Well that didn’t last long.
One minute, Heyride is making all this noise in Austin and disrupting the taxi industry there.
And the next, it’s swallowed whole by SideCar, a competitor, based in Silicon Valley.
On Thursday, SideCar, a ridesharing startup, announced it acquired the assets of Heyride.
SideCar has a free app for smart phones that hooks people who need rides up with pre-screened drivers.
SideCar is making the acquisition just in time for SXSW. That’s where Josh Huck, the founder and CEO of Heyride, got the idea to create Heyride in 2012. He noticed a shortage of cabs and wished there was a better way to get from place to place than taking a traditional taxi.
While Heyride was only available in Austin, SideCar offers its services in San Francisco and Seattle and has already provided people with more than 100,000 rides. The company will expand its service to Philadelphia, Austin and Los Angeles this weekend and is actively recruiting drivers in New York, Chicago, Washington, DC and Boston.
“We’ve heard from people across the country and around the world that they want the SideCar community to take root in their cities and towns,” Sunil Paul, CEO of SideCar, said in a news release. “Heyride’s talented team has developed a unique design and experience that will help take the rideshare movement we started here in San Francisco nationwide. We are thrilled to welcome Heyride to the SideCar family.”
Heyride had five full time employees. They will join the SideCar staff. Silicon Hills News did this interview with Huck last November.
SideCar has raised $10 million from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Google Ventures, Spring Ventures, Huron River Ventures, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures and others.
Heyride raised $400,000 from Silverton Partners in Austin.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The ridesharing industry is beginning to take off despite some early regulatory troubles. In addition to the traditional taxi cabs, Sidecar faces competition from startups Uber and Lyft.
Tag: Austin (Page 20 of 37)
This week, We Are Austin Tech, the weekly video site highlighting local movers and shakers in the technology industry, has put the spotlight on Erica Douglass, founder of Whoosh Traffic.
Douglass moved to Austin last year from Silicon Valley. Susan Lahey wrote this profile of her last year.
“Erica started a web hosting and development company in 2001, at age 20,” according to We Are Austin Tech. “Over the next 6 years, she turned the business into one of Silicon Valley’s most well-known web hosting companies, hosting sites for hundreds of the Valley’s most successful startups.”
She sold her company in 2007 for $1.1 million and a few years later launched a popular blog called Erica.biz and then Whoosh Traffic.
BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Patti Rogers, founder of Rallyhood
“We have all these different ways to keep track of the projects at work and our kids’ soccer teams and the boards we’re on and the second grade class activities. It’s in all these different silos. But that’s not how we live our lives,” says Rallyhood founder Patti Rogers.
Rallyhood provides private dashboards for any kind of group to communicate over issues, share photos, build a community calendar, sign up volunteers, collect RSVPs and dues and more. It can replace giant streams of email, Facebook and Yahoo group pages, Google shared calendars, Evites and Paypal accounts, all in one application. And that doesn’t include the customization the company can do for groups with premium services.
Plus, you can build a “Rally” around anything, from a company project to a youth sports team to your parents’ anniversary party. And if you have multiple “Rallies” you can get a daily schedule that incorporates all your group activities and deadlines, right in your inbox. The calendar can be exported to other sites like Google and Outlook. It even has integrated maps so you don’t have to look up where you’re supposed to be.
Kevin Embree, CEO of Online Persona, used to run his online marketing company on Base Camp. But there were issues. Techies related comfortably to Base Camp, but clients who weren’t particularly tech savvy, including many of the non-profits the company works for, didn’t want to mess with it.
“They were wondering ‘What is this I’ve been invited to? How am I going to use this?’” Embree said. Clients who rejected Base Camp stuck to emailing, which required tens of emails back and forth every day and made communication a chore. That resulted in lower client satisfaction rates.
With Rallyhood, Online Persona could maintain running conversations on the dashboard, download screenshots of social media and other campaigns, and divide information according to who needed access. One of his clients, YMCA, became so enamored of the tool it started using it nationwide to keep track of all of its offices.Plus, Embree says, he keeps track of his daughter’s volleyball. It’s right there on the dashboard with his work stuff, which is a pretty snazzy marketing strategy on Rallyhood’s part. Each person who is won over converts others, because it makes his or her life easier.
This might prove a giant coup in the case of some of Rallyhood’s customers, like the Girl Scouts of Central Texas which includes 22,000 scouts and 13,000 adults, all of whom are converting to Rallyhood for Girl Scout related communications over the next two years. Lolis Garcia-Babb, Director of Marketing and Communications says some members have fallen in love with the application while others are putting off learning it as long as possible.
The organization has 85 service units, each overseeing 60 troops. It puts out a magazine twice a year. But quickly communicating something important–like when a Central Texas girl was named among only 15 recipients of a national award–is an emailing nightmare. With Rallyhood, it’s put on a central Rally and everyone gets the news. More importantly for the organization, it gets the news privately. Girl Scouts is extremely cautious what information the public has access to. When they used Yahoo Groups, too much information was accessible.
Rogers is thrilled about groups like the Girl Scouts and its talking to other regions. But that’s not what she had in mind when she first envisioned Rallyhood. In fact, in many ways the company started the day Rogers found out she had breast cancer. She was 41.
“I was merging into traffic, wearing a Bat Girl suit because we were having a big ol’ Halloween party and I was planning to pick up my kids dressed as Bat Girl,” she recalls. “And they called and said ‘We wanted to let you know you have breast cancer….’ My first thought was ‘No, this is Patti ROGERS…R-O-G-E-R-S, not Roberts….’ I kept it together and at the end of the evening we kicked out the last few neighbors and unplugged the margarita machine and I told my husband.”
The next many months would bring surgeries and chemo and a hugely supportive community that was a full-time job to manage. Many people wanted to help, but didn’t know how. People wanted to bring meals but didn’t know what. Rogers’ sister tried to orchestrate the tremendous outpouring but it involved a jillion emails and phone calls that ate up her time. And that’s what sparked Rogers’ idea. When she recovered, she considered how great it would be to have a central place where people can go to get information, sign up to help in an organized way, without having to bother the family or lamely offer “If there’s anything I can do….”
If someone uses Rallyhood for support around a sick friend or family member, people can sign up for meals on a calendar. They can see, without having to ask, if the family is gluten free or vegetarian or really hates broccoli. They can make sure that not everyone brings lasagna or offer to help carpool, if that’s what’s needed instead.
But Rogers wanted to make the tool “group agnostic” so it wouldn’t create just another silo. She wanted it to be something that schools and organizations, businesses and families or really any group could use and incorporate other groups. One of the first groups she took it to was a school that had not only classrooms, but teams, organizations, teacher groups, parent groups, boosters and more. The key was getting rid of clutter and chaos. So when the date for a meeting has to change, the site administrator can change it on the calendar and the word will go out to all the group members, rather than having to send a mass email.
Another organization that uses it is Komen Austin. While it’s a small office, when it comes to organizing committees and volunteers, say for Race for the Cure, they needed a tool that could encompass a crowd.
“I love it,” said Christy Casey-Moore, Executive Director. “I can’t be involved in all the nitty-gritty of the committees but I’m on all the rallies and I can go to rally, click on it, and there’s everything.”
Rogers has a web design background. Her husband is in IT in software. They bootstrapped the company in 2010 when she recovered from her cancer and began to wireframe the new site. In 2011 they raised $500,000 of angel seed funding with an additional $1.3 million injected by a group of professional angels led by Tom Meredith and Calendars.com. The company has nine employees at its downtown offices and several engineers off site. As a team, they not only provide the basic Rallyhood services but a high level of customization, said Garcia-Babb.
“I’ve been told I am a good listener,” Rogers said. “I’m eager to find out what isn’t working and fix it in the marketing and design before we build it. Then we measure and iterate. What is it about that feature that is slowing up adoption, making it difficult for leaders to use?” At first, for example, she focused n making the application easier to use in terms of membership lists and data but that left something to be desired in engagement. So then that piece needed attention.
Her real focus is building community and reducing chaos and clutter. That, she said, leads to a happy life.
A Rallyhood account is free and small groups can use it without cost. But there are premium services offered to large organizations based on the scope of services required. Those services include customization of the dashboard, advanced branding solutions and community-specific templates and advanced analytics and products. Enterprise services include gray and white labeling for organizations who want to create their own branded communities with Rallyhood’s feature set.
Now it’s just a matter of making it the go-to in the world of social communication and organization.
As Garcia-Babb said: “If you can capture the imagination of your audience, and if they feel like they’re getting left out, that’s what’s going to drive them there.”
Andy Keil has some projects he just hasn’t had the time to finish.
So Keil, head of products at Handsome, launched Finish Up Weekend.
It’s an invitation-only event that takes place at Chicon Collective, a funky new co-working space in downtown Austin. The tag line for the event is “Let’s get shit done.”
Already, Keil has signed up 40 people to participate in Finish Up Weekend, which is sponsored by Rackspace and Vintage Heart Coffee.
Keil hopes to finish up a print magazine for his music site, Popstash.
“That’s just one of the projects I have in the works that isn’t yet complete,” he said. “I need help with the layout of the magazine from a printer.”
Keil moved to Austin from Chicago in November with whatever stuff he could fit in his car. He slept on a friend’s couch and after a couple of weeks he met with the CEO of Handsome and landed a job.
His inspiration for Finish Up Weekend is to get all of the right combination of skills in the right place to tackle unfinished projects. That means collecting Web developers, illustrators, copywriters, mobile developers, engineers, videographers, photographers and designers.
“I jokingly call it a selfish event,” Keil said. “We spend a lot of our time working on other people’s stuff this is our chance to work on our own stuff.”
Finish Up Weekend is not the place for someone who has a business idea to come and get free labor, Keil said.
“Some people are doing projects that have been years in the works,” he said. “Some people are just coming to work on their own projects. Some people are coming to only help other people.”
Finish Up Weekend is about collaboration and community, Keil said.
“We’re not giving out free help,” he said. “We’re building a community.”
Josh Sklar, founder of Heresy, thinks the advertising industry is broken.
“In the late ‘80s the business was still sexy, it was still like the Mad Men days,” Sklar said. “The client would come to us and we would work together and we would build something.”
Then over the years, ad production became more of an assembly line that sucked away the creativity.
“You are just doing production for other people’s ideas,” Sklar said. “How did the business go from being something so many creative people in the world wanted to be a part of to something where you’re just forced to do schlocky work to make some money?”
Sklar asserts that the entire industry is about to fall over a cliff.
“The future was not just bleak but dire,” he said.
So Sklar and his friend and former colleague John Lambie decided to take action. They’ve created “Digital Doesn’t Matter,” a “manifesto, a book, in interactive, feature rich digital and standard hardcover formats.”
Digital Doesn’t Matter is not just a book, but a lasting platform that can be updated and changed with the focus on what went wrong with the advertising industry and ideas on how to fix it.
“We didn’t want to write a book that is out of date,” Sklar said.
They’ve already conducted more than 100 interviews with marketing and branding experts who have shared their “insights, anecdotes, experiences, frustrations, opinions, and perspectives.”
Sklar and Lambie have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $30,000 for the project. They’re almost half-way to their goal with 152 contributors and 24 days remaining. They need the money to create the iPad app and to self-publish the book on Amazon in digital and hardcover formats.
“Everyone who works in the business sees where it’s going and what it used to be like,” Sklar said.
Sklar and Lambie have worked in the advertising industry for more than 25 years and they’ve worked in senior executive positions within top 10 global agencies.
“We know the story and the challenges from the inside out as most recently evident in our positions running WPP’s Enfatico agency to service the Dell worldwide business,” Sklar wrote in a post. “But, more to the point, we know and have access to successful, brilliant people all over the world who are even more experienced, in even more impressive positions and who know exactly what is going on and what needs to change.”
Crytek GmbH announced it has opened its fist U.S.-based video game studio in Austin.
It is the ninth studio worldwide for the company.
“Crytek has always enjoyed a special relationship with gamers and business partners in North America, so establishing a permanent presence in the US was a natural step,” Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said in a news release.
The Austin studio will be headed up by David Adams, who will serve as CEO of Crytek USA Corp. The studio will have 35 employees.
Crytek, based in Frankfurt, has an established presence in Europe, Asia and North America. It is an independent company that makes games for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC, mobile devices and games-as-service.
Cospace, one of Austin’s original and popular coworking spaces, shut down last week.
The site, located at Highway 183 and Lamar in North Austin, is working with TechRanch, a nearby tech incubator and coworking site, to relocate its members.
While the physical space is gone, the Cospace brand continues to live on and serve entrepreneurs and professionals nationally through a coworking search engine that also provides economic and real estate information.
“In July 2012, partners affiliated with the workspace
launched the Cospace online site to index and promote every work environment; connecting skilled professionals with the right place to work,” according to a news release.
“I am very proud of the positive impact Cospace coworking has had in the startup community,” Kirtus Dixon, Managing Partner of BlindOx LLC, owner/operator of the Cospace coworking space, said in a news statement. “I will be eternally grateful for all of our customers and colleagues, some of who gave of themselves without any expectation of return. It’s been a great run.”
“Collaborative, accessible work spaces are one of the keys to innovation and working through a cospace should be an option to anyone,” James Weddle, head of Cospace Ventures, the management and holding company for the Cospace brand, said in a statement. “We are proud to continue to support the coworking movement through our web service. I am particularly excited about the role the web service, Cospace.co, can play in helping students, entrepreneurs, skilled professionals, and even cities, bring innovation to market.”
In the past few months, this new, virtual Cospace has grown to serve over 1,000 spaces throughout the country and is connecting nearly 100,000 professionals each month with the ideal work space.
“We’ve mapped over 50 work environments in Austin alone and the insight, from doing that, to Austin’s future as an entrepreneurial community
is tremendous,” Paul O’Brien, Co-founder and developer of the Cospace.co web service, which will be developed further in a new entity, said in a statement. “Cospace.co has helped thousands of skilled professionals, teams, and startups find the right work environment in Austin while working
closely with stake holders invested in the economic development of Austin and surrounding cities to understand how and where to invest
further in creating environments that will foster innovation, help employ Austin, enable success for entrepreneurs.”
The classes and education programs Cospace formerly operated are being acquired by Brainco; a school of advertising, interactive studies, and design, recently relocated from Minneapolis to Austin. Brainco will be further developing and serving such popular classes in Ruby on Rails, iOS app development, WordPress, and other skills through spaces throughout Austin.
We Are Austin Tech, a weekly video segment featuring Austin’s technology industry movers and shakers, has released its latest video featuring VolunteerSpot Founder and CEO Karen Bantuveris.
Bantuveris founded VolunteerSpot, which creates tools for moms, nonprofit organizers and others to coordinate volunteers, in 2009.
Last summer, VolunteerSpot raised $1.5 million from ff Venture Capital of New York along with the Central Texas Angel Network, Nebraska Angel network, Angel List and Baylor Angel Network.
The Austin-based startup currently has more than 2 million users.
By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Rackspace’s New Offices
The company moved into an 87,000 square foot location next to I-35 in north Austin in October. The offices can accommodate more than 500 employees. The web hosting company currently has 400 people – adding around 100 employees per year for the last two years. Rackspace wants to hire 50 more employees this year.
Rackspace, founded in 1998 in San Antonio, has more than 3,000 employees in San Antonio at its headquarters in the former Windsor Park Mall on Walzem Road. The company also has an office in San Francisco. Rackspace reported revenue of $1.24 billion last year and net income of more than $100 million. The company has a market cap of more than $9 billion.
Rackspace attributes the steady growth over the last few years to its service-oriented business model of web hosting.
Bill Blackstone, Austin Community Outreach Leader for Rackspace
According to Blackstone, the support teams are fully authorized to make important decisions and resolve a customer’s issue without having to check with a supervisor or another department. They are also available at any hour. It all fits into Rackspace’s often touted motto of providing “fanatical support”.
But the support aspect is only one of the four pillars of service to which Rackspace attributes its success. The other three: The security found in physical dedicated servers, the scalability found in virtual servers, and the ability to combine physical and virtual servers to fit a client’s need.
“The combination of those is something that doesn’t exist elsewhere,” says Blackstone.
Rackspace also has an advantage in being the co-founder of the new standard-setting cloud computing platform called OpenStack. Developed in partnership with NASA, Rackspace helped set the standards for OpenStack that are now used industry-wide. The new technology is open-source and available for anyone to use. As a result, over 850 organizations are currently working to further improve the technology. While this means that any competitor can provide OpenStack service, Rackspace hopes to retain the lion’s share of potential new customers due to their reputation for support and their status as a leader in the OpenStack technology.
“We still believe that at the end of the day it’s not necessarily the actual technology, but the service that makes the difference,” said Blackstone.
Rackspace prides itself on “Fanatical Support”
“The folks that were established that were doing this were like, ‘No, I like my physical server,’ even though it was only 6 percent utilized,” says Thoene.
But as the recession hit, companies feeling the pinch were forced to take a look at cloud services for the cost savings that they desperately needed. As a result, many made the big leap to cloud technology within the last few years. Thoene sees it as a glass-half-full situation.
“It really served as a vehicle to get people to kick the tires and look under the hood of cloud a lot more closely than they would have (otherwise),” said Thoene.
In fact, the International Data Corporation (IDC) — a market research firm — has released an often quoted prediction that “80 percent of new commercial enterprise apps will be deployed on cloud platforms” by the end of 2012 – a major swing for the hosting industry since the 2008 recession. Rackspace is second only to
Rackspace Austin Site leader Max Thoene
Rackspace Hosting is also enjoying the advantages of an Austin location. Just one of many tech companies expanding in Austin, Rackspace is experiencing rapid growth due to the city’s educated population and its popularity as a place to relocate talent. The local tech scene provides an ideal recruitment spot for Rackspace.
“We find that there is a great cross section in Austin that has both the technical skill and the service leadership type of skill set that we are looking for,” says Thoene.
According to Austin Technology Council President Julie Huls, this is a common trend for tech companies in the Austin area.
“Companies the size of Rackspace — which are growing at the same pace — are attracted to Austin for its culture. I think we have ample talent as it relates to certain skill sets. We have a very creative workforce here,” says Huls.
In fact, Rackspace enjoys a special symbiotic relationship with the hotbed of tech start-ups in Austin. It works with both the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and the Austin Technology Council to invest in new start-ups. They also sponsor fairs – such as Chamberfest – and provide mentoring for new companies trying to get off the ground. In turn, many of those companies can then take advantage of potential cost savings with Rackspace’s cloud services – gaining the company more customers in the long run.
Thoene sees Rackspace’s tech community involvement as something that benefits both the company and the City of Austin by creating a healthy business environment.
“It’s a win-win,” says Thoene. “It’s a win for Rackspace because we get great people and it’s a win for Austin because we keep people employed.”
Story and photos by Andrew Moore
Josh Huck, CEO of HeyRide
The company, founded in 2012, draws its inspiration from “the success of collaborative consumption companies such as Airbnb and car2 go.”
Heyride has established an alternative marketplace to cabs in Austin. It’s a place where people can give and receive rides via their smartphones.
Last week, the Austin Chronicle published a cover story on HeyRide. Shortly after that the City of Austin issued a statement reporting the city had sent HeyRide a cease and desist order on Oct. 31.
The City reports that HeyRide “very closely resembles that of a taxi franchise and that any operation dispatching drivers to potential passengers ondemand requires a City Council approved Franchise Agreement, and that all drivers are required to successfully satisfy criminal background and driving history checks as set forth by the Austin City Code.”
The Austin American-Statesmen originally reported that the City had shut HeyRide down. But Josh Huck, its CEO, reported on the Austin Startups Facebook group that HeyRide is still operating.
Q. How did you come up with the idea for Heyride?
A. I was frustrated that I couldn’t get a ride during SXSW, and I wondered why I couldn’t just ask someone for a lift. I decided that it was pretty ridiculous that people weren’t able to connect in this way, as I’d been traveling around the world using services like Couchsurfing and Airbnb for years. So I decided to build it myself.
Q. How does it work?
A. You fire up Heyride, say where you are and where you want to go and a driver makes a bid on your ride. You choose who you want to ride with and they take you where you want to go. You pay electronically with your phone and the credit card you have on file.
Q. How many people are signed up for the HeyRide service currently?
A. We’ve currently signed up almost 1000 users.
Q. How many do you anticipate will use the service?
A. We’d like to take Heyride national, so we think the sky’s the limit. After Austin, we’ll be exploring new markets and spreading the word.
Q. How does HeyRide make money?
A. If you give a Heyride, you take 80% and Heyride takes 20% as a service fee.
Q. Why has the City of Austin taken action against HeyRide to shut the service down?
A. Actually, they haven’t taken any action yet. A cease and desist doesn’t mean Heyride is going anywhere. We don’t feel that the City of Austin actually understands our business model; specifically, the difference between a taxi cab company and people using a platform that enables peer-to-peer ride-sharing. Because of that, they’re standing beside old-school regulations that haven’t caught up to innovations in the marketplace. We’re confident that once we open a dialogue, we’ll be able to work together for a common goal: making Austin a better place where it’s easy to get a ride when you need one.
Q. How do you plan to deal with that?
A. We’re going to begin a dialogue with the city, mobilize our customers to raise their voices on our behalf, basically get people behind the idea of ride-sharing and take our case to people who can help us change any necessary regulations to accommodate this type of innovation.
Q. Who are your competitors?
A. There are a few similar services of note out on the West Coast, Lyft and Sidecar. But we’ve taken a different path with Heyride, creating a better user experience with more choice for the user and safety and privacy features that go above and beyond.
Q. Who makes up the HeyRide team?
A. You can find this on our About Us page at heyride.com.
Q. Is HeyRide bootstrapped? Do you plan to seek Angel of Venture Capital Investment?
A. Heyride received its Series A funding from Silverton Partners, a local venture capital group.
Q. Where is HeyRide located?
A. We’re nestled in the East Side of Austin at 1306 E 7th St.
Q. What kind of car do you drive?
A. I’m the proud owner of a silver 2005 Pontiac Vibe. It’s kind of a mutt, being half-Toyota, but I love it anyway. It gets 40 miles to a gallon, has leather bucket seats, a sunroof, an iPod adapter and a sunroof. Gonna be some rocking Heyrides in the ol’ P-Vibe!
Q. What’s your favorite local startup resource?
A. Digging on the Austin Startup Facebook Group – great place to interact in real-time with people in this community. Also, our investor Kip McClanahan’s awesome blog www.ReOverthinking.com is chock full of great resources for people who want insight into VC.
Q. Anything else you would like to make a point of that I haven’t asked you about?
A. I love running a business in Austin.