Steve Papermaster (left) and Dr. Jiren Liu (right)
The venture capital continues to flow into Austin.
This time, Appconomy has landed $10 million in a first round venture debt funding deal designed to accelerate its operations in China.
Appconomy has created a merchant payment system called AppWallet and offers an app for smartphones, tablets and feature phones. The company has a Chinese corporate headquarters in Shanghai and a development center in Chengdu, Sichuan province. Its U.S. headquarters is in Austin. Qiming Venture, based in Shanghai, led the round and its managing director Gary Rieschel will take a seat on the company’s board of directors. Neusoft Corp. also took a stake along with existing investors Western Technology Investment and True Ventures.
“With these two, new cornerstone commitments from Qiming and Neusoft, Appconomy will move rapidly to bring our unique AppWallet marketplace for global brands and local merchants to China,” Steve Papermaster, Chairman and co-CEO of Appconomy, said in a statement.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
Left: Larry Wikelius, cofounder, vp software engineering Right: David Borland, cofounder vp hardware engineering
As startup stories go, Calxeda’s is pretty dramatic: Mobile tech expert Barry Evans cooks up the idea of trading energy gobbling data server chips with small, efficient mobile phone chips that only need a tenth the power. They’re built to conserve energy when their hardware is idle. It’s a solution that should mitigate the growing global problem that the world demands ever more data but the energy costs to operate mega data centers make it impossible to satisfy them. Evans solution “is obvious… in the sense that every really elegant solution is obvious after the fact,” said VP and principal analyst Richard Fichera of Forrester Research Inc.
Existing data centers–often giant buildings filled with servers that store, analyze and process information for individual companies, the internet and cloud computing systems–pump out tremendous amounts of heat but require cooling to protect the data. Globally they consumed 31 gigawatts of energy last year—roughly the same amount as New York City consumed on its highest peak day back in 2006. Evans’ idea is to switch from giant, sweaty workhorse servers to small, efficient servers on tiny batteries.
At first people tell him he’s crazy. Not only that, but the recession causes all venture capital funds to dry up for early startups and it looks like Evans has a much longer row to hoe than he anticipated. But he and his partners continue to experiment with the idea and two years later, recession or not, his company raises $48 million in venture financing—a huge sum for a startup that doesn’t intend to manufacture its own product. A year after that Calxeda announces who will be handling the server side of its venture: server giant Hewlett Packard.
“Companies were building data centers by rivers, in Finland…everybody was working to solve the issues around the problem but nobody was working to solve the problem,” said Larry Wikelius, Calxeda cofounder and vice president of software engineering . “This is the first time somebody said, ‘We can take power out of the equation.’”
Evans is a 20-year veteran of the semiconductor industry who started Calxeda after leaving his position as vice president and general manager of Marvell’s Application Processing Business Unit in the Cellular and Handheld Group (acquired from Intel). He spent a year talking to end users about using a mobile-type power source for servers, one that would only require a tenth the energy of existing servers and would work better with servers fluctuating energy needs.
His first partners were his cofounders, Wikelius and David Borland, vice president of hardware engineering. The company planned to model the chip somewhat after those being produced by British mobile chip manufacturer, ARM, and made several attempts before figuring out how to do it. It was crucial to the founders to create a solution that could be plugged into existing data centers without major overhauls, Wikelius said.
“Too many companies say ‘If you just remove your software and change all your infrastructure we have a great product for you,’” he said. “We support standards so it’s easy to plug in to the existing infrastructure.”
But it’s not exactly plug and play, according to Fichera.
“ If you mean recompile, reload and it works fine, with some applications it works that way,” he said. “Others will have to be completely recoded.”
Still, Borland said, finding the simplest solution is part of Calxeda culture. “Calxeda is a loose Latin translation of the name we started with—Smooth Stone. “ In the David and Goliath story, he points out, when everybody else despaired in the face of a big problem, David applied the simplest answer, a smooth stone.
“We’re not interested in science projects, ideas that make you say ‘That’s really cool, but how do you apply it” Wikelius said.
Finding the simplest solution, however, has required building a complex network of partners who can speak to all the development issues. And that, too, has become part of Calxeda’s culture. The company has a dozen or so partners it talks about in its Trailblazer initiative. But it has many more it doesn’t talk about. One it has connected with is Pervasive Data Rush, a big data solution of Pervasive Software.
“Calxeda and Pervasive have a shared interest in providing solutions for one of the key challenges of IT today – the economics and energy consumption of data centers,” said David Inbar, senior director of sales and marketing of Pervasive Big Data Products and Solutions. “The problem is, typically only 15 to 30 percent of processor capacity is being utilized at any given time. The rest of the capacity is idle, but still burning energy. Pervasive DataRush technology gives people the ability to build programs that run in parallel, taking full advantage of processors to get lower costs and better energy efficiency.”
That’s the kind of problem Calxeda’s been hashing over with its partners to make sure its solutions work. The founders were deliberate about the order in which they moved forward, building the company for three years before announcing its server partner. They kept their options open as long as they could, Wikelius said, because things change fast in this industry and you may have knowledge and information next year that’s missing this year.
When it did finally announce its server manufacturing partner November first, it put the little Austin startup in a whole new class. To come out of the gate with the most prominent dance partner on the floor sets the company well ahead of competitors.
And it does have competitors. Other companies in the game include Applied Micro which has an intermediate level ARM based chip for servers. But, said Fichera, Calxeda’s offering a lot of different pieces of the architecture on one server which sets them ahead in reducing the footprint and the need for power. Calxeda has other advantages. One was Evan’s experience in the mobile space. Another, Wikelius said, was the company’s intense focus on producing this product for internet and cloud server industries. Big companies couldn’t afford such focus. And finally, Evans said: “You just have to go faster than everybody else.”
Teaming up with HP puts Calxeda on a new playing field. HPs new servers will be called Redstone. They’ll take up a fraction of the space a rack of servers formerly required and will share resources. As a Wall Street Journal story put it they will “sip energy lightly.” HP announced that a typical server project of 400 servers in 10 racks would cost $3.3 million to purchase, install and operate. Redstone runs four times as many servers in half of one rack and draws a tenth the energy, dropping the price to $1.2 million.
In the near future, Fichera said, the impact of Calxeda’s work will be seen more in the transformation of the way the industry thinks about data centers, rather than in big profits. After a few years, however, it’s likely to be lucrative niche.
In the meantime, Calxeda and its partners are thoroughly enjoying themselves. The variety of working with all these partners makes Calxeda a fascinating ecosystem.
“There are a bunch of people who would never work for the same company in our partnerships, it makes a whole ecosystem,” Borland said. “It makes us much more than a chip provider.”
From the partner perspective, Inbar said, “it’s fun (working with Calxeda). We share a lot of culture.”
The partnerships work for a couple reasons. For one, Wikelius said, Calxeda is very transparent with partners and employees. For another, they’ve created a culture that invites people to rethink everything. Just because a server has always been a giant box and a small chip runs mobile phones doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.
Working in that environment, with these people is Evans’ favorite part.
“I love it,” he said. “I’m enjoying the ride.”
Superconductor Technologies, based in Santa Barbara, Calif. announced Monday plans to move its corporate headquarters to Austin along with a new manufacturing plant.
The company, which makes high performance wires for power systems and cell phones, considered the “technical talent pools, facilities, and energy costs in a number of states” and determined Austin was the best location, said Jeff Quiram, STI’s president and chief executive officer in this news release.
“We believe Austin is an ideal location to initiate the production of our Conductus superconducting wire on a commercial scale,” he said “STI is excited to become a contributor to the region’s continued high-tech success.”
Superconductor Technologies will move into its new headquarters by the end of March next year. It’s moving into a 94,000 square foot plant, previously occupied by Applied Materials. It’s also planning to keep a research and development facility and other operations in California and it does not expect any layoffs associated with the move.
By Susan Lahey
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
One of the first stories that ran in The Daily Dot: The Hometown Newspaper of the World Wide Web, was an obituary.
Most obituaries for Angelica Marie Schaaf Rayl talked about her as a wife, a mother, even a soap maker. The Daily Dot focused on her founding Etsy Bitch, a forum for artists and craftspeople who sell their work on the Etsy website. Schaaf Rayl had built an online community of more than 500 people who were passionate—not always in a good way—about Etsy.
That’s what The Daily Dot does.
The new, online, Austin-based paper covers the web like a city full of unique communities whose citizens are intensely engaged with each other. Cities have school districts, development corridors and business communities; the web has Etsy, Facebook, Reddit and World of Warcraft. The Daily Dot covers politics, entertainment, culture and business, like other newspapers. But its focus is exclusively on how these play out online. The fact that the Internet address RickPerry.com was for sale might be a blurb in some papers; but it’s big news in The Daily Dot. A kid who garnered worldwide support from a YouTube video about being bullied was doubly covered by the Dot when he followed that up with a smug video about not really needing peoples’ support. He had played fast and loose with the global community.
It’s written in internet speak, with no apologies for terms like “twee” which, according to the urban dictionary, means excessively sweet. No explanation of ‘spambots’ or ‘uniques. ‘
The Daily Dot is led by CEO Nicholas White, an idealistic, poster child for a liberal arts education. The product of six generations of journalists from a family that now owns 10 newspapers and 12 radio stations, White naturally was committed to do anything but journalism. He studied film, earned a master’s degree in American Studies and recently completed his master’s in positive psychology. He also has two certifications in film, and for awhile that was his career of choice. He studied at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he met Joshua Jones-Dilworth, Daily Dot cofounder, who was studying English and philosophy. The pair created Eighty-Watt Theater, a student theater company “dedicated to pushing the bounds of common perceptions about theater.” That turned into Eighty-Watt Cinema where the pair, with other partners, made films to wake people up.
But one day, while on the elliptical machine–“This was all very symbolic” White said—he was struck with a serious doubt.
“I was wondering if it was possible that no matter how much the movies I make are a wake-up call, I am still supporting something, an industry and a culture, that does the opposite.” He’s not sure he thinks that anymore, but it was enough to send him back to his roots, to become a reporter at a family-owned paper, the Norwalk Reflector in Norwalk, Ohio.
He fell in love with journalism, especially the newsroom banter about heroes, villains and the bizarre cast of characters that comprise the newsmaking body of a community, including the amusing behavior of business moguls and favor-currying politicians.
What he didn’t like was the fact that very little of that extremely colorful comedy/drama ever made it to the pages of the paper. He didn’t like the mentality of many journalists that the paper’s job was to publish what people needed to know and turned a blind eye, in some ways, to what people wanted to read about. He thought the industry should change to woo readers back.
He also didn’t like how reluctant newspaper folk were to embrace the internet. Because he pushed his paper to enter the 21st century, he was given the honor to drag it there. He taught himself to program and created interactive media programs first for his paper, and eventually for the whole chain. By the time he left, he held the title of Vice President of Audience Development in the Midwest Division.
Where many newspaper people saw the internet as the usurper of advertising dollars, White saw it as an invitation to evolve. Instead of expecting readers to stick around because it’s the right thing to do, it was the job of newspapers to attract customers and advertisers.
“There was just so much opportunity to do cool, interesting stuff….”
The idea for the Daily Dot, though, came from a different direction.
Nova Spivak was a serial entrepreneur and friends with White’s partner-in-film, Joshua Jones-Dilworth. When White went into journalism, Jones-Dilworth went into marketing. In addition to his role on the Daily Dot, he runs a public relations firm that specializes in working with startups. It was Spivak who had the idea, Jones-Dilworth liked it and soon they hit upon the person who would be ideal to run it: Nick White.
They tossed it around for awhile, played with business plans, and soon learned that nobody wants to invest in content. Investors, White pointed out, holding his hands around an imaginary object, want a “thing. ” And they want to know they’ll get their money back. True, Huffington Post just sold for $315 million. But that’s the exception for a content business. Moreover, the founders of The Daily Dot have no plans to sell it. No easy exit plan that helps investors see the payoff.
So instead they did an F Round of financing, meaning friends and family. And about $600,000 later, in August of 2011, The Daily Dot was born.
The Daily Dot lists about 10 communities it covers, including blogs as one community. The company sells banner ads through Federated Media and Martini and lists ad rates of $18 to $40 per thousand impressions. The minimum monthly is $500. The paper had 170,000 unique visitors as of December 9.
Now, White said, he thinks they have a “thing” investors can see as an opportunity. So they’re getting ready to seek financing.
From an editorial perspective, The Daily Dot is still forming. Its founders want it to be the small town newspaper for the web and they talk a lot about old school journalistic standards. But it’s not intuitive, covering this kind of community.
“At first,” said Owen Thomas, founding editor, “we thought we’d have one reporter for Facebook, one for Twitter….. But then you take something like politics, now we’re more interested in how a political community is across these networks. That’s our challenge.”
Daily Dot reader Jason Stoddard thinks it might be too much of a challenge to overcome.
“Any time you try to organize and formalize any kind of a union, because of so many hard preferences, fragmentation is inevitable,” said Stoddard, entrepreneur and founder of Stagira Marketing. The internet is one such union with too many people having hard preferences to be united.
“What a local newspaper is supposed to do is be the hub voice, the central voice of a culture,” Stoddard said. “They say the internet is the last free market on earth, but it’s not really on earth….it’s very difficult to hedge the niche.”
Too much of the paper’s coverage, he believes, is fluffy. It covers the viral blog, but not the back story of the blogger. “It seems a little too glib, almost an apology because they don’t’ want to take themselves too seriously. You can’t go halfway on it. If you’re going to put a stake in the ground, put it in the ground.”
He quoted Arthur Hays Sulzburger: “Obviously, a man’s judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it….” The information in a daily paper informs people’s judgments and decisions. The Daily Dot operates in the culture of “Likes” which lends itself to popular information more than valuable information. That makes it too shallow to inform good judgments, Stoddard said.
White has great visions for the social impact of the Daily Dot. He wants the paper to provide a venue for discussing the global issues that the world can’t address without a compassionate dialogue. He paraphrased Karen Armstrong of the Compassion Project saying compassion begins when you’ve put yourself in the other person’s shoes so much that you can say “I can understand saying that” about something you ordinarily would hotly dispute. And The Daily Dot promotes a lot of internet communities’ altruistic side. Various communities raise vast amounts of money for causes both public and private and the paper covers those efforts regularly. But the paper also wants to be “The alternative to Fox News. ” And in the vast compassionate conversation, it seems unlikely Daily Dot staffers can see themselves saying something like “Vote for Perry.” Readers who are not hip, liberal internerds may not feel the love.
David Matthews does, though. A self-proclaimed “startup guy” who is currently working on a startup called Sponsorfied, he’s an active member of the Reddit community. But if he misses a few days, he doesn’t feel lost now, he said, because Digital Dot will be on top of it.
“That’s the value for me,” Matthew said, “they give me a summary of all the things that are going on.”
The Daily Dot’s plan? To become THE Internet newspaper.
“It’s a dauntingly crazy ambition,” acknowledges Executive Editor Owen. “But what other kind of ambition is worth having?”
(White wrote this blog post for PBS Mediashift on 5 Lessons Learned Building The Daily Dot.)
The shortage of technology workers in the Silicon Hills region continues. The Austin American-Statesman today reported that the recent trip technology CEOs from Austin took to California didn’t result in any new employees moving to Texas. Perhaps that’s why San Antonio-based Rackspace recently opened an office in San Francisco. The technology companies have to go where the talent resides. Also on Saturday, Rackspace held a recruiting event called Rackerpalooza at its Austin office. Rackspace also recently expanded its San Antonio headquarters.
On Friday, Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, gave a talk at San Antonio’s Startup Ignite’s third monthly Hack-a-thon at the Geekdom in downtown San Antonio.
On Wednesday, Austin-based Portalarium, which makes games for social networks and mobile platforms, announced its first social network game, Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale. Gaming Legend Richard Garriott is developing the game, which will be available for a beta release later this year.
Also on Tuesday, the Austin American-Statesman reported that a group of investors including San Antonio Billionaire Red McCombs has invested $1.75 million in an Austin-startup called Bypass Lane, which has created an app that lets people order food and drinks from their seats in a stadium while watching an event.
On Monday, Gowalla’s founder Josh Williams officially announced that Facebook had acquired the Austin-based start-up, but it didn’t acquire the company’s data. It mainly wanted their development team. The Austin American Statesman had a story on the acquisition and didn’t mention anything about the $10 million Gowalla raised in venture capital. But Michael Arrington at Uncrunched reported that the deal might be a liquidation and it was uncertain if investors would get their money back.
On Monday, Globalscape of San Antonio bought Tappin of Seattle in “a deal worth up to $17 million,” according to this story in TechFlash.
Chris Mckinzie, co-founder and CEO of Enlyton.me, a new search company in Austin
Doing research online can take a lot of time and effort and led to frustration. It can also be difficult to retain the research in an easy to access and share format.
That’s the opportunity that Chris Mckinzie, co-founder and CEO of Enlyton.me set out to fix.
“Search should be more of a discovery, not queries,” he said. “Our goal is to help people instantly find and consume related information naturally.”
Enlyton.me has patent-pending search technology that uses all of the words in a document or article online and matches those with other related documents.
That eliminates the need for keywords when searching and it saves time, Mckinzie said.
“You shouldn’t search for pages, you should search for objectives,” he said.
Enlyton.me also saves the research in a booklyt that serves as a curation tool online. The booklyt addresses are easy to share with others too on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook or by e-mail.
The market opportunity for simplified search online is $12 billion, Mckinzie said
Mckinzie has been involved in several start-ups including HearMe, Agillion and Fluid Innovation. He also worked for AT&T Internet Services.
With his latest company, Fluid Innovation, Mckinzie created a software platform to manage complex deals. The company licensed the technology to American Express. During that process, he met Mark Johns who had created an algorithm for search technology. Johns went to work for Fluid Innovation for two years. Now Johns and Mckinzie are taking the search technology to the marketplace through Enlyton.me.
“This is something that doesn’t exist at least as we’ve seen in the marketplace,” said Rob Baker, board member of Fluid Innovation.
The site makes aggregative and content curation easy, Baker said.
“The ability of Enlyton.me to aggregate an abundance of relevant information and package that in this booklet and then share it with one click, it’s quite novel and very unique,” Baker said.
Enlyton.me expects to launch a WordPress Plug-in in January. Enlyton.me plans to make money by embedding ads between the pages of a search and to match the ad to the context of the search. It also plans to license the technology to publishers. It is currently working with MedCity News and has other deals in the works, Mckinzie said.
“We’re targeting publishers who are trying to drive additional page views and open up additional communication with their audience,” Mckinzie said.
Enlyton.me’s search technology can produce the most targeted ad possible matched to the content, Baker said. It can bring new life to old stories and create new revenue streams from archives for publishers, he said.
“Everyone’s looking for consumption of information in a very efficient and fast manner,” he said.
To date, the founders have financed Enlyton.me, but now it’s seeking $500,000 in seed stage funding, Mckinzie said. He plans to use the funding to build out Enlyton.me’s mobile platform.
Startup Texas launched today.
With Michael Dell on the board of Startup America, it’s natural that Texas is one of the latest regions selected by the organization to help foster entrepreneurship.
Startup America launched earlier this year and is a private-public partnership initiated by President Obama and the White House. But Steve Case, CEO of Startup America Partnership, sees the organization as rallying private companies to help spur innovation and create jobs through startups.
The Startup America regions already include Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts and Tennessee. The Austin Chamber of Commerce is spearheading the Startup Texas effort. Its goal is to provide more jobs in central Texas and the chamber plans to provide funding through its Opportunity Austin initiative.
“Cities like Austin prove that as young companies are founded and grow, they create the jobs America needs right now,” Case said a in news release. “We’re thrilled to work with the Austin team to initially launch Startup Texas, and look forward to integrating our resources and reach throughout all of Texas, with its formidable and well-established culture of entrepreneurship.”
John Price, CEO of Vast.com will serve as chair of Startup Texas.
Local tech start-ups want to keep as much homegrown talent in town as possible.
So they created Made In Austin, a job fair that matches area students with start-ups looking for technology talent.
The first event, featuring 100 tech companies and more than 500 registered students, took place Tuesday night at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center downtown.
The 3-hour job fair, which started at 6 p.m., drew a big crowd of students, some guys dressed in suits and ties, others wearing hoodies, jeans and polo shirts and some women in sweater dresses and knee-high boots.
The event organizers banned swag like free T-shirts, stickers and other giveaways. The crowd munched on pizza bagels and brownies and drank ice tea.
Jacqueline Hughes, founder of Austin Start-up Week, organized the event along with Joshua Baer, head of the Capital Factory and OtherInbox. Other organizers included Campus2Careers and other start-up companies. Large companies like American Express, Dell and Rackspace sponsored the tech meet-up.
At the OtherInBox table, Baer, CEO, had already collected several resumes and talked with lots of people. Baer has hired from local universities to fill openings at his start-up in the past. In fact, OtherInBox’s lead product developer started out as an intern when he was a student at St. Edward’s University.
“It’s worked really well for us,” Baer said. “ I love hiring really great experienced people. I also like hiring inexperienced passionate people who I can teach.”
Luke Carriere, who just founded Approachab.ly a few weeks ago at 3 Day Start-up Weekend San Antonio, had a place at a table recruiting Android and iPhone developers, Bluetooth and Near Field Communication specialists. He was also looking for marketers and sales staff.
“I’m looking for business majors who might be able to help me with market research,” Carriere said.
Events like Made In Austin help Carriere network and make connections that eventually help to further his business, he said. At a mobile conference a few weeks ago, he met a guy who has joined him to become technical co-founder of his start-up.
“What’s been amazing is meeting people who want to help you by opening up their rolodexes,” he said.
The event provided an opportunity to recruit young talent, said Ramin Jahedi, CEO and founder of CaniSolutions, restaurant consultants. He runs the start-up FindWaiters.com.
“Our market is just exploding,” Jahedi said. Early on during the evening, he had already collected a few resumes and talked with several people.
Patrick Mizer at SpareFoot also talked to a lot of students and planned to follow up with a few of them following the fair.
“We are looking to hire some young engineering talent,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of success hiring engineers in their last year of college.”
Kevin Chu, a junior majoring in management information systems at the University of Texas, attended the fair to find a Spring internship.
“Start-ups give you the opportunity to learn more,” he said. “They’re small so you can do a variety of jobs.”
Linda Ye, a junior majoring in management information systems, was also looking for a Spring internship with a start-up. She already has a summer internship set up with a large company.
“Austin is a start-up city,” Ye said. “Start-ups tend to be more flexible with hours. They are also able to teach you a lot. Start-ups fit me the best right now.”
If you were so busy Wednesday night preparing for the big turkey day, that you forgot to set the DVR and you missed Austin public television station KLRU’s new gem of a program that focuses on Austin innovation, don’t worry.
KLRU plans to re-run the program, Capital of Innovation: Episode #101, which debuted Wednesday night. The next showing is Sunday at 4:30 p.m.
Capital of Innovation’s first episode features Josh Kerr, co founder of Zosh, and maker of an iPhone app that allows people to sign contracts on the mobile phone. YouSendIt acquired Zosh in January of 2011.
The program also features Chris Richter who created a drink mix and Ruth Glendinning who turned an abandoned retail site into a micro incubator for small businesses.
Chris W. McKinzie with Enlyton will be giving SiliconHillsNews.com a demonstration of its bookmarking technology today. Here’s a video explaining the company’s product. I’ll have more to share later.
