Tag: Austin (Page 21 of 37)

Astrotech Puts a Spotlight on the Space Industry From Austin

November 16, 2012 / / 3 Comments

UT Professor of Innovation Bob Metcalfe interviews Tom Pickens, CEO of Astrotech, photo by Dave Michaels


By DAVE MICHAELS
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

The Technology Entrepreneurship Society (TES) and 1 Semester Startup (1SS) Thursday hosted its Fall Finale, inviting Tom Pickens, President and CEO of Astrotech Corp., to speak on the space industry and his company.
TES President Aaron Sanchez said that TES’s mission is to plant the seed of entrepreneurship and provide crucial resources through their vast network to catalyze projects and startups. By exposing members, mainly technology students, to successful entrepreneurs and hands on activities such as hackathons, the hope is that students will see it’s possible to take an idea to market and consider entrepreneurship as a viable alternative to the more established route of a corporate job.
More than 100 students attended the event, which featured UT Professor of Innovation Bob Metcalfe interviewing Pickens on stage at the UT Student Activity Center’s auditorium.
Astrotech’s core business is testing and preparing satellites for launch, serving as an intermediary between satellite owners and launch service providers at Cape Canaveral (FL) and Vandenberg (CA). Their service is critical, because once a satellite’s in space, there’s no way to get it back for repairs. Astrotech’s jobs span working with the satellite team to run through all functions the satellite will need to perform, mounting the satellite to a platform that fits the nosecone of the rocket, and finally delivering to the launch pad. Their ability to work quickly on mission critical and complex tasks makes them the go-to provider, as confirmed by their holding 98 percent of the market. According to Pickens, “We only had them for 13 to 14 weeks. So all the teams come in that had been working on that satellite for five to eight years. Some of those things are really complex.”
This business brings in approximately $25 million in revenue ($10 million in profit). And though they have cornered the market, the lack of growth is pushing toward diversification.
Astrotech has been operating since 1984 under the name SpaceHab, but when a shuttle carrying an Astrotech client’s payload crashed, there was subsequent legal action against NASA that caused some tension in the partnership. Ultimately they were unable to pursue legal action, and this, coupled with other debt threatened to sink the company. Pickens joined the company in 2007 and to keep the company afloat took strong action, convincing existing board members to leave, as well as negotiating debt to equity agreements to keep the creditors at bay and layoffs. The company currently employs 72 and has facilities in Florida, California, and Houston (R&D), with its headquarters in Austin (midpoint between FL and CA). Pickens decided on the name change to Astrotech to mend fences with NASA.
Astrotech had a role with the International Space Station (ISS) the biggest component of their NASA relationship for a long time. However, As U.S. involvement in ISS has been discontinued, the nature of the relationship has evolved. Astrotech stills counts NASA as a customer, servicing their satellites for launch and delivered their mass spectrometer for use (see First Detect below). They are also partnering on the ISS research side to continue the work for Astrogenetix, its subsidiary.
The growth of Astrotech is being built from past work and research. Astrotech worked with NASA on the microgravity lab in the ISS, developing the module to serve as the lab. This work has built a strong platform to harvest new ideas for development, the most prominent example being their wholly subsidiary, Astrogenetix.
Astrogenetix came from Astrotech’s work on the International Space Station where they developed a module for running a variety of experiments (over 1,500) in microgravity. The body of work that was done is a trove of possible application. A key finding that they are moving on is the discovery that some bacteria cultures grow much more in microgravity than on earth. The application is allowing for greatly improved efficiency of discovering disease biomarkers that map a path to a cure for different diseases. Currently, they are working on Salmonella and Methicilin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (“MRSA”). Drug companies that are doing similar work can spend upwards of $20 million so with a much lower cost method, Astrogenetix would have a huge market for a variety of different diseases needing a path to cure.
As Astrotech’s work with ISS wrapped up, the company realized it needed to diversify and they drew on their expertise to start developing a highly differentiated mass spectrometer. First Detect is another wholly owned subsidiary that developed a low power, miniature mass spectrometer which can detect a variety of substances through isolating individual molecules and identifying their unique signatures.
It improves the accuracy for current solutions which in the most extreme cases could save lives, not to mention lower cost of use and portability.
“I’m seeing a pretty big market size,” Pickens said. “If you go into food processing, if you go into TSA, you go into semiconductors, oil and gas, the list goes on and on, all kinds of manufacturing. I’m seeing a multi-billion dollar market.”

SubtleData Raises Seed Funding, Launches Product and Appoints CEO

November 15, 2012 / / 0 Comments

SubtleData launches a new software platform for sales, appoints a new CEO and closes on a seed round of funding.
Bryan Menell, a successful serial entrepreneur formerly with the Dachis Group, has joined the Austin-based startup, which connects mobile applications to point of sale systems, as its CEO. He joins Richard Bagdonas, company founder and Chief Technology Officer, on the executive team.
“The range of applications being developed empower consumers to split checks at restaurants, purchase drinks for their friends, track loyalty and rewards points, and even connect with other people at the hottest night clubs,” according to the company’s news release.

Bryan Menell, CEO of SubtleData

Through AngelList, SubtleData raised $500,000 in seed funding.
“We’re extremely fortunate to have a group of investors that are bringing key customer and developer relationships to us along with their investment” Menell said in a news release. “This provides us with significant momentum as we continue to expand our Point of Sale integrations and number of mobile developers.”

NetApp Acquires Austin-based CacheIQ

November 15, 2012 / / 2 Comments

NetApp has acquired Austin-based CacheIQ, a privately-held a privately storage solutions company, for an undisclosed amount, according to a NetApp news release.
CacheIQ was started in 2010 by Joel Trammel and other veteran storage and networking entrepreneurs, according to its CrunchBase profile. The company raised $6 million in angel funding from 25 private investors.
“The company is developing software to solve the network storage bottlenecks that plague today’s data centers,” according to its profile.
“The acquisition will provide NetApp with intellectual property that extends its capabilities to support nondisruptive operations for enterprise data center environments,” according to the NetApp news release. “NetApp will integrate this intellectual property into its product offerings over time.”
The Austin Business Journal reported on Wednesday that CacheIQ had 14 employees in Austin and that it bought “the intellectual property of Austin-based Storspeed Inc., which was founded in 2007.”
Also, the Austin Business Journal reported that Trammel, chairman of the Austin Technology Council, previously co-founded Austin-based NetQoS Inc. which was sold for $200 million.

Five Austin Startups Demo Products at the InnoTech Beta Summit

November 9, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Evan Baehr, co-founder of Outbox

By L.A. LOREK, Founder of Silicon Hills News
The Beta Summit at InnoTech Austin on Thursday featured five innovative startup companies.
Joshua Baer, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Capital Factory, served as the event’s moderator. He pitched his startup, OtherInbox, at the InnoTech Beta Summit a few years ago.
The startups each had eight minutes to showcase their companies to the standing-room only audience of more than 150 people. The startups included TrustRadius, Outbox, Ube, Skyence and Compare Metrics.
First up, TrustRadius, a company so new that Baer hadn’t heard of them yet, gave a demonstration of its enterprise software review site.
With consumer services like Yelp, people can find a thousand reviews of Home Slice Pizza on Congress Ave. but few reviews on expensive enterprise software programs companies buy to run their businesses, said Vinay Bhagat, TrustRadius Founder and CEO.
That’s the problem TrustRadius seeks to solve. It has launched a beta program for its review site for company software.
The site providers users with a template to evaluate a software product based on quality, customer service, ease of use and more. The reviews can also be sorted according to company size and industry. So a company technology professional can get relevant results for a small, medium or large business.
TrustRadius plans to make money through partnerships with software vendors and through subscription plans to premium content, Bhagat said.
Next up, Evan Baehr, co-founder of Outbox, gave an overview of his startup seeks to disrupt the bureaucratic and slow-moving U.S. Postal Service.
Outbox received $2.5 million in funding to create a new and better way to deliver mail to people in the digital age, Baehr said.
They built a product that digitizes all postal mail and delivers it to a user’s computer, phone or iPad. The product is in beta testing in Austin and already has 200 users.
Outbox seeks to innovate where the U.S. Post Office has failed, Baehr said.
“We’re young, we’re hip,” Baehr said. “We’ve got great outfits and really cool cars.”
Everyday Outbox’s employees, decked out in bright red Under Armour shirts, drive their white Outbox Prius cars to pick up customers mail. They then open the mail and scan each piece into a highly secure website. Customers can then access their mail and decide which items they want hard copies of to keep. Those items are delivered every Friday to the customers.
Outbox charges $4.99 a month for the service. Customers only need to send a picture of their mailbox key to Outbox to get started. Outbox then scans the key and creates a copy of it using a 3-D printer, Baehr said. The service is available in 40 zip codes in Austin right now. In the coming months, Outbox will expand to San Antonio, Houston and Dallas, Baehr said.
Outbox plans to integrate online bill paying into its service to make it easy for its customers to pay everything online, Baehr said. Right now, only 14 percent of bills are paid online, he said.
In the beginning, Outbox tried to partner with the U.S. Post Office. Baehr and other Outbox employees met with Postmaster General in Washington, D.C. to pitch their idea for digitizing the mail. The U.S. Post Office was not receptive, Baehr said. So they pursued the idea on their own.
At the end of the presentation, Baehr handed out postcards with a code for free two-month discount to the Outbox service.
Baehr talked so fast and enthusiastically that at one point he joked he felt like he was selling a Ronco Knife set.

Utz Baldwin, CEO and founder of Ube, demonstrates the Ube app to turn on lights

Next, Utz Baldwin, CEO of Ube, joked “That’s what happens folks when you feed your kids Redbull for breakfast.”
Ube recently won the People’s Choice Award at DEMO Fall 2012. The company plans to launch next month its free iOS app to control IP-enabled devices in the home like lighting systems, smart TVs and thermostats.
Baldwin is a former CEO of CEDIA, the global organization representing the connected home industry.
“The Internet of things is here,” Baldwin said.
Right now, creating a connected home can costs thousands of dollars and requires all kinds of hardware. Ube replaces all that, Baldwin said. With the app, anyone can control lights, TV and other devices in their home using a smartphone, a Wi-Fi router and the Internet.
Baldwin demonstrated how he could dim lights with his smartphone. He ended his presentation with a question to the audience.
“What will Ube controlling next month?” Baldwin said.
The fourth company to pitch, Skyence showed off its cloud services management software. The company launched six months ago and is in a private invitation only beta, said Tony Frey, its co-founder.
The software helps companies manage their files in the cloud on services ike Yammer, Shoutcast and Dropbox, Frey said. Skyence filters across all the cloud services, he said.
Skyence can track files and let management know who is using them and who are they sharing the files with online, he said.
Lastly, Compare Metrics’ Garrett Eastham, founder and CEO, provide an overview of his feature-driven search engine for e-commerce sites.
“We’re adding a new layer of interactivity and discovery on top of e-commerce sites,” Eastham said.
Compare Metrics has created a platform that delivers only the most relevant features to a customer. The platform becomes more intelligent the more a user interacts with it. It learns a person’s preferences and then makes product suggestions based on certain features. The company has a patent pending on its feature discovery and comparison platform.
Compare Metrics makes money by selling categories to e-commerce sites on a monthly basis. It is a software as a service company and charges $500 per month per category to retailers.
Its first customer, LivingDirect.com, goes live next week with Compare Metrics’ platform, Eastham said.

Austin to Play a Key Role in Transforming GM

November 2, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Austin’s combination of educational institutions and IT professionals convinced General Motors Cos. to open an innovation center here and hire 500 workers, said Timothy Cox, its executive director for enterprise solutions.
“We’re looking for the best and brightest to help us,” Cox said Friday morning during a phone interview.
Cox will deliver the keynote speech at Innotech Austin, a technology conference at the convention center next Thursday. He plans to tell the GM transformation story.
“What we are doing and how we are doing it and specific steps we’re taking,” Cox said.
A big part of that transformation will take place at GM’s new innovation center in Austin. Cox has been at the new center, which opened in a former Dell building at 717 E. Parmer Lane, interviewing job candidates.
“It’s been good so far,” he said. “We have some good people on the ground with us. We’re hiring people on a project basis.”
GM wants to hire software developers, project managers, database experts, business analysts and other information technology professionals.
“As we go through this transformation of the company we are bringing back in house core IT skills,” Cox said.
Software applications that the company once outsourced to others will now be done inside the company to increase productivity and efficiency, Cox said.
Workers in Austin will create operating systems and software applications for GM’s Information Technology Group. They’ll create a broad range of tools for internal use for GM. They will not be working on in-car engineering design systems, he said. That group is based in Michigan.
“To run a company like GM there’s a lot of large sophisticated business processes to automate,” Cox said.
In 1984, GM acquired Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems, known as EDS, for $2.55 billion to modernize and automate the carmaker and to expand into the IT industry. But the integration of the two companies never worked and GM ended up spinning off EDS as an independent company in 1996.
“Because of the speed of the market and competition we found that we can move faster if we have direct control of those resources,” Cox said. “It’s all about innovating more quickly so we can get a leg up in the marketplace and be more competitive.”
Once the largest car and truck maker in the U.S. with more than 48 percent market share, GM’s market share has shrunk to around 18 percent of the market in 2012, according to a recent article in Forbes. GM’s partners make vehicles in 30 countries. Its brands include Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, GMC and Isuzu. Cox drives a Cadillac ATS, a luxury sedan that is

GM’s all-new Cadillac ATS (Photo by Sam Sharpe for Cadillac)

“light and nimble,” he said.
While Austin is not known as an automotive center, that’s not important, Cox said.
“There are broad array of capabilities required to run automotive company,” he said. “While Austin may not be an automotive center it’s very much an information technology center. Its breadth of technical skills in this area is a real asset.”
GM plans to build four innovation centers around the country. It announced Austin as the first center and a few weeks ago it announced the second one will be located in Michigan. The other two sites have not been announced yet.
GM has also announced it plans to hire 3,000 people from its business partner, Hewlett-Packard. But Cox said he doesn’t anticipate that many of those people will be in the Austin area. Most of the employees in the local innovation center will come from Austin, he said.
“We’re very pleased to be here,” Cox said. “It’s a wonderful city. Great people. We look forward to a long and productive relationship here.”

Innotech is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Austin Chamber’s New A-List of Startups to Watch

November 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Stacy Zoern, CEO of Community Cars, Inc., runs a car manufacturing business out of Pflugerville.
But that’s not the most remarkable part. Zoern, who uses a wheelchair to get around, wanted to find a car that would provide independence to wheelchair users.
Online, she found the Kenguru, an electric smart car. Only problem was the company ran out of money and shut down operations. So she raised $1.4 million and partnered with the company and they moved the defunct car operations from Hungary to Texas and began manufacturing the bright yellow smart cars in 2010.
That innovative and entrepreneurial spirit earned Zoern’s Community Cars Inc. a spot on the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce’s A-List, which recognized this week 28 innovative technology startups.
Zoern’s is the only car company to make the list.
The list is meant to shine a spotlight on some of the region’s most innovative technology startups that are seeking funding. To compile the list, the chamber’s tech partnership sought input from investors.
“Austin is rich with innovative startups that are primed for growth and simply need exposure and, most importantly, capital, to transform potential into reality,” Susan Davenport, senior vice president of Global Technology Strategies for the Austin Chamber, said in a news release.
Silicon Hills News has done profiles of several companies on the list including InfoChimps, BlackLocus, Calxeda, MapMyFitness, MassRelevance and Gazzang.

This slideshare contains screen grabs of the homepages of the 28 companies that made the Austin Chamber’s list for 2012.

SXSW Branches Out to Las Vegas

October 23, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Like countless pioneers, the quintessential Austin technology, music and film conference, South by Southwest ventures West.
SXSW announced Tuesday that it plans to host SXSW V2V in Las Vegas next August 11th to 14th at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. The show will focus on entrepreneurial innovation. The four day event seeks to bring together startup companies and entrepreneurs with venture capitalists and mentors. The schedule can be found here.
Badges to attend the show are on sale now at the early bird rate of $695 through Dec. 14th and the prices go up from there with a walk up rate of $1,050.
The show will select some of its speakers and presentations from those submitted through its SXSW Panel Picker process. But SXSW V2V is also accepting new applications to speak through March 29th. The event is also seeking mentors and coaches.
The SXSW Las Vegas conference also features V2Venture, a two day pitch event focused on innovative startups. That program will begin accepting applications in January.
“With the growth and popularity of the startup-related programming across the SXSW family of events, it is clear that there is enough momentum to create a wholly unique and independent event focused on entrepreneurs,” SXSW V2V Producer Christine Auten said in a news release. “SXSW V2V will follow the same general strategy we have followed with other SXSW experiences. It is about turning creative ideas into reality — bringing visionaries to Vegas.”
“Las Vegas is repositioning itself as a hub for innovators and digital creatives. We are excited about all the new energy in this city. This is the perfect place for this small, offshoot event to find its voice and grow as the Las Vegas tech scene emerges onto the national scene,” SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest said in a news release. He visited Las Vegas and spoke to the technology community there last summer.

Bijoy Goswami on “We Are Austin Tech”

August 14, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Every week, We Are Austin Tech, a group of entrepreneurs, technologists and other volunteers release a video highlighting someone who has contributed to the local technology industry.
Last week’s video put the spotlight on Jason Cohen, founder of WPEngine and other startups including co-founding Capital Factory.
We Are Austin Tech seeks to tell the story of the city’s vibrant technology community blending the stories of veteran entrepreneurs with others involved in the industry such as public relations experts, journalists and more.
This week, the video features Bijoy Goswami, the founder of Bootstrap Austin. Susan Lahey, a reporter with Silicon Hills News, did this profile on him earlier this year.

The Decade of the Angel Investor

August 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

This decade will be remembered as the decade of the angel investor, said Paul Singh, partner in 500 Startups.
He spoke to a gathering of angel investors and startup founders at Capital Factory in Austin Thursday night.
‘The number one mistake angels make is that they take the entire round,” Singh said. “One of the things we have to think about today is are we going to be the only suckers in the deal.”
Angel investors who put money into 20 deals have the greatest chance of getting multiple returns on their investment, Singh said.
“You will make the most multiples on your initial check,” said Singh. “But you will make the most absolute returns on your second one.”
It’s all about quantitative portfolio analysis and controlling risk, he said.
As an angel if you do five deals you might double your money, said Singh. Ten companies returns closer to a 1.7 times return and 20 deals gets a 2.3 return, he said. To get a three times return, an investor must put money into 123 companies, he said.
“The takeaway for angels is you shouldn’t get into this asset class unless you’re wiling to do 20 deals,” Singh said. “Do not get excited about any one company.”
Instead of doing due diligence on one company for six months and then writing a $1 million check, it’s better to turn that investment into 20 checks of $50,000 each, Singh said.
The analogy he uses is a casino. Old school venture capitalists walk into the casino and go to the roulette table and put their chips down.
“What I’m doing is going to the blackjack table, playing the minimum hand while I count the cards,” Singh said. “When I see a pattern I double down heavy.”
500 Startups provides initial investments ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 and second rounds or bridge rounds of $250,000 to $500,000.
“Bad bets fail fast,” Singh said. “Smaller check sizes force companies to figure stuff out quickly.”
Interesting phenomenon that happens on the backside of that is the best companies are raising lots of little checks and so you’ve got a lot of living dead out there.
“There are a lot of companies today that have raised too much money,” Singh said.
After 500 Startups writes a check, a company can raise on average $535,000 within 30 days.
But most founders don’t come to 500 Startups for money or that initial check, he said.
They want to tie into 500 Startups’ network. They can get founders access to the guys who run the Facebook API. They can resolve a Paypal problem within 8 minutes at 2 a.m.

Uberpong’s Ping Pong Paddles Feature Austin Artists

August 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

As a kid, I played countless games of Ping Pong in my uncle’s recreation room with my brothers and cousins.
Now I’ve got a kid, and we play Ping Pong too.
But in all those years, the paddles still look the same: green and brown.
Now Uberpong seeks to change that.
They want to make Ping Pong Uber Cool and what better way to do that than with the coolest paddles ever?
Uberpong creates Ping Pong paddles featuring the designs of 20 artists and graphic designers. Hipsters no long have to suffer from green paddle syndrome.
So how do you get your hands on one of these uber cool paddles? There’s a Kickstarter Program for that. David Lowe of Austin is spearheading the project.
The program launched on July 16 and so far has 65 contributors who have pledged $3,289. But Uberpong needs to reach its goal of $10,000 to fund the project. It has until August 15 to do that.
“Uberpong is an Origin of Cool project with the aim being to bring more color and style to the game of table tennis” according to its posting. Why do they call it table tennis?
“Think of table tennis being the traditional, formal English parlor game, Ping Pong being the more contemporary American version and Uberpong being the future of the sport.”
The paddle artists include British artist Hannah Adamaszek, American design firm The Bungaloo and Swedish graphic designer Viktor Hertz.
This project is also a way to help out the local arts community as the paddles feature designs from Austin artists Jay Bramhall, Nathan Brown, Charlie Chauvin, Sophie Roach and Dan Patton. The artists each receive 20 percent on every paddle of their design sold.
Ping Pong is a hot sport for high-tech startups. And it’s even an Olympic sport at the summer 2012 games.

Full Disclosure: I just backed this project on Kickstarter because I think it’s clever, cool and artistic.

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