At The Capital Factory’s office, founder Josh Baer gave an overview of Demo Day 2011 during the Startup Crawl.
The third annual Capital Factory Demo Day took place on Wednesday at the AT&T Conference Center in downtown Austin. Five Capital Factory Finalists showed off their companies to investors and others at the day-long sold out event, which was livestreamed. Each of the five companies spent 10 weeks to nurture their ventures.
Emil Hajric, CEO of HelpJuice, gave a demonstration to investors at the Capital Factory’s Demo Day 2011. His company was one the five Capital Factory 2011 Demo Day Finalists. HelpJuice makes an application that makes updating knowledgebases like Frequently Asked Questions or FAQs for companies easy.
Jack McGary, co-founder of SpeakerMix, gave a presentation to investors and others at the Capital Factory’s Demo Day 2011 Wednesday morning. SpeakerMix was one of five Capital Factory 2011 Finalists.
Speakermix is a one-stop shop for finding a speaker for an event. The company’s website is like an online match making service for event planners and speakers.
The market for speakers is $10 billion annually, McGary said. SpeakerMix already has 6,500 speakers on its site and has booked $1 million in speaking engagements, he said.
“We’ve got to work with everyone from Michael Phelps to Glenn Beck,” McGary said.
“There’s a ton of really great speakers that meeting planners are not going to find on Google.”
Kirtus Dixon, co-founder and CEO of GroupCharger was selected as one of the five Capital Factory 2011 Finalists. He pitched his company to investors during Austin Startup Week at the Capital Factory’s sold-out event Demo Day 2011.
Dixon’s company, GroupCharger, seeks to get alumni more actively involved and donating to their Alma Maters through its first web application called AlumniCharger. But that’s not an easy task.
For example, Oklahoma University has an alumni base of roughly 300,000, but only 8 percent give back every year, Dixon said. The university is using GroupCharger’s app to increase engagement with its alumni, Dixon said. The app finds alumni on social networks and then sends event information, invitations and introductions to other area alumni.
“Alumni who stay in touch with their schools after graduation are three times more likely to give back,” Dixon said.
Higher education institutions receive $30 billion in contributions annually and universities spend $2.4 billion on technology to engage alumni, Dixon said. The market is huge with 1.5 million alumni clubs, 55,000 alumni associations and each university spending, on average, $125,000 a year to market to alumni.
GroupCharger launched its beta version in July and it has 20 customers including the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas and Texas A&M University. They pay $500 for the service, Dixon said.
GroupCharger is seeking to raise $200,000 in venture capital and already has $75,000 committed, Dixon said. It needs the money to expand to 40 universities which will be its break even mark to profitability, Dixon said.
SwimpTopia makes it easy to join a swim team.
The Austin start-up, known as TeamTopia, first product is SwimTopia, a web-based application that reduces the paperwork hassle involved in joining a swimteam, said Mason Hale, CEO of co-founder.
Launched earlier this year, SwimTopia has 2,700 registered users and 1,100 athletes for 6 teams. It has processed $120,000 in registration orders.
“At this point, we have a working product and customers who are happy,” Hale said.
The U.S. swimming market is estimated at 2.6 million athletes on 25,000 teams paying $250 registration fees and dues and another $300 million in merchandise and equipment.
50 million youth sports athletes in the U.S. that spean $5 billion in merchandise and registration fees.
“Every team uses its own registration, communication systems,” Hale said. “When I see this I see a big opportunity to save a lot of people a lot of time. To take the hassle out of something that is supposed to be fun. To enable coaches to spend more time coaching and parents to spend more time with their kids.”
The swim market is huge but it’s just the entry point to the overall youth sports market with 50 million children enrolled in organized youth sports, Hale said.
By L.A. Lorek
Austin’s High Tech Happy Hour takes places about eight times a year at the Molotov Lounge in downtown Austin. It’s an opportunity for people to meet and mingle. But it’s also a place where deals get done and employees get hired. The next Austin High Tech Happy Hour is this Thursday during Austin Startup Week. This footage was taken at the August gathering which featured Laura Beck’s company StripedShirt.com as a sponsor as well as IBM. Bryan and Angi Menell launched the Austin High Tech Happy Hour four years ago. Bryan Menell contributes to the AustinStartup website and is a co-founder of Capital Factory, an incubator for high-tech business.
By L.A. Lorek
Got tech talent?
Then Austin companies want to recruit you.
A group of Austin CEOs plan to travel to San Francisco and Sunnyvale on Sept. 13th and 14th to hire engineers, software developers and others with technology skills.
Many Silicon Valley area companies already have a presence in Austin, but this will be the first organized effort by area CEOs to hire high tech workers from California, said Joel Trammell, chairman of the Austin Technology Council.
“We certainly have good talent in Austin,” said Trammel, who also serves as CEO of CacheIQ. But the city’s growing high-tech industry needs more, he said. His company seeks three or four more software developers, he said. And it’s not alone.
In May, the Austin Technology Council hosted a high tech CEO summit and many company executives reported a shortage of engineers, coders, programmers and software developers.
The 30 companies travelling to Silicon Valley to recruit include Homeaway, BazaarVoice, Gowalla, CacheIQ, Ravel and Creditcards.com.
Why would software developers pull up stakes and move to Austin? The city repeatedly lands on best place to live in the country lists. Austin ranked second behind Silicon Valley on the nation’s most innovative places list compiled by Forbes Magazine. And Kiplinger’s list of best cities for nurturing a business. Austin offers a much lower cost of living, shorter traffic commutes, high quality schools and a strong high tech community, Trammell said. Also, Texas does not have a state income tax, he said.
“The lifestyle is amazing,” said Bart Bohn, chief operating officer of Ravel, which needs four new employees focused on product sales and services. Ravel does analytics on big data.
“Austin is shockingly easy to recruit for,” Bohn said. “It has great brand recognition. Everyone thinks of it as fantastic lifestyle with good technology jobs. A lot of people get exposure to it in other ways like Austin City Limits Music Festival and South by Southwest.”
Already, several big Silicon Valley companies have offices here.
“Most people don’t know that Apple has a 3,000 person office in Austin,” Bohn said.
Google and Facebook also have offices here and Evernote is going to open one soon, he said.
“Austin is known to have a great talent base,” Bohn said.
Austin has recently seen an explosion of good, credible start-ups combined with the opening of established tech companies’ offices and that has increased the demand for technology talent, Bohn said.
“Maybe that sucked up a lot of talent that would be available for other companies,” he said.
CreditCards.com wants to add up to five new employees to its staff of 55 in Austin, said CEO Chris Speltz.
“We need to grow the talent pool here,” he said.
For more information, you can follow the Austin Technology Council on Twitter @ATCouncil or follow the conversation on Twitter with #ATXGrow.
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