At the 9th annual InnoTech Austin on Thursday, a Beta Summit will feature five Austin Startup companies.
The startups include Outbox, Skyence, TrustRadius, Ube and Compare Metrics.
Bryan Menell with AustinStartup is hosting the Beta Summit which takes place at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday at the Austin Convention Center. He has detailed descriptions of each of the companies in this post on his site.
This is the sixth year for the beta summit which features new technology companies. Each company will present an eight minute pitch and demonstration.
“These are products that you may not yet be aware of and may have a profound impact on your business (and business in general) in the near future,” according to Sean Lowry, director of Innotech.
In addition to the Beta Summit, InnoTech has a full lineup of speakers including a keynote address by Timothy Cox, the executive director of enterprise solutions delivery at General Motors Information Technology.
The conference also features special events like an eMarketing Summit, the Austin CIO Summit & IT Executive Awards, the Women of IT Summit and an exhibition hall packed with technology companies.

Innotech Austin is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Sam Decker moved here in 1999 to work at Dell and now runs a startup called Mass Relevance.
“I learned more from failures at early startups than I did from success,” said Decker in the latest video on We Are Austin Tech. Every Tuesday, We Are Austin Tech posts a new video on its site featuring an interview with one of Austin’s technology leaders.
In the video, Decker details how his experience at Dell helped him greatly in running his startup.
Cool startups he’s rooting for are Umble and Famigo.
In 10 years from now, Austin will have a higher concentration of high tech. That’s going to cause more traffic congestion. Decker wants more options for mass transportation.
He also wants technology entrepreneurs to think bigger.
Decker’s father often quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line about fear and that motivated Decker into action: “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”
“So every time I had a chance to do something that I was either fearful of or didn’t know, I took that opportunity,” he said. “And if you ever feel like your capabilities and competencies aren’t growing it’s a time to go on and do something else. You’re not doing it because your fearful of it. But once you do it it becomes second nature. So everything I’ve done I’ve never done before.”

Austin is a bootstrapped kind of technology startup scene, says Joshua Baer, entrepreneur and co-founder of Capital Factory.
He gave an overview of the Austin Startup scene last Friday at Capital Factory, the downtown coworking space and technology incubator.
He says technology entrepreneurs move here not just for the technology industry but for the quality of life.
“Austin is a great place to be poor,” he said.
San Francisco and Silicon Valley are not great places to be poor, he said.
Social capital is also important here. People help each other out, Baer said.
The tide is also rising in Austin. It’s not just one thing. Everyone does better when everyone wins. Multiple successes create a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem, Baer said.
During a talk Monday night at Capital Factory, an audience member asked him what it would take for Austin to become a huge technology center like Silicon Valley.
“I think Austin is kind of number three,” he said. “Silicon Valley and New York are the top two.”
They are followed by Austin, Seattle and Boston, he said.
Silicon Valley is at its peak, he said.
“There’s pretty much an established hierarchy,” he said. “If you know people it can be great.”
But if you don’t, it can be a tough place to break into, Baer said. Austin’s entrepreneurs are much more accessible, he said. They hold office hours and meet with new entrepreneurs in coffee shops around town. They want to help out, he said.
In the video on the Austin Startup Scene, Baer provides some history of the technology industry in Austin with companies like MCC, Dell, Tivoli and Trilogy.
Recently he points to the success of BazaarVoice and Homeaway, which both went public and Indeed.com which was sold to a Japanese company.
He says to keep an eye on WhaleShark Media. He thinks they are the next big Austin Initial Public Offering.

At the age of 10, Joshua Baer won a state award for piano composition.
It was one of his first endeavors at creating something new.
“Piano lessons were somewhat of a torture for me,” he said. “I was forced to go for seven years.”
It wasn’t until he got to compose his own music that he began to enjoy the piano.
Baer recounted that story during Startup Grind, a technology meetup at Capital Factory Monday night. About 50 people attended the event.
That desire to create something from nothing has driven Baer in most of his entrepreneurial endeavors. He has created three companies, invested in dozens more and co-founded Capital Factory, a technology startup incubator and co-working space in downtown Austin.
“If I get to the end of the day and I haven’t made something then I feel like a failure,” he said.
Baer got interested in computers in the 1980s when America Online was big. As a sophomore in high school, he participated in a summer program at Carnegie Mellon University and decided he would study computer science there after graduating.
At Carnegie Mellon, he started his first company from his fraternity house.
“I think I always wanted to run my own business,” Baer said. “My father was an entrepreneur. His father was an entrepreneur.”
Baer strongly believes that “activity causes opportunity.” So he became involved in ListStar, an e-mail service in college.
“I was a poor college kid and I was studying computer science,” Baer said.
Because he had time, he read the manual for the ListStar software and began answering questions in forum groups.
“People started asking me to consult,” Baer said. He charged $20 an hour. Then customers began asking him to host their e-mail servers for $50 a month.
“That was the beginning of my hosting business,” he said.
Over the next two to three years, he kept doing that. He initially ran the business on the school’s Internet network, but soon moved to a house off campus with friends. He took the basement and installed a T-1 Line and filled one half with servers.
“We kind of grew organically from there,” he said. “I was definitely focused on the business more than school.”
But Baer did graduate in 1999 but at first he was reluctant to leave Pittsburgh. His business had $200,000 a year in revenue.
“I could buy beer every weekend,” Baer said. “I thought I was the king of the world. I was thinking this is it. I’ve got the life.”
But one of his friends landed a job at Trilogy in Austin and convinced him to move. The executives at Trilogy told him he could continue to run his business.
At Trilogy, Baer participated in Trilogy University. It was a survivor-like contest inside the company in which 25 teams formed and worked on their ideas throughout the summer and in the end only the five best teams survived. Those teams got funding. Baer created a team that got funding and was later sold for $20 million. His entire team moved to Seattle, but he decided to stay in Austin.
His side business had taken on its own life. He had 25 people working out of his house.
In 2004, Baer bought a building and moved the company there. That’s where he met Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software. His company was across the street.
A year later, Baer moved his company to the eighth floor of the Omni Building downtown. In 2006, Skylist won an award as one of the best places to work in Austin.
“Winning that award was one of the things I’m most proud of,” Baer said. “I just wanted to build the kind of place I wanted to work at.”
Creating a fun business culture attracted talented employees, he said.
“Most people will chose lower compensation if they like where they work,” he said.
Baer also launched OtherInbox. Unlike his previous businesses, which he bootstrapped, he raised money to launch that company.
“There was this big idea. That didn’t work,” he said. “The big idea was wrong.”
Baer has a strong preference to raise as little money as possible to launch a business.
“Inherently when you’re raising money, you’re getting out ahead of your skis,” he said. “Too many people think raising money is some sign of success. It’s not.”
Baer also co-founded Capital Factory in 2009, fashioned after Trilogy University and Y-Combinator. Capital Factory has had three classes of five companies each. Its biggest success is Sparefoot, Baer said.
Capital Factory now occupies the entire 16th floor and is a year round program and co-working space with 175 people and 80 companies with the goal of reaching 250 people and more than 100 companies.
“It’s something bigger than what it was,” Baer said.
Capital Factory has a small fund that invests in companies based there. It takes a 3 percent equity stake for its investment.
The focus of Capital Factory is companies that can get profitable on $1 million or less, Baer said.
“You shouldn’t need to raise money to prove an idea,” he said.
Baer is also focused on software companies.
“You can create something out of nothing,” he said. “The cost of doing that has dropped to nothing.”

Nick Longo, director of Geekdom, and Graham Weston, co-founder of Rackspace and Geekdom, at TechStars for a Day.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

By Michael Girdley
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

TechStars Cloud alumni panel at TechStars for a Day, photo courtesy of Geekdom

– There was a suprising little amount of coding during the three-month program stated Justin Delay, Founder of Tempo-db. The teams spend the vast majority of time in meetings with mentors, potential customers and program staff rather than writing code. That was a big surprise.

– While mentoring is a huge part of the program, the quantity of mentors means that multiple conflicting or contradictory opinions is a real thing. Teams must learn how to distill down the opinions and make their own choices in the face of “Mentor Whiplash.”

– Finally, a huge portion of the success of the program is due to expectations. As a cohort going through the same process at the same time with mentors and leaders who expect a lot, results happen faster than they would naturally.

Disclosure: I am a volunteer mentor for the program.