Tag: Chaotic Moon

Whurley Launches Honest Dollar, a Fintech Startup

w-5bqGvFZcAeEftdRDA27sBoOTEEJfPGo8K8ZWy7VZAWilliam Hurley, known as Whurley, formerly the creative “evil genius” behind Chaotic Moon, has left that company to co-found a new financial technology company, Honest Dollar.

Henry Yoshida, a certified financial planner, co-founder and principal of The Maresh Yoshida 401k Group, with more than $1.3 billion under management, is his co-founder.

“We are forming the company this week, gathering investment next week, then launching the company officially at a party during SxSW on March 14th 2015,” Whurley wrote in an email message. “Currently we haven’t taken on any investment in the company. We are opening a convertible debt round next week. Anyone interested can contact us directly about the specifics.”

Not much is known about the Austin-based company at this time other than they launched their Facebook page today and they have T-shirts with the slogan “Honesty is the New Policy.” And Whurley will serve as the Chief Executive Officer of the new startup.

Honest Dollar has five employees.

“We’re hoping to keep the number of employees low, but will scale as needed to meet the demands of the business,” Whurley said.

RC2Tcl8rABfSiaI7FNW-5vNSSrUHt4KnbVomc8FerSgHonest Dollar is currently looking for office space.

“We actually just started yesterday so we’ve been touring office space yesterday and today but haven’t seen anything we’ve really fallen in love with yet,” Whurley said. “We’re focused on downtown, but parking is a nightmare in almost every case. If anyone has suggestions, I’m all ears.”

Whurley co-founded Chaotic Moon in 2010 with Ben Lamm and Mike Erwin. They launched Chaotic Moon Labs, a research and development division a few years later. He officially left his daily role at the company on Oct. 1.

Whurley, who holds 14 patents, previously worked at IBM where he was a certified “Master Inventor” and Apple.

Brewbot, Vaporshot and Other Tech Gadgets at Engadget Austin Live

McClellendon, CEO of Brewbot.

Chris McClellendon, CEO of Brewbot at Engadget Live Austin.

A big crowd turned out for Engadget Live Austin held last Friday to showcase some of the city’s latest tech products.

A customized beer brewing station controlled with a smartphone, a vaporized alcohol machine and a virtual reality Oculus Rift headset were a few of the devices on display at the Austin Music Hall.

Engadget, an online technology news site, is doing a series of live events around the country to showcase new gadgets, said Jeff Taylor with Engadget. More than 3,000 people got a ticket to attend the Austin event.

Other events will be held in Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles and New York.

Austin-based startups at the event included Atlas, which makes a wearable activity monitor, Chaotic Moon, maker of all kinds of software and hardware inventions, Brewbot, a robot that brews beer, Re3D, a 3D printer, Plum, a smart home lighting control device and Techjango, maker of a laptop Xbox gaming station.

The Brewbot booth attracted a steady crowd. It featured the Brewbot, a customized beer brewing device that can be controlled wirelessly with a smart phone. It’s about the size of a mini-frig and it contains everything necessary to brew homemade beer.
Brewbot moved to Austin from Belfast, Northern Ireland to participate in Techstars Austin, said Chris McClelland, its CEO.

The Brewbot costs $3,000 and they can be customized to meet the needs of the customer, McClelland said.

“It’s a robot that brews beer,” McClelland said.

Brewbot, which raised more than $194,000 from a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, is working on a venture-funding round, which the company will announce shortly.

The year old startup moved all five members of its team to Austin.

The line to sample vaporized alcohol from Vapshot was among the longest at the event.

A guy trying out Vapshot's vaporized alcohol shot at Engadget Live Austin.

A guy trying out Vapshot’s vaporized alcohol shot at Engadget Live Austin.

Victor Wong, co-founder of Vapshot, came up with the idea during a “boring weekend” last February. He got together with his friend and engineer, Larry Cotton, co-founder, and they created the Vapshot. They took the machine to a tradeshow in Las Vegas and sold $70,000 worth of the machines, which cost $4,000 each.

“We started shipping them last week,” Wong said.

The machine vaporizes alcohol into a bottle, which people then inhale with a straw. The Vapshot delivers alcohol into the lungs for an immediate buzz, which Wong estimates lasts only 15 minutes.

Vapshot is selling the machine to bars licensed to sell and distribute alcohol, Wong said. The machine can get 1,500 vaporized shots out of bottle of liquor, compared to about 20 shots in liquid form.

The Chaotic Moon booth at Engadget Live Austin

The Chaotic Moon booth at Engadget Live Austin

The line for Chaotic Moon’s demonstration stretched to the door. The company had an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset for 3D gaming interacting with an iPad app, which Chaotic Moon created. The person controlling the iPad used it to drop bombs on the person playing the Oculus Rift game.

The mash up isn’t anything Chaotic Moon plans to sell, said Chance Ivey, the company’s lead game designer.

“We look at how we can utilize it with other technologies we’ve been working with,” he said.

Austin Chamber Names 12 Startups to its Austin A-List for 2014

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

BnEfhvbCEAAFIPpThe Austin Chamber of Commerce Wednesday night named 12 companies to its A-List of Startups for 2014.

In the “Emerging” category, for companies that have raised less than $1 million, the winners were Datical, Compare Metrics, Embrace, TeVido, TrustRadius and Spot on Sciences.

“You look at the companies that won last year and this year, it’s a great honor to be part of that group, because they are next generation of startups that are pushing us forward,” said Bart Bohn, founder of Embrace, customer relationship management software.

“It’s such a strong entrepreneurial business environment in Austin and it’s such an honor to be part of it,” said Jeanette Hill, CEO of Spot On Sciences, the maker of HemaSpot, a medical device that allows for remote blood sampling.

“It really means that all your hard work paid off. People see that what you’re doing is exciting and innovative and game changing and Austin is the place to be game changing,” said Laura Bosworth, CEO and co-founder of TeVido BioDevices, which uses 3-D printing technology to reconstruct and print breast tissue.

In the “Growth” category, for startups that have raised more than $1 million, but less than $10 million, the winners included Umbel, Square Root, Set.fm and TurnKey Vacation Rentals.

And in the “Scale” category, for companies that have raised more than $10 million, the winners were Novati and Chaotic Moon.

More than 250 startups applied for the Austin A-List awards, a 65 percent increase in participation from last year’s list, said Michele Skelding, senior vice president of global technology and innovation for the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.

BnE3GWTIYAES3kqSkelding and Hugh Forrest, executive director of South by Southwest Interactive, announced the winners at the inaugural State of Innovation event at the ACL Live at the Moody Theatre. Several hundred people attended the event which featured fireside chats by Laura Kilcrease, managing director of Triton Ventures, and Gene Austin, CEO of Bazaarvoice and Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas, inventor of Ethernet and co-founder of 3Com, and Mike Maples Jr., partner at Floodgate Ventures.

In addition, Mayor Lee Leffingwell proclaimed May 7th as “Austin Innovation Day.” He also discussed the city forming an “Innovation District” around the Dell Medical School. And Thomas G. Osha, managing director of Innovation and Economic Development at the Wexford Science and Technology, gave a talk about the development of Innovation Zones.

“Chaotic Moon is the quintessential Austin company”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

William "Whurley" Hurley, founder of Chaotic Moon

For the moment, forget that Chaotic Moon created the app for The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s groundbreaking newspaper for the iPad. Forget that this two-year-old company works with clients like Sesame Street and the United Nations, Discovery Channel and Hello Kitty. And forget that the company charges a couple million dollars for most of its apps.
For a moment, think only of Chaotic Moon Labs’ Board of Awesomeness: a battery-powered, all terrain skateboard that surges to 32 miles an hour. It’s not Chaotic Moon’s magnum opus, but it is a signature piece. The Board of Awesomeness is the kind of thing kids have fantasized about for decades, lying under big trees in the grass, drinking root beer, eating Starburst and thinking: “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a motorized, all terrain skateboard that went as fast as a car?”
Take a bunch of people who still live that moment, give them ridiculous amounts of technological know-how, and you have Chaotic Moon.
The face of Chaotic Moon is its general manager, Whurley. Born William Hurley (and previously thoroughly insulted by the Whurley moniker because it wasn’t meant as a compliment,) Whurley started life as an Army brat. His dad gave him access to a computer when computers were still in their infancy. And his parents taught him to love ideas, inculcating him with shows like Connections, a television series in which British narrator James Burke– wearing the same pantsuit in every episode– shows how everything that happens in modern times can be traced back to inventions, decisions and cultures of 100 years ago, 500 years, a thousand. Watching that show religiously as a kid taught Whurley perspective.
His parents never explained that some things can’t be done. They were more inclined to say “Try it, see what happens.” So he did.
His first career choice was as a bassist in a successful funk band which toured regularly and achieved some success and whose name he refuses to reveal. But in 1991 his music career was interrupted by a serious car accident. He endured 13 hours of exploratory surgery and several weeks in the ICU, followed by nearly a year of recovery. The band went on without him. So Whurley—then known as Bill or Billy or William—started toying with sound synchronization on CDs. It stemmed from his interest in music but expanded to movies and games. He was able to make sound line up with action. It was a skill Apple computer needed and it was the start of Whurley’s tech career.
The career progressed from R&D for Apple to Master Inventor, Senior Manager of Targeted Internet Solutions for IBM, where he racked up many patents for the company. Then he voyaged through several other companies: Qlusters Inc., Symbiot Inc.—of which he was a cofounder–and BMC Software.
Whurley had no college degree, though he’s considering pursuing a degree in Awesomeness. But neither would he say he’s self taught.
“No one is really self taught,” he shrugged. “I’ve had dozens of amazing mentors who were nice enough to take the time to teach me.”
Among them were Steve Smith, Chaotic Moon’s Chief Technology Officer, Tom Bishop of BMC. Doug Lenat, founder of Cycorp Inc.
He’s always been fascinated by what was possible, and was among the founders of a camp for iPhone developers when another founder, Raven Zachary, invited him to go for a walk. It was 2007. Zachary announced: “I’m going to start a company building apps.” Almost without thinking about it, Whurley responded “Me too.”
At that moment, he said, he had a vision of Obi Wan Kenobi floating in front of him saying “Pioneers get all the arrows in the back.” Apps were new. Anyone who plunged in in 2007 was destined for some arrows in the back. So Whurley took his idea to his old friend Mike Erwin who suggested they wait three years. 2010. That would be the perfect moment to launch an app company.
“Waiting three years was hard for me,” Whurley said. “It’s always been so easy for me to see advanced technology and say ‘This could be a reality now. ‘ But the tech isn’t there or the people aren’t ready for it, they won’t buy it yet.”
In 2009 at SXSW, Whurley and Erwin met Ben Lamm and he instantly became “the third wheel of our tricycle.” They had three very different personalities and different skill sets but together they made a perfect team. For awhile, Whurley said, they postulated that if any one of them were to disappear, the cult/family that is Chaotic Moon would dissolve. But now they think it’s taken on a life of its own.
In the last months of 2009, they all took time off. Erwin to travel. Whurley to spend time with his teenage son. In January of 2010, he said, he started asking “Hey, remember that company we were going to start?” By mid February it was a matter of some urgency. They launched at SXSW in 2010.
The company’s structure is meant to fuel dreams. As Whurley said in an interview with Businessmakers: “Chaotic Moon…is kind of a dream engine if you will. Most people’s plan looks like a three-step plan, right? And step one is, you know, fantastic idea, and step three is profit, and step two is a big question mark.”
Chaotic Moon does step two. The studios group does work for hire in very large apps such as The Daily. The games division is a publisher of original titles as well as titles people bring to the company. And the labs is the intellectual property development arm. “That’s where we respond to client needs when nothing exists to meet the client’s need,” he said.
The company runs on a two-out-of-three management system. If two of the three founders outvote the other, he stays outvoted. Whurley swore they’d never have a CEO. But one day, he was in a meeting with a client and Ben Lamm who was the Chief Creative Officer.
“The guy says, ‘This is an $8 million deal, I’m not going to negotiate with the chief creative officer.’ So I called Mike and said ‘This guy needs a CEO what do you think of making Ben CEO?’ and he said ‘Done.’ So I turned back to the guy and said, ‘Okay, he’s the CEO, let’s negotiate.’”
Currently Whurley’s working on a $20 million deal but most apps cost a couple million. Sometimes the company gets paid in cash, sometimes stock and royalties. It has a strong incentive and profit sharing program to encourage the wholehearted participation of stellar developers.
Chaotic Moon’s founders created its culture very deliberately, with a video-game, space-guy avatar that speaks to many generations, the tag line “All Your Mobile Apps Are Belong to Us” and the constant promise “We’re smarter than you.”
“You know you go to the website of most of these app developers and they’re so serious and then you go meet them and they’re all like ‘We’re so awesome.’” He said. “We wanted to do the opposite. So they go to the website and we’re like ‘We’re awesome, we’re smarter than you,’ and then they meet us and we’re just these regular guys. People who don’t have a sense of humor never call us. They don’t get it.”
“Austin has this very strong be yourself ethos,” said Bijoy Goswami, founder of The Bootstrap Network. “It’s about individualism and self expression. The question isn’t just ‘Did you build a big company?’ it’s ‘Did you build one that was unique and true to yourself?’ In a lot of ways, Chaotic Moon is the quintessential Austin company.”
Equally important, Goswami said, is how Chaotic Moon is exporting that unique culture outside of Austin “showing us where we ought to be going.”
Whurley, too, is part of the brand. Whurley intends to create a whole website, the domain of which someone acquired for him years ago. He avoided it because it originally referred to the fact that he’s high energy, all over the board. “Whirly.” But he was speaking on going for a bold brand once and an audience member challenged him about why he had failed to embrace the name. After that, he became Whurley everywhere.
“He’s part of what makes the startup community what it is,” said Eve Richter, the City of Austin’s Emerging Technologies Coordinator. “He’s one of a handful of people everyone knows, thought leaders, personalities. But I’ve never heard anyone say ‘Oh Whurley, yeah he’s full of himself or he’s posturing. I’ve never heard anyone say that. People like him and they like being around him.”
His business card, she pointed out, listed him as “Evil Genius.” Anybody with that on their business card is okay in my book.”
Keith Casey, developer evangelist of Twilio said Whurley showed him around town and heard someone refer to Whurley as Tony Stark.
“He just cracked up,” he said.
But Whurley gives entirely too much credit to his partners and the 30 or so brilliant people who work with their company to create extraordinary products to be Tony Stark.
He explains his group’s success succinctly.
“We have a healthy imagination and no respect for boundaries and limits.”

Chaotic Moon Labs showcases its “Board of Awesomeness” at CES

Last week I attended the first meet up for the Austin chapter of the Online News Association.
Robert Quigley, senior lecturer with the University of Texas journalism school, and Cindy Royal, professor at Texas State University, are cofounders of the Austin ONA chapter. The first meeting had a great turnout.
In addition to other journalists, I met with some people in the technology community to brainstorm story ideas for SiliconHillsNews. (We really drank a couple of beers and talked about some of the cool companies in town.) One of the names that came up was William Hurley, known as Whurley. He runs one of the most innovative companies in Austin called Chaotic Moon, a mobile application development company.
This week, the folks from Chaotic Moon Labs, a division of Chaotic Moon, are at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They are showcasing their “Board of Awesomeness,” an electric skateboard controlled via a Microsoft Kinect and Samsung tablet computer.
Chaotic Moon announced that it plans to invest another $6 million into its lab division this year to work on more projects.
“The labs team has clearly demonstrated that with the “Board of Awesomeness” we can transform an interface previous confined to your living room and make it fun and useful for transportation in the outside world,” said Ben Lamm, CEO of Chaotic Moon Studios.
A Samsung tablet hooked up to Xbox Kinectic controls the skateboard which can reach speeds up to 32 miles per hour. ” With video recognition, speech recognition and hand signals, a rider controls the director of the board and its speed and direction.

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