Texas Angel Network, I thought ‘I really like these guys. They’re really smart. Many of them had graduated from MIT or Harvard. I was so impressed with their skills and their willingness to share their time and knowledge. I thought ‘These people are doing good in this community. I want to do what they do.’”
At almost the same time, he also took on the role of CEO in local startup TuffWerx, a company that offers online sales of used heavy equipment such as bulldozers to both small and enterprise customers. TuffWerx founder Erik Dreyer needed a CEO who—unlike him– didn’t have a full time job and a young family.
TuffWerx, Forni said, had all the criteria. It had a disruptive idea. It had customers in a huge market. Among its competitors, no one had more than four percent of the market. And more than any other element, it had a team he believed in who listened.
“Erik is one of the main reasons I went for it,” Forni said. “He is a stunningly smart guy and an awesome CTO. Unlike some CTOs who are heads down technologists who don’t want to interact with people, he’s really good with people. He takes direction, but he’s willing to argue his points, argue for the validity of his ideas. When you find people like that, that’s also a good indicator for investors.”
“Bringing Gary on was a no brainer for me,” Dreyer said. Though he has been running TuffWerx since he launched it in 2007, he simply couldn’t handle the work of managing the company in the time he had available. Forni, he said, has been very good at gradually asserting his authority.
“This is something you don’t blindly hand over the keys to,” Dreyer said. “I trust him. We’ve built a personal relationship, not just a business relationship. He’s a tremendous listener….he’s very gracious. He’s got great people skills. A great business sense. Integrity. And he’s very humble, not self deprecating but he said to me ‘You can learn something from anybody’ and he lives that attitude.”
Forni grew up in the San Francisco Bay area before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley. His world, he recalls was mostly vineyards and chicken farms, people who worked for the phone company or the police department. He went to school at the University of California in Santa Barbara and got a degree in electrical and computer engineering. He got a job as an engineer at Intel and later became software group manager and then Worldwide Director of Marketing for Intel’s Cellular Ecosystem. Intel made both Intel and ARM chips for the cellular industry and it was Forni’s department’s job to make sure they worked in other manufacturer’s devices. This is where he learned many early lessons in intrapreneurship.
Not all the group’s products worked. Some, as he recalled “went down in flames.” One product never sold a single device. It was a key prompt for computer security. Nobody understood the need for a thing like that. That kind of experience taught him to talk to 100 potential customers before launching into a product.
Intel sold the ARM division in 2006 to Marvell, which brought Forni to Austin. But when he moved from Marvell to Calxeda, a company with eight employees at the time, he really fell in love with entrepreneurship.
“I thought, ‘This is much more exciting in that the decisions you make have much larger ramifications. You’re completely committed to the success of this and directly tied to the success of all the individuals of the company.”
But he’s gotten enough startup miles behind him that his head can’t be turned by a cool idea any more. He’s all about due diligence and getting to the nitty gritty with companies he helps. Many companies, he said, try to talk to investors from a high-level perspective. “But investors,” he said “want to take it all apart, look at everything, open the kimono, get down to hair, gut and feathers. Every deal has warts,” Forni said. “If you know what they are ahead of time, you can put in an action plan to deal with that.”
And that’s part of the excitement of what he does: Makes decisions that move the company forward in a way that’s not possible in a large company.
“Startups move so much faster than a large company,” he said. “A large company can write programs over months and quarters. With startups it’s like: We’re going to be done tonight. We’re going to work on this until it’s done. Better order pizza….’”

This summer, I covered High School Startup, a three weekend long technology focused camp for 20 teenagers to create products.
It took place at Anderson High School in Austin and four team produced four separate products at the end of the camp.
The first project just went live to raise funds on Kickstarter. The kids created Switchbox, a new gearbox designed for competition robots. The gearbox is easier to mount and repair and also has flexible gear ratios.
Their Kickstarter campaign seeks to raise $15,000 by Dec. 21st.
If you want to know more High School Startup, read this story I filed at the conclusion of the first camp.
Also this Friday, the students will be giving demos and pitches of their companies at the first High School Startup Demo Day at Anderson High School auditorium at 6:30 p.m. You can sign up here.
The keynote speaker is Eric Meltzer, founder of The Open Company.
The panelist providing feedback to the students include Josh Baer, founder, OtherInbox and managing director of Capital Factory, Evan Baehr, founder, Outbox Mail, Whurley, general manager, Chaotic Moon Labs.