Category: San Antonio (Page 12 of 62)

For more than four years, San Antonio’s technology community has been percolating with excitement amidst a ground swell of support bubbling up to create a vibrant startup industry.

First, Geekdom set up operations in downtown San Antonio at the Weston Centre and then moved to its own building, the Rand on Houston St.. And now, there’s the San Antonio Entrepreneur Center on Houston St., The Workery, VenturePoint and others.

But one of the most exciting developments to come along this year is the first San Antonio Startup Week, which kicks off February 8th and runs through Feb.12th. To register, sign up at sanantonio.startupweek.co.

San Antonio Startup Week is a celebration of everything entrepreneurial in downtown San Antonio. Trinity University’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the 80/20 Foundation are behind the effort. They released a schedule of events. They are working with Café Commerce, Geekdom, The Workery, Codeup, the San Antonio Entrepreneur Center to put on the events.

The format is similar to Austin Startup Week, which drew its inspiration from a similar event in Boulder, Colorado. The fifth annual Austin Startup Week took place last October.

“San Antonio Startup Week is a reflection of the work being done by aspiring and established entrepreneurs in the city. The week is meant to celebrate the unique startup community and tech scene in San Antonio,” Vanessa Paige, Operations Manager of 80/20 Foundation, said in a news release. The event features free coworking day passes along with workshops and events hosted daily for five days. The full schedule is available at San Antonio Startup Week.

Silicon Hills News is hosting “Write Like a Journalist” on Wednesday, Feb. 10, at 11 a.m. at the San Antonio Entrepreneur Center at 219 E. Houston, Suite 300. If you’ve got a story to pitch, be sure to attend the hour-long event. Be sure to register for the events as space is limited.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

San Antonio had a good year in tech. A new movement called SA Tech Bloc launched. They helped to bring Lyft and other ridesharing apps back to the city. A new source of funding from Bexar County called SA Tech Fuel also launched to provide seed stage funding to a few local startups.

And Geekdom celebrated its fourth birthday in grand style. And Geekdom has also fully moved into its new headquarter building at the Rand. It also is filling up quick and some bigger startups like Codeup have moved into new offices nearby. The Open Cloud Academy also expanded and moved into the entire fifth floor at the Rand building.

Google announced Google Fiber is coming to San Antonio, but no dates for the rollout have been announced yet. Meanwhile, AT&T launched Gigabit service to some of its customers in San Antonio.

Without further ado, here’s a roundup of the top ten technology stories as ranked by traffic on the Silicon Hills News news site for San Antonio in 2015.

A Technology Revolution is Brewing in San Antonio

The New Techstars Cloud Class Kicks off in San Antonio

SA Tech Bloc Seeks to Advocate for San Antonio’s Tech Industry

Rackspace and Intel Open the OpenStack Innovation Center

Seven Women Run Tech Startups to Watch in San Antonio

Ten Life Sciences Companies to Watch in Central Texas

Lyft Returns Ridesharing to San Antonio

Techstars Cloud Demo Day in San Antonio Features 10 Startups

Mass Venture of San Antonio Approved as Texas’ First Equity Based Crowdfunding Portal

Invictus Medical Sells a Device to Help Newborn Babies

For its fourth birthday Geekdom hosted a free Circus-themed party in downtown San Antonio Thursday night at Main Plaza.

The event featured the Wooden Nickel Carnival, which provided Vaudeville entertainment and vintage style carnival games including ring toss, darts and a hat toss games. The prize for winning at one of the games was a wooden nickel. The evening included stilt walkers, aerial artists, fire dancers, a fire eater, D.J. and so much more.

The Flying Balalaika Brothers, a four man Russian gypsy band out of Austin, entertained the crowd from the steps of the San Fernando Cathedral with a multi-colored light show displayed on the background.

Nick Longo, co-founder of Geekdom, carried a bullhorn and dressed in a black top hat with a red jacket. Graham Weston, co-founder of Geekdom, also attended the event with his family. More than 1,500 people RSVP’d to attend the party which kicked off at 5:30 p.m. and ran until 9 p.m. Several people wore Geekdom hoodie jackets and T-shirts. Alamo Beer Company gave out beer in neon plastic Geekdom cups. Geekdom also gave away sunglasses and had a booth providing information on membership in the downtown coworking and collaborative tech space at the Rand building. And many guests filled up bags with free cans of Red Bull from several coolers around the plaza.

An artist also drew caricatures of people for free. The entire event was free and open to the public.

What kind of impact can a privately financed technology incubator have on a city?

Just take a look at Geekdom, the collaborative coworking technology center in downtown San Antonio.

Four years ago, Graham Weston, co-founder of Rackspace, and Nick Longo, founder of CoffeeCup Software, launched Geekdom on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre with the idea of creating an epicenter for the technology industry in the sprawling city of San Antonio.

Since then, Geekdom has served as the catalyst for igniting the city’s technology industry. It has attracted the Techstars Cloud accelerator, incubated dozens of companies and enlisted hundreds of entrepreneurs as members. It also moved into new headquarters and expanded into the entire historic Rand Building on Houston Street.

Geekdom companies have raised $50 million in venture capital, said Lorenzo Gomez, its director. Four startups have also been acquired including Akimbo, ZeroVM, RAM Law Firm and Carbon Black, he said. And five local companies have gotten into Techstars. They include TrueAbility, Parlevel, Nebulab, Slash Sensei and Help Social.

Geekdom has had “net positive growth every month for the last two years and we’re really excited about it,” Gomez said. Geekdom members are pioneers in building a new kind of city around ideas and innovation and they are creating great opportunities for entrepreneurs and tech workers locally, he said.

“We are a city you can build and very few people get to participate in building a city in their lifetime,” Gomez said.

Two years ago, Weston bought the Rand building with the goal of filling it up with technology companies.

Today, the Rand building is projected to be 100 percent full by the end of the year, Gomez said. Geekdom occupies the top three floors, the Open Cloud Academy takes up the entire fifth floor. Other tenants include WP Engine, Rivard Report and TechBloc, Gomez said. Companies are fighting to lease the second and third floors, he said. He can’t say who they are but they will move in late this year or early next year, he said.

Geekdom is also working to get some retail establishments on the first floor of the Rand Building, Gomez said.

“The ecosystem went vertical and then it spilled out into the streets,” Gomez said. “Now it’s all over downtown.”

Companies like Codeup, led by Michael Girdley, have moved into their own building nearby. Gomez said he sees this trend continuing.

“Members build companies,” Gomez said. “Companies build ecosystems.”

Grassroots organizations like Techbloc have also worked to galvanize San Antonio’s technology community, Gomez said. They have been instrumental in presenting issues of importance to city leaders, he said. Techbloc played a key role in bringing ride sharing companies like Uber and Lyft back to the city.

During a fireside chat, Weston and Longo recounted the story about how they bid against each other to acquire the Geekdom.com domain name. They traveled the country looking at other technology centers and they set up Geekdom to become a collaborative coworking and technology incubator.

Geekdom is the place where startups are born, Weston said.

“When Nick and I started Geekdom, we said we were going to throw a party and put up a keg and buy some pizza and hope that people show up,” Weston said. “Ultimately Geekdom is not worth anything without you.”

Money can’t buy human energy, ideas, enthusiasm and excitement and that’s what Geekdom helps foster, Weston said.

“This is a city that is being built right now,” Weston said. “Twenty years ago, I’ve heard this my whole career here. I’ve heard people say 20 years ago this city was ruled by five white guys…That’s not true today. This city today is ruled by you. This city is ruled by us. This city’s future is led by us. This isn’t a sleepy South Texas town that it may have been a few years ago.”

The changes that will happen in San Antonio will come from the members of Geekdom and the innovations they cook up, Weston said.

To celebrate its fourth birthday, Geekdom held a community Circus-themed party Thursday night complete with band, fire dancers, stilt walkers, aerial artists, game booths, Alamo beer kegs, food trucks and even an artist drawing caricatures of people for free. More than 1,500 people RSVP’d for the event held in Main Plaza downtown.

Tania Jess joined her husband and daughter to volunteer at Rackspace Saturday morning to give away turkeys and food boxes.

It’s an annual family tradition.

They waited for a line of cars to come through their stations in the parking lot at Rackspace’s headquarters and then they loaded up each car with a turkey and box of food for Thanksgiving.

The wind whipped across the parking lot playing havoc with some of the Rackspace tents, but the sunshine kept everyone in high spirits. Many car drivers honked their horns, people waved and some rolled down their car windows to give high fives to the volunteers and to say thank you and happy thanksgiving as they drove through the line.

A DJ kept the music upbeat and a few people dressed in turkey costumes danced around.

It’s all part of Rackspace partnering with the San Antonio Food Bank in Rackspace’s ninth annual Fill a Box, Feed a Family Thanksgiving Food Drive. This year, Rackspace gave away 1,850 turkeys and bags of food locally. It’s the largest food distribution event in San Antonio, said Erika Borrego, chief operating officer with the San Antonio Food Bank.

“We are pleased to partner with Rackspace to make sure all the families on this side of the city get fed,” Borrego said.

The cars began lining up before 6:30 a.m. Saturday at Rackspace’s headquarters. And Rackspace began distributing the food at 9 a.m. By 11:30 a.m., the organizers and volunteers had served 750 families with a few hours to go, Borrego said.

Each family received a Butterball turkey, ranging from 10 pounds to 16 pounds, a box of food with canned veggies, yams, piecrust, pie mix and a bag of fresh produce.

The turkey and food box gives families the opportunity to have memories together during the holiday, Borrego said.

Overall, the San Antonio Food Bank plans to give away 10,000 to 15,000 turkeys throughout San Antonio, Borrego said. It’s still seeking turkeys and monetary donations, she said. The Food Bank serves 58,000 individuals every week.

Rackspace is giving away 2,500 turkeys and food boxes across all of its offices nationwide, said Cara Nichols, community affairs director for Rackspace and president of its foundation. Rackspace works with family specialists at each of its adopted schools in its neighborhood to identify the families in need. Each family receives a voucher to bring to the event to redeem for the turkey and food items.

“It is bigger every year,” Nichols said. “The schools are much more integrated into the event this year. We have teachers helping us, family specialists…when the students drive through and see familiar faces it just makes what could be a humbling experience into a very fun, exciting activity for the whole family. It just fills people with so much joy to come through.”

More than 400 Rackspace employees, known as Rackers, volunteered to make the event possible, Nichols said. Rackspace started planning for the Thanksgiving holiday event in May, she said.

Rackspace buys the turkeys and Rackspace employees donate money and food to fill the boxes that make up the meal. Some families take a box, decorate it, fill it up and donate it, Nichols said.

“The energy is always the same. The Rackers always bring their A game, their positive attitudes and their spirit and we appreciate that,” Borrego said.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

San Antonio taxi cab driver Abdirahman Jama used to drop passengers off at the Weston Centre to attend the Open Cloud Academy.

Then he found out that for $3,500 he could take classes through the academy and receive his Cisco Certified Network Associate credentials. He taught himself the prerequisites for the class. He also previously took three years of college credits but that didn’t create a pathway for him to find a job in IT.

Jama, who is from Somalia in East Africa, found his true calling through his studies at the Open Cloud Academy in San Antonio. In a few weeks, he’ll graduate and he hopes to land a job at Rackspace as a network expert.

“Dream job,” he said.

At the end of September, the Open Cloud Academy, which is operated by Rackspace, moved into new headquarters on the fifth floor of the Rand building in downtown San Antonio. The academy launched in 2013 on the sixth floor of the Weston Centre.

Last week, the academy held an open house to celebrate its new offices. Also, the City of San Antonio announced a grant of $250,000 to help train residents in the academy programs in cooperation with its partner, Project Quest. The Open Cloud Academy and its partners have received local, state and federal grants to train IT employees in San Antonio.

In addition to the academy, Geekdom has expanded to the sixth and seventh and eighth floors of the Rand building. Techstars Cloud occupies most of the eighth floor.

“It’s great networking for our students,” said Marcus Benavidez, manager of the Open Cloud Academy.

Some of the students who graduate from programs at the Open Cloud Academy land jobs with startups at Geekdom. WP Engine, a WordPress hosting company, has hired several of them, Benavidez said.

The new Rand office has allowed the Open Cloud Academy to expand from three to five classrooms, Benavidez said. It also let the academy develop a fun and funky space with quotes on the wall from great leaders like Martin Luther King and wall murals in code done by Italian artist Alka Cappellazzo. The space is bright and colorful and inviting.

“We built out the space to our specific needs as a training center,” Benavidez said.

The academy operates in two phases, Benavidez said. The first phase requires students to have their network plus certification. To help them do that, the academy offers free nightly certification courses. It offers 12 to 18 classes a month specific to network training. The minimum age for participants is 18. Class size is around 24 students.

“They come from all kinds of different walks of life,” Benavidez said.

The students range from people who worked retail jobs to retirees looking for a second career, he said.

The academy also has a Linux Systems Administration training room, which can hold up to 20 students and a Network Operations classroom with 15 students. The room features a one to one student to equipment ratio, which helps students to pass their Cisco Certification Network Associate test. This year, 97 percent of the students have passed and received certification, Benavidez said.

On Dec. 11th, the latest class will graduate. The classes last eight to nine weeks and cost $3,500. Some of the students receive tuition assistant from Project Quest. The students attend classes from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. But they have 24/7 access to the facility and many work after hours on projects.

Right now, a lot of the students are preparing for job interviews, Benavidez said. Rackspace hires about 47 percent of the students, he said. About 76 percent of the Open Cloud Academy graduates have found information technology jobs, he said. Data Foundry, GigaNews, Cisco and Golden Frog in Austin have hired graduates from the program, he said.

The Open Cloud Academy also runs a Linux for Ladies program once a year in the summertime. It is focused on getting more women into IT jobs, Benavidez said. The last class had 21 students. Rackspace hired seven of them and four others found IT jobs in San Antonio.

A current student, Elizabeth Hils quit her job as a bank teller and now she’s about to graduate from the networking class.

When people used to come into her bank with a red lanyard around their neck and a Rackspace ID, she used to chat them up about what kind of jobs they had open. One of the employees told her about the Open Cloud Academy and that’s when she decided to pursue a job in IT full time. She started attending the workshops, read a book and got her network plus certification.

“I’m doing stuff I never thought I could do,” Hils said.

Hils said working in IT will also double her previous salary. She has a college degree but only made in the $20,000 range at her bank job. With her Cisco Certified Network Associate credentials she hopes to make $55,000 a year or more.

“This is an amazing deal,” she said.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

For 55 years, Harold’s Art and Framing on San Antonio’s South Side in the Mission district has done business through its brick and mortar store.

But on Monday morning the mom and pop business got its own website thanks to Google’s Let’s Put Our Cities on the Map program held at Café Commerce at the main San Antonio Public Library.

“This will help our business tremendously,” said Kevin Sekula with Harold’s Art and Framing. “In addition to framing, we offer art supplies and we’re hoping to offer both online.”

During the morning sessions, Sekula also learned about keywords and how to drive traffic to his newly established website. His company was one of about 100 registered to attend the free event.

U.S. Representative Will Hurd (R-Texas) also attended the event and joked he promised Google breakfast tacos and margaritas to lure the program to San Antonio.

Hurd also said he recently found a great coffee shop in Castroville by searching online. But he didn’t know it existed before they listed their business on the Google map. Another business in Texas increased its sales by 250 percent after establishing an online presence and joining the Google map, he said. Half of the country’s Gross Domestic Product is created from small businesses and two-thirds of the nation’s new jobs come from small businesses, Hurd said.

“It’s great being able to bring you some tools and put them into ya’ll’s hands so you can continue to be the engines of our economy,” Hurd said.

While 97 percent of Internet users search online for products and services, half of all Texas’ small businesses do not have a website or online presence, according to Google. The Let’s Put Our Cities on the Map program is a nationwide program Google has been running for the last three years, said Patrick Lenihan, Google spokesman. Google also partnered with StartLogic to provide a website to all of the businesses for free with a customized domain name and webhosting for one year, he said. Google set up the site GYBO.com to help small businesses get their business online.

Maria Williams, owner of Majestic Events by Maria, founded in 2009, attended the event to gain knowledge about increasing her company’s web presence online.

“I can do a wonderful event for you but as far as updating my website, it’s very difficult for me,” Williams said. She has also hired people to help her with the website, but that didn’t work out well. So she decided to attend the workshop to learn how to do Search Engine Optimization, Google Analytics and more on her own. She put her business on Google’s map during the event.

“It’s going to help bring more people to my business and increase my business,” Williams said. “I think it’s a great program. It’s going to help put a lot of small businesses in San Antonio online.”