Tag: technology (Page 8 of 25)

The Collaborative Economy Can Help Save the Planet

October 7, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

The world is getting hotter.
In fact, it’s supposed to rise 11 degrees fahrenheit over land by the 2060s if we don’t meet our goals to reduce carbon impact, said Robin Chase, founder of Buzzcar, a peer-to-peer car sharing service and co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, a car sharing service.
That means we must act now to institute drastic change to save our planet, Chase said during the afternoon keynote at South by Southwest Eco in Austin.
“I’m really, really focused on getting these jobs done,” she said.
Global warming is caused by Carbon Dioxide and air pollution trapped in the atmosphere, which acts like a blanket warming the earth when the sun heats it up. The biggest contributor to global warming is the burning of fossil fuels.
To solve the problem, Chase proposes Peers Incorporated, a partnership to drive the collaborative and shareable global economy.
“It’s a partnership between autonomous individuals and bigger institutions,” she said.
In 2000, when Chase launched Zipcar she saw an unfilled need and excess capacity in the marketplace.
On average, it costs $8,000 annually to own a car, but owners only drive them five percent of the time, Chase said.
The problem was people could only rent cars in 24 hour bundles.
“You couldn’t buy it in the way you actually consume it,” Chase said. “There was a real economic opportunity here.”
To address the problem, Chase created a platform for participation and treated Zipcar’s customers as its peer collaborators. They were not consumers, but co-creators.
“You wouldn’t rent a car for an hour if it was going to take you 20 minutes to get one,” Chase said. “Thanks to the Internet we could make that transaction cost really simple. We built this platform that allowed you to rent a car in 60 seconds.”
To create Zipcar, they would ask people for help all the time.
“We talked to them intimately about our desire to build a great company,” Chase said.
The big shift in the Peers Incorporated method is to look at customers as collaborators and producers. Some of today’s most successful tech companies relied on this method to scale their platforms including Skype, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, eBay and Flickr.
Chase discussed the power of the shareable economy to scale quickly.
For example, she said it took the largest global hotel company, InterContinental Hotel Group, 60 years to amass 645,000 hotel rooms in 4,400 hotels in 100 countries. And Hilton, the second largest, took 93 years to build 3,800 hotels with 610,000 rooms in 88 countries.
But it only took four years, for Airbnb, a peer-to-peer room rental service, to amass 650,000 rooms in 192 countries.
And Couchsurfing, which is nine years old, has 2.5 million rooms in 207 countries.
“It is the incredible pace of growth that is possible,” Chase said. “This new way of doing business is incredibly disruptive. And it provides some good opportunities for us.”
The old industrialization model required companies to build a business as big as possible. It involved industrial strength, large investments, multi-year efforts, integration and aggregation of many parts, deep sector knowledge, diverse technical expertise, standard contracts and standardization, consistency, brand promise and globalization.
The new model relies on individual strength focusing on people, small non-government organizations and companies, small investments, short term sporadic efforts, delivery of small services, local knowledge, specific unique expertise offering customization, specialization, creativity, and personal social networks (trusted individuals.)
“With this model, we can capitalize on what individuals do best,” Chase said. “It’s this collaboration that I’m calling Peers Incorporated.”
It’s a platform for participation, she said.
“The individuals bring this incredible creativity,” Chase said. “Each side has to give a little that makes it interesting for the other side to play. Excess capacity is just permeating the whole thing. Platforms deliver economies that scale and high growth – that is what a platform is made to do.”
In addition to Airbnb, other examples include Etsy, a marketplace for selling things made by individuals, Fiverr, which has grown from 2010 to 2013 to offer 2.5 million gigs, or things people will do for $5. And even though the smartphone is only five years old, people have created more than 1.5 billion apps for Apple devices and Android devices.
The Peers Incorporated model lets people tap into “those tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people outside of the room,” Chase said.
The Peers Incorporated model brings diversity, innovation, resilience and redundancy, Chase said.
Under that model, the economics of things completely change, she said.
Her latest venture is Buzzcar, a peer-to-peer car sharing company in France that leverages the excess capacity of vehicle owners to rent out their cars to others. Buzzcar has a network of 7,000 cars across France, Chase said.
“I think of this excess capacity as a path toward abundance,” she said.
PeersIncorporated.com just launched based on case studies but this kind of disruption is happening in every single sector of the economy, Chase said.
For example, Global Forest Watch provides satellite images to let people find out what is happening in forests right now and shows deforestation happening in real time.
“It’s giving the power of the corporation to individuals,” Chase said.
Massive satellites and photographic evidence given to the tribe leader of a region in the Amazon in Brazil enables him to fight corporations to take back his land, Chase said.
“For me this is an example of a powerful platform for participation,” she said.
To end, she quoted Tim DeChristopher, a climate activist: “We are on track for such rapid and intense change, we might as well steer toward the world we want to see.”
Chase said there’s three things to do every day to build a sustainable world we want to live in:

Exploit excess capacity
Build Community Muscle – the future ahead is so hard – this is something we really have to do.
Focus on Platforms for Participation – scale and grow as fast as possible.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report says that the world will use up its carbon budget in 30 years, Chase said.
“We should feel this incredible urgency,” she said.

For more on Robin Chase’s ideas, watch her Ted Talk from last year.

UTSA Holds Biannual Entrepreneur Boot Camp

October 6, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Dirk Elmendorf and Pat Condon, co-founders of Rackspace, speaking at an Entrepreneurial Bootcamp at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

To launch a business in college, students must master all kinds of skills.
They might have to make a business plan, find funding, do market research, sell products or services, stay on top of legal issues and intellectual property rights and sometimes figure out manufacturing.
This weekend, 150 University of Texas at San Antonio students got an edge on their competition. They covered these topics in less than eight hours in UTSA’s CITE Technology Entrepreneur Boot Camp. The camp featured ten speakers, including Rackspace Hosting co-founders Pat Condon and Dirk Elmendorf.
“Follow your own path. Don’t follow conventional wisdom necessarily,” Condon said. “Some of the conventional wisdom that we did follow that we shouldn’t of was: don’t serve your customers because you can’t make money doing it. Our history is littered with doing things because a lot of other people were doing it. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should be doing it that way too.”
Condon and Elmendorf discussed the triumphs and pitfalls of their experiences, speaking at length about a time when Rackspace’s customer support was more abysmal than fanatical. They encouraged the students to push forward with their ideas even if they didn’t feel qualified or smart enough to see them through.
“When you read hacker news, Techcrunch, all that stuff — it always feels like the founders are these anointed geniuses that are passed down from – well, there is founder worship,” Elmendorf said. “Because we give this presentation inside Rackspace, I never want someone who is joining to think it was founded by geniuses and they couldn’t contribute. We were idiots! We got lucky and we worked hard. If you can stick it out and do all those things you can make it.”
Other presenters included YUMIX founder Alex Garner, Jackson Walker Attorney William R. Borchers, and It’s 2Cool Ltd. CEO Deb Prost.
“I hope that I can inspire some of these folks to really take that nugget of an idea that they have and do all the blood, sweat, and tears that you have to do to get to where you really can market a product,” Prost said.
Held biannually, the CITE boot camp is open to students and faculty members and is designed to both inform and encourage students towards a life of entrepreneurship. The students came from a wide variety of situations. Some were getting ready to enter the $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition with a team and a product. Others were part of the student CEO organization, part of the Certificate of Technology Entrepreneurial Management program, or simply entrepreneurship-minded students hoping to develop their skills.
“We’re taught in our program that whenever you have the opportunity to sit down and talk to people in the tech space that are from a different perspective, it’s always a good idea,” Business Senior Somer Baburek said.
Baburek is currently in the Business College’s entrepreneurship program and is preparing to enter the $100,000 competition with a medical device that wirelessly monitors fetal heart rates in labor and delivery. She attended the event to gain business knowledge and look for additional engineers for her team.
Engineering Senior Davis Richardson is also preparing for the competition, and attended to get better acquainted with the business side of startups. Richardson will be entering the competition with a device that trains students to design hydraulic systems.
“This is a really interesting opportunity because in the engineering college we spend all of our time looking at how to develop products internally,” Richardson said. “It’s not until here, or in electives, that we really get much insight into how this works outside the design process.”

Ramon Coronado and Tony Yuan at the UTSA Entrepreneurial Bootcamp

Ph.D. Biomedical engineering students Ramon Coronado and Tony Yuan also attended the boot camp to buff their business skills. The two students are in UTSA’s Certificate of Technology Entrepreneurial Management program – an optional track designed to give Ph.D. students extra entrepreneurial training so they can launch their own businesses. Coronado and Yuan are currently preparing to launch Mobile Stem Care – which will help veterinarians take advantage of stem cell advancements.
“We have a lot of science in academia but no one around the department can teach us about business,” Coronado said. “Before this course we didn’t have the chance to see how to translate the technology [to market].”
The event also attracted younger students as well. Sophomore David Barrick is not involved in a competition or an entrepreneurship class, but he does have a few ideas for a tech company and attended to learn more about obtaining patents and talking to investors for seed funding.
“I saw this conference on a Tweet in Twitter for UTSA. I have been thinking of starting a tech company, so I saw this and said, ‘yea, this is for me’” said Barrick.
As of this weekend, 1,300 students have now gone through the CITE Technology Entrepreneurship Boot Camp at UTSA. CITE, short for Center of Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship, is an interdisciplinary center for the colleges of engineering and business directed by Cory Hallam and Anita Leffel. While the boot camp is an achievement for the university, Hallam also sees the event as an essential part of an effort to grow the startup community, and the local economy, of San Antonio.
“We have to feed the pipeline of entrepreneurship in San Antonio, and these are students who will found companies now, found companies later, participate in three day startups, go be part of Geekdom,” Hallam said. “It’s great to be a contributor for San Antonio in that pipeline.”

FBI Busts $1.2 Billion Silk Road Illegal Online Marketplace with Ties to Austin

October 4, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Ross William Ulbricht, alleged mastermind behind Silk Road, an illegal online marketplace for drugs, hacking software, forgeries and hit men. Photo from Ulbricht’s LinkedIn Profile.

The crazy tale of Ross William Ulbricht, also known as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” after a masked fictional character in the movie “The Princess Bride,” sounds like a HBO series on a renegade Internet entrepreneur gone wrong.
Ulbricht, 29, allegedly operated the Silk Road, a sprawling $1.2 billion black-market bazaar for drugs, computer hacking software, forgeries and hit man services. He founded the site, programmed its features and oversaw its operations on a daily basis, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
The FBI arrested Ulbricht earlier this week on charges of narcotics trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering, according to a sealed criminal complaint by Christopher Tarbell, FBI special agent.

A Native of Austin

Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin and graduated from Westlake High School in 2002, is now in jail in San Francisco facing charges that carry several hundred years of jail time.
The FBI arrested Ulbricht for owning and operating the underground website known as “Silk Road,” which provided a platform to sell heroin, cocaine, LSD and Methamphetamines. Ulbricht, under an alias “altoid” allegedly called the site “an anonymous Amazon.com.”
The complaint also alleges that the Silk Road provided a platform to trade “malicious software designed for computer hacking, such as password stealers, keyloggers, and remote access tools.” It also traded in other illicit goods and services through a payment system based on Bitcoins, an unregulated digital currency.
The FBI alleges that Ulbricht added a Bitcoin “tumbler” to the Silk Road payment system to “ensure that illegal transactions conducted on the site could not be traced to individual users.”
The two-year investigation of Silk Road, headed up by FBI Special Agent Tarbell, also involved agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and Homeland Security Investigations.

So who is Ulbricht?

Ulbricht’s Facebook page reveals that he liked beer pong and crazy hat parties. He enjoyed movies like The Matrix, Office Space, Time Bandits and Lord of the Rings. His favorite books included Be Here Now, Hyperion, The Power of Now and Shogun.
His interests spanned money, partying, yoga, dancing, drumming and strength training.
He also focused on entrepreneurship and participated in a 3 Day Startup program in 2010. His LinkedIn profile listed his occupation as an “investment adviser and entrepreneur” based in Austin.
But the FBI alleges that starting in January of 2011 through September of this year, Ulbricht ran a global platform for drug dealers to sell controlled substances online.
And the plot deepened even further this year when Ulbricht allegedly “solicited a Silk Road user to execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site,” according to the complaint.
The Silk Road operated on the “the onion router” or “tor” network, which provides anonymity to users.
“Based on my training and experience, Silk Road has emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today,” according to Tarbell. “Silk Road has been used by several thousand drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to well over a hundred thousand buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars deriving from these unlawful transactions.”

All transactions took place using Bitcoins

The site generated more than 9.5 million Bitcoins and collected 600,000 in Bitcoin commissions, equivalent to about $1.2 billion in sales and $80 million in commissions, according to Tarbell.
As of Sept. 23, the Silk Road had 13,000 items listed for sale under categories such as “cannabis,” “dissociatives,” “Ecstasy,” “Psychedelics,” and “Stimulants.” The items were sold in individual dosages and bulk orders.
During its investigation, law enforcement agents purchased more than 100 items of controlled substances such as cocaine, heroin, LSD and more from sellers on the Silk Road.
The Silk Road charged a commission, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent, for every transaction on its site.

Hiring Hitmen

Tarbell also reported that Ulbricht took “it upon himself to police threats to the site from scammers and extortionists, and has demonstrated a willingness to use violence in doing so.”
In a second criminal complaint from the state of Maryland listed on the Baltimore Sun’s website, Ulbricht is alleged to have hired a hitman to kill an employee who he thought was stealing from Silk Road. He allegedly paid $80,000 to an undercover cop to execute the employee in January of 2013.
And in another case of hitman for hire a few months later, Tarbell outlines how Ulbricht allegedly sent messages to have a Silk Road user in Canada with a wife and three kids, named “FriendlyChemist,” killed for $150,000 or 1,670 bitcoins. The guy was trying to extort Ulbricht for $500,000 or else he would release the names and addresses of Silk Road users.

Ross Ulbricht, photo from Twitter

Ulbricht struck a deal with a user called “redandwhite.” After receiving his payment, that user messaged Ulbricht stating, “Your problem has been taken care of…. Rest easy though, because he won’t be blackmailing anyone again. Ever.” The user provided pictures to Ulbricht of the alleged dead body of the victim, but the police have been unable to find any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, when this incident allegedly took place.

How did Ulbricht end up in jail?

He graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 2006, according to his LinkedIn profile. Then he attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania School of Materials Science and Engineering.
On his LinkedIn profile, Ulbricht states that his goals shifted since graduate school and that he was focused on “creating an economic simulation” designed to “give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force” by “institutions and governments.”
Tarbell believed that system to be Silk Road. He also reported that Ulbricht, under the alias “altoid” posted on different online forums to market Silk Road.

The Social Media Trail

The FBI heavily relied upon social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google + to put together a profile of Ulbricht and link him back to Silk Road. For example, Ulbricht’s Google + profile listed his favorite YouTube videos, which included a number originating from Mises.org, the website of the Mises Institute, the world center of the Austrian School of Economics.
Ulbricht, under the alias DPR, had cited the “Austrian Economic theory” and the work of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard – economists closely associated with the “Misus Institute” as providing the philosophical underpinnings for Silk Road.
Ulbricht’s best friend is Rene Pinnell, founder of Hurricane Party and Forecast in Austin, which shut down in July of 2012. Pinnell moved to San Francisco shortly after that. Ulbricht was living at his parents house in Austin and moved shortly after that to join Pinnell in San Francisco.
In its complaint, the FBI reported that Ulbricht lived for a while with a friend who moved to San Francisco in September of 2012. That friend is believed to be Pinnell. They also made a YouTube video together interviewing each other for Story Corps, according to a posting on Pinnell’s personal website. The video shows Pinnell and Ulbricht in split screen talking about moving out to San Francisco, school friends, work, women and other interests. The two have known each other since sixth grade at West Ridge Middle School.

Josh, Frosty and other Aliases

In July of 2013, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted a package from Canada that contained nine counterfeit identity documents. Agents then visited Ulbricht at his house on 15th Street in San Francisco where he sublet a room for $1,000 monthly, which he paid in cash. He provided them with a copy of his real Texas driver’s license and said that his two other housemates currently only knew him by the fake name “Josh.”
He told the agents that “hypothetically anyone could go onto a website named “Silk Road” on “Tor” and purchase any drugs or fake identity documents the person wanted.”
“The agents also spoke with one of Ulbricht’s housemates at the address, who state that Ulbricht, whom he knew as “Josh,” was always home in his room on the computer.”
Tarbell concluded in his investigation that Ulbricht was stocking up on fake identities so he could rent multiple servers from hosting companies under false identities.
Ulbricht also used the alias “Frosty” posting in computer coding forums for help on programming his illegal underground website.
So how did a kid, who liked cliff jumping and snowboarding and grew up in Austin, got advanced degrees and studied to be an entrepreneur, go down such a bad path? That’s something that only Ulbricht knows. But one thing is for sure, this Silk Road didn’t lead to riches and the good life, but to the inside of a dingy jail cell. And if convicted, Ulbricht, a bright kid with so much promise, faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
At a hearing on Friday, Ulbricht’s lawyer denied all charges including that Ulbricht ran the Silk Road website, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Sparefoot and Sputnik Creative Make Best Young Companies to Work for List

October 2, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Turnstone, in partnership with Wharton management professor and human resource expert Peter Cappelli, has selected 15 Best Young Companies to Work for nationwide.
The list includes two companies in Austin: Sparefoot, an online marketplace for self-storage, and Sputnik Creative, a digital and branding studio.
Turnstone received more than 100 nominations in its inaugural contest.
Turnstone selected the companies based on positive culture, great leadership, business innovation, talent retention, community outreach and “an intentionally designed workspace,” according to a news release.
The companies had to be less than 10 years old with no more than 100 employees.
“These 15 companies have created environments which embrace the company’s personality by vividly representing their culture, fostering a tight community and exuding fun,” Kevin Kuske, general manager and chief anthropologist for turnstone said in a news release.
The other companies included: Chalkfly of Detroit, Cloudability of Portland, OR, Fanology of Los Angeles, Greatist of New York, Groove Commerce of Baltimore, MD, Hoopla.io of Kansas City, KS, Nexus IT group of Overland Park, KS, Parking Panda of Baltimore, MD, Privy of Boston, MA, SocialRada of Washington, D.C., Sparkhouse of Costa Mesa, CA, Sprout Social of Chicago, IL and Thanx Media of Glen Ellyn, IL.

UTSA’s New Dean of Business Focuses on Entrepreneurship

September 30, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Gerard Sanders, the new dean of the College of Business at UTSA.

Last summer, Gerard Sanders became the new dean of the College of Business at the University of Texas in San Antonio. Sanders comes from the Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business and brings numerous credentials in management and finance, including a doctorate in management from the University of Texas. Working with Center for Innovation and Technology Director Cory Hallam, Sanders is pursuing some ambitious goals for student entrepreneurship.
In the next five years, the Business College wants to launch ten student tech startups annually. The school currently turns out two to three startups a year between its biannual $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition and its faculty research.
Sanders and Hallam have multiple objectives in mind to accomplish this goal, starting with changes to the College of Business.
“There are a lot of good things happening here. There is a lot of potential. But we are spread a little too thin, and we need to focus,” Sanders said. “Entrepreneurship is one area that will receive that focus.”
Sanders said the college suffers from an overabundance of majors, minors, and concentrations that often overlap and drain administrative resources. By pruning and simplifying those degree plans, he hopes to allow students more class options with fewer concentrations so they can get more out of their education.
“Students can get all these same classes within a smaller program infrastructure,” Sanders said.
Administrative and financial resources will now be focused more than ever on student entrepreneurship training. The college plans to double its entrepreneur-focused faculty and all new faculty hires, regardless of discipline, will need to have an interest in entrepreneurship as well as some private sector entrepreneurial experience.
The Business College is also working on a new, more flexible curriculum structure that would allow students to learn several entrepreneurial skills required to start a business in the same three hour course.
“We want the educational experience to mirror closer to the actual entrepreneurial problems, and address the educational need there,” Sanders said.
Hallam also wants to open up graduate level Business College classes to students in other departments such as computer science – giving those students more entrepreneurial tools while also adding diverse perspectives to the classes.
“It actually builds the quality of the class because you end up with very good students from different disciplines which then expands the thought process of the class,” Hallam said.
Hallam hopes to create a similar approach with the CITE (Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship) program’s $100,000 Student Technology Venture competition, which pairs business and engineering students to create products. The goal is to expand the competition to include students in computer science, material science, physics, and other tech departments who could work with business students to launch a technology company as well. In the five years since the competition began, 650 students have participated and a total of 85 business plans have been presented. Hallam believes getting students from other departments in the mix will significantly grow the competition and result in more companies.
Of course, none of those startups will get off the ground without some financial backing. To that end, Sanders and Hallam plan to create an endowed student startup seed fund. The endowment — which is simply a large chunk of money in a bank that generates interest — would have to be several million dollars to be effective, but once established it would provide a better way to fund startups.
“Right now, if we have student startups that are struggling for money, Cory has to get on the phone and call someone and say, ‘Hey, $2000 would really help this little company,’” Sanders said.
“We need to grow that donor base and endow it so that you are not having to ask every year but now know you have built an endowment that funds this many companies a year,” Hallam said.
There are a few more ways the College of Business will boost entrepreneurship as well. This October, the UTSA student CEO organization will partner with Venturelab to hold a 3 Day Startup event on campus similar to other 3DS events held at Geekdom of San Antonio.
To facilitate long-term entrepreneurial collaboration between students, Sanders wants to create an entrepreneur-only dorm space in one of the current residence halls. The space will even be equipped with offices and a board room where students can hold meetings with clients. The Business College is still in the initial planning stages for the space but plan to have it set up in three to four years.
While UTSA’s future goals for student entrepreneurship are important, it’s also important to look where it has been. UTSA’s student CEO organization has more than 100 student owned and operated business. The Business College’s CITE program has seen more than 1000 students go through their tech boot camp. The biannual $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition averages around 20 competing companies a semester and the exiting companies have applied for a total of 12 patents.
Multiple student startups exiting CITE have already gone on to hire experienced CEOs, create prototypes, and raise significant funding. Examples of such companies are Technophysics Solutions, Leto Solutions, Cyclosa, Lapara Medical, and Invictus – some of which have already raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even if students do not move forward with their initial venture, Hallam is confident that they will be able to use their acquired entrepreneurial skills to start additional companies in the future.
“We are trying to unlock their inner entrepreneur,” said Hallam. “We would expect that the rest go out and work in companies and launch products or services – work five to ten years – and at that point they are in the right age bracket to understand the market niche they are familiar with, they understand the business they are in, and at that point they tap into their inner entrepreneur and spin off a company…and 10 years after that we ask them for a donation.”

A Storify Wrap-up of the Nonprofit Tech Summit at Rackspace

September 28, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Promoter.io Featured on A Slice of Silicon Hills

September 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Every business understands the importance of creating loyal customers.
However, they may not know how many loyal customers they actually have or why those customers are loyal in the first place.
Founded by Chad Keck and Ricardo Reyna, Promoter.io was created to help companies guage customer loyalty by measuring their “net promoter score” – a customer loyalty metric invented by Fred Reichheld and explained in his book “The Ultimate Question.”
The net promoter score is measured by a customer’s response to a single question: “How likely are you to refer our brand to a friend or colleague?” Customers answer on a scale of zero to ten, and then specify the most important reason for their response in an open ended format. Customers who select nine or ten are “promoters,” and customers who select zero to six are “detractors.” The final score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
The questionnaire is normally sent to customers by email and is used by Rackspace Hosting, Apple, USAA and Southwest Airlines. According to Bain and Company, companies with a high net promoter score tend to outperform industry competitors.
Promoter.io is working to make this metric accessible to smaller scale operations and startups in a less expensive way. The startup handles the email questionnaires for its clients and aggregates the resulting scores and feedback on a dashboard so businesses can know why they are gaining or losing loyal customers and make better decisions with their products or services.
Promoter.io has just finished its inital pilot program with ten companies in which they sent out more than half a million questionnaires. Some participants received response rates of 15 percent to 50 percent, well above the industry norm of around two percent.
Promoter.io will be releasing their beta to the public in the next couple weeks. The startup has already raised $184,000 in seed stage funding from a handful of San Antonio investors, the Geekdom fund, and personal contributions.
Promoter.io is currently looking a front end developer and designer.

A Slice of Silicon Hills hosts Educational Nonprofit Venturelab

September 5, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

What is the best time for students to be exposed to entrepreneurship and tech careers? Early College? High School? San Antonio nonprofit Venturelab is giving kids hands on experience with entrepreneurship and product invention as early as age 10.
Founded earlier this year by Cristal Glangchi, Venturelab is an evolution of an earlier Geekdom nonprofit called ESTEAM. Venturelab still uses the ESTEAM framework – stressing entrepreneurship, science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. The nonprofit organization has numerous summer programs, weekend events, and after school programs for all levels of students from elementary school to high school to college and beyond. These range from the Venturelab MakerSpace camps that educate students at ages 10-14 to the 3 Day Startup Events that help young professionals build companies. All students receive training in creating business models, inventing products, and giving pitches to sell those products.
Venturelab also puts a special emphasis on inspiring women and girls to become entrepreneurs. All programs must have 30 percent of participants be women and some, such as the GirlStartup camp, are exclusively for women.
The nonprofit organization is funded by several private donors in San Antonio. It is currently looking for additional donors as well as volunteers for the 3 Day Startup in November.
If you would like to enroll yourself or your child in a Venturelab program, you can find the program list at its website.

Grocery Delivery Service Burpy Featured on a Slice of Silicon Hills

August 28, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 5 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Ever wish you could call someone to go grocery shopping for you? Not bring you frozen food in a truck, but actually go to H-E-B or Walmart and pick up what you want as if you were going yourself. Well, if you live in Austin, you can now use Burpy – a grocery delivery service that does exactly that.
Burpy was founded by University of Texas mechanical engineering Senior Aseem Ali. Ali did not have a car for his first few semesters at UT, and had been looking for an alternative way to purchase groceries. Teaming up with four other UT students, Ali launched the company in March of 2013 and has made around 120 deliveries so far. Burpy also participated in UT’s Longhorn Startup program, where the five students were mentored by Sai Ganesh, Dennis Kashkin, Travis McCutcheon.
Users can order food and other items found at grocers such as HEB and Whole Foods directly from Burpy.com. The delivery price varies from $10 to $12 depending on the type of service you select — Burpy can deliver any time between 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. or can be scheduled to deliver at a specific time. Users are also able to upload an entire grocery list if they already know what they need.
In the last three weeks, Burpy has expanded its operation to serve the entire Austin area. It is currently looking to contract additional drivers for specific area codes.

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TeacherGraph Wants to Solve Communications Problems at Schools

August 22, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The team behind Ed-Tech Startup TeacherGraph

Joseph Van and Tony Le founded TeacherGraph, a software as a service (SaaS) application online that allows schools to send messages via email or text to parents and for them to send back messages all on one platform. Van spent some time Wednesday answering questions about the new startup which has just launched out of private beta.

Q. In simplest language, please explain what is TeacherGraph?

A. In the simplest language, TeacherGraph is a tool that allows schools and parents to communicate more effectively by putting all that communication into one application.

Q. How does it work?

A. As a teacher or an as an administrator or anyone in the school you can reach one or many parents with a click of the button. It’s really simple for the school to message the community. And teachers can blast the class with any reminder. But parents can also reply back to them with email or by text. It’s private and secure. Text messaging is really, really popular. It’s increasing the reach you can get in these socially diverse economic situations for people who don’t have a computer or email.

Q. What problem are you trying to solve?

A. How schools, administrators and teachers can reach parents easily and effectively. Right now, there is no way to make sure that the messages that parents are sending are being received or that the messages the schools are sending are being received. TeacherGraph is a new tool at a very affordable price that can tackle all forms of communication within the school at once.

Q. Who makes up your team?

A. Tony Le is the co-founder and we currently have four developers who are really talented and energetic individuals. We also have two business development guys.

Q. Why are you guys the ones to solve this problem?

A. Tony and myself sit at the intersection of education and technology. We have backgrounds in technology, communications and education.

Q. What’s your secret sauce that differentiates your product from the competition?

A. It’s a combination of things. We have a really, really great team with backgrounds in Google, Facebook and educational companies. There is a lot of talent on this team that is young. We’ve had a really vocal, awesome community of fans.

Q. Who are your customers?

A. We have tons of beta partners. As of Saturday, we opened up our Beta. We are working with a couple of schools and individual teachers throughout the U.S. K-12.

Q. Are you bootstrapped, angel funded or VC funded?

A. We are super bootstrapped. The bootstrapped route is doing very well for us.

Q. Where are you based in Austin?

A. Sometimes it’s on campus (at the University of Texas at Austin) and sometimes we’re based at Capital Factory. Other times we are working out of schools.

Q. What Austin startup resources do you use?

A. Austin has been such a great resource. The Capital Factory for one has been instrumental in connecting the right dots in starting a SaaS based company. We had a launch party on Saturday. It’s really awesome to know these teachers, administrators. It’s a great city to grow into.

Q. What’s the business model, how do you guys make money?

A. It’s free for teachers. Schools when they decide to adopt they pay on a monthly basis. Potentially – the pricing model is based on per user – per teacher.

Q. Who are your competitors?

A. We compete with all the really big enterprise level software companies that do 300 things at once. Then there are group text messaging services and another startup Remind 101.

Q. How are you going to acquire customers?

A. We’ll get customers through really great digital word of mouth. We have a very big Facebook following. It’s nice to see that active teacher community on Facebook. We can reach out to them on Facebook. We’re still pretty young. The Austin Ed-Tech Meetup in Austin has been a great resource.

Q. Anything else you would like to add or make a point of?

A. A lot of parents and schools want to know about the security of the platform. From a security perspective, how secure is this data and will this communication be public? It’s even more secure than it was in the past. When you are using Teachergraph the communications are encrypted and secure. Parents can safely receive texts and keep their communications anonymous.