Under Armour announced Thursday it has acquired Austin-based MapMyFitness for $150 million.
The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.
The acquisition gives Under Armour, based in Baltimore, more digital products and solutions to help athletes train and perform.
MapMyFitness’ 100 employees will remain in Austin. The company has more than 20 million active users for its suite of websites and mobile applications under its flagship brands, MapMyRun and MapMyRide. The GPS technologies allow users to map, record and share their workouts.
“This partnership is about Under Armour enhancing our digital expertise to drive the future of performance innovation for the global athlete community,” Kevin Plank, Founder and CEO of Under Armour said in a news release. “We will build on the community of over 20 million registered users that MapMyFitness has cultivated in the connected fitness space, and together we will serve as a destination for the measurement and analytics needs of all athletes.”
“MapMyFitness has engaged and built a global community, making advanced training tools more accessible through our web and mobile platforms,” Robin Thurston, MapMyFitness Co-Founder and CEO said in a news release. “The combination of Under Armour’s powerful commitment to athletes and innovation and our connected fitness technology allows us to better serve the needs of athletes around the world.”
Tag: technology (Page 6 of 25)
IBM Wednesday unveiled its new product design studio in Austin, which will focus on designing software for a global audience.
The 50,000 square foot studio will serve as the center for IBM’s software efforts in Big Data, cloud, mobile, social software and cognitive solutions.
IBM designed the space to encourage collaboration and to bring together designers, developers and product managers involved in creating new software products.
“This studio is the embodiment of a new approach to software design. It is the home of IBM Design Thinking, a broad, ambitious new approach to re-imagining how we design our products and solutions,” Phil Gilbert, general manager, IBM Design, said in a news release. “Quite simply, our goal — on a scale unmatched in the industry — is to modernize enterprise software for today’s user who demands great design everywhere, at home and at work.”
IBM already hosts a one-week training camp at its studio called “Designcamp.” So far, it has held more than 60 camps.
IBM is also recruiting design experts from top design schools nationwide.
This week, IBM released its first commercial product, InfoSphere Data Explorer, using its IBM Design Thinking initiative.
In addition to the Austin Design Studio, IBM’s Austin campus also has research and development labs, SmartCloud Innovation Center, Watson Solutions, cloud and smarter infrastructure teams and IBM Security Systems.
Every year, tech startups look forward to the highly selective South by Southwest Accelerator competition at the Startup Village.
The 2014 SXSW Accelerator marks the sixth year for the competition.
The organizers are expecting more than 500 startups to apply for the 48 slots available. The deadline to apply is Friday, Nov. 8th.
“This event provides an outlet for companies to present their new technology of Entertainment and Content products, Social, Enterprise and Big Data Technologies, Innovative World, Wearable, Music, or Health technology to a panel of industry experts, early adopters, and representatives from the Angel/VC community,” said Chris Valentine, its organizer.
Past judges have included Tim Draper of DFJ, Paul Graham of Y Combinator, Craig Newmark of Craiglist, Bob Metcalfe of University of Texas, Guy Kawasaki of Alltop, Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, and Tom Conrad of Pandora.
The competition takes place March 9th and 9th.
AngelHack takes place next weekend at Capital Factory starting at 9 a.m. on Saturday.
This is the second time AngelHack has held a hackathon in Austin. The first one took place last June at Mass Relevance’s headquarters.
This hackathon is focused on mobile apps. AppHack takes place in 30 cities worldwide and focuses on building mobile apps and teaching developers Android and iOS development.
The event also features workshops. Jeff Linwood is teaching an Android development workshop, Ryan Pitylak is teaching mobile customer acquisition and there’s also a cloud app platform workshop.
Steve Guengerich, co-founder with Appconomy, Josh Kerr, co-founder and CEO of Written.io and Pitylak, CEO of Unique Influence, are the judges and mentors.
Moo.com, Lob, PayPal Develop, 99Designs and Capital Factory sponsor AngelHack.
Joshua Baer and Nicholle Jaramillo with Capital Factory are organizing the event.
The winner of the competition gets a chance to go to Angelhack’s HACKccelerator program and a trip to San Francisco.
Use the promo code, “SiliconH100” to get FREE tickets to AngelHack Austin.
Full disclosure: Silicon Hills News is a media sponsor of AngelHack.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Alan Knitowski calls it like he sees it, letting fly his controversial perspectives that: Austinites bootstrap too much, entrepreneurs interested in work/life balance need to “grow up” and he would happily rail on the entire group of investors at Austin Ventures to their faces.
The investor, serial entrepreneur and CEO and co-founder of Phunware spoke at Startup Grind Austin Monday night, giving his audience of about 30 people a fast lesson in how to reach entrepreneurial success, Knitowski-style.
When he founded Phunware in 2008, he said, he knew that peoples’ mobile devices were going to be their main screens and that the perfect convergence for future endeavors was SaaS, the Cloud and mobile. So he created a company that’s Mobile as a Service.
He wanted to help companies with apps accomplish:
• universal login and data capture
• advertising content management
• media and hosting alerts and notifications
• high margin loyalty and rewards
• location tools
• analytics and business intelligence
“Nobody wants 12 partners for procurement with 12 sets of hardware and 12 people pointing fingers when nothing works,” Knitowski said. He wants Phunware to do it all.
Knitowski grew up in Arizona to economically disadvantaged parents. Until he was 19, he said, he was 5’2 and weighed 110 pounds. So he got tired of being told what he couldn’t do because of his circumstances or his size. He admonished the budding entrepreneurs in the room “If you don’t live life as a victim and you get off your ass and work, anybody can do anything.”
He got his bachelor’s in industrial engineering from the University of Miami on an ROTC scholarship and his master’s from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He served as a ranger with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and spent part of that inspecting nuclear facilities in Korea before getting his MBA at University of California at Berkley. That launched his years in Silicon Valley.
His first business model, he said, was annihilating Nortel because the company tried to pull funding from his MBA.
“Hell hath no fury like a serial entrepreneur with a crap load of capital,” he said.
Austin entrepreneurs, he said, think in terms of building a customer base in Austin, then Central Texas, then Texas, then the world. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, on the other hand, think in terms of taking on the world with a revolutionary idea. Austin entrepreneurs love stealth mode; Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and Knitowski himself, readily share their ideas, he said, because they know that just because someone knows your business model doesn’t mean he can execute it. And Austin entrepreneurs are so wedded to bootstrapping that they miss the opportunities that well-funded companies get from influxes of cash. Gowalla, he said, not Foursquare, should have dominated that market, but they were too dedicated to bootstrapping their business and Foursquare won.
Knitowski had a whole series of points for the entrepreneurs present:
• Always be honest and always be transparent. We send reports to investors every month. Too many people never talk to their investors until they want money again. Your investors will fight to the death with you if they trust you.
• Cash flow is the only thing that matters. Make sure you know, every day, how much you have coming in and how much you have going out. What’s your burn rate? We have a current asset report every week.
• Use reputable lawyers, auditors and other professionals. If an investor asks who your auditor was and you mention a low budget firm, they’ll have to do the numbers all over again. If you say Price Waterhouse Coopers, that’s a question answered. He gave a list of recommended firms.
• Raise money before you need it.
• If you want a lifestyle business, that’s fine. But if you take a dollar from anyone, you have to let go of the idea of work/life balance or leaving every day at five to attend a kid’s sporting event. “Stop fooling yourself. Being an entrepreneur is an immense sacrifice and I can only do it because I have an amazing wife. She shoulders crazy burdens with our four kids.”
Phunware is slated to have $23 million in revenues this year and aiming for more than $100 million by 2015. It has received $20 million in several rounds of funding and is planning to take its first institutional investment soon to expand the company globally.
There will be no Startup Grind Austin event in November. The next event is Monday, Dec. 2 and features Robin Thurston, co-founder and CEO of MapMyFitness.
Simon Galpin, the director general of investment promotion at Invest Hong Kong, also known as InvestHK
But now the exotic Asian island wants to reinvent itself into a startup hub with the Startmeup.HK initiative.
And it seems to be working.
During Austin Startup Week, a lot of the focus spotlighted the local bustling startup culture.
But one international visitor managed to host a lunch at Capital Factory and attract quite a crowd.
Simon Galpin, the director general of investment promotion at Invest Hong Kong, also known as InvestHK, gave an overview of all the startup activity happening in Hong Kong. InvestHK is the government’s effort to attract foreign investment into Hong Kong.
“In the last two or three years, we’ve noticed the whole startup ecosystem has started to develop rapidly,” Galpin said.
Hong Kong now has 14 co-working sites focused on a variety of different industries, he said. The startup crowd likes to be in the center of the action and not in a high-rise building on the hillside, he said. Hong Kong also has some government run tech incubators and about 14 privately run incubators, Galpin said.
Hong Kong also has an active angel investment community, Galpin said. Some Hong Kong investors have also shifted investment from real estate into technology and startup businesses, he said. And Hong Kong officials are working on attracting more venture capital firms to the region, he said.
“Hong Kong is a springboard for companies to go global,” Galpin said.
The Austin visit was part of Galpin’s U.S. tour, which also included visits to New York City and Philadelphia, to promote the new “Startmeup.HK” initiative.
InvestHK launched “Startmeup.HK” to support startups globally to provide them with access to money as well as intellectual and social connections. The goal is also to develop Hong Kong as an entrepreneurship and innovation hub, Galpin said.
His visit to Austin is hopefully the first of many, Galpin said. He plans to come back and bring entrepreneurs with him, he said. And he would like to see some startups from Austin visit Hong Kong.
By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
“Learn to Program. Get a Job Offer. Guaranteed.”
This is the not-so-humble sales pitch of Codeup – a for-profit code education startup founded by San Antonio entrepreneur and angel investor Michael Girdley. The startup offers a nine week programming boot camp located at Geekdom of San Antonio which will teach the programming skills currently sought for in the workforce. The startup’s first boot camp, starting Feb. 3, will focus on web development and will cover Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and JavaScript. The camp price tag is $7,430, and if the student does not receive a job offer within six months of completing the course they get half their tuition back. Enrollment has already begun.
Girdley justifies his guarantee with his business approach. Before launch, he collaborated with both small startups and larger companies in need of developers to find out exactly what skill-set they want to hire.
“We went and talked to them and got feedback on what they are looking for. We added a whole set of methodologies in terms of how to work as a team of programmers to the course after meeting with certain employers,” Girdley said. “Ultimately we have two customers. One is the student and the other is the employers. We have really worked hard to have them meet in the middle for everyone to be happy.”
Codeup’s classroom experience is designed to be as intensive and hands-on as possible. Students will learn concepts quickly in 15 minute intervals and then immediately implement them with exercises lasting 20 minutes. Each class will hold 20 students. Girdley will be teaching the classes along with Jason Straughn, Samantha Atkins, and Chris Turner. During exercises, all four instructors will be present to answer any questions. Classes will be eight hours a day and five days week.
To ensure that graduating students get hired, Codeup has formed agreements with 18 startups and recruiting companies who have agreed to consider hiring the graduates upon completion of the course. A few of the employers Girdley has talked to – whom he can’t name at this time – have such difficulty finding developers that they are willing to hire immediately after graduation.
Despite its growing tech talent, finding full time developers in San Antonio is a difficult task — both for large companies like Labatt Food Service and smaller startups such as Geekdom’s TrueAbility. Founder and COO Frederick “Suizo” Mendler welcomes an easier way to find developer talent.
“For us, it is a constant challenge to find folks that can operate at a fairly high level when it comes to the dev stuff. If they produce a good candidate then, yea, we’ll take a look at them,” Mendler said. “All the other developers we hire, we have to go out and hunt them down, go find them in weird places.”
Codeup will start out with only one class of 20, and that class is already starting to fill up. Codeup has received seven applicants since they went public a week ago and have already confirmed two spots. Texas State University Communications Graduate Leslie Tolbert was the first to sign up. She developed a love of programming in her last semester of college but was having trouble learning it all on her own.
“I really feel it’s an investment to myself to make this bigger commitment. It’s really hard to teach yourself how to program through all the other resources out there,” Tolbert said. “It was really appealing to me to have the option that Codeup presents to work with a team of peers…in a collaborative space with expert instructors available to answer questions.”
Tolbert was also able to take advantage of one of the three women’s scholarships Codeup offers, which will pay for half of the tuition. Two are still available.
As a for-profit company, Codeup will raise revenue by charging tuition and by charging a placement fee to the employer when they hire a graduate. The employer’s fee will be equal to 10 percent of the graduates annual salary. Codeup currently has no competitors in San Antonio, but would be competing with MakerSquare in Austin. While the model is similar to Rackspace Hosting’s Open Cloud Academy, the two will not directly compete because they are teaching different skills. In another similarity to the Open Cloud Academy, Girdley says applicants do not need any prior coding experience to be admitted.
“If you are a smart person and you are willing to work hard, you don’t need to know anything. Show up, we will take care of you.” Girdley said.
Geekdom was a sponsor of Silicon Hills News. TrueAbility is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News.
Boxer, an inbox management app, has landed $3 million seed stage funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures.
Boxer, formerly known as TaskBox, has integrated its platform with Box, Dropbox, LinkedIn and Facebook.
It expects to announce more strategic partnerships later on this year.
“As mobile devices have become our primary means of receiving and reading email, users have become increasingly frustrated with the primitive experiences provided by stock email apps,” Andrew Eye, CEO and Co-Founder of Boxer, said in a news statement. “Now, with the backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, Boxer can continue to execute on our strategy of extending the mobile mail experience with relevant third party information and interactions.”
Boxer is available for free from the Apple iTunes App store.
Taskbox, founded in 2012, raised $600,000 in seed stage funding from angel investors with the Central Texas Angel Network previously. The company merged with Boxer last May and has rebranded itself Boxer.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Three Day Startup began in 2008 as a project of some University of Texas graduate students who thought entrepreneurship, like many other areas of study, really ought to have a lab where students could make experiments and—if necessary—blow things up as part of the learning process.
Since then it has evolved to 73 programs at 30 universities in the U.S., Israel, Chile, Thailand, Spain, the Netherlands, Columbia and more.
Seven teams, plus one dummy team, presented Sunday night at the Austin Technology Incubator after working on their projects since Friday night, often staying up until 4 a.m. and being sent out to get at least six hours of market validation. They presented before an audience and a panel comprised of Jason Seats of Techstars, Josh Kerr of Written, Jeff McMahon of Open Labs and Fred Schmidt of Capital Factory and Portalarium.
Biquity
Biquity is investment banking using bitcoin, an unregulated online currency. The practice is illegal in the U.S., but is being used in several Latin American companies where there’s restricted access to equity financing. Biquity would work as a kind of transaction validation escrow service between a company auctioning shares and a company or individual buying shares. Because there are no foreign capital controls on bitcoin, the transaction would not be subject to limits or federal or bank-driven fees
The problem, as Seats pointed out, is that while the lack of oversight means lower transaction costs it also means there’s no oversight to protect parties. The remedy for that is that bitcoin now has futures contracts connected to local currency to ensure that the price agreed upon stays consistent relative to other types of currency. Once the transaction is made it may be easy to convert the bitcoin into local currency that is protected.
Snip Book
Snip Book is an app for hair stylists to capture information about their customers, cataloguing images of haircuts or dye jobs they’ve given, with the specific angle of the cut or the color of dye so that if customers come back asking for the same cut or color they had before, the stylist can easily call up the information. The team’s presenter said 90 percent of the 1.6 million stylists in the U.S. rely on repeat customers for their business’s survival, so being able to recall a cut one gave a client several months ago is important. The original model would be subscription based for about $20 a month with add-on services such as client scheduling. The app could be scaled horizontally to be used at nail salons, tattoo parlors, etc.
The problem, the panel pointed out, was that a lot of this could be done on Evernote. But, Snip Book would also push the hairstyles to social media, such as Facebook, and enhance marketing.
Alza
Alza is an app designed to help users avoid losing time in distractions like getting lost for hours on Facebook or oversleeping. Alza collects data from users’ calendars, social media, and other apps, and sends you notification if it sees users playing candy crush instead of studying for the test or presentation they have to give tomorrow.
With other apps and computer tools, people have to manually track their time, pressing a start and stop button. But with Alza, it’s all done automatically. The team planned to do a monthly subscription and also work with organizations like Groupon. If someone has a productive week, they get extra discounts on restaurants and entertainment.
Fred Schmidt asked if this would help him if he was wasting time at the golf course and one team member said it would use his phone’s GPS system to see whether he was where he should be during that time.
Another problem was that iOS sandboxes apps, preventing the app from seeing whether or not a customer is wasting time on another app. But the worst liability was that audience members said they would turn the app off after one session of nagging. A lot of people don’t want to waste time but they don’t want their phones telling them what to do, either.
Parents might buy it though.
EventApps.com
EventApps.com is an app for small to medium sized conference and event planners. The simple, module-based app lets users plan and promote events without investing a lot of time in creating a short-lived app or a lot of money—though the price point was $100 for an event with fewer than 200 attendees and $1,000 for events with more than 200.
Sally Stone pitching Match Setter
The panelists also questioned the jump from $100 to $1,000.
Match Setter
Match Setter is an app for tennis players to find pickup games in their geographic area with other players who have roughly the same skill level. Presenter Sally Stone said many players can’t find games when they have the time to play them or if they do their opponents aren’t as good a player as they claim. Match Setter not only lets people rate their own playing but allows others who have played them to rate them as well. It creates a community of tennis players and also allows players to plan games around what skill sets they want to improve on.
The team planned to monetize Match Setter with a subscription, but the panel recommended having sponsors, such as tennis ball manufacturers, instead. Having the app free to users would create critical mass necessary to find other funding models.
Looksy TV
Looksy TV uses small cameras to collect analytics on crowds in restaurants, bars and other establishments that enable venues to gather useful data on their traffic and also let prospective users check in on whether a particular restaurant is too crowded, empty or otherwise lacking ambiance the customer is looking for.
Similar to Scene Tap in its function, the application differs in that, instead of identifying approximate ages and genders of patrons it uses a cartoon filter to obscure the faces and identities. It only allows a user to see a 30-second window into a particular establishment, locking the person out for 15-20 minutes after that glimpse to prevent stalking.
Chiron Health
Andrew O’Hara with Chiron Health
The company would charge a fee for the service, taking its cut after the doctor gets paid. More than 20 states require insurance to pay for medical telechats the same way they would pay for in-person visits, O’Hara said, and more states are coming on board.
The panel asked whether the platform was defensible when huge medical conglomerates could take over the market at a moment’s notice. O’Hara said Chiron sees the opportunity to partner with other healthcare technology companies in the next several years to help launch the product.
The final presentation brought three men to the stage…one a typically scruffy startup guy and the other two ridiculously pretty, ripped men in recently ironed clothing proposing a Craigslist-style site for musicians to purchase supplies. Music Matrix was a piece of Moth to Flame Productions’ movie about the startup world Funemployment.
Revionics, which sells retail software as a service, known as SaaS, online, plans to move its headquarters to Austin.
The company, which is relocating from Roseville, Calif., plans to expand its marketing, sales and training operations and plans to hire hundreds of new employees. It reports plans to quadruple in size.
Revionics currently has less than 200 employees, according to its LinkedIn.com profile. Its new office will be at 5000 Plaza on the Lake.
Revionics also has offices in Scottsdale, Arizona and London and will keep an office in Roseville.
“As we enter into our second decade of strong growth, relocating to Austin helps position us for more rapid expansion in the retail technology industry and offers our employees the benefits of a culturally rich city with a relatively low cost of living,” Marc Hafner, its president and CEO said in a news release.
“We are excited to become part of the ‘Silicon Hills’ community, which currently includes leading technology innovators such as IBM, Dell, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Facebook, Oracle Corporation and more. With our global expansion, we also envision establishing offices in other regions of the world as our tremendous growth continues,” Hafner said.
The company, founded in 2002, has raised $18 million to date, according to its CrunchBase profile.
