Ixia, a provider of IP and wireless network test systems, announced today its acquisition of Austin-based BreakingPoint Systems, a security testing firm, for $160 million in cash.
The deal is expected to close by the end of September pending regulatory approvals.
BreakingPoint’s security products allow Ixia to offer its customers a strong defense against Cyber attacks.
“The current threat landscape is changing everything from the way we conduct business, to how we protect data and secure infrastructures, to the way we train cyber warriors,” Vic Alston, Ixia’s president and CEO said in a news statement. “This dynamic IT landscape is creating a growing demand for solutions that provide definitive and current insight into the resiliency of critical IT infrastructures and defenses. The use of disparate testing tools, threat intelligence, and monitoring products allows dangerous security vulnerabilities that erode the security posture of businesses and government agencies.”
BreakingPoint had revenue of $33.5 million in 2011, up 40 percent from a year earlier.
“As a leader in cyber security research, BreakingPoint has built a library of more than 34,000 attacks, exploits, malware, and more,” Dennis Cox, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of BreakingPoint. said in a news statement. “Joining forces with Ixia creates a powerful platform in security and application testing — one with an extensive global sales reach into enterprises, service providers, and government agencies.”
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Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
I covered the conference for the local newspaper.
Florida made quite an impression on me. I thought he understood the high-tech workforce better than anyone.
And at a time when everyone focused on globalization and a mobile workforce, Florida’s message was that cities needed to create places where talented people liked to live.
“Place is the single most important thing in the global economy,” Florida said at the time.
That’s still true.
That’s why Austin does so well in attracting and retaining a high-tech workforce. The city is a wonderful place to live and raise a family. It’s affordable and the city has a thriving creative class of artists, musicians, writers and high tech workers. The city has lakes, hike and bike trails, parks and more. Austin Fit, a marathon training program downtown, regularly attracts between 300 to 500 people at 6 a.m. on a Saturday during the sweltering summer heat to train for marathons. Austin and its citizens focus on recreation and exercise. But they still know how to have fun with festivals like Keep Austin Weird and Eeyore’s Birthday as well as the nationally known Austin City Limits and South by Southwest. Austin also has great restaurants, bars and more than a dozen coworking sites.
One of the things that makes Austin attractive, in my humble opinion, is the collective intelligence of its people. Maybe it’s because the University of Texas makes it home there, but Austin people are whip-smart.
San Antonio isn’t on the list – yet. But I think San Antonio is making huge progress toward becoming a high-tech hub. Mayor Julian Castro has addressed the obesity epidemic and put a huge focus on the importance of exercise and nutrition. San Antonio has the Fit Family Challenge with free Zumba classes and more every week in city parks.
The city is also focusing on improving its high school dropout rate, which is among the highest in the country. San Antonio is affordable, beautiful and has a creative class of artists, musicians and writers. And it’s high-tech workforce has also been growing.
This month, Richard Florida has a revision of The Rise of the Creative Class book coming out: The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited and he’s compiled a list of the top tech cities in the U.S.
Seattle, home to Microsoft and Amazon, claims the top place from Silicon Valley, which ranked first in his last book. Silicon Valley, which consists of the San Jose metro area, ranks second followed by the greater San Francisco area.
Portland, Oregon claims the fourth spot followed by Austin.
Raleigh, San Diego, Durham, Greater Boston and Boulder round out the top 10.
New York and Washington, D.C., don’t make the list despite their growing high-tech regions.
Florida ranks the top Tech cities by technology, talent and tolerance.
“While technology is an important driver of economic growth and development, it needs to be part of a broader social and cultural ecosystem before it can generate real prosperity,” Florida writes in this article in Atlantic Cities. “There is considerable overlap between the Technology Index and the Creative Class, which makes up more than 35 percent of the workforce in 14 of the top 20 Technology Index metros, and exceeds 40 percent in six of them.”
VolunteerSpot, which creates tools for moms, nonprofit organizers and others to coordinate volunteers, has received $1.5 million.
ff Venture Capital of New York led the investment along with the Central Texas Angel Network, Nebraska Angel network, Angel List and Baylor Angel Network.
The Austin-based startup plans to use the funds for marketing and to double its user base from 1.5 million to 3 million this fall when kids go back to school.
“VolunteerSpot makes giving of your time, talent and money easy for our legion of power moms, teachers and community coordinators who drive the lion share of volunteer activities in this country,” VolunteerSpot CEO, Karen Bantuveris said in a news release.
“VolunteerSpot has tapped into a highly desirable demographic and created an accessible solution to a long-time vexing problem,” John Frankel of ff Venture Capital said in a news release. “ff Venture Capital appreciates VolunteerSpot’s unique approach to both the mom-focused and cause-marketing markets and sees huge potential in their business.”
Austin-based Skyonic Corp. received $9 million of a $35 million investment for a carbon capture and utilization plant in the U.S.
Investors included Northwater Capital Management, ConocoPhillips, PVS Chemicals, Carl Berg and Zachry Corp. in the Series C funding.
The company plans to use the fund to build the plant this summer and for research and development and company operations.
“Skyonic’s green carbon chemistry technologies present a cost-effective solution to a problem that many industries have struggled with for years: emissions,” Frank Egan, Managing Director at Northwater, said in a statement.
Skyonic’s lab in San Antonio
“Skyonic’s electrolytic carbon capture technology, SkyMine®, will selectively remove CO2, acid gases, and heavy metals emitted from the cement plant’s flue gas streams and recycle it into hydrochloric acid, sodium bicarbonate and other byproducts,” according to the company. The City of San Antonio will provide utilities for the plant.
The GIF, Graphics Interchange Format, is 25 years old.
And it’s gotten a makeover.
The annoying images of flashing e-mail boxes and under construction signs from the early days of the Internet still exist. But few people use them.
Instead, companies looking to get the attention of a highly distracted Internet audience have turned to the video GIF.
And Cinegif in Austin wants to create special GIFs for them.
“Animated GIFs are making a comeback,” said Graham McFarland, Cinegif’s CEO.
Some people say the GIF killed Myspace.com because everyone junked up their profiles by placing numerous animated files on them, McFarland said. But GIFs are one of the most popular postings to Tumblr, the popular blogging platform, he said.
“GIFs are making a comeback because they can be easily put together to look like a video file.”
Cinegif is bringing this trend to businesses, McFarland said.
Companies can put the video GIFs into e-mail campaigns and social media campaigns, McFarland said.
“Anywhere you can use an image file you can use an animated GIF,” he said.
Right now the biggest creators of animated GIFs are teenagers and high-end fashion photographers in New York and Los Angeles, McFarland said.
Earlier this month, Burberry’s tweeted animated GIFs from its London Fashion week show.
Cinegif is doing a handful of pilot projects with small businesses locally and nationally to bring the technology to a wider business market, McFarland said.
The startup company recently launched its Cinegif App for the iPhone that lets consumers share 10 second video clips within a text message.
Cinegif has created a video conversion software that reduces file size and makes sharing short videos easy. The company has three patents on its technology and one more pending, McFarland said.
With the Cinegif video app, which is free, anyone can send a 10 second video GIF in a text message. The size of the file is compatible for mobile delivery with any telecommunications carrier, according to the company.
Doug Richardson, a professional photographer, came up with the idea and formed the company in 2006, but he’s only recently begun to commercialize it. The company has some angel funding and plans to seek additional funding later on this year. Cinegif currently has three employees and two contract employees.
Cinegif plans to host a 20 second film festival in Austin later this year to raise the awareness of what GIFs are and how they can be used, McFarland said.
“The goal is to get the technology out and into the hands of creative people,” McFarland said.
Judging from the comments on the last Sprint story, customers really want Sprint’s 4G LTE service.
And now they don’t have to wait much longer in San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Kansas City.
Sprint announced its 4G LTE network service starts on July 15.
The service should launch in Austin a few months later, according to Sprint officials.
Sprint built a new nationwide 3G and 4G LTE network, dubbed the Vision network so customers will receive faster download speeds and fewer dropped calls.
“The performance of both the 4G LTE and improved 3G networks are exceeding our expectations and we are pleased with the progress of the entire Network Vision program,” Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse said in a news release.
By the end of 2013, Sprints expects to have the service rolled out to all of its customers in the U.S.
BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Joshua Baer has a set of those millionaire-on-a-skateboard dotcom Gold Rush stories that give the Austin startup scene its own sexy tech history.
Baer graduated Carnegie Mellon with a less-than-stellar academic record, and a couple hundred grand in revenues from being an early dabbler in web hosting and email services. He secured two houses: one for his business and one for his home and skateboarded to work every morning. He was one of the dozens of entrepreneurs spun out during of the Golden Years of Trilogy. And, as a young man, he sold his first company and made enough money that he could afford to sit back and contemplate what he’d like to do with the rest of his life, now that he could do whatever he wanted.
He decided what he wanted was to help other entrepreneurs take their own version of the wild ride that brought him there. So Baer founded Capital Factory, which provides work space and mentoring to entrepreneurs. He’s also the founder and CEO of OtherInbox—which he sold in January to Return Path. He’s also a specialist at the University of Texas and an investor and advisor at more than 25 other companies.
The man who once-upon-a-time was scared to have his own company is equipping all the entrepreneurs he can with the knowledge and contacts to create theirs.
Baer grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire, a third-generation descendant of Eastern European immigrants. His father was portrait photographer and most of his ancestors were entrepreneurs.
“So when I first started a company, I thought of it as something achievable,” he said. “It wasn’t as intimidating to me as it is to some people.”
As a computer science major at Carnegie Mellon, he was an early internet adopter. At the time, if you wanted a web site you had to run your own web server. He couldn’t afford a web server and he didn’t get chosen for the StarNine WebSTAR beta program. So instead, he applied for the beta program for ListSTAR, an email server that fewer people were applying for. Being a student with time on his hands, he could afford to play with the email software and read the manual, which led him to start answering questions on the ListSTAR forum. He became the resident expert and eventually drew the attention of the StarNine CEO, who decided to make him an intern, an official spokesman of sorts, to answer questions on behalf of the company.
Soon people were hiring him to consult about issues on their servers, paying him a pizza or $10-$15 bucks an hour. He started farming out work he didn’t have time for to fraternity buddies who were computer science majors. Then one day, one of his customers proposed that, instead of fixing problems as they arose, he would pay Baer $50 a month just to keep his server up and running to avoid chronic breakdowns and angry customers. It looked like money for nothing and Baer launched into the server industry. That was the real beginning of his first company in 1996, SKYLIST. And as it grew, rapidly, Baer got nervous.
“I was afraid to have my own business,” he said. “I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” The CEO of StarNine had sold that company and started another. He offered to help Baer out by making Baer’s company a division of his own.
“By the time I graduated in 1999 I had a couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue,” he said. “I employed a couple people doing tech support and people doing programming. I was the king of my world. I could buy more beer than anybody I knew.”
He got inundated with job offers. But then Jonathan Berkowitz, a friend who graduated six months before him, got hired by Trilogy Inc. and told him about it.
“I met with the CEO and he said ‘Keep your company. Come down here, work for me, learn a ton on my dime and when you’re done you can go back up there.” How could he refuse?
He brought his CMU gang who were working for him down to Austin. They housed servers in his house until they ran out of room, then rented a place up the street. His next company, UnsubCentral, spun out of SKYLIST. Compliance rules were emerging around email and he created a leading compliance solution for email list operators. Part of that company required him to meet with the Federal Trade Commission to provide industry comment on CAN-SPAM. He was 24.
“I don’t really enjoy wearing a suit,” he recalls. “But if I had to do it again now I am so much more confident and better prepared, I would totally show up in jeans and a t-shirt. Back then I was a 24-year-old trying to be an adult.”
When he was 30, he sold both SKYLIST and UnsubCentral to Datran Media (now PulsePoint) for an undisclosed amount estimated at $10 million in 2006. And that changed his life.
“Selling my first company was an inflection point,” he said. “Right as I turned 30 I sold my first company. It was a life changing event. I wasn’t doing poorly before I sold the company but I never had any financial security. ..your perspective on life changes when you have financial security.”
He pondered what he wanted to do. Go sit on a beach? A career as an EMT seemed exciting. “I romanticized the idea….” he said. “It must be incredible to walk home every day and say I saved two people’s lives today. But I pass out when they take blood from me.”
“Then I realized: I get a ton of personal satisfaction from helping people become entrepreneurs. … If I help somebody actually get their company started I feel successful. I get a ton of positive energy back from them…. The best way I can help the world is to help one person achieve financial independence. They’re going to make their own lives better and it’s going to have a trickle-down effect. If they start a company, that makes Austin better. That makes the world better. That’s I thing I can do and I’m good at it.”
So that’s what he does. He has always been a good networker, by his own admission. And he teaches what he’s learned along the way.
“He was one of the instructors for our class, we got to get advice from him on a weekly basis,” said Dwayne Smurdon, CEO of Predictable Data, a company that was created in one of Baer’s classes. “He’s very pragmatic. He gets down to issues you really need to worry about rather than the big scale issues like human resources. He focuses on what is the minimum you have to do to be viable, to get your company started up. “
That might include teaching students how to deal with mentors: Make sure you’re prepared to ask them very specific, targeted questions. Don’t waste your time or their time. Make sure you’re asking until they’ve said no; you never know how much a mentor is going to give.
It includes pitching advice: Start with a story people can relate to. Start with a small picture and build towards the big picture.
“He helps you network, get involved in the entrepreneurial community,” said Smurdon. “He’ll introduce you and what you do with that is up to you. It’s such a big advantage that other people who didn’t’ get to know someone like Josh don’t have.”
Both Smurdon and Baer say he emphasizes focus. There are so many potential issues to tackle, entrepreneurs don’t know where to look first. During pitch competitions, he said, entrepreneurs need to be able to drill down to the point.
“My goal is that I should be able to help everyone in some way: Introduce them to somebody, help them figure out a key tactic–something to do differently,” Baer said. And he’s carved a unique spot for himself in the world of Austin startups
“Josh is such a great catalyst for the city of Austin,” said Bryan Jones, 2012 chair of the Greater Austin Technology Partnership through the Austin Chamber of Commerce and CEO of Collider Media. “There aren’t many people that are both a successful entrepreneur, prolific investor and community activist. His ability to evangelize the city, while still making the community feel smaller by making constant introductions, is amazing.”
Baer is a fierce advocate for Austin as a tech growth center and weighs in often on the Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Hills controversy. While California benefits from a greater supply of early stage capital, for example, he points out that fewer companies need that much capital. He, for example, bootstrapped his first two companies.
“We want to learn what we can from the Silicon Valley, take their investors and their money and never become them. They’re at the pinnacle, they are the Mecca of consumer internet technology but they’re kind of like an established old boy club. It’s not impossible to break into that, but it’s hard. It’s hard to carve out a niche. Austin is a big pond that’s growing. That’s the exciting place to be for me, not in the busiest, most crowded room, but a growing one that creates opportunity…. You can affect what it’s becoming. You can change it. You’re not going to change Silicon Valley….I was a nobody in Austin but I’ve been able to get involved, get to be part of the community, stepping up and filling the void. There are places to jump in and play your part in what is going to be.”
So that’s what he’s bringing to Austin. The message and the knowledge to invite entrepreneurs: There’s opportunity here…come and play.
ATX Innovations, the makers of the popular Tabbedout bar payment app, has raised $3.5 million of a $4 million offering, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Austin Business Journal first reported the story.
The Austin-based startup, founded in 2009, has already raised more than $6 million since its inception, according to a previously published story in the StartupGazette.
Jason Seats, managing director of TechStars Cloud and cofounder of Slicehost
He’s not only the managing director of the TechStars Cloud program at Geekdom, a collaboration and coworking space downtown, but he’s been there done that and has plenty of T-shirts to prove it.
In 2006, Seats, cofounded Slicehost with his college friend Matt Tanase and two years later sold it to Rackspace for millions. The exact price of the acquisition was not disclosed.
But Rackspace did report paying $11.5 million in cash and stock for Slicehost and JungleDisk and up to $16.5 million more based on performance goals.
Here’s a video of Robert Scoble (at the time a reporter with Fast Company Magazine. He now covers startups for Rackspace) interviewing Seats and Tanase about the acquisition, which took place on Oct. 22, 2008. The acquisition allowed Rackspace to compete more effectively with Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud computing business.
The life of an entrepreneur is a risky one.
Some people prefer the security of a desk job with a corporation while others risk everything to create something from nothing.
Life is about making active and passive choices, according to Seats.
He graduated in 2001 from St. Louis University with two degrees in computer science and engineering. He got a job at a startup right out of college.
“It was a rough time to graduate,” Seats said. The Dot Com collapse had just occurred and the job with the startup didn’t work out. So he took a secure job with St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis and he stayed there for five years. He wrote software programs for the hospital.
“If I could stay there five years I could have done it for 15 years,” Seats said. “A lot of the people I worked with are still there sitting in the same chairs.”
But Seats was bored and restless. He took an MIT online course on open projects. One day, he read an article on “How to Love the Job You’re In” and he realized that he needed to make a change.
“I was rationalizing what I was doing there,” Seats said.
He started looking at his options and ended up taking a job with CPI Corp., the company that ran Sears Portrait Studios. He worked on creating a video software compression program for them.
“That broke me out of my rut,” Seats said.
Around that time, his buddy, Matt had started Slicehost, a web hosting company in 2006. He had already invested $10,000 in the business. Seats matched that and they became partners. But Seats didn’t quit his day job. He spent nights and weekends working at Slicehost and his days at his CPI job. They spent three months building the core product. The idea was to buy a server and virtually divide it into smaller pieces and sell “slices” to customers. They bought three initial servers. Then they put up a Website, explained the offering and opened up a chat room. They turned the system on and the first customer walked through the virtual door. Web hosting started at $40 and rose from there depending on the amount of server capacity required.
Seats planned to quit his day job at CPI within two years of starting up Slicehost. Instead, he quit two months later. By then, they had two dozen servers running, a waiting list of customers wanting to buy the service and they never advertised.
“It became clear that things were going to happen faster than we expected,” Seats said.
Seats and Tanase had one client on retainer for a development job that helped finance Slicehost. They bootstrapped the company and poured all the revenue back into buying more servers.
By the fall of 2007, Slicehost hired its first employees: one programmer and one community support person.
“We had a big open community,” Seats said. “If one of our members had a problem they could go out to the community. Our support costs were very, very low. People felt good about the support we gave. And our customers worked for us.”
To maintain that community, Seats and Tanase put up a blog post with job postings and hired the first two people who applied for the programmer and community support jobs.
“It was a totally organic move to bring them in.” Seats said.
Paul Tomes in the United Kingdom got the community support job. He’s still with Rackspace today, Seats said.
By the end of the second year, Slicehost had eight employees and 15,000 customers with 55 percent of them in the United States and the others coming from 170 countries.
“We never did any advertising,” Seats said.
Slicehost grew organically through word of mouth marketing by its customers.
“We spread in the circles that made sense,” Seats. “We never had an active sales force. We never talked about sales. We talked about support all the time.”
All of the Slicehost employees spent time in the chat rooms dealing with support, Seats said.
“We were always looking for ways to solve root problems,” he said.
In July of 2008, Lew Moorman, now president of Rackspace, opened up a support ticket with Slicehost and that started the courtship that would end up with Rackspace acquiring the company. From that first e-mail, it only took a week for the first acquisition offer, Seats said.
The guys at 37Signals did this great 30 minute four-part video interview with Tanase and Seats that recounts the full version of the Slicehost story from founding to acquisition.
As a condition of the acquisition, Seats moved to San Antonio to join Rackspace. He bought a house in December of 2008. He worked at Rackspace until June of 2010. He considered the idea of going back to school to get his Phd in Physics. But instead he started volunteering as a mentor with 3 Day Startup San Antonio. He liked working with entrepreneurs.
In the fall of 2011, Graham Weston, chairman of Rackspace, and Pat Condon, co-founder of Rackspace, approached him about heading up the new TechStar Cloud program in San Antonio. He met with Nicole Glaros and Dave Cohen with TechStars and they offered Seats the job.
“Working with Jason has been pure joy,” Glaros said. “He did a wonderful job. It’s going to be really cool watching him develop the program further.”
TechStars Cloud had its first class of 11 companies graduate last April. Seats still talks with the companies weekly. And they think very highly of him.
“Not only is Jason technically competent but he’s very insightful,” said Matt Gershoff with Conductrics, one of the TechStar Cloud companies.
Seats is tremendously loyal and speaks plainly and truthfully, Gershoff said.
“Everyone respects him,” he said. “He’s an amazing guy.”
Colin Loretz with Cloudsnap, another TechStars Cloud company, already knew who Seats was before joining the program.
“It was cool to meet him and realize he was the kind of guy who will go out of his way to help you out and help you succeed.”
Seats was the “best mentor I could ever hope for,” Loretz said.
Who is this guy in this picture that doesn’t have a positive opinion of cloud computing?
San Antonio-based Rackspace today released a survey of information technology decision makers showing that nine out of ten have a positive opinion of cloud computing and customer service and technical support were their top considerations when choosing a cloud computing provider.
They also reported computing power and data migration as important when choosing a cloud provider.
“The world is in the midst of a tectonic shift toward cloud computing that is revolutionizing the way companies do business,” Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said a in a statement. “The survey shows that IT decision makers understand the importance of selecting a cloud provider that empowers their businesses with the systems, products, and customer service capabilities to successfully make the transition to the cloud.”
“We believe it is important that companies be empowered with choice, an open cloud and the high level of technical support they need to concentrate on their core business,” Napier said. “A chief benefit for IT decision makers using open-source technology is portability of workloads across vendors and the elimination of vendor lock-in.”
You can find out more about the survey here.
Rackspace is a sponsor of SiliconHillsNews.com
