In 2011, 13 companies moved to Austin with the assistance of the Austin Technology Incubator’s Landing Pad Program.
The companies included Amatra, BlackLocus, Convergence Wireless, Digital Harmony Games, Drivve, DXUp Close, SceneTap, Social Muse, Tactical Information Systems and V-Chain Solutions. Also, Ben Dyer, a serial entrepreneur, moved here from Atlanta with TechDrawl, and has since helped NightRaft and BeHome247 relocate here, according to this news release.
The Austin Technology Incubator’s Landing Pad Program helps companies relocate to Austin or establish headquarters here. It focuses on early-stage high technology companies in the biosciences, clean energy, wireless and IT industries. The nonprofit incubator is part of the IC2 Institute of the University of Texas at Austin.
“We are so proud of the business environment that exists in Austin, all the right ingredients for success, but via a supportive, community approach,” Robert Reeves, ATI’s director of IT and wireless, said in a news statement.
“ATI has always been focused on finding, welcoming, integrating and helping make successful new technology companies, whether from Austin or not,” Eve Richter, the city’s emerging technologies coordinator, said in a news statement. “Over the past few years, the Landing Pad concept has brought two dozen companies to town, and we are so thrilled ATI has really taken the program up a notch, formalizing it in 2011. The City of Austin is proud to support ATI in all efforts, including the Landing Pad Program.”
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CEO and Founder of WhaleShark Media Cotter Cunningham
By Eoghan McCloskey
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
The popularity and success of daily deal sites such as Groupon and Living Social have created opportunities for others like WhaleShark Media.
The Austin-based startup connects consumers with multiple daily deal and coupon services like Deals.com and CouponShare.com as well as deal sites outside of the U.S. like Gutschein-Codes.de.
Founded in 2010, WhaleShark Media has received $300 million from several venture capital firms including Austin Ventures, Google Ventures, and Institutional Venture Partners. In less than two years, WhaleShark Media has evolved into a profitable and quickly growing company, generating 30 percent growth in site traffic and 50 percent revenue growth. WhaleShark Media’s rapid growth stems, in part, from a series of major acquisitions of other coupon vendors, most importantly RetailMeNot.com, the single largest online coupon site in the world, and VoucherCodes.co.uk, the UK’s top online deal site.
WhaleShark makes money from advertising on its sites from more than 300 million visits to its web properties, said Brian Hoyt, WhaleShark Media’s communications director. It also makes a small commission off thousands of retailers whose offers the company helps merchandise and facilitate sales for via the coupons and deals clicked on its site, he said.
“This relationship goes beyond big box retailers and includes thousands of other large and midsize merchants,” Hoyt said.
Last year, WhaleShark Media made more than $70 million in revenue as part of the $1.7 billion in sales generated for its merchant clients.
WhaleShark's workplace
“We originally invested in WhaleShark because of the enormous potential for growth we thought was there, as well as the ability to innovate within the online coupon and deals space,” said Austin Ventures Partner Thomas Ball. “We also had a relationship with Cotter, who we believe is a great executive.“
Jules Maltz, General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), reflected Ball’s view.
“IVP looks to back premier late-stage companies and management teams,” said Maltz. “WhaleShark is the leading online coupon company with strong profitability and tremendous growth potential. We’re excited to back Cotter and help WhaleShark continue to expand.”
WhaleShark Media is also focused on hiring technology talent locally and worldwide to fuel its expansion, Hoyt said. The company has 170 employees worldwide, including 120 in the U.S., with most of them based in Austin. Last week, it announced that Matt Howitt would join the company as vice president of engineering.
“We recognize there is a limited talent pool in Austin and we want to keep them in Austin,” Hoyt said.
WhaleShark Media plans to hire another 50 people this year, he said. The company is also taking over another floor at its downtown headquarters. It currently occupies the seventh floor at 301 Congress and it’s expanding to the eighth floor.
Late last year, WhaleShark Media received $150 million in venture capital, which it plans to use to increase its market share in the retail deal industry. The company plans a series of product innovations and is concentrating on expanding its presence in the mobile coupon and deal market, Hoyt said.
“We’re looking at growth inside the U.S. and Europe,” Hoyt said. “We’re also looking at the Asia market.”
WhaleShark Media doesn’t have any short term plans to go public, Hoyt said.
“Right now we’re focused on building our business.”
Never underestimate the importance in play in the workplace.
People who play together have better collaboration and social skills, according to SocialWare, which produced this info graphic on the Importance of Play in Enterprise.
But the guys at uShip already know that. They got together with seven other startups companies: BuildASign, Mass Relevance, Adlucent, Sparefoot, Spredfast, WhaleShark Media and Boundless Network to participate in the first Startup Olympics. The teams participated in ten activities on Saturday which involved copies amounts of beer and camaraderie. The events included foosball, darts, shuffleboard, pop-a-shot basketball, beerpong, flipacup, ping pong, trivia, connect four and an obstacle course.
In the end, uShip took home the big trophy, followed by BuildASign and Sparefoot. About 200 people participated in the events, which raised lots of money for local charities.
uShip took the top prize in Austin’s inaugural Startup Olympics competition Saturday at the uShip headquarters. BuildASign.com captured second place and Sparefoot came in third.
We’ll post a full story and a video later on, but for now, here’s some photos from the event.
Put Geek athletes into the Google search engine and what do you come up with?
A correction suggestion for Greek Athletes.
So the conclusion must be that Geek athletes are an evolution of the ancient Greek athletes that invented the Olympic Games in 776 BC in Olympia in Greece.
And as part of that evolutionary process, now a team of Austin innovators have created the first Austin Startup Olympics which features Austin’s elite startups Adlucent, Boundless Network, Build-a-Sign, Mass Relevance, SpareFoot, Spredfast, uShip, and WhaleShark Media competing in 10 grueling activities including Ping Pong, Foosball, Darts and Trivia.
The games begin today at 2 p.m. at the uShip headquarters. The event is closed to the public, but an after party to raise money for charity will be held at Club De Ville. “Bands performing at the after-party include The Lemurs and Burgess Meredith. All proceeds from the $10 cover charge will benefit local charities,” according to a news release.
You can also follow today’s action on Twitter.
Proceeds from the event will benefit Austin Children’s Museum, Austin Pets Alive, Austin Pro Bono, Capital Area Food Bank, Communities in Schools of Central Texas, the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas , Kure It, and Livestrong/Lance Armstrong Foundation. Sponsors for the event include Tito’s Handmade Vodka and Cedar Door.
The Startup Olympic organizers want to challenge other startups, particularly those in Silicon Valley, to come to South by Southwest and compete in the second Startup Olympics. Contact StartupOlympics.org for more information.
“Guys like Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican Bobsled team were true innovators, giving their particular sports a new twist, a new look that made them legendary,” Shawn Bose of uShip and co-Chair of the Austin Startup Olympics said in a statement.
“You’ll find that same innovation among Austin’s startups – not only among those competing in the event, but citywide,” said Bose. “We’ve brought new ideas to existing industries and businesses. Many of these ideas came about during fierce games of ping pong, beer pong or even Connect Four while squatting at ‘innovative work spaces’ like Crown and Anchor Pub and Mozart’s Coffee Roasters.”
SceneTap wants you to know what’s going on at your favorite bar before you get there.
Today, the startup officially launches a network of cameras in 30 bars around Austin including Soho Lounge, Trophy Club, Haven, Ranch and Library that feed real-time information into its SceneTap mobile phone app and website. The network will expand to up to 50 bars with the next few months.
“It’s probably going to go beyond bars to other venues like coffee shops, retail outlets and restaurants,” said Cole Harper, co-founder and CEO of SceneTap. “It’s our goal to let people know what’s going on in their favorite place.”
With the SceneTap mobile phone application, which is available for free, people can survey the crowd and see how many men and women are at a particular bar. They can also find out what specials are being offered and what band or DJ is playing.
SceneTap gathers information from video cameras and collects statistics on the demographics of who’s there. It then compiles the stats into percentages and posts them to the site. Consumers can’t see the data associated with the stats to protect privacy, Harper said
The SceneTap app can tell you whether a bar is 85 percent full and the male to female ratio along with the average age of the patrons. The company uses facial detection software to compile these statistics.
“We’re not collecting any individual information,” Harper said. “There’s no information that’s collected or stored. People can’t see individual records.”
SceneTap aggregates its information every half hour and does not store any footage from the bars, Harper said
“It’s entirely automated. The video stream is being perpetually interpreted by the software, which creates rows of data,” Harper said. “The main purpose behind the data is to let you know where the best party is at.”
The data also lets the bars know whether they are spending their money wisely on entertainment to get customers in the door. If a bar spends $300 for a DJ and several hundred people show up then they’ll be able to track stats on the success of their promotions, Harper said.
The main way SceneTap makes money is through advertising. It has 45,000 users currently, which it hopes will rise to 50,000 tonight. It offers companies a very targeted market, Harper said.
The average bar last four years and night clubs last just two and a half years, Harper said. SceneTap can give the owners of these establishments real-time data on their bars and clubs that help them to manage them better, he said.
SceneTap launched in Chicago in December of 2010 and raised nearly $2 million in a seed fund from friends, family and angel investors. SceneTap is currently negotiating with investors to raise at least $3 million in a series A round, which it hopes to close in the next 60 to 90 days.
“We expect we’ll have some rapid growth in next six to twelve months” Harper said.
More than 50 venues in the Chicago area use SceneTap and plans for another 20 in coming months. The company moved to Austin late last year. Its headquarters are in house near Zilker Park where five of the guys live and work. SceneTap has 16 employees and another 30 sales consultants nationwide.
Within the next six months, SceneTap plans to expand into other markets including Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco.
Privacy is one issue that Scene Tap takes very seriously, Harper said.
“We go well out of our way to ensure consumer privacy,” he said. “Our technology, as scary as it may seem, is less intrusive than a lot of technologies that have been out there in the last 10 years.”
The advantage is that a tourist visiting Austin can either go to Yelp and find a review of a bar or check out SceneTap and find out what’s happening there right now, Haper said.
Sherry Lowry, principal of The Lowry Group, The Vision Enactors Collective, All Content Tribe
Since then, the organization has grown to 150 members.
On Thursday evening, about 90 people gathered at Maggianos at the Domain in North Austin to celebrate.
“We want to foster women in their personal and professional lives to connect, learn, grow and lead,” said Megan Maldonado, president of Austin Women in Technology.
The event featured a panel discussion on “Why Your Time is Now (really)!”
“Chaos is our new norm,” said Lynelle McKay, CEO and president of Leadership Essentials, LLC and former senior vice president and general manager of the networking and multimedia group at Freescale Semiconductor. Paradigm shifts happens every afternoon, she said.
“We want to teach you how to surf the waves of change,” McKay said. “We want you to embrace that chaos and thrive in it.”
Business as usual is long dead, said Sherry Lowry, a serial entrepreneur, mentor and career coach. To understand the changes, Lowry recommended The Shift Index by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. She predicts that by 2015 corporate structures will completely disintegrate.
Janelle Monney, certified executive coach and former semiconductor senior vice president, disagreed. She thinks the corporate structures will disintegrate but not that quickly.
Only 12 women are CEOs at Fortune 500 companies today, Monney said. It’s difficult to get to the top, but women can do it, she said.
To succeed in business today, “you have to be technically competent in whatever you do,” Monney said. “You’ve got to develop communication skills and use the tools of today…You have to be willing to pick the juicy assignments.”
She recommended the book “Break Your Own Rules” and said that women often limit themselves.
“We have a way of thinking that prevents us from getting ahead,” Monney said.
Lowry recommended women find a mentor to move up the ladder within an organization. Mentors are everywhere and often they don’t get tapped for their expertise, she said.
“You never hear a truly component person insist they are flooded with requests to be a mentor,” Lowry said.
The ability to adapt and be flexible in today’s marketplace are key to success, said Casey Rowe, principal of Casey Rowe Consulting.
It’s also important to find people as mentors of different generations, Lowry said. She learns a lot from her youngest grandson. She recommends getting a mentor from every decade because they know what “you don’t know,” she said.
She has launched a website “Vision Enactors” to highlight current leaders in the Austin area.
“You can do anything,” Lowry said. “You can be anything you want but don’t do it alone. Find a tribe or create one. If you can’t do it in Austin, you’re living in your closet or cubicle.”
Monney’s mantra is “don’t ask permission, ask forgiveness.” She advises people to go figure out stuff that is wrong and fix it. Bring a positive energy to the job, she said.
“Companies that have diverse leadership at the top are the most successful by every metric,” Monney said.
Women who want to be CEOs and moms need to know that they can’t have it all, Monney said. There are tradeoffs. Figure out what having it all means. There’s no such thing as balance.
“You have to figure out what you’re wiling to outsource,” Monney said. “You’ve got to get help.”
In the technology startup world, lean is a way of life.
Being lean is not just a mantra, to many technology startups it’s how they operate day to day.
“Running lean is a systematic process for innovating from Plan A to one that works before you run out of money,” said Ash Maurya, founder of Spark59 and author of Running Lean.
Most startups fail just like most products fail, Maurya told about 50 people gathered Thursday afternoon for a Lean Startup meeting at Geekdom, a San Antonio collaborative workspace at the Weston Centre downtown. Many of the entrepreneurs in attendance belong to the TechStars Cloud, which kicked off on Jan. 9 and is based at the Geekdom.
“The odds of success are really stacked against new products,” Maurya said. “I would suggest not focusing on the failure rate but focusing on this statistic: 66 percent change their product along the way. What separates a successful company is not finding that perfect plan but perfecting that plan along the way.”
Eric Ries coined the term Lean Startup and trademarked it. His 2011 bestselling book has a similar theme of Running Lean. Ries teaches about how to use build, measure and learn cycles to identify what customers really want.
Lean comes from lean manufacturing or lean thinking, Maurya said. The key there is eliminating waste.
Companies fail because they fail to find markets for their products and they fail to find the right customers, he said.
First, entrepreneurs need to ask themselves if they have a problem worth solving. They can do this by interviewing potential customers. Next, they must create a demo to put in front of a customer as quickly as possible. It’s also important to stay focused.
“We have this myth of the visionary entrepreneur,” Maurya said. “The most visionary of our times is Steve Jobs who recently passed away.”
But Apple has a string of innovation behind its successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad that goes back to the first Newton, a tablet computer that Apple built that failed twice.
But Maurya said that product development actually gets in the way of learning. The best way to learn is from customers and markets in the earliest stage.
“We get some learning at that point, but the real learning occurs when we release the product into the market,” Maurya said. “Lots of companies build something hoping there will be a market for it. That’s where they go astray.”
The Running Lean process shortens the time from idea to product release. The key to success is building a product people want and knowing how to listen to customers to adjust the product.
For example, if Henry Ford asked people what they wanted for transportation they would have said faster horses, Maurya said. But Ford was able to identify the hidden problem embedded in there. People wanted faster transportation and he was able to create an alternative.
“All the customers can do is tell you what their problems are,” Maurya said. “Define what that ideal solution is for them. That’s what running lean can be boiled down to.”
One of the most important parts of Running Lean focuses on the activities entrepreneurs do to engage with customers.
“You need to get out of the building and engage with customers throughout that development process,” Maurya said. “The answers don’t lie on your computer or in the lab. You have to engage with customers and talk with them.”
Startups need to run small experiments and find ways to do 10 to 20 releases in six months to refine the product and path to one that works.
“Business plans fall short,” Maurya said. “It goes from critical thinking to fiction writing. You start making up stuff. The format for a business plan is a bad one. We call it a form of waste in the lean terminology.”
So Maurya created a shorter version to distill down the most important concepts behind a startup. He calls it the Lean Canvas format. It’s a one-page adaptation of the original business model plans. To date, more than 8,000 startups have filled out a Lean Canvas format on his site. He’s also sold 15,000 copies of his book in a combination of PDF formats and traditional publishing. The second edition will be released in March.
“Because it’s a single page it gets conversation going whether it’s good or bad,” Maurya said. “ If you put it in front of someone they can’t help but read it.”
Startups are about risk mitigation initially. If an entrepreneur is trying to raise funding, it’s not about solutions yet, Maurya said. Investors look at your business model from a completely different lens.
“What we are doing here is taking a very complex product like building a company and breaking it down to its components in manageable sizes,” Maurya said.
By now you’ve probably heard of SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act introduced by San Antonio Congressman Lamar Smith.
The jist of it is that media and entertainment companies want to protect the copyright on their content from pirates. Not too many people would take issue with that.
But the legislation would effectively give content producers the ability to censor the web.
On Wednesday, dozens of websites including Wikipedia, Reddit, WordPress, Craigslist and others blacked out their content in protest over the legislation. Google, which also opposes SOPA, blacked out its logo.
PIPA, the Protect IP ACT, introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont is already losing support.
But when Congress reconvenes work will begin on SOPA again, according to this article from Engadget.
San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting has been working with lawmakers to fix the bills to effectively fight online piracy and avoid Internet disruption or “imposing unreasonable costs on Internet users and service providers,” Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier wrote in a blog post.
He said the existing bills, SOPA and PIPA, are “well-intentioned, but would do more harm than good. Their enforcement provisions could be easily evaded, and they would undermine the security and stability of the Internet.
Meanwhile, Congressman Smith contends that SOPA is vastly misunderstood. He also blasted Wikipedia for what he called a publicity stunt.
“It is ironic that a website dedicated to providing information is spreading misinformation about the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill will not harm Wikipedia, domestic blogs or social networking sites,” according to Lamar. “This publicity stunt does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts. Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy.”
Smith says the “Stop Online Piracy Act only targets foreign websites that are primarily dedicated to illegal activity. It does not grant the Justice Department the authority to seek a court order to shut down any website operated in the U.S.”
Sopa and PIPA Protest Sites
View more presentations from Laura Lorek
Greenling's marketing director Kathryn Hutchinson shows off the company's locally sourced produce
By EOGHAN MCCLOSKEY
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
Greenling has tapped into the growing interest in sustainable, organic, seasonal and locally sourced food by providing an alternative to traditional grocery stores and instead focusing on an increasingly sophisticated, organically inclined clientele.
Greenling is a start-up organic grocery delivery service which allows customers to shop for produce, meats, dairy, prepared foods and other products online and have those groceries delivered to their homes or workplaces up to four times per week.
Greenling’s mission is to provide home cooks with fresh, healthy foods in a manner that minimizes environmental impact, said Kathryn Hutchinson, Greenling’s marketing director. By delivering produce to customers’ homes, customers burn less fossil fuels than if they were to drive to the grocery store. The majority of Greenling’s produce is locally sourced, and those products not from Austin or surrounding areas are certified organic and sustainably produced. Produce that is out of season or that sells out quickly is pulled from Greenling’s webstore immediately, a practice which contrasts sharply with that of other, larger grocery stores, whose need to provide produce year-round leads to reliance on unsustainable and non-organic producers.
Lately, Greenling is seeing a big uptick in demand for its meal kits, which feature pre-cut and pre-measured ingredients ready to heat and serve. Kits are delivered in compostable or recycled containers and can even be tailored to customers’ unique dietary needs. So popular are Greenling’s meal kits that Greenling is currently expanding to a larger prep kitchen in order to accommodate demand.
Greenling was founded in 2005, funded by $5,000 investments each from Mason Arnold, current owner and CEO, and two co-founders. Since then, Greenling has raised $1.5 million from a range of investors and grown into the largest produce delivery service in central Texas, servicing roughly 5,000 customers along the I-35 corridor from Georgetown to San Antonio and everything in between. This year, Greenling is planning an expansion into the Dallas market, working with a network of farmers and producers to bring sustainable, organic produce to Dallas customers. At the heart of Greenling’s success is a simple and intuitive online store which displays available produce as large graphical icons—locally sourced produce marked with a prominent green tag—and allows customers to specify delivery dates and times. Its webstore and other innovations have allowed Greenling to succeed despite the capital-intensive nature of working with and delivering highly perishable produce. Customers who are interested in organic and sustainable produce tend to be more tech-savvy, notes Christine Blank of Supermarket News, and consumers in this demographic increasingly have less and less time to spend on going to the grocery store but still want to provide their families with healthy food options. Shopping online at Greenling only takes 10 to 15 minutes, notes owner Matthew Arnold in Blank’s piece “Organics Online,” as opposed to dealing with traffic congestion, parking and large crowds at a grocery store. Satisfying the needs of these time-strapped, net-savvy consumers has allowed Greenling to flourish on delivery services alone without the need to open a storefront. A lack of free time to shop for healthy food was what drew Patrick Condon to start shopping with Greenling, and their success in delivering such foods compelled him to invest in the company several years later. “They do all the research and vetting of farmers for me and then deliver the best of the best to my doorstep, “ Condon notes. “It is truly a farmer’s market on my doorstep.” Condon praises in particular Greenling’s plan to move into the Dallas market. “[Greenling is] positioned incredibly well for the changing tide happening in American’s taste in healthy and sustainable food alternatives,” since Greenling has been able to combine consumers’ nascent passion for sustainable foods with a successful business model.
Of course, online grocery shopping is nothing new. PeaPod, Safeway.com, Plumgood Foods, Planet Organics, MyWebGrocer and other businesses have all built successful online grocery shopping markets. Nor is interest in online grocery shopping confined to the US; global grocery giant Tesco this year rolled out a virtual grocery shopping smartphone app in Thailand and online grocery sales are expected to double in the UK over the next five years, all but overtaking traditional grocery shopping. But Greenling is unique in part because of its focus on regional geography, delivering Texas produce to central Texas eaters. Limiting business to Texas is an asset rather than a hindrance, Arnold notes, because “sometimes [Greenling has] a better timeframe for delivery” than distributors that focus on larger areas. Greenling’s marketing strategies are also very regionally focused, rarely relying on more than word of mouth to advertise their services.
“Growth has been spectacular,” Arnold remarks, noting the humble beginnings of the company running out of one of the co-founders’ garage. Seven years and $1.5 million raised from a range of investors later, Greenling is poised to continue growing and continue attempting to change the way we eat for the better.