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SolarBridge Technologies lands $25 million in funding

May 30, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Austin-based SolarBridge Technologies has received $25 million in venture capital.
The company, which makes micro inverters used in solar panels, has raised a total of $71 million.
Shea Ventures led the latest Series D round, and previous investors including Battery Ventures, Rho Ventures and Osage University Partners, also participated.
“AC modules powered by SolarBridge microinverters are the clear choice for residential and light commercial solar,” Ron Van Dell, president and CEO, SolarBridge, said in a news release.
SolarBridge plans to use the money to launch new hardware and software products, for marketing and sales and global expansion.
“As the market for rooftop solar continues to grow, we are excited to partner with SolarBridge, which provides innovative and reliable microinverter technology and a highly differentiated business model,” said Jason Schoettler, managing director of Shea Ventures.


About SolarBridge Technologies

Gazzang Branches Out from its Encryption Roots

May 25, 2012 / / 2 Comments

By YASMIN GHAHREMANI
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News

Larry Warnock, CEO and president of Gazzang

Something was bothering Larry Warnock. It was 2010 and the former CEO of Phurnace Software had recently finished leading his company through a successful sale to BMC. His next challenge was advising two Houston entrepreneurs on how to realize their business idea.
Mike Umansky and Chris Gillan had come up with an encryption solution for open source software that filled a gaping hole in the cloud computing market. But Warnock felt the name they’d chosen for their company, Critotech, was all wrong. It wasn’t just that it sounded like a relic from a Cold War spy novel. It was that the name’s security connotations would hamstring the company’s growth outside the encryption space, a goal the startup veteran considered crucial to its long-term success.
“I didn’t want to be known as Encryption, Inc.,” says Warnock.
So when he joined the firm as CEO that year, one of the first things he did was look for a fresh web brand name. In a request that sounds like it’s straight out of Seinfeld, he asked his team to come up with a name that meant nothing. He didn’t want the company typecast as it continued to find itself. After some fruitless brainstorming, the team began to look through comic books for words used to denote sounds.
“Sure enough a guy went home and his son found in a comic book a picture of a good guy punching a bad guy and it said ‘Gazang,’” recalls Warnock. “And it was in a little cloud. So we said that’s it.”
Gazang.com was already taken, so they added another Z to make the name Gazzang.
Blank slate in hand, the team has since been writing its own story in the cloud. Management has narrowed the market focus to customers who need Big Data solutions. And it’s got two new cloud tools in the works – one of which will debut in July.

Encryption pays
Not that the founders are ashamed of their encryption roots. On the contrary, their flagship platform-as-a-service software, recently renamed zNcrypt, is turning heads. Gazzang was one of 10 vendors recently selected for the MIT Sloan CIO Innovation Showcase. What’s more, the company recorded its strongest quarter to date in Q1 and its customer base has expanded to 220, including Philips Electronics, the United States Department of Health and Human Services and Boston Children’s Hospital. Healthcare, finance and government are target sectors because they’re required to protect data.
“Compliance was a huge thing for these folks – PCI, HIPAA, SOX – all those guidelines were big challenges,” says Umansky.
He and Gillan first got the idea for zNcrypt while talking with people involved in grid computing and virtual machine automation – the predecessors of cloud computing. Users needed encryption that wouldn’t interfere with the performance of their databases and other applications.
“Chris and I did market analysis and realized that MySQL was the database of choice for these guys,” says Umansky. “It had such huge traction and really there was no way to encrypt that data at rest, so we went out and built our transparent data encryption platform and key management platform.” Transparent data encryption is a process that happens on the fly and behind the scenes so the developer doesn’t have to change the database or underlying application.
“It just happens auto-magically as the data goes to the disk,” explains Warnock. “Then when the data is requested back for processing, its magic key determines if that requester is authorized.”
Because zNcrypt secures the data instantly, it leaves less room for breaches than products that only encrypt periodically. The tool now protects all LAMP-based applications and data. Wendy Nather, research director of the enterprise security practice at 451 Research, says no one else is specializing in database security for the open source community, and it’s a problem that badly needs an answer.
“Every enterprise has open source software somewhere incorporated,” says Nather. “Even if they’re writing their own software, chances are a developer has incorporated some open source components in it. When you’re developing things and you need a lab to play with you’re generally going to turn to open source components because they’re cheaper and you can have as many as you want when you need them.”

Chasing Big Data
Gazzang has continued to refine its direction, shifting slightly when Big Data began to gain
attention. Big Data refers to huge data sets that are not well suited to be handled by current relational databases – usually petabytes or exabytes of information. Much of the data created today couldn’t be processed in a relational database anyway because it is unstructured. It comes from smart phones, tablet computers, cameras and numerous other connected devices.
Data and distributed file system technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB can turn these otherwise lost bits of data into valuable information that companies, governments,science organizations and the like can analyze for insights. Marketers use Big Data to understand aggregate buying behavior and computer scientists use it to analyze the interactions of thousands of nodes in a network.
Gazzang realized that its zNcrypt architecture would fit with technologies like Hadoop and decided Big Data is the way of the future. It’s a change from what the founders initially envisioned but Warnock says that’s par for the course in startup-land.
“Every startup I’ve been in, when we ultimately had great success it was different than what we thought it was going to be,” he says.
Investors are happy with the way things are turning out too. Austin Ventures provided Gazzang with Series A funding worth $3.5 million and has been pleasantly surprised by the turn of events.
“The customer set they’ve gotten has been a little bit different than we originally thought it would be but better in some ways because the deals are larger and the sales cycle is frankly a little bit shorter,” says Thomas Ball, general partner at Austin Ventures.
With all the hype around the cloud and Big Data, Ball concedes that Gazzang risks getting lost in a game of lingo bingo.
“I think positioning and rising above the clutter is the biggest challenge because everyone wants to use the term cloud now,” he says. “But when people see how good the product is and how easy it is to scale, it’s an easy sale.”

In the pipeline
Next up on Gazzang’s agenda: zTrustee, a universal key manager for a wide variety of applications. zNcrypt manages keys for data it encrypts but zTrustee will work with any kind of key, certificate or token used for a wide array of computing processes. It’s intended to be a “single point of trust” for keys and the policies around them, and it will launch in July.
Later this year the company will roll out zOps, a console to monitor and diagnose issues with cloud computing functions.
It’s all part of Warnock’s vision for market expansion beyond the encryption space.
“A lot of the data center tools that exist were never built for the cloud,” he says. “So there’s actually a market opportunity to rebuild all the tools people have been relying on but in this new architecture.”
If Warnock has his way, when people say the name Gazzang they’ll hear a bat hitting a home run.
“What we’re doing with Gazzang and what I think works best in early-stage is to swing for the bleachers,” he says. “We are going to be wildly successful or an epic disaster.”
Whatever the outcome, one thing is for sure. The game will certainly be interesting.

Polygraph Media launches Facebook data analytics software

May 24, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Facebook has 900 million users generating gobs of public data every day.
Their comments or likes on Facebook pages can provide valuable insights for marketers.
But it’s often difficult to mine the data to sort through everything to find meaningful information.
That’s where Polygraph Media comes in.
The Austin-based startup this week launched its Polygraph Reports, which allows marketing agencies and brands to employ data mining and analytics for Facebook.
“We’re mining publicly available information,” said Chris Treadaway, founder of Polygraph Media and author of “Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day.”
“Facebook probably represents the greatest opportunity for marketers to understand what the consumer is saying and what they want,” Treadaway said. “It’s creating terabytes of information everyday on what consumers are thinking and saying.”
Polygraph’s software collects data from Facebook pages and subscriber-enabled profiles, and produces more than 40 charts, graphs, and data visualizations to give marketers information about their marketing campaigns and strategies.
The service offers an alternative to Facebook Insights, which Facebook provides on its site.
Polygraph mines the source data that makes up Facebook Insights to give companies more information, Treadaway said.
“A lot of people are suspicious of Facebook Insights,” Treadaway said. “The numbers just don’t jive.’’
So Polygraph created an unbiased alternative by collecting and evaluating every social interaction that might take place on a Facebook page.
“We can tell brands who left a comment, what time did they do it and what did they respond to,” Treadaway said. There’s a ton of informational content that can be boiled down into what did all the women say, what did all the men say and how many interactions take place within an hour of a post, he said.
One of Polygraph’s biggest competitive differentiators from Facebook Insights is that brand cannot get information on their competitors. With Polygraph reports, they can, Treadaway said.
“Facebook is the largest self-contributed database of information that the world has ever seen,” Treadaway said.
Polygraph brings data mining, analysis and reporting tools to anyone who wants to analyze business to consumer activity on Facebook. The software shows marketers how their Facebook marketing campaigns and strategies work based on data.
“The data doesn’t lie,” Treadaway said. “The data tells a lot of things that you’re trusting people to tell you. I trust the data more than I trust some self-interested consultant. If they have bad numbers, do they want to share them?
Founded in 2008 as a couponing site aimed at small businesses, the company originally raised $235,000. But it has since shifted its business to the data mining space. Polygraph Media has five employees. In June, the company will begin its push to raise venture capital to expand its development team.
“We’ve all heard how if Facebook were a nation, it would be the third largest country on Earth. So it’s common sense that brands have focused so much attention here,” Brad B McCormick, principal at 10 Louder Strategies and a former senior digital leader at Ruder Finn, Porter Novelli and Cohn & Wolfe global agencies, said in a news release. “But just because a company can be on Facebook doesn’t mean they know how to be on Facebook and measure success. Acquiring Facebook “likes” is just the first step for brands. Ongoing engagement that builds brand equity is the holy grail of Facebook. But all too often today, brands and agencies are measuring success with empty platitudes and without data or relevant benchmarks,” McCormick continued. “Polygraph Media offers by far the most robust Facebook analytics I have ever seen. It not only gives brands new insights into their own performance, it allows them to compare each of their KPIs against their competitors, in real time. It’s a game changer.”
Later this year, Polygraph will launch data mining tools for Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and other sites.
Already, more than 25 brands, major agencies and consultants use Polygraph reports. It is offered as a software as a service model. Pricing is based on the size of Facebook Pages that are analyzed.
“The launch has been really successful. We’ve had good response to our pricing,” Treadaway said. “People have picked up from the data that they can do all kinds of creative things.”

Sparefoot teams up with Penske to make moving and storage easy

May 24, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Move it and store it.
Austin-based startup Sparefoot has teamed up with Penske Truck Rental to make it easy for folks to move and store their belongings this Memorial Day weekend.
Sparefoot informs us that this coming Tuesday is known in the business as “Crazy Tuesday” because it’s the unofficial biggest day of the year for the storage industry.
“This collaboration with SpareFoot will make for a more convenient moving experience for our customers,” Don Mikes, Senior Vice President of Rental for Penske Truck Leasing, said in a news release.
SpareFoot is the world’s largest online marketplace for consumers to find and reserve self-storage units, with comparison shopping tools that show real-time availability and exclusive deals.

Happy 39th Birthday Ethernet

May 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

In 1973, there were no personal computers, says Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet.
But 39 years ago today, Metcalfe and David Boggs, Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson at Xerox set out to build a network for them. The idea for Ethernet first appeared in print in a memo that Metcalfe wrote on May 22, 1973.
They borrowed the word – Ethernet – from physics and the term: luminiferous aether – “meaning light-bearing aether” and describing “a medium for the propagation of light.”
In 1979, Metcalfe co-founded 3Com Corp. to build Ethernet products.
And in 1981, 3Com shipped the first adapter for personal computers when IBM invented its desktop PC at its Boca Raton campus in Florida.
Today, Ethernet has evolved so much that what people refer to as Ethernet has little resemblance to the technology developed 39 years ago, Metcalfe said.
In this video, Metcalfe discusses Ethernet’s past briefly and he focuses on the future of the technology. It’s worth watching.
Today, Metcalfe serves as professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin.

SceneTap sparks controversy in San Francisco

May 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

SceneTap launched in several Austin bars last January and no one seemed to care all that much.
But at that time, Cole Harper, SceneTap’s CEO, wanted to make sure that we reported correctly on his company’s facial detection technology. He wanted people to know that it does not record identities and merely reports on how many men or women are at a bar at any given time and their ages so patrons could judge whether or not they wanted to join the scene. He was afraid there might be a privacy backlash.
Austin-based SceneTap gathers information from video cameras and collects statistics on the demographics of who’s at a bar. It then compiles the stats into percentages and posts them to a website or mobile app. Consumers can’t see the data associated with the stats to protect privacy.
Here’s the story we wrote at the time of the launch. And as far as I could gauge, the reaction in Austin was not that great. Certainly, no one protested the technology.
But that’s quite a different reaction to SceneTap’s reception in San Francisco. The company launched in several bars there last Friday and dozens of articles have been written about the controversy the so-called Big Brother technology has stirred up there. People have threatened to boycott bars employing the facial detection technology.
And now SF Weekly Blogs is reporting that San Francisco bars are nixing “SceneTap’s Creepy Facial Detection Cameras.”

To address the controversy, Harper has penned a letter to San Francisco. The letter is posted below.

Dear San Francisco,
We’ve taken a lot of heat in the past few days and I can completely understand the concern. I realize there are aspects of our technology that could appear to be controversial and raise serious red flags for people, and I assure you I’m not taking it lightly. I know that up until this point we’ve tried to explain what the app is all about in an attempt to set the record straight, but I owe you more than that.

Criticisms in the past week have broken down into two groups: invasion of privacy and a “creepy” app for men to hunt down women. I do understand how that might be your initial reaction after reading some of the blog posts and articles that talk about the app, so I’d like to take this time to better explain the technology and ease these concerns.

When I started SceneTap with my friend, Marc Doering, our intent was for this to be a lighthearted app for consumers and one that would help venue owners with their marketing efforts. Our first thought was “wouldn’t it be great to know what’s happening somewhere before you waste money on a cab?” To get that info, we could pay a doorman to click a button, but that would get expensive and manipulated quickly, so no go. We could use check-ins, but that would rely too much on users and pull personal information, as other geo-location services do – besides, check-ins would never encompass the entire population of a place, so that would be an incomplete evaluation of the scene.

Then we looked at video-based software, which could automatically translate an image into data. Facial recognition was ruled out for privacy reasons and the complexities of user governance. Facial detection, on the other hand, could only figure out facial features through an algorithm, and estimate, with a high level of accuracy, the gender and age of a person. The technology cannot identify an individual person. Recognition says, “Cole Harper walked in, and he’s a 28 year old male living in Austin with 300 friends on Facebook, and here’s his email.” Detection says, “This person appears similar to a male, age 28.” There’s no personal information collected or transmitted within that data.

Further, we knew that in publicizing any of this data, personal or not, we had a responsibility to present it in a way that protected operators and users. So we decided not to present any individual data either. Everything is shown as a percentage or an average over time. Further, we let venues and users decide on business rules to cap out what statistics would show. Male percentage would never exceed 72%, because that would negatively impact the perception of the venue (based on feedback). Female percentage would never exceed 58%, because it may create a “correction” from a swarm of males showing up. In almost a year, we’ve never had any complaints or concerns expressed from a user on the way we display this information (although operators do want to show a higher number of females and a lower number of males, for obvious reasons).

Back to the “video-based” software. Here’s the thing – there are no videos or images stored at any time. Once the data is triggered, the images are overwritten, deleted, gone. There are no tapes. There is no video feed either. No one can go to www.scenetap.com and see what is happening. It’s all data and numbers – that’s it. And since we’re only focused on the door, you’re free to do keg stands and dance like Bernie or hit on that bartender all you want – we do not track you in the venue.

Unfortunately, I think I underestimated the controversial aspects of this technology and what the public’s reaction would be. I know it’s hard to just take me at my word on this, so that’s why I’ve been trying to explain how the technology works in an attempt to put everyone at ease.

Because this is such a serious issue, we’ve been working with Congress, the FTC, and privacy advocate groups to further the privacy agenda as the world becomes increasingly filled with these types of cameras. I’ve also heard your suggestions about working with organizations like the EFF, and it’s something I’m going to explore because I want to make sure that you feel that your personal privacy is always respected.

At the end of the day, there isn’t a way to use SceneTap to go out and target specific women (or men) – all you can do is find out where there are more women or men of a certain age range. The “crowd size” has been most universally used in the decision on where to go, which has nothing to do with the gender/age component. For us, it’s about helping locals and tourists alike find the place that’s right for them. We aim to be more like an objective Yelp, a real-time Zagat…a tool to help you make your decision.

While gender is an interesting novelty, most of our users report using the app to find the scene that is right for them. For some people, it’s finding a bar that’s super packed with young people. For others it’s finding a less crowded bar where you know you’ll get a table or can chat on a date. I actually use the app more to find a place to watch a game with friends or the place with the good food/drink specials, so long as it isn’t dead.

I hope this helps to explain some things for everyone. I really do understand the concerns, but I want to assure you that we are working closely with both the government and the industry leaders to ensure that everyone’s privacy is protected. I think San Francisco is a great city full of passionate, smart people, and you know your technology and social media better than anyone else. I’m glad you’re challenging SceneTap and keeping us on our toes. You’ve given me some very serious things to consider, and you’ve helped me to see that I need to address the potential flaws in my business (perceived or actual) if I want this company to succeed.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at charper@scenetap.com . Things will be crazy with the launch over the next few days, but I will personally take time to respond to everyone who reaches out to me as quickly as possible.

Sincerely,

Cole Harper
CEO, SceneTap

Cyfeon to pitch at Disrupt NYC

May 21, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Austin startup Cyfeon is pitching its software today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NYC.
Cyfeon is the first Austin startup picked for the battlefield competition in the combined ten-year history of TechCrunch Disrupt events in New York and San Francisco. More than a thousand new companies from around the world applied to be a part of Startup Battlefield, and only 30 were selected.
Cyfeon’s technology, called Answer Factory, uses data to help businesses make decisions.
The company will present for six minutes to a panel of venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs and technologists. The winner receives $50,000 and the “Disrupt Cup.”

Silicon Laboratories buys Ember Corp.

May 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Austin-based Silicon Laboratories has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Boston-based Ember Corp. for $72 million.
Ember makes chips, hardware and software used in wireless smart meters for and the home.
“This acquisition of a high-caliber team with proven wireless mesh networking know-how accelerates our ability to offer complete system solutions to our customers,” Tyson Tuttle, president and CEO of Silicon Laboratories, said in a statement.
“We believe our track record and technology leadership in ZigBee-based systems combined with Silicon Labs’ broad portfolio and focus on establishing a market-leading business in embedded wireless will enable our customers and the Internet of Things market to grow faster,” said Bob LeFort, chief executive officer of Ember.
Ember is expected to contribute approximately $10 million to $12 million in revenue in the second half of 2012. Ember has approximately 60 employees worldwide.

“Why I Moved My Company to California”

May 18, 2012 / / 5 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Moderator Laura Beck of Stripedshirt.com hoped the panel would spark fiery debate. But it turned into an event along the lines of Eeyore running out of Prozac during the rainy season when the Austin Technology Council 2012 CEO Summit hosted several entrepreneurs speaking on the topic “Why I Moved My Company to California.”
Panelists James Beshara, co-founder of Crowdtilt, Frank Coppersmith, COO of GameSalad, Matt Pfeil, co-founder of DataStax and Tom Serres, CEO of Rally listed numerous reasons why they moved to the San Fransisco Bay area or Silicon Valley, including vastly more venture capital money, a wealth of thought leadership and a pace of activity 20 times faster than that of Austin. The only thing they missed back home in Texas was the food—specifically barbecue and breakfast tacos with green chile.
The panel was part of day two of the second annual CEO Summit at the Hilton Hotel. The Austin Technology Council sponsored the two-day event in which more than 150 CEOs and other top level technology executives meet to discuss the outlook for Central Texas’ technology industry and how to recruit and retain technology talent. Though the agenda for Friday appeared to largely focus on what Austin needs to do to give its startup community more support.
Rally’s Serres said he went to Silicon Valley for the capital. “For every venture capital firm here there are about 1,000 in the valley,” he said. “And it’s a different style of investor here. In the valley, there’s a larger number of risk takers. I was going for a larger consumer tech play. I don’t think the talent is in Austin for a large consumer tech company.”
Beshara said he intended to move to the Bay Area only temporarily. But within three weeks, he’ddecided to stay. “Out there, things move so ‘friggin fast,” he said. “And speed is everything.”
Coppersmith pointed out that the thought leaders are in California.
“If you are in movies, you’re in L.A….if you’re in tech, you’re in Silicon Valley. It’s about getting access to the thought leaders.”
Pfeil pointed out that the Silicon Valley ecosystem is all about startups. Stanford graduates, he said, come out with a mission in life to “quit after their second year of work and become the next Google….UT is going to have to focus less on graduating great, world-class engineers and focus on graduating entrepreneurs who will start great, world-class companies.”
Panelists mentioned problems that were repeated throughout the day: Exponentially more venture capital money exists in Northern California; the Universities, the funders, the famous companies like Google and Facebook, in short the entire culture supports startups; access is immediate—startups can have face time with venture capitalists and angel investors regularly. In Austin, by contrast, a lot of investment money goes to oil and gas; funders are more conservative; there are inadequate flights in and out of the city making travel to and from Austin cumbersome; the University produces employees for Dell, not entrepreneurs.
Even the attributes Austin claims to have over the Bay Area, such as low taxes and quality of life were debunked by panelists. The taxes may be 60 percent higher, Beshara said, but his company’s valuation was 3.5 times higher. And, Serres said, he spends time at Napa, at Lake Tahoe “I have a great life (in California.)”
Beck kept hoping for a fight from the audience but instead a deafening pall settled over the room.
There were some arguments made in defense of Austin. It’s less expensive to fail here, for example.
Serres said that many tech areas, such as Boulder, Colorado and Raleigh, North Carolina, struggled with the same issue. But the important thing was for each of those areas to stop trying to be Silicon Valley and figure out what they do best.
Josh Baer pointed out that he knew a number of Austin entrepreneurs who had moved here from California and that not all of them needed the kind of heavy capitalization these entrepreneurs had sought. He acknowledged the shortage of financing on the traditional model but asked if there might be another model coming down the pike where Austin could excel. The consensus seemed to be “No.”
But while there was no battle in defense of Austin as a tech city, people afterward did talk in small groups about the fact that not every startup aimed to be the next Facebook or Google. Some entrepreneurs were just happy to build reasonably successful businesses from their ideas. Some are even happy to bootstrap those businesses. But there was agreement that Austin needed to fight against an identity as the place where the call centers for the Googles and the Facebooks of the world were located.
Later panels including one that gave the Investor’s Perception of Tech in Texas, addressed many of the same issues the first panel raised including the lack of nonstop flights and the lack of proximity to venture capitalists who want to play a hands-on role with the companies they fund.
The fact that there is a smaller number of startups in Austin than in the Silicon Valley means that top talent will be more reluctant to move here, because there aren’t “a lot of plan Bs” said John Stockton, Venture Partner with the Mayfield Fund.
Jimmy Treybig, Venture Partner with NEA pointed out that many Austin companies tend to think of their market as the U.S. with global expansion being an afterthought. In the Valley, entrepreneurs start out thinking of huge, emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil as key markets from the beginning.
Some advantages, Austin has, however, include the fact that companies don’t have to have a billion dollar target to get funded, unlike companies in the Valley. And SXSW is a huge caveat for Austin’s reputation as a tech center, Treybig said. By the end of the day, Austin did not walk away with any illusions it was gaining on Silicon Valley’s nearly 80 years of development as a tech center. But it did walk away with a laundry list of action items to push it to the next phase. And that might be more important.

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