Tag: technology (Page 5 of 25)

Lessons of a First Time CEO at SA New Tech

December 4, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Jay Miltor presents XYN Technologies, photo by Andrew Moore

Jay Miltor presents XYN Management, photo by Andrew Moore

At SA New Tech Tuesday, Pressable’s Founder Vid Luther shared tough lessons learned as a CEO.
Originally named ZippyKid, Pressable, a WordPress hosting startup, got a new name following an eight hour meeting, scheduled to last 30 minutes, in June with Rackspace Hosting founder Dirk Elmendorf and a few others. After much consideration, Luther decided that the “Kid” in ZippyKid targeted the wrong demographic and didn’t leave a professional and reliable impression.
Now named Pressable, the startup has changed its web layout and pricing to target a more professional demographic – namely other web developers. The rate is now $25 to manage up to five sites, instead of only one, so web developers can use Pressable on the backend for website stability, speed, and security on their client’s websites.
“Rather than us managing a client one by one, they manage clients and we make them look good,” Luther said.
Five days after the changes, Pressable began to see more customers sign up and has enjoyed a brisk signup rate ever since. To date, Pressable boasts more than $1 million in yearly revenue and has around 1,200 customers.
Luther also gave advice on what a CEO should, and should not, do to have a successful business.

Raise more money than you think you need.
Hire smart people and then get out of their way.
Have a mission, a vision, and a value proposition, and make sure your employees share them.
Learn to speak to investors, marketers, and non-technical employees in language that they will understand.
Be personable and smile! Your face is the face of the company.
Spend more money on things that generate revenue, like marketing.
Have confident body language.
How you think about your customers is how your employees will think about your customers.
Don’t make self deprecating jokes as a CEO, important listeners might not know you are joking.
Don’t use sarcastic humor as a CEO; new employees may take you seriously.
Don’t assume that you are 100 percent responsible for your employee’s livelihood; they should know what they are getting into with a startup.

In addition to Luther’s presentation, Michael Girdley touted his Codeup boot camp, XYN Management employee explained its statistics solution for hospitals organ transplants and a Southwest Research Institute engineer shared an open source robotics code.

Codeup

Codeup is a nine week in-person web development boot camp that guarantees to either get their graduates a job or refunds half of their tuition. The boot camp was created by Entrepreneur Michael Girdley because, well, he “got mad”.
“I’m mad that our educational system is so broken,” Gridley said. “I’m mad that people like Vid and all my friends who run companies can’t hire good people. And then I was mad that I had all these friends that wanted to be programmers but kept failing. I also like teaching.”
Teaching oneself to be a programmer is difficult, and Girdley found that most people either did not know where to start or were unsure what to teach them.
The boot camp, which begins on Feb. 3, costs $7,985 and will cover Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and JavaScript. The classes will be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Students will spend only 45 minutes to an hour in lecture each day and will devote the rest of the time to applying what they learned. Girdley has already received 50 applications and has accepted 17. His first class still has a few more spots left. To get more women involved in web development, Codeup is offering three half-off women’s scholarships.
There will be a Codeup info session at Geekdom on Thursday, Dec. 12.

XYN Management

Pronounced “Zen Management” and presented by COO Jay Miltor, XYN Management has created a cloud based application which helps hospital solid organ transplant programs keep up with their patient outcomes and predict what the outcome will be for future transplant procedures.
According to Miltor, all transplant centers in the United States get a report card twice a year which grades them on their transplant outcomes. This includes how many patients survived and how many kept a functional donated organ. If the hospital falls below standard, they must undergo a rigorous and expensive corrective action plan.
XYN Management has created a system that allows hospitals to keep up with their report cards in real time and predicts what future report cards will look like with statistical analysis. The system will also calculate the risk for a transplant based on a patient’s medical record.
The startup has been in business for a year and a half and has 15 current clients. Miltor says the company is profitable but is also looking for additional investments.
XYN Management is currently looking to hire a high level statistician (has a college degree in statistics) who can also code. Additionally, they need an interface designer, an Apex programmer, and a programmer.

Southwest Research Institute’s ROS industrial software

Southwest Research Institute Sr. Research Engineer Shaun Edwards presented the ROS industrial software – open source software for industrial robotics programming.
Edwards is working to create a community for the software and hopes someone will be able to create a breakthrough in the industrial robotics industry. A robotics programmer, Edwards is frustrated with the current state of industry technology which has been largely resistant to change and has been lagging behind other robotic applications with 10-year-old technology. Edwards hopes more users will build up the software base and ultimately be a resource for SWRI, opening the door for greater robotics possibilities in the industrial area.
“They build up the code base. People actually give software back to the ROS industrial program. Then we can leverage that,” Edwards said.
In a demonstration of the software, Edwards showed how it can identify visible objects such as a bag on the floor. He hopes that one day industrial robots will be able to look at and interact with objects intelligently.

Texas Intrepid Ventures’ David Spencer on Startup Grind San Antonio

December 1, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

David Spencer is an advocate for San Antonio’s technology community.
Spencer was a founding board member and co-chair of the now defunct San Antonio Technology Accelerator Initiative, known as SATAI. He also served a two year term as chairman of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, which invested in early stage technology companies in Texas. Aside from his public advocacy for the technology industry, Spencer is an entrepreneur. He founded OnBoard Software with a friend in 1996 when his employer, Kelly Air Force Base shut down. The software development company grew to $17 million in annual sales.
In 2005, Spencer sold OnBoard Software to MTC Technologies for $34 million. He has invested in a few startups since then and currently runs Texas Intrepid Ventures, which invests in commercializing military medicine.

Techstars Austin’s Jason Seats on Startup Grind San Antonio

November 29, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Jason Seats, managing director of Techstars Austin

Jason Seats loved playing with Lego blocks as a kid and even did college projects with Legos as a young adult.
His heroes were Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman growing up and the fictional Indiana Jones. At the age of eight, he thought he wanted to be an archaeologist.
But even as a little kid he dreamed of running his own business, which he would call Seats Enterprises.
He grew up in St. Louis. His older sister is a nurse and his younger brother is getting his Phd in physics at Stanford.
He graduated in 2001 from St. Louis University with two degrees.
In 2006, he co-founded Slicehost, an early cloud hosting company, with Matt Tanase, a college friend. Two years later, they sold it to Rackspace for millions.
Seats served as managing director of Techstars Cloud at Geekdom in San Antonio for two years. He moved to Austin earlier this year to head up the inaugural Techstars Austin class.

Startup Grind Features Graham Weston of Rackspace

November 27, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

Graham Weston, co-founder and chairman of Rackspace Hosting, grew up in the greater San Antonio area.
At his first job, he worked in his dad’s cookie plant balancing the books from delivery drivers and occasionally packaging cookies. His dad owned Grandma’s Cookies and later sold the company to Frito Lay.
Weston’s first venture into entrepreneurship in grade school involved selling organic pork from his family’s ranch through advertisements proclaiming “Go Hog Wild” in the local newspaper. He also ran a photography business in high school.
In college, he would drive back and forth from Texas A&M in his VW Diesel Rabbit listening to get rich quick tapes in his cassette player.
His junior year at Texas A&M, Weston launched a successful real estate venture while going through college. He successfully protested his family’s property tax appraisal and then figured that there might be a business doing that for others. He founded a company that protested commercial property taxes.
Because of his property tax business, Weston was well positioned to see opportunities in real estate during the financial crisis of the late 1980s.
After school, Weston ended up buying one of the tallest buildings in downtown San Antonio, later named the Weston Centre at the age of 27. The building had fallen into foreclosure and then bankruptcy during the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s. He wanted to buy the KCI Tower, but wasn’t able to do it. Later the former National Bank of Commerce building came open. It was way more than Weston wanted to spend. But he raised more money and then bid against real estate mogul Sam Zell and won.
The Weston Centre later contained one of the first data centers for Rackspace. It housed some of the first websites on the Internet for YouTube and HotorNot and other Internet pioneers.
Rackspace, now a multi-billion dollar company, had a humble beginning.
Weston and his partner, Morris Miller, met three college students who bid to wire the Weston Centre with high-speed Internet access. The students didn’t get the contract, but Weston and Miller liked them. They asked them what else they were working on. That’s when Pat Condon, Dirk Elmendorf and Richard Yoo told them about their hosting business, which would later come to be known as Rackspace.
Weston recounted how they invested $1 million and in less than a year another company wanted to buy the business for $20 million. That deal fell through. But they knew they had a solid business, which was making money every month. They grew Rackspace by adding more servers and data centers and in 2001 they planned to take the company public, but the dot com bust occurred. They went through a few tough years, but they were able to persevere and succeed where many failed largely through Rackspace’s focus on providing “fanatical” customer support.
In 2008, Rackspace went public at $12 a share. Its stock closed Wednesday at $37 a share. The company has a market capitalization of more than $5 billion.
Today, Rackspace has more than 5,000 employees worldwide and is San Antonio’s largest high-tech employer with close to 3,000 employees in Central Texas. Rackspace also has an Austin office.

New Rules, New Tools for Startups and Tech Companies

November 26, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Duane La Bom with the Open Cloud Academy

The demand for high tech workers outstrips the supply.
So Rackspace Hosting came up with an innovative solution. The San Antonio-based company launched the Open Cloud Academy last year to put people through a rigorous training program that equips them to do jobs as network systems administrators and other technical positions.
“I can get you job ready in a matter of two to three months,” said Duane La Bom, director of training at Rackspace and director at the Open Cloud Academy.
La Bom spoke on a panel at FreeFlow Research’s New Rules, New Tools San Antonio event Monday night at Geekdom. The panel focused on new training opportunities to match skilled workers with jobs. It also touched on new ways to raise money for startups through equity-based crowdfunding.

Peter French, founder of FreeFlow Research

Peter French, founder of FreeFlow Research, also announced his startup has merged with John Hill’s Technology Connexus Association, a nonprofit technology research organization. FreeFlow Research will continue to be based at Geekdom and will also sponsor more events in coming months, French said.
The other panelists included Andres Traslavina with MyEdu, an Austin-based startup, Luis Martinez with Trinity University, Joy Schoffler with Leverage PR and CF50 and Nathan Roach with Greenhouse.
Originally, Rackspace planned to hire about a third of the graduates from the Open Cloud Academy. But to date, it has hired 68 percent of the graduates, La Bom said. The other 30 percent have found jobs with other companies, he said.
The Open Cloud Academy also focuses on helping military veterans find jobs in the commercial world and it adds some diversity to the typical candidates Rackspace hires for IT jobs, La Bom said.
“We wanted to get more females and more minorities into IT. The Open Cloud Academy was a way to do that,” he said.
The Open Cloud Academy classes costs between $3,500 and $4,000 and lasts between eight to ten weeks. Typically, Rackspace paid $12,000 to $15,000 to a recruiter for each technical person it hired. Now it can avoid those costs by training its own IT workers, La Bom said.
Traslavina with MyEdu said the startup helps students plan their careers by using academic tools and simple apps to make their lives easier. MyEdu can also unveil their innate talent and help them visually set up a portfolio of their projects, work experiences and academic credentials, he said.
“We focus on helping recruiters hire potential and not focus on the traditional hiring credentials,” he said. .

New Rules, New Tools San Antonio panel

Trinity University’s focus is on undergraduate education and its strength is in equipping students with critical thinking skills, said Martinez with Trinity.
“We match students with opportunities for real world experience plus the community here in San Antonio,” Martinez said.
San Antonio’s entrepreneurial community is like Boston in the 1980s, Martinez said. Lots of entrepreneurial ventures and innovate growth is happening in San Antonio right now, he said.
Rackspace has also partnered with high school programs to recruit younger students to pursue careers in Information Technology jobs, La Bom said.
And the Open Cloud Academy does not yet have specific funding for veterans yet, but Project Quest and Workforce Solutions Alamo both provide scholarships to attend the programs.
Project Quest covers 50 percent of the tuition costs for students who qualify and also reimburses them up to two months rent and provides money for utilities and childcare costs too.
The Workforce Solutions Alamo provides funding through a Federal fund.
To date, 20 students have received a full scholarship to attend the Open Cloud Academy under that program and another 45 received funding through Project Quest, La Bom said.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Austin Startup ScanSee Creates an All-in-One City App

November 21, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Imagine that you needed to report a pothole to the city, pay your electricity bill, find a good sushi place nearby, and promote your business on mobile devices. What mobile app would you use? Well you would have to use several, because no one app does all that – at least not quite yet.
Austin startup ScanSee is creating that app, called HubCiti, which can link a city’s businesses, departments, services, and consumers together in one place. ScanSee is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur and CEO Roy Truitt — founder of 17 different companies including Truco Enterprises which manufactures the On the Border brand of chips and salsas. Truitt founded ScanSee along with fellow entrepreneur and friend Nathan Ungarean three years ago. The startup has an ambitious scope, but Truitt has been working on the app for three years and already has $4 million invested – most of which is personal money from past ventures.
“It’s not a minor undertaking,” Truitt said. “What we’ve done is really put all the commerce in the city together with one app. You can find all the city information, you can report a lost dog, you can two-way communicate with city employees.”
ScanSee, founded in Dallas in January of 2011, launched in Austin last March and moved its corporate headquarters to the city at that time.
When fully implemented with a client city, HubCiti will enable users to access government services, find and interact with nearby businesses, and market their own business directly to customers. A beta version of the business component, called myScanSee, has been out on the Apple App Store since the beginning of the summer. Fifty Austin companies participated in the free beta trial including service companies, restaurants, bakeries, bars, retailers, and specialty businesses.
According to ScanSee, about 70 percent of the beta companies have converted to the paid version, which offers each business a page on the app with full Website functionality. The service costs $50 a month and can be cancelled at any time.
“It is driving more phone traffic my direction,” Central Texas Gun Works owner Michael Cargill said. “Once we got it all set up, they showed me the different statistics of people going to the site.”
Cargill is already paying for the app and plans to keep it as long as it drives more traffic to his store. Michelle’s Patisserie owner Michelle Doyon also plans to pay for the app because it lets her business push out specials.
“I feel like it was another way to get us the everyday type of customers who are looking for a little deal here and there,” said Doyon. “We really don’t do any advertising to that market.”
ScanSee also offers a free version for businesses that includes a link to the business’s website as well as basic location and contact information.
The full version of ScanSee’s product, HubCiti, will generate revenue by charging each client city a negotiated yearly subscription. Local businesses utilizing the paid version of the app will pay $50 a month and local manufactures will have a similar functionality for $500 a year.
ScanSee has been seriously negotiating with several Texas cities for the last five months and has already closed their first deal in the last week. The startup has chosen not to release the city name, as they are waiting to do a joint press release event.
To implement its app, ScanSee works with each client city to create a database of all businesses by using city records, reaching out to local chambers of commerce, and buying additional city information from affiliate networks such as Impact Radius. It then approaches local businesses about using the apps paid features. To get residents to adopt the app, they will use traditional options like billboards and ads.
While ScanSee is for-profit, it was also founded with a philanthropic goal.
“What the company was created and founded to do was to provide funding for higher education in a self sustaining way versus asking for donations all the time,” Truitt said. “In order to do that, we generate funding and give half of it to higher education.”
ScanSee generates this funding in two ways. When local businesses and manufacturers sign up for the paid version of the city app’s business product, a percentage of that revenue is given back to the city to be used for a higher education fund. Additionally, ScanSee will give back half of the final profit it generates from each city towards the fund.
While ScanSee is the only company selling such an app to Texas cities, it is not without competitors for the consumer market. Yelp.com already has locations, reviews, and contact information for many restaurants and businesses and Google remains an effective tool for exploring a city as well.
ScanSee CMO Penny Merian says HubCiti will still have an edge because it provides a deeper level of information on businesses and also gives the consumer the ability to access deals and promotions a business might offer.
“Google does do a lot, but I couldn’t – as a retailer – know that you are three miles away from me and I’m running a happy hour so I’m going to push out a special to you to come in.” Merian said. “A big piece of these app sites is the marketing piece.”
According to Penny, HubCiti also aggregates reviews directly from businesses which should enable users to get reviews all in one place – which could give the app an edge over Yelp.com and other review sites.
ScanSee expects to hold the launch event with its first client city in the next 30 days.

Formula One Fuels Tech Connections Between Austin and the U.K.

November 18, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
There was something almost surreally Texan about the Best of Great Britain Showcase Friday night at the Moody Theater at ACL Live. At one point, a conclave of what appeared to be seven-foot men in 10-gallon hats created a kind of Texan Stonehenge, towering over the crowd near the photo booth where Rick Perry was getting his picture taken with British Consul General Andrew Millar.
Standing among them, hatless, was Formula Austin president Andy Fish. Fish has been following Formula One for 30 years. His father raced the #2 Shelby Mustang to a national championship in the late 1960s.
“When we wanted the Formula One race to be here in Austin my international friends asked ‘Why Austin?’” Fish said. So he asked them, when they went to races in other parts of the world, what did they do besides go to the race. The answer came back, not much, because there wasn’t much else to do.
“I said, ‘That’s why the race is in Austin. Because Austin is different from every other track in the world. We’ve got so much going on here, when the world comes, they love it!”
To prove it, the Formula Austin team helped create a number of events, like this one with iconic music like Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel, Robert Earl Keen, Carolyn Wonderland, Rick Trevino and Marcia Ball, all of whom performed for crowds of two-steppers and swing dancers.
Another connection to Austin is technology, Fish pointed out. Three years ago, he said, he was with the Williams team at the Silverstone track in Great Britain and got access behind the pit wall. There, he said, engineers had 1,500 sensors on each car, feeding information into 24 computer screens, and a bank of servers, all with the name Dell on them.
Dell, along with Intel’s, Technology helps the Caterham F1 Team perform at its peak capabilities.
“Huge supercomputers perform billions of calculations to see which of a hundred front wingplates will work best,” according to Dell. “Servers provide a mobile office for over 60 people, 20 times per year. Gigabytes of data travel through virtually bulletproof laptops before being beamed back to a team’s base, sometimes on the other side of the world.”
Danny Lopez, Head of UK Trade and Investment spoke briefly about the UK’s campaign to promote the greatness of Great Britain, building on the momentum they gained during the London Olympics and “showcasing stories of creativity, technology and innovation: That’s the story of formula One,” he said. The Britain is great campaign “reminds audiences around the world that Britain is a great nation in which to invest, do business, study and visit.”
But he also got the biggest laugh of the night in this Keep Austin Weird crowd, by citing a BBC report that showed people from the UK are moving to Texas in great numbers because Texans are friendly, the business world is thriving, and Texans are “normal.”
Among the places he visited during his time in Austin was Capital Factory.
Gov. Rick Perry also spoke, pointing out that, when Texas was a republic, Great Britain was one of the nation’s that recognized its statehood. He also noted “No one will ever forget that it was a Brit who won the first U.S. Grand Prix.”

SparkFun’s National Tour Teaches Kids the Basics of Programming

November 16, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

On Geekdom’s projector screen, a buffalo and crab were prepared to move around a purple race track. SparkFun’s Jeff Branson gave the students the final programming directions for moving their animated characters.
“We have to be able to rotate to drive the buffalo, or in your case the flying pancake or whatever you’ve created,” Branson said. “I have to use my slider to drive my buffalo.”
This wasn’t Branson’s first digital rodeo. The SparkFun National Tour has already visited 70 cities on the way to San Antonio while teaching kids about programming, soldering, and building circuits. The SparkFun tour is an educational outreach mission of the larger SparkFun Electronics Company — based in Boulder, Colo. — which makes components for a wide range of prototype electronic devices as well as components for students, teachers, and inventors.
The San Antonio stop, which taught programming, was organized and funded by San Antonio nonprofit SASTEMIC – an educational organization working to organize and grow the local Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, known as STEM, community. SASTEMIC signed up for the event a year ago when they contributed $1,500 to the SparkFun Kickstarter campaign. Geekdom hosted the event.
Thirty-five students, ages 8-14, attended the event. While using Scratch, a drag-and-drop programming software, the students learned to program if-then statements and manipulate variables so that their animated character, called a sprite, could maneuver around a race track while avoiding another sprite. By the end of the day the students would have a simple game, which even included programming sprite collisions and creating a scoring system.
“When the crab runs into the buffalo, what do we want to happen?,” SparkFun Curriculum Curator Derek Runberg asked. “How about we lose one coin? What do we do when we want to subtract coins?”
To control their game, the students used a PicoBoard– a SparkFun-created multifunctional circuit board that has buttons, sliders, and sensors and can be programmed to work with Scratch. The kids had to program their software to work with their hardware. In this case, they used the slider to steer their sprite and a button as an accelerator. Once their character moved, they collected coins around their racetrack.
While the kids might not have noticed, the exercise required substantial problem solving as well as some intermediate math.
“It’s a very concrete way of teaching variables to kids at this age. In their standard math class, they just see a variable as a letter. In this they get to see that value change over time depending on what they are doing on the board,” Runberg said. “It makes a really good mental connection between something abstract and reality.”
Programming a racing buffalo or pancake might be more fun than work, but it’s the first part of a much bigger picture for SparkFun. The ultimate goal, according to Education Outreach Coordinator Jeff Branson, is to speed up the educational process for the next generation of programming talent.
“We feel like it’s the key to the future of innovation in this country,” Branson said. “It takes about 15 years to produce a significantly advanced engineer or computer programmer who is able to work at the levels of technology that are common in our society. If we start kids really young in these drag-and drop programming environments, by the time they get to the [Coding] languages, the vocabulary and the techniques are something they’ve already got. So it makes it that much easier, they learn that much faster, and we can push them into advanced territory that much sooner. ”
Parents such as Jay Tkachuk agree. While Tkachuk is Vice President of Online Services for Security Service Federal Credit Union, he has never been code-savvy and wants his kids to have that ability.
“To put it mildly, people who know how to code have special powers. I want our kids to not only be savvy how to use technology but to understand it on a fundamental level,” Tkachuk said. “We are trying to move away from the paradigm of just being users. I want them to be able to create or, if necessary, fix things.”
Both of Tkachuk’s 8-year-old kids, Kai and Michael, participated in the event.
“We were doing Scratch the cat, and we were making racetracks so they could race each other and see who would win,” Kai said. “I put the cat on the buffalo and I drew a Mario horse.”
The SparkFun National Tour will continue on to Houston Sunday and then will end in Victoria on Monday.
SASTEMIC plans to continue creating STEM programs, starting with a high school outreach program in January led by STEM Director Mark Burnett. The nonprofit organization purchased Geekdom’s Geekbus last summer, and will begin a high school pilot program next year using the resources of the SA Maker Space.
SASTEMIC founder and Chairman Scott Gray, who is also the President of Elevate Systems, says the programs are important to the San Antonio economy.
“The goal is to get the K through 12 kids excited about all of the STEM pathways so that they can progress and go to college and get degrees so we can hire them here in San Antonio,” Gray said.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Diligent Consulting Lands $5.2 Million Contract with the Military

November 15, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

San Antonio-based Diligent Consulting announced on Friday that it has received a $5.2 million contract with the military.
The company got a contract for Cryptologic Mission System Software Services to support its Air Force Lifecycle Management Center Cryptologic and Cyber Systems Division in San Antonio.
The contract supports modernizing and integrating the cryptographic units in various United States Air Force applications.
“Diligent understands the criticality of ensuring these crypto systems function correctly, keeping information secure in support of multiple worldwide missions,” Rich Riney, the company’s Chief Operating Officer, said in a news statement.
Founded in 2001, Diligent a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business.