Tag: technology (Page 18 of 25)
By Luke Carrière
Lead Organizer of 3DStartup NYC
In August 1994, Nick Longo founded a coffee house in Corpus Christi, Texas, which became one of the first internet cafes in the world. He created a website for his coffee shop and began designing websites for others in his community. By 1996 it had became so popular that he designed software to help people make their own websites and called it CoffeeCup Software, Inc., a startup that went on to win Shareware Industry Awards Foundation (“SIAF Awards”) for Best Web and Internet Software for six years from 1999-2004. In 2000, Nick founded then spun-off Bluedomino Web Hosting, which hosted over 15,000 websites. Nick is now at Rackspace in San Antonio, Texas as “Chief Rainmaker & Director of Strategic Initiatives.” One of the initiatives he is involved in is a collaborative workspace for entrepreneurs called Geekdom.
How did you recognize the opportunity/research the feasibility of the idea?
That’s a good starting place. That was from being a user first. I think a lot of good ideas come from saying to yourself, “hmm this isn’t done right,” or, “I could do this better.”
So, opportunities seem to be right in our own backyard. We are really good at our hobbies and things we do everyday. For example, I’m a webmaster and I don’t like the tools that are available. The idea comes about to make my own software so life will be easier for me. If I can make my life easier for myself, then it is probably going to make someone else’s life easier too. That is exactly how CoffeeCup was formed. I wanted to make my life easier. I had an intuitive sense at it was going to help others because they must be running into the same problems.
How did you finance your business?
I started with just a Master Card. I bought a $500 computer. I setup the computer in my coffee house and slept on the floor for the first year. I spent 24/7 focusing on creation and distribution of software. I took no financing.
What did you do with initial profits?
I wasn’t concerned with paying myself the first year, except for minimal stuff. When I had to make the first hire, I stockpiled cash because I would need another developer. I used the income I earned early as my bootstrapping money. So, I would “save, save, save,” and then hire to make more software. It was really a bootstrap deal.
How long did it take for your company to become profitable?
Within the first three months I was able to close the coffee house. I paid myself as much as I could, of course, I was keeping it really low. At the end of year one I had already made another two pieces of software.
How did your idea change throughout the process?
Originally I put it out for free. But a few things that changed. First, I had no idea how big the market was going to become. I made an HTML editor and that was all I planned to make. Then, a few months later, I realized there was a lot more opportunity and I need to make more software. My original intent was only making an HTML editor. But by the time I was done there were 35 pieces of software. That was a major shift.
Did you ever think of giving up? If so why?
I’m not a big fan of the “fail” methodology. If I were operating on a “fail fast” mindset, I would have been discouraged at month 3, and at month 6. When you are doing it by yourself, or only one other guy, you have all these aspirations to make a million dollars, and then you realize you can barely pay yourselves. That can be discouraging. I don’t have a “fail” bone. I say to myself, “I am going to ride this out as far as I can for as long as I can before it fails.” When I start something I don’t start believing its going to be successful, I start believing that I don’t want to fail. I always keep this little “fear of failure” thing in my pocket. I don’t worry about it succeeding, I just don’t want to fail. That can be a major driving motivator. Sometimes it’s not healthy. I’m more concerned about paying the rent.
What was your initial role? What is your current role in the company now?
We didn’t use the word “startup.” Starting a new business automatically made me a founder. As business develops and you add more products and there are more revenue and profits which increase the amount of problems like taxes, accountants, insurance and employees. The role shift goes from Founder to CEO, and that is a hard transition to make. Founders have fun: CEO’s not so much. Then it becomes a daily process and a monthly process of watching numbers. Before I sold my business I spent more time during the last half, 5-6 years, hitting refresh and checking revenue and planning marketing and sales, than I did in the first half.
What are the most successful marketing techniques? Guerilla marketing?
Everything I do is guerilla. Try to spend least possible on anything normal. In 11 years I spent approximately $100,000 in total marketing costs. We did a lot of one-on-one marketing to our distributors like CNET and other download sites. We would take those guys out to parties, which was cheaper than paying for advertizing. In return, they would give us way better advertising spots than we could ever afford by being cool with them. I’m a big fan of contests. I’ve given away Super Bowl tickets, a Rolex, a Mercedes: I’m really big on contests. Surprisingly, that is cheaper than having a marketing budget. We would raid conferences, like crashing a wedding. We wouldn’t even buy tickets. We didn’t even look like we should be there. We handed out our software up and down every isle. I’d rather have a developer than spend money on marketing. It did take a lot of tricks to walk through the back door to get to the front door.
What is the worst advice you have ever received and why?
Well, to be honest with you I didn’t really take peoples’ advice. Our culture was a little weird. We used to talk about being in a petri dish. You were either in the petri dish or your not in the petri dish. We didn’t let much in and we didn’t go out of it. We were really making our own rules. I didn’t take much advice.
The best advice I got was to make it shareware and actually sell it and timeout the software. I remember that. It was from one of the founders of download.com. Besides that, we weren’t taking much advice. To me all advice was bad. If we ever heard it, it usually didn’t match what we were doing because the company was very rouge.
You were trailblazing?
If you want to call it that. If our attempts didn’t work it was okay because it was the internet. You could delete it and it goes away and its not a big deal. If you released software and no one bought it you could delete it and move onto the next project. We didn’t invest too much time in any one specific piece f software. We were developing software in really short amounts of time, the epitome of agile development or rapid application development. We would say, “if we add this feature…wait, lets just make it its own piece of software.” Every 2-week and 4-week blocks we were delivering another piece of software.
Which part of your job is actual work opposed to passion?
You’re mostly driven by passion, not by what the outcome will be. If you love what you’re doing you are probably going to get a good result. That doesn’t always have to mean money. Even today, CoffeeCup is pretty well known. We were trying to help people change their lives by using our software so they don’t have to work for the man any more. That made us anti-establishment. That drove our passion. All the people who worked for us were that way.
We didn’t follow any process. The smaller the team, and closer we are together, the more money we can make, and the more we can do what we believe to be the right thing, which was to make software cheap for everyone, so they don’t have to work for the man. If that was the mission, it was passion driven. It means 24/7 hours, but passion doesn’t have to be about hard work if your having fun. If you are having fun, it shouldn’t be work. So, if you find yourself thinking you are working too much it probably means you are losing some of the passion you started with on your first day.
How is the economy effecting your business?
I think that is product driven. During my tenure at CoffeeCup we went through the Dot Com Bubble Burst, and 9/11, and another stock market crash. Those were actually opportunities. When the economy is down people lose their jobs, which means more people want to do their own thing. More entrepreneurs and startups are born when the economy is down. CoffeeCup was there through a lot of the bad, but we made out better because of it.
If everyone has tons of money they will buy the expensive software, regardless of whether it works well or not. We were there for beginners and intermediates. It was perfect in goods times and bad. In bad we did better. That is an awesome market to be in: a business that is recession proof. I would always be looking for that.
There is a big difference between needs and wants. For example we need a car, we want a Mercedes. You are better off selling products or services that people need. “Want businesses” are hurt the most, not the “need businesses.”
What is your advice to future entrepreneurs?
First, find the thing that people need, not what they want. Second, absolutely do the thing that you are passionate about, not the thing that you think is going to make money.
Those are two super super important things. Right when you find the striking balance between those, that is when you will find yourself successful: worrying less about failing but knowing that it is still there.
Don’t drive for success: drive not to fail.
Reprinted with permission from 3DStartupNYC
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
WP Engine co-founder Jason Cohen knew there was a market for what he wanted to build. Because it was exactly what he needed.
The founder of four companies and a dedicated blogger, Cohen often made the front page of Hacker News. And every time he did, his site went down. Having a sudden surge of popularity and traffic, he realized, doesn’t do you a lot of good if it causes your site to crash until the traffic goes away.
It was easy to assume that, with 15 percent of all websites and 22 percent of new websites in WordPress according to WP statistics, others were having the same issues. WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and one of the web’s most popular content management systems.
“I needed to know what are the root pain points?” Cohen said. “Volume is one. Speed is another. It can often take three or four seconds for a page to come up. What about security? What about support? What about testing? Everything is live right now. Testing is where I can work it out and see it.”
Cohen talked to 50 people before starting the business, asking them: “Would you pay for this? What would you pay for this?” Once 30 people committed to spending $50 a month, he started to build his hosting company for the middle market, people with a lot of traffic “who aren’t CNN.” WP Engine launched in July of 2010. Cohen founded the company with Aaron Brazell, who stepped down last October to do consulting work.
When Matt Halfhill heard about Cohen’s infant company that hosted high volume WordPress sites, he said what so many of WPEngine’s customers say: “That’s exactly what I need!”
“That was my biggest problem ever in business,” Halfhill said. “So few hosts understand the nuts and bolts of how WordPress works. (WPEngine) breaks it down to the point where there are next to no inefficiencies.”
At the time he joined WP Engine, in 2010, Halfhill’s company NiceKicks had more than a million visitors per month. The site, which previews and reviews sneakers, was paying Rackspace $6,000 to $7,000 a month for the bandwidth to handle all its traffic. With WPEngine, it pays closer to $1,000. And its monthly traffic has more than doubled.
Rackspace spokesman Rob La Gesse said “While many providers choose to compete on price, Rackspace differentiates itself on service, which we call Fanatical Support®. With that being said, WPEngine and Rackspace have significantly different business models, products and pricing structures.”
Cohen has always been something of a prodigy. He was fresh out of college with his computer science degree when he was discovered by Jim Woodhill, a famous psychologist and venture capitalist who was on an email list of “random smart people” with Cohen’s dad.
“He is the kind of guy who doesn’t care as much about the idea as the team. He decides ‘I just need to collect certain kinds of people and I want you,’” Cohen said. The company Cohen started, however, didn’t create products but performed services. And though he was bringing in $1 million a year, the venture capital firm lost interest. Soon afterward, he connected with Gerry Cullen, a serial entrepreneur.
“He was young,” Cullen says of Cohen. “You want to know how young he was? He was so young I had to rent cars for him.”
The two created Sheer Genius Software.
“He was the genius software guy and I was the CEO lead developer,” Cullen said. “I was the leg guy and he was the brains….Jason was very fast on his feet. People asked him questions he just answered them, kaboom. I’d lift the flagstone up and all the little snakes would run and we’d get them. It was great happy times.”
For one order, the $750,000 big order, Cullen said, they were brought to London to develop a program for a government office. Cohen wound up having to jerry-rig a modem using ‘doorbell’ wire running from the building’s bathroom. And, because the monitors were so small and the offices so bright it was difficult to see the screens, Cullen created a little hut of foam board to make it dark enough.
“It was like we were showing weird porn in the government offices and we didn’t want anybody to see.”
They got the order.
After Sheer Genius, they started IT WatchDogs, which manufactured climate monitoring devices for server facilities. During that time, Cohen said, Cullen taught him all about the business end of startups. He taught him, for example, about the Stanford Test, a test he made up.
The Stanford Test is this: If you make something, can you give it away for free? Will people want it? Because if they won’t, there’s not much point in charging for it.”
IT WatchDogs demonstrated the Stanford principal. The first climate control monitor plugged directly into the servers. Server companies were horrified.
“They’re like ‘You’re not sticking that thing in my server!’” Cohen recalls. It failed the Stanford Test. Then they created a model that only plugs into the wall outlet and never touches the server. That model people wanted. They’d even pay for it.
Cohen and Cullen wound up selling IT WatchDogs. But about the same time they had started it, Cohen had, almost inadvertently, started Smart Bear Inc. He created a site online whereby programmers could submit code they were working on for peer review. It was an idea he was tinkering with that took off. He ran it until 2009 when he got an offer to buy the company that would give him enough money he never had to work again. After checking with some of his advisors—17 to be exact—he took it.
He took a sabbatical to stay home with his new baby. He began blogging almost obsessively. And then the idea for WPEngine arose.
He and Josh Baer, founder of Capital Factory and a serial entrepreneur in Austin who runs Other Inbox, put in a little bit of seed money and within seven months, the company was profitable. They hired two people and six months later it was profitable again. But all these baby steps were time consuming. So Cohen sought funding and wound up with $1.2 million last November. Silverton Partners from Austin led the round, which included prominent angels investors like Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel, Rob Walling and others. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also participated with a strategic investment.
WP Engine now has an install base of more than 30,000 personal and professional WordPress blogs. It recently dropped its base hosting price from $50 a month to $29. And it has plenty of room to grow. More than 71 million WordPress sites exist worldwide and WordPress.com hosts about half of them.
WP Engine is always tweaking.
Halfhill said the company is super proactive. They’ll call him to say “You’re definitely sucking up a lot of resources, we might want to reconfigure. There are no charges for that. It just feels like they’re taking care of me as a customer. It’s just like breathing.”
Cohen, though, is a startup guy. He’s constantly percolating with other ideas. Lately he’s been really focused on the idea of honesty, how honesty should be the bedrock of businesses. He might do something with that at some point.
“People asked me, ‘When you had enough money to live off forever, why do a startup?’” Cohen said. “It’s just in you…some people have to do companies.”
Disclosure: Rackspace is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News
Who knew Microsoft made movies?
Microsoft will screen its new movie on entrepreneurship, Ctrl+Alt+Compete tonight at 6 p.m. at Geekdom, a collaborative workspace in downtown San Antonio.
“Ctrl+Alt+Compete is a new documentary that takes a revealing look at the startup and emerging business scene through the eyes of 5 founders and their teams and tells a story of the passion, fortitude and insanity that is bringing a startup to life,” according to Microsoft.
The first TechStars Cloud program kicked off in San Antonio on Jan. 19 with 11 companies that all moved to the city from outside the state. Jason Seats and Nicole Glaros, managing directors, run the TechStars Cloud program at Geekdom on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre. The three-month incubator and mentoring program ends with a demo day in April.
Microsoft has been at Geekdom all day teaching the TechStars Cloud entrepreneurs about Microsoft Azure, said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom.
Joshua Baer, founder of the OtherInbox and founder of a gazillion startups, has a new venture he’s heading up. He has joined with a handful of people in the Austin technology community to create WeAreAustinTech.
Each week the site will highlight an “icon” in the Austin technology community in a video interview posted to its site.
“The past two Saturdays I’ve been huddled under hot camera lighting with Toyin Akinmusuru, Ruben Cantu, Rene Lego, and Austen Trimble interviewing some of the top movers and shakers in the Austin tech community who also happen to be many of my idols,” Baer wrote in his weekly Startup Digest. “It’s been an incredible experience and we’ve captured unique and moving content. We will be unveiling the site soon, but for now you can follow us on Twitter @weareaustintech and Like us on Facebook.”
ChooseWhat guides entrepreneurs through the process of starting up a business.
And now the Austin Technology Incubator has announced a formal partnership with ChooseWhat.com.
The Austin-based company, founded in 2007 by Gaines Kilpatrick and Leo Welder, seeks to solve problems for small business owners such as how to get the best deal on a fax line or phone service provider or tax service. ChooseWhat.com has set up a special site tailored to the needs of ATI’s technology companies. My favorite piece of advice? How to choose a coffee maker.
The Austin Technology Incubator, a non-profit organization affiliated with the IC2 Institute of the University of Texas, will host a graduation ceremony tonight for 21 of its member companies.
The event also celebrates the 23 years ATI has helped incubate central Texas companies. Founded by Dr. George Kozmetsky and first directed by Laura Kilcrease, ATI has worked with more than 200 status companies and helped them raise more than $1 billion in capital, according to this news release. Silicon Hills News will be there tonight to cover the event. So stay tuned for more information.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
William "Whurley" Hurley, founder of Chaotic Moon
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.”
SceneTap wants you to know what’s going on at your favorite bar before you get there.
Today, the startup officially launches a network of cameras in 30 bars around Austin including Soho Lounge, Trophy Club, Haven, Ranch and Library that feed real-time information into its SceneTap mobile phone app and website. The network will expand to up to 50 bars with the next few months.
“It’s probably going to go beyond bars to other venues like coffee shops, retail outlets and restaurants,” said Cole Harper, co-founder and CEO of SceneTap. “It’s our goal to let people know what’s going on in their favorite place.”
With the SceneTap mobile phone application, which is available for free, people can survey the crowd and see how many men and women are at a particular bar. They can also find out what specials are being offered and what band or DJ is playing.
SceneTap gathers information from video cameras and collects statistics on the demographics of who’s there. It then compiles the stats into percentages and posts them to the site. Consumers can’t see the data associated with the stats to protect privacy, Harper said
The SceneTap app can tell you whether a bar is 85 percent full and the male to female ratio along with the average age of the patrons. The company uses facial detection software to compile these statistics.
“We’re not collecting any individual information,” Harper said. “There’s no information that’s collected or stored. People can’t see individual records.”
SceneTap aggregates its information every half hour and does not store any footage from the bars, Harper said
“It’s entirely automated. The video stream is being perpetually interpreted by the software, which creates rows of data,” Harper said. “The main purpose behind the data is to let you know where the best party is at.”
The data also lets the bars know whether they are spending their money wisely on entertainment to get customers in the door. If a bar spends $300 for a DJ and several hundred people show up then they’ll be able to track stats on the success of their promotions, Harper said.
The main way SceneTap makes money is through advertising. It has 45,000 users currently, which it hopes will rise to 50,000 tonight. It offers companies a very targeted market, Harper said.
The average bar last four years and night clubs last just two and a half years, Harper said. SceneTap can give the owners of these establishments real-time data on their bars and clubs that help them to manage them better, he said.
SceneTap launched in Chicago in December of 2010 and raised nearly $2 million in a seed fund from friends, family and angel investors. SceneTap is currently negotiating with investors to raise at least $3 million in a series A round, which it hopes to close in the next 60 to 90 days.
“We expect we’ll have some rapid growth in next six to twelve months” Harper said.
More than 50 venues in the Chicago area use SceneTap and plans for another 20 in coming months. The company moved to Austin late last year. Its headquarters are in house near Zilker Park where five of the guys live and work. SceneTap has 16 employees and another 30 sales consultants nationwide.
Within the next six months, SceneTap plans to expand into other markets including Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco.
Privacy is one issue that Scene Tap takes very seriously, Harper said.
“We go well out of our way to ensure consumer privacy,” he said. “Our technology, as scary as it may seem, is less intrusive than a lot of technologies that have been out there in the last 10 years.”
The advantage is that a tourist visiting Austin can either go to Yelp and find a review of a bar or check out SceneTap and find out what’s happening there right now, Haper said.
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.