WP Engine added two new executives and announced an expansion to San Francisco.
The Austin-based startup, which specializes in hosting WordPress sites online, has hired Chris Errett to lead IT and developer operations and LaurieAnne Lassek to oversee marketing. Errett previously worked at Trion Worlds and the U.S. Army. He has experience in scaling IT businesses. Lassek has more than 10 years of experience in technology marketing and perviously worked as vice president of marketing at Quova, which Neustar acquired.
“When we started WP Engine we knew that there was a need for premium hosting for WordPress-built sites, but just how much of a need has really been eye-popping,” Jason Cohen founder and CEO, WP Engine said in a news release. “It’s been very important for us to maintain the highest level of support every step of the way. Our customers and the WordPress community have come to trust us to deliver excellent services and support. LA and Chris bring the right experience to help us to continue to expand our platform and scale services and support as we grow.”
Errett and Lassek join co-founders Cohen and Ben Metcalfe. Lassek will be based in San Francisco working alongside Metcalfe. Errett will be based in Austin.
“Founded in 2010, WP Engine was born out of a need for a scalable hosting platform to support WordPress, the fastest-growing CMS on the planet, now powering 18% of the world’s top 1000 highest trafficked websites,” according to the company.
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Dell has donated an ARM-based server concept to the Apache Software Foundation, a volunteer group which oversees nearly 150 open source software projects and initiatives.
Dell’s server runs Calxeda’s ultra-low power scalable energycore computer chip, which it reports is ten times more energy efficient than x86-based servers. Calxeda’s chips power servers in giant data centers that require peak efficiency.
The ARM technology in Calxeda’s chips is similar to the low-power processers used in smartphones and tablets.
Dell reports that a lot of its customers use Apache’s open source software products and that the ARM infrastructure shows promise in saving energy and money.
The Dell ARM-based server is available to the ASF community now at builds.apache.org. The donation includes hosting and technical support.
TrueAbility, a startup focused on testing the technical aptitude of workers, has launched its first contest.
The contest tests the skills of Linux techs and allows them to compete for the top prize of a 3-D printer and three $100 ThinkGeek.com gift certificates.
Already hundreds of people have taken the test and a few have come really close to getting a perfect score, said Frederick “Suizo” Mendler, co-founder and COO.
The contest runs to midnight Central Standard Time on Friday. The company has listed the top eight contestants on its leader board.
TrueAbility, which is in Beta testing, has created a testing platform that will allow companies to know in advance how competent its job candidates are in different technical skills like Unix, Php and Java Script among other skills.
In addition to Mendler, the team members include Luke Owen, co-founder and CEO, Marcus Robertson, co-founder and CTO and Dusty Jones, co-founder and chief architect.
The team members used to work at Rackspace Hosting and have hired hundreds of technical workers.
The company is based at Geekdom on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
Photo by www.CassStudios.com – Media Bombshell HQ — at Link Coworking. Courtesy of Link Coworking.
Its founder Liz Elam, who previously spent 14 years working from home for Dell, wanted a nice place to work without the disruptions of coffee shops and with plenty of electrical outlets and speedy Internet access.
When she couldn’t find a place like that, she created Link Coworking in the Village Shopping Center at 2700 West Anderson Lane.
“Link Coworking provides members with a professional and interactive workspace where they don’t have to worry about spending too long at a coffee shop, trying to find an outlet, or being distracted by kids and chores at home,” according to Elam. “Members choose to work from Link not only because it provides them with a comfortable work environment and boosts their productivity, but also because they gain a new community of coworkers and the ability to network with people in many different industries.”
On its second anniversary, Link has expanded to Link Too, a 3,500 square foot workspace in the same location as Link, which provides a quieter work environment with dedicated desks and offices. Link Too also offers 24 hour access to the site whereas the original Link site closes at 6 p.m. daily.
Liz Elam with Link Coworking created this video to provide a virtual tour of its offices.
The nation’s fastest highway: SH 130 opens today in Texas.
The speed limit on sections of the road is 85 miles per hour.
SH 130 is a stretch of road between San Antonio and Austin that hopes to alleviate traffic congestion on existing roads like Interstate 35, which has seen its traffic load skyrocket more than 100 percent since 1990. In fact, I-35 has become “the busiest inter-metro Interstate in Texas and is overloaded on many sections,” according to the Texas Department of Transportation. It reports more than 80,000 to 100,000 vehicles traverse the corridor daily.
“In addition to local growth, NAFTA has put an additional strain on the corridor in the form of dramatically increased international truck traffic,” TxDOT reports.
The new tollroad, SH 130, is a 91 mile expressway that has been on the drawing boards for decades. The route is part of the now-defunct Trans-Texas Corridor project.
The tollroad is free until Sunday, Nov. 11th. Rates will be 15 cents per mile and will be billed with a Texas toll tag or by cameras which will record license plate numbers and bill the owner by mail.
The idea for a light community rail between Austin and San Antonio is not dead. Discussions continue about establishing a railway along SH 130 as a rail bypass that would “also free the existing rail line for a planned San Antonio-Austin commuter rail system,” according to TxDOT.
Online game maker Zynga cut 5 percent of its workforce or 150 employees Tuesday.
Zynga reportedly laid off 100 Austin employees, nearly its entire local workforce.
The game maker is “sunsetting 13 older games and we’re also significantly reducing our investment in The Ville,” Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus wrote in a memo to employees, posted to the company’s blog.
Zynga also closed its Boston studio and is proposing closing studios in Japan and the United Kingdom. It also cut 100 employees in Austin and reportedly gave them just two hours to clear out their desks and vacate the office.
“This is the most painful part of an overall cost reduction plan that also includes significant cuts in spending on data hosting, advertising and outside services, primarily contractors,” Pincus wrote. “These reductions, along with our ongoing efforts to implement more stringent budget and resource allocation around new games and partner projects, will improve our profitability and allow us to reinvest in great games and our Zynga network on web and mobile.”
Zynga, founded in 2007 by Pincus, is the most popular gaming platform on Facebook. The company reports 60 million people play its games daily which include Words with Friends, Farmville and Mafia Wars.
On June 3, 2010, Zynga acquired Challenge Games in Austin for $20.5 million, according to Crunchbase, and hired its 35 employees and renamed it Zynga Austin. Challenge Games’ Co-Founder CEO, Andrew Busey, became its general manager and vice president. But he eventually left Zynga in September of 2011 and now serves as a partner in Austin Ventures.
Zynga just laid off 100+ employees (incl. my friends) in its Austin office during the Apple Event. Gave them 2 hours to vacate. RT please.
— Justin Maxwell (@303) October 23, 2012
Like countless pioneers, the quintessential Austin technology, music and film conference, South by Southwest ventures West.
SXSW announced Tuesday that it plans to host SXSW V2V in Las Vegas next August 11th to 14th at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. The show will focus on entrepreneurial innovation. The four day event seeks to bring together startup companies and entrepreneurs with venture capitalists and mentors. The schedule can be found here.
Badges to attend the show are on sale now at the early bird rate of $695 through Dec. 14th and the prices go up from there with a walk up rate of $1,050.
The show will select some of its speakers and presentations from those submitted through its SXSW Panel Picker process. But SXSW V2V is also accepting new applications to speak through March 29th. The event is also seeking mentors and coaches.
The SXSW Las Vegas conference also features V2Venture, a two day pitch event focused on innovative startups. That program will begin accepting applications in January.
“With the growth and popularity of the startup-related programming across the SXSW family of events, it is clear that there is enough momentum to create a wholly unique and independent event focused on entrepreneurs,” SXSW V2V Producer Christine Auten said in a news release. “SXSW V2V will follow the same general strategy we have followed with other SXSW experiences. It is about turning creative ideas into reality — bringing visionaries to Vegas.”
“Las Vegas is repositioning itself as a hub for innovators and digital creatives. We are excited about all the new energy in this city. This is the perfect place for this small, offshoot event to find its voice and grow as the Las Vegas tech scene emerges onto the national scene,” SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest said in a news release. He visited Las Vegas and spoke to the technology community there last summer.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
An application that helps chronic pain sufferers manage pain through increasing activity won the Health 2.0 Austin Codeo Sunday, October 21st at the Capital Factory.
Triumph Over Pain was one of seven teams to spend the weekend creating health-related tools at the event, which was sponsored by Athena Health/More Disruption Please. Athena Health is a cloud-based medical management company and More Disruption Please holds conferences and code-a-thons to try to identify new ideas and fresh thinkers in the medical space. Frequently the company adopts some of these ideas into its accelerator.
The codeo teams formed Friday night had a little more than 24 hours to build something around the ideas they’d chosen. Triumph Over Pain was a company already founded by Tricia Scott, Business Office Director for the Cooper Fitness Center Foundation of McKinney Texas. But the app was new.
David Walling, Chris Huntley and Tricia Scott
But the chief goal of the app was to help people see how increased activity shrinks the intensity of their pain.
Other winners of the competition included CrowdRX, a team from UT’s one semester startup. CrowdRX used data sets to create an algorithm to help doctors know, almost instantly, whether a stroke victim was a good candidate for a drug called t-PA which has remarkable results in helping some stroke victims when administered early; but which has disastrous effects on others.
In third place was Followup Doc, which let emergency room doctors follow up with patients they’ve seen, rather than just treating them, releasing them and not knowing the outcome of the treatment or whether the patient would receive further care.
The most important factor in judging was patient centeredness and application of health literacy concepts. Judges included not only developers for Athena Health, but physicians Tracey Haas and Tammy McConnell, John Lebkowsky, founder of Society for Participatory Medicine and Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW.
Other sponsors included Twilio, Frog design, Texas Health Alliance, attorney Erin M. Gilmer, Ad Clarity, WCG and HCB Health.
Venture capital investments in Texas dropped nearly 29 percent in dollar volume to $127.7 million in 35 deals during the third quarter, according to the Moneytree survey.
That compares to $179.5 million invested in 38 deals in the second quarter.
For the first three quarters of the year, Texas companies have received $716.8 million in 119 deals.
Nationwide, venture capitalists invested $6.5 billion in 590 deals in the third quarter, down 11 percent in dollar amount from the second quarter.
The MoneyTree Report comes from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on data provided by Thomson Reuters.
For the first three quarters of the year, venture capital investment drop was $20 billion into 2,661 deals, well below this point last year.
“The decline in funding for Seed/Early stage companies is firmly in place – we’ve seen a drop in dollars and deals both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year,” Tracy T. Lefteroff, global managing partner of the venture capital practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said in a news release.
“We’re seeing fewer new venture funds being raised which means less capital is available for new investments. And, we’re seeing venture capitalists be very cautious with the capital that is available due to the lack of a significant number of liquidity events. Instead, venture capitalists are continuing to support the companies already in their portfolio.”
The software industry continues to get the bulk of the funding with $2.1 billion invested in 304 deals during the third quarter and the fourth quarter in a row in which investment exceeded $2 billion.
Investment in biotechnology and medical devices topped $1.7 billion in 181 deals showing an increase in dollar volume but declined in the number of deals done for the third quarter.
Overall, though, investment in biotechnology and medical devices is down 19 percent in dollars and 12 percent in deals for the first three quarters of 2012, compared to the same time last year.
Investments in alternative energy, pollution and recycling, power supplies and conservation also dropped 20 percent in dollars but rose slightly, 2 percent, in deal volume with $791 million going into 58 deals during the third quarter.
Other industries seeing growth in dollars invested in the third quarter included financial services, healthcare services, business products and services and retailing.
AirStrip Technologies has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against mVisum.
The federal lawsuit, filed in New York, accuses mVisum of violating AirStrip’s patented intellectual property rights. San Antonio-based Airstrip received a patent on Aug. 28th this year covering “an industry-leading method for remote monitoring of patient medical data on smartphones such as the iPhone®, tablets such as the iPad®, and on other mobile devices.”
“AirStrip has a responsibility to exercise its patent protection in ways that rapidly drive the evolution of mHealth in a
uniform and positive direction,” AirStrip CEO Alan Portela said in a news release. “AirStrip respects the intellectual property of others, and will vigorously defend our own. Such action is not taken lightly, but we feel it is in the best interest of providers, our partners, and ultimately, patients.”
AirStrip Technologies develops mobile apps for physicians and other medical workers to care for patients remotely. AirStrip is backed by investments from Sequoia Capital, Qualcomm, Inc., Hospital
Corporation of America (HCA), and the Wellcome Trust. Dow Jones VentureWire this week reported that AirStrip Technologies had just landed an estimated $10 million in additional venture funding.
