Category: San Antonio (Page 11 of 62)

Choose San Antonio wants people to choose San Antonio.

It’s a nonprofit organization that just sprung up out of the blue devoted to promoting San Antonio to the world. Eric Bell, vice president of corporate development at Group 42 and Kevin Peckham, chief strategist with Lightning Jar, a digital marketing firm, founded the organization. It has the backing of the City of San Antonio’s Economic Development Department, the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation, the Bexar County Economic Development Department, TechBloc, Café Commerce, Geekdom and more.

And this year, the organization is spearheading parties, taco cook-offs, panels, exhibits and more at South by Southwest, the music, film and technology conference that has been going on in Austin, just 75 miles north on Interstate 35, for the past 30 years.

The goal is to showcase the best of San Antonio from its art, music, cuisine and technology. San Antonio is one of the largest hotspots for Cybersecurity in the country and it has a multi-billion-dollar biotechnology industry. The business side of San Antonio often gets overshadowed by the city’s tourism industry and party-focused festivals like Fiesta.

San Antonio’s Rackspace, the city’s largest tech employer which also has offices in Austin, has had a big presence at SXSW in the past. But the city historically has not participated in the conference.

That changes this year. Choose San Antonio has rented out the Old School Bar & Grill at Trinity and Sixth Street as its headquarters, dubbed Casa San Antonio, to showcase the city.

And from Friday through Sunday, Choose San Antonio is sponsoring a free shuttle, on a first come, first serve basis, to take people back and forth from San Antonio to Austin. The shuttle departs from Geekdom at the Rand Building downtown.

On its webpage, Choose San Antonio lists programming, special events and the expo for SXSW.

One event getting a lot of attention lately is the Taco Wars Cook-off held on Friday at 8 a.m. at Old School featuring Chef Johnny Hernandez in a breakfast taco cooking competition versus a “yet-to-be-named” Austin chef.
SXSW is just one of the events Choose San Antonio is participating in. The organization also runs a campaign called #210Reasons why people chose to live in San Antonio.

Accenture Federal Services plans to hire 300 new employees in San Antonio this year for its Technology and Innovation Center.

Accenture already has 1,100 employees in San Antonio. The center, which opened in 2015, provides technology services to federal clients nationwide.

“This expanded Technology and Innovation Center accelerates our ability to help more federal clients implement digital-first while helping improve the way citizens work and live,” David Moskovitz, Accenture Federal Services chief executive said in a news release.

The center will focus on helping its federal clients glean insights from analyzing data and improve decision making. It will also help those clients leverage advanced analytics, mobility and the cloud, according to a news release.

“Accenture’s new Technology and Innovation Center in San Antonio creates quality jobs in software engineering and related business services and is a welcome addition to the local economy and community,” Mayor Ivy R. Taylor, said in a news release. “San Antonio is a growing incubator for innovation, and we are proud they have chosen to expand and create new jobs here in our city.”

Accenture has partnered with nonprofit organizations: Project Quest and Knowledge is Power Program, known as KIPP, in San Antonio and Business Career High School. Accenture provides mentoring workshops, internships and college-preparatory curriculum guidance.

Accenture also has offices in Austin, Dallas and Houston.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A theme at TEDxSanAntonio this year swirled around disrupting the education system to train kids for jobs in the information age.

The Internet has had a profound effect on jobs and the way students learn, said Colin Lang, aerospace studies teacher at Alamo Heights High School. Today, the base of knowledge doubles every 13 months, and that means students will constantly have to retrain to keep up with existing technology to stay employed, he said.

“For teachers this means we’re being asked to prepare students for jobs that don’t exist yet,” Lang said. “Using technologies that haven’t been invented yet and trying to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet. All this while using an antiquated education system that was designed for the industrial revolution that was actually modeled after a country that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Lang was one of 16 speakers at the sixth TEDxSanAntonio event at Rackspace’s event center Saturday. More than 650 people attended the day-long program which featured a variety of speakers on topics including the future of architecture, the power of a mission, BiblioTech, the nation’s first all-digital public library, community building, makers movement, cybersecurity and saving sharks.

Lang spoke about the key to solving the nation’s problems is to create the next generation of innovators.

“This is what made us the greatest economy on the planet,” Lang said.

And then for some reason, the U.S. stopped doing it, Lang said. Fewer and fewer students went on to study science, technology and math, he said. Today, only 3 percent of graduating seniors nationwide attend engineering school, Lang said. That’s a 33 percent drop over the last decade, he said.

“Einstein once said we cannot solve our problems by using the same thinking we used to create them,” Lang said. “In other words, we cannot solve our educational problems simply by modifying the current system. We have to instead change our focus from a teacher centered environment to a student centered one. Most importantly, though, we have to teach our kids how to teach themselves.”

The focus needs to be on teaching kids to learn through project-based education, Lang said.

Lang teaches the Aerospace Studies Program at Alamo Heights High School, known as Systems Go. In the program, students design and build rockets and the projects involve just about every subject in education, Lang said.

“These kids are doing everything. They are doing math. They are doing science. They are doing professional writing,” Lang said. “They also have to do economics. Because they keep track of their own budget because they purchase all their own materials.”

The students fabricate over 90 percent of the rocket in Lang’s classroom, which is also a working machine shop. The program began nine years ago with 17 kids in the junior class, Lang said. That year, the students built a rocket cable of taking a one-pound payload to an altitude of one mile high. Since then, the program has grown to 150 students across all four grade levels.

“My juniors now build rockets capable of breaking the sound barrier,” Lang said. “My seniors, on the other hand, they research, design and fabricate a rocket capable of taking a 35-pound payload to an altitude of a 100,000 feet at speeds in excess of Mach 3, that’s three times the speed of sound.”

The rockets are so sophisticated that Lang and his students travel to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the summertime and the military launches the rockets for them.

“You can’t do this in your backyard,” Lang said.

Lang brought two nose cones to the stage from rockets the students made. The student who built the nose cone that will be launched at White Sands this summer invested more than 600 hours of his own time to fabricate it by hand out of aluminum, fiber glass and carbon fiber, Lang said.

While only 3 percent of seniors nationwide go on to engineering schools, 90 percent of the students in the rocketry program at Alamo Heights go on to engineering school, Lang said. In fact, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University created a special scholarship for Systems Go students, he said.

During his talk, Lang recounted stories about two of his former students, Eric, who wanted to drop out of high school at 16 before he entered the rocketry program. He is now an engineer at NASA developing the rocket engines going on the Space Launch System, the largest rocket ever assembled. And Julia, who also hated math and science, graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in earth and space sciences. She has interned at NASA and she has built penetration rockets for NASA and now she’s working on her master’s degree on planetary space science. But her ultimate goal is to be the first female astronaut on Mars, Lang said.

Lang wore an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt in her honor.

“Programs like this are so successful because the students are so engaged,” Lang said. “They care so much about their projects that they literally invest hundreds of hours during the school year and much of their summer working in a hot machine shop, fabricating and assembling these rockets, getting them ready for White Sands.”

In the end, the product of the program is not the rockets, but the students, Lang said.

“For students like Eric and Julia and so many other kids, Systems Go Aerospace project-based learning has provided the launch pad to grow their confidence, to learn how to learn and to ignite the innovators of tomorrow,” Lang said.

Anna Eilering worked as a chef before becoming a software developer two years ago.

“I make four times the amount of money I made as a chef,” Eilering said.

She also has healthcare and other benefits as an employee at Rackspace in San Antonio. But it took her almost ten years working as a chef before she decided to go back to school and get a degree in computer science.

Today, Eilering, who sports bright pink hair, is co-organizer of SA PyLadies Meetup and loves her new career.

“We bring new, diverse ideas to the field,” Eilering said.

On Tuesday evening, Eilering spoke to a gathering of about 100 women and a few men attending an informational meeting on the Linux for Ladies program at Rackspace Open Cloud Academy at Geekdom. She was one of a handful of speakers who recounted their experiences as women working in the technology field dominated by male employees.

Rackspace, through its Linux for Ladies program, seeks to train more women for careers in the technology field. The San Antonio-based company launched Linux for Ladies two years ago and has since graduated 43 women from the program, and the majority have found careers in the technology field.

Among them, Laura McMasters got a scholarship to attend the first Linux for Ladies program in 2014. She left graduate school in physics to pursue a career as a Linux system administrator. She now works at Rackspace. She told all of the women that she was in their situation just a few years ago and she didn’t know if she would land one of the 20 spots in the class, but she worked hard, persevered and she got selected for the program. She told them she worked from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. every day of the program. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it, she said.

The Linux for Ladies program has changed people’s lives, said Deborah Carter, senior manager of global talent development at Rackspace. Candidates come from all stages of life, she said. Some are students, others have had a career and want to pivot into something new and some are stay at home moms re-entering the workforce, she said.

The program costs $3,500 but Rackspace, in cooperation with Project Quest, is offering scholarships to 20 women. The requirements are the women must be 18 years or older and have a high school diploma to participate. It starts May 31st and lasts eight weeks. It runs Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5 p.m.

To qualify for the program, applicants also have to have their Comp TIA network plus certification to participate. Rackspace’s Open Cloud Academy offers a self-paced program to achieve that certification.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A group gathered at bleachers in a test field just off Culebra road on Monday as a giant red cab of an eighteen wheeler drove up and stopped along with a Ford Explorer, nicknamed Marti, and a Humvee. None of them had drivers.

Most people have heard about Google testing its autonomous vehicles on the streets of Austin, just the second location outside of its Mountain View, California headquarters.

But how many people know for the past decade a group of scientists at Southwest Research Institute have been working on autonomous car research in San Antonio?

At SwRI, driverless trucks, cars and even Humvees regularly hit the road or the dirt on the SwRI campus to prefect their navigation systems and software.
On Monday, SwRI showed off a few of the more than 4,000 projects underway at the nonprofit organization that does contracted research and development for companies and government agencies. It was part of its 68th annual meeting of its advisory trustees and board of directors. In the morning, visitors listened to presentations from scientists and engineers. In the afternoon, they boarded busses to tour labs, buildings and research test sites like the autonomous vehicle field.

“We’ve been doing research and development in this area for about 10 years now for a variety of clients, foreign and domestic, military and commercial,” said Ryan D. Lamm, director of research and development in the applied sensoring department for the Automation and Data System Division at SwRI.

“The whole point of this technology is to save lives,” Lamm said.

The institute has automated more than 15 different vehicles, Lamm said. They’ve deployed them in five countries on four continents. In 2014, the institute sent two military vehicles to Afghanistan.

What purpose do the autonomous vehicles serve?

“From a military application standpoint, it’s to get the soldiers out of harm’s way,” Lamm said. “From a commercial standpoint, it’s to make cars that don’t crash.”

SwRI’s training ground for autonomous vehicles is geared around the complex problems for accelerating the realization of this technology, said Steve W. Dellenback, executive director of the Intelligent Systems Department in the Automation and Data System Division at SwRI.

The institute’s test track has an oval pattern which is about a mile in length with paved streets equipped with stoplights and railroad crossing areas. But it also tests the military vehicles on dirt roads or fields to simulate what those vehicles might encounter in a war zone. The institute also has 200 acres in a private area at the SwRI campus where it tests autonomous vehicles, Dellenback said.

In the U.S., 64 percent of the roads are paved so that leaves 36 percent that are not paved, Dellenback said. The institute has developed technology specifically for autonomous vehicles to navigate unpaved roads, he said. It has created software that runs on a hardware system with a bunch of sensors and costs about $10,000. The institute’s autonomous vehicles can operate without GPS and radar in a stealth mode, which is necessary in a war zone. At the institute, autonomous vehicles use sensors, software, cameras and perception to navigate the landscape, Lamm said.

“The technology is moving very, very fast,” Lamm said. “It’s accelerating. It’s nice to see. We’re hoping to see these systems out on the roadways. I hope my children and I get to enjoy them sometime soon.”

In addition to the autonomous car research, visitors to SwRI at a different test site watched a truck drive 60 miles per hour into a guardrail to test the safety of the guardrail. The truck, which also didn’t have a driver, was on a cable pulled by another truck in the opposite direction which helped keep it on course. The institute, which has worked on guardrail and highway safety for more than 30 years, is doing research for guard rail manufacturers, according to a spokesman.

The other on-site demonstration involved fire technology. The institute tests building materials for fire resistance by burning them in a giant kiln. It has also created an on-site pollution abatement system to capture the carbon released during the fires.

During the morning sessions, SwRI staff presented technical programs on everything from New Horizons mission to Pluto to large scale robotics development.
SwRI has a campus in Boulder, Colorado with more than 100 staff. Alex Parker, a planetary astronomer at SwRI, leads a team that work on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. He shared his insights at the SwRI meeting on capturing images of Pluto.

“New Horizons collected an unprecedented amount of data for a first flyby mission,” Parker said.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the division name and the number of continents the autonomous vehicles have been deployed to.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

At the Aztec Theater in downtown San Antonio, entrepreneurs with 11 startups took to the stage to present their companies during the fourth Techstars Cloud Demo Day Thursday afternoon.

The companies participating in Techstars go on to raise, on average, over $1.5 million during the course of their journey, said Dave Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Techstars. They have raised $2 billion in aggregate as they continue to grow their businesses, he said. The valuation of the 700 plus Techstar alumni companies is well over $5 billion, he said.

This year’s Techstars Cloud class came from four different countries and eight cities, said Blake Yeager, managing director of the Techstars Cloud. To date, 33 alumni companies completed the Techstars Cloud program and they have raised collectively $150 million in outside capital, Yeager said.

The first company to present, Help Social, spun out of Rackspace. It’s a “local, home grown San Antonio-based startup,” said Matt Wilbanks, CEO. He founded the company with Robert Collazo, Chief Technology Officer, in 2014. They raised seed stage funding from Mark Cuban and the Geekdom Fund.

Since its launch, Help Social has created a customer service platform that it licenses to companies to help them communicate with their customers through their social media feeds like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

“Large consumer brands are facing a crisis with customer service. The way that customers interact with brands has evolved quickly and customer service platforms haven’t kept up,” Wilbanks said. “We live in an on demand mobile world where businesses no longer decide how or where they are going to interact with their customers.”

“Social media, in particular, has become a primary method of communication and it has given customers unprecedented control of the conversation,” Wilbanks said. “They now have this giant public megaphone where they can share a good experience with a product or they can bash a brand after a bad experience.”

Help Social’s platform helps companies keep up with the demands of social media and provide excellent customer service, Wilbanks said. It has eight call center companies using its platform currently, he said. The overall market for social media customer service is estimated to be worth $5 billion by 2020, he said.

HelpSocial has five employees based at Geekdom. But it plans to scale its operations to grow, Wilbanks said.

Isaac Saldana, president of SendGrid, a Techstars alumni company with more than 300 employees, introduced the second presenter, ilos, based in St. Paul, Minn. Ilos has solved a major problem for companies looking to document processes, he said. He is so impressed with the company he is also an investor in them.

Ilos created software tools to allow people to take videos of their computer screens, known as screen casting. Its mission is to bring more video into the workplace for training, sales, support and more, said Sean Higgins, co-founder and head of business development for ilos.

The current process of recording videos is fragmented, Higgins said. Ilos takes the traditional process of video creation and condenses it into one step, Higgins said.

“You can easily create, instantly share, while having all your content in one spot,” he said.

Ilos is already generating $20,000 in revenue monthly, Higgins said. It’s a storage and hosting business for videos too, he said. The company has 12 employees.

“And it’s just the beginning,” he said. “Why? Customers like the product.”

The third presenter, Popily, a data story telling site, is one of the three companies participating in the latest cohort from Austin.
Popily is a software as a service company which turns data into easy to read charts and spreadsheets.

Jonathon Morgan, co-founder, said a lot of data is trapped in companies and they need a tool like Popily to access and analyze that data. The service just launched last month. In addition to Morgan, Vidya Spandana and Chris Albon are co-founders. The company charges between $9 to $59 a month to subscribers who use its software.

Next up, Austin-based startup, HuBoard touted its project management solution for users of GitHub and GitHub Enterprise.

Within six months of launching the service, HuBoard had 250 paying customers, said HuBoard CEO Ryan Rauh. Shortly after that, large enterprises wanted a version to work behind their firewalls, he said. Today development teams at Microsoft, Mozilla, Adobe and hundreds more are using HuBoard, he said.

“Without spending a dollar on marketing, we built this business to over $11,000 in monthly reoccurring revenue,” Rauh said.

The first international company to pitch, Jumble, presented its email encryption technology. The company is from Dublin, Ireland.

Fiona Kelly, chief operating officer of Jumble, gave an overview of the company’s business. Encryption is the solution to sending secure email, she said.

Unfortunately, encryption services today are hard to use. That’s the problem Jumble solves, she said. It makes it easy to send encrypted email for its customers inside Gmail, Outlook and even mobile devices, she said.

“An unsecured email is a serious business risk,” Kelly said.

Jumble charges companies $5 per user per month to use its email encryption software. Today, the company has more than 1,500 individual users and 400 company accounts in its beta trial, she said.

Rudy Ellis, CEO of Switchboard, pitched his Orlando-based startup which connects video and audio content creators with a platform of sponsors and brands. During the Techstars program, the startup changed its name from Joicaster to Switchboard.

“With Switchboard I get an audience that is ten times bigger and ten times more targeted than in the past,” Ellis said.

The company’s customers include Monster and Ted.com. Its platform ranges in cost from free to $30 a month and special pricing for enterprise customers.

The Techstars Cloud Demo Day also featured a little magic.

David Ortego, co-founder of Pomika, based in Malaga, Spain, a platform that turns images into shopping experiences, performed a few magic tricks on stage during his pitch. He used a black curtain to cover up a model and then dropped the curtain to reveal a different outfit. The act concluded with a white curtain and the model changing into a white evening gown.

Pomika is a cloud-based platform that sends users information about where they can purchase the items from images they post. Pomika makes a commission on each sales referral. It also changed its name during the Techstars Cloud program from Imagenii to Pomika.

One of the fastest growing startups, Clyp, based in Austin, has already reached more than one million unique users including a few high profile users like Eric Clapton, said Jordan Patapoff, co-founder. He founded the company in 2013 with Tyson Ferguson.

Clyp is a simple to use drag and drop platform that allows people to share audio files. Clyp takes music creation from an isolated process to one of collaboration, Patapoff said. Its Pro-Plan starts at $9 a month, he said.

The other companies included UXTesting, based in Taiwan, a toolkit to improve mobile user experiences using data visualization, Haste, formerly known as Thalonet, based in Atlanta, a private network to provide video game players with better performance on the Internet and Sage Hero, formerly Slash Sensei, an online training platform. Erik Larson, its CEO, announced Rackspace as a paid pilot customers at the event.