Austin-based SpareFoot, the self-storage marketplace, will donate a month of storage space to people in Oklahoma affected by the devastating tornadoes in the Oklahoma City area.
A massive tornado tore through Moore, Okla., just to the South of Oklahoma City, on Tuesday. It wreaked havoc leveling entire neighborhoods, businesses and schools and left two dozen dead including nine children, according to official news reports.
SpareFoot will cover the cost, up to $100, of the storage unit to those tornado victims who rent a storage unit within a 50-mile radius of Oklahoma City. The offer is good to customers who move in by June 21.
“The images of the destruction in the Oklahoma City area are heartbreaking. Our thoughts go out to the communities in this region that felt Mother Nature’s wrath,” SpareFoot CEO Chuck Gordon said in a news statement. “While human lives obviously are the most important consideration in a situation like this, we at SpareFoot hope our offer of free storage space can help people in the Oklahoma City area recover from these powerful tornadoes.”
SpareFoot offers a free marketplace that lets customers find and reserve storage units online. It has the largest inventory of storage units in the U.S.

Akimbo Financial wants to change the way people pay for things.
The three year old company, which recently moved from Austin to San Antonio, has created a prepaid card that connects to a digital wallet and allows people to easily share money with others.
Akimbo recently closed on $850,000 of a $3 million Series A round led by Graham Weston, co-founder and chairman of Rackspace Hosting, Tom C. Frost Jr., former CEO and Chairman Emeritus of Cullen/Frost Bankers Inc. and Akimbo co-founder Tom O. Turner.
Akimbo plans to use the money for marketing and customer acquisition.
“This investment will help us meet the growing demand for our product after its official launch a few months ago, in addition to helping us ramp up unprecedented company growth in the coming months,” Akimbo co-founder and CEO Houston Frost said in a news release.
Founded in 2010, Akimbo has raised $2.15 million to date.
Akimob offers the Akimbo Visa Prepaid Card that can be loaded from a bank account, via direct deposit or with cash at various retail locations. The Akimbo card can used at ATMs nationwide and users can send money via email, Facebook and SMS.

Founder.org received more than 500 submissions for its Big Ideas competition.
Its mission is “to inspire students to chase big ideas and become founders of impactful companies that drive innovation and economic growth.”
Founders.org has narrowed the field down to 50 Big Ideas as the semifinalists and five of them are from the Austin Technology Incubator at the University of Texas.
In fact, the University of Texas at Austin ranked third nationally, ahead of Harvard and Stanford, in the Founder.org competition. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkley ranked first and second. The winner receives a $100,000 grant to pursue their idea.

The UT Austin semifinalists include:

AdBm Technologies – Oil & Gas, Offshore Pile Driving – AdBm has created technology to reduce noise pollution from oil and gas drilling operations to help protect marine life.

AuManil – Consumer Products – AuManil has created a data-driven analytics and predictive model platform to help companies with customer relationship management.

Beyonic – Financial Services, Payments, Mobile, Developing world marketing and distribution -Beyonic is creating a mobile payment aggregation service for the developing world. Our platform allows any business to move beyond cash.

Lynx Laboratories – Art, Design, Industrial Imaging, Architecture, Real Estate – Lynx has created a camera-like device that can capture the shape and motion of an environment for easy 3-D modeling.

Seismos – Water Contamination Detection – Seismos has created diagnostic tools that can monitor real time oil and gas drilling operations to protect groundwater.

Founder.org is expected to announce the finalists in the next couple of weeks.

Bob Metcalfe, University of Texas’ Professor of Innovation, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise, delivered this keynote address Saturday to the 2013 graduates of the Master of Science in Technology Commercialization (MSTC) Program.
Metcalfe contends that “founderati – the people who invent, innovate, commercialize technology, found and grow startups, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs” are made, not born. And programs like UT’s MSTC help create them.
Metcalfe also contends that “our Free Enterprise System is under attack these days, by people who would prefer to grow governments, rather than economies.”
He says entrepreneurs, who create new ventures, are the solution.
Metcalfe moved to Austin from Boston two years ago and his mission is “helping make Austin a better Silicon Valley.”
“And by “Austin” I mean to include this our fair city and all its nearby suburbs — north, east, south, and west — Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and El Paso.”
The aim isn’t to be “BETTER” than Silicon Valley, but “a” better Silicon Valley, Metcalfe said.
“By the phrase “Silicon Valley” I mean the bloodthristy take — no — prisoners swing–for–the–bleachers Free Enterprise Venture Capitalism during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in which I freely prospered.”

Metcalfe’s entire speech is reprinted with permission below and it’s well worth reading.

MSTC.keynote.metcalfe

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Serial entrepreneur and entrepreneurial guru Gary Hoover has an old electric shaver box that his father gave him when he was a boy. Inside it is a crudely drawn game board with businesses on it: Neiman Marcus, Marshall Field. When he was seven years old, he started playing this game of building, selling and buying businesses. In college the game was movies. He and his friends would create movies, hire screenwriters, go on location. If you wanted to hire Paul Newman, you had to be ready to cough up $1.7 million.
This game has run, like a theme, through all Hoover’s businesses, grown more complex, wound up on complicated spreadsheets. And this game of Big Wigs is Hoover’s next business venture.
It will be played interactively on whatever the device of the day is, right now that’s iPads. It will be based on and model his indepth research on the various industries—up to 30 industries by the year 2020—beginning with the restaurant industry. Players can choose whether to be a fine dining establishment, a diner or a fast food joint. They can choose a location in a real place, hire staff, purchase food. Then, say the game adds a retail industry component, mall owner players can negotiate with restaurant owner players. There will be investors, partnerships, IPOS, a court component….
The game will be free to $10 for consumers.
“There are at least 25 companies that sell games to MBA programs but they don’t really model the industry,” Hoover told a packed room at his RISE session at Capital Factory Friday. “The bottom line is everybody deals with businesses every day and virtually no one understands how they work.”
A game he plays with students is having them make predictions about businesses and profits.
Hoover has a thousand ideas for new businesses, he said, though the title of his talk only mentioned 235.
“When it’s time for me to start another company, my system, the first thing I ask is am I passionate about it. I don’t care about ‘This is hot. That’s where you make the most money.’”
He looked into healthcare, he said, because the number of healthcare companies among top ranking businesses has exploded over the last several years. So he bought $200 worth of books on healthcare. He couldn’t get through them. He was bored.
“If I’m going to start a business,” he said, “I gotta love it. I gotta stay up all night and jump buildings in a single bound and all those things entrepreneurs do.”
If you read about an industry for 10 minutes and check the clock, he said, that’s not the business for you. If you look up and realize the sun’s coming up and you’ve been at it for eight hours, you’re on the right track.
That’s the first criteria. The other is “Are people going to love it?”
Sometimes, he said, it’s hard to find market validation. “It’s great to go around and ask 100 customers what they think of your idea,” he said, “but the more bold and brazen your idea is, the less likely you can do that. Nobody was walking around saying ‘I can’t make it another day without Federal Express.’”
This is the first time he’s ever gone into an industry that was a gold rush, Hoover said. Most of his other ideas were unique. And game experts tell him he can’t possibly get to profitability with $500,000. Games are too expensive.
On the other hand, game experts all agree that Monopoly is a terrible game. No industry, including the real estate industry Monopoly was modeled on, has a “last man standing” model.
The world that grew up on Monopoly doesn’t seem bothered by that. That’s because, he said, Monopoly speaks to the fact that people and businesses all run on the same principles that have been around since the 1900s and which he said Whole Foods embodies: If you love what you’re doing, you win.
“Do you love your customers? Do you love your product? Do you communicate that love? Whole Foods is like ‘We love olives. Olives are great. Olives are cool. Do you love olives? You should! They just love food and they love what they’re doing. And you can’t beat that.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
The key takeaway from the RISE Crowdfunding Super Panel Lunch and Learn Friday was that while crowdfunding started as this groovy, organic, community experience where people gave to causes and companies they believed in—by the time Congress, celebrities and the marketing world gets done with it, it may be a very different animal.
The packed lunch session at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center included Jeff Henderson, VP of sales and marketing at Invested.in, a Los Angeles based crowdfunding platform; Justin Jensen, founder of Cinetics, an Austin company that builds tools for filmmakers and photographers; Elizabeth Smith Kulik, founder of New York crowdfunding platform ProHatch; and Chauncey Lane, a corporate and securities attorney with Brown McCarroll who formerly worked with the SEC. Bijoy Goswami, founder of Bootstrap Austin, moderated the session.
Lane explained that crowdfunding gives anyone the opportunity to invest in a business, a cause, an artist, any person or entity seeking funds. Generally, the person creates a campaign, generates some buzz around the project and has 30 days to raise funds online during which time anyone can contribute. In return, that person or entity often gives rewards, repayment or a piece of equity in a company.
While Congress has passed the JOBS Act and President Obama signed it into law last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has not yet released its rules that would allow for equity based crowdfunding. The SEC has reported that it is working on the rules to protect the investors. The current rules though, putting a $1 million cap on crowdfunding in a 12-month period and loading the deal up with regulatory hurdles, would make crowdfunding—now among the least expensive funding options—into one of the most expensive options. Lane said he expected lending-based crowdfunding to wind up under the same regulatory umbrella as equity based funding because it relies on the company’s ability to generate income and return the loan money.
In the meantime, crowdfunding platforms, entrepreneurs and others are still trying to tease out best practices in crowdfunding.
“People are learning how to do this only now,” said Kulik whose company is analyzing the top 50 crowdfunding projects to spot why those projects succeeded.
“Now you have 73,000 Kickstarter examples of what happened,” she said. “You have real statistical analysis and performance metrics.”
Panelists pushed the importance of engagement. That includes getting key bloggers in your industry writing about your product, having media outlets cover it and doing huge social media campaigns. Jensen, whose company raised nearly $500,000 in a Kickstarter campaign in 2011 and $114,000 in 2012, said he worked on the first campaign for a year before launching it.
Henderson of Invested.in said if entrepreneurs should have the first 10 percent of supporters ready to donate before ever starting a campaign. People respond to other people. Very few people go on Kickstarter or other sites looking for places to give their money away.
“If you build it,” Kulik said, “they will not come. You have to create a funding community from ideation to IPO. You have to be aware of what the messaging is, coordinate across media outlets. It’s a tremendous amount of work. It’s everything you do in a bricks and mortar business except that instead of touching customers once, you’re touching them 1,000 times, instantly. Capital is a relationship if they buy you once they’re going to buy you twice and buy your issue as well.”
All the panelists agreed that being secretive about your product precludes using crowdfunding. People want to see what they’re investing in. There are a couple of exceptions. Sometimes, Kulik said, a compelling story is enough, as in the case of Karen Klein, the bullied school bus monitor, who tried to raise $5,000 for a vacation on Indiegogo but wound up with $703,168. Another example was one of the participants who has bootstrapped a learning center in Austin for more than 30 years but wondered if crowdfunding would work for his business. Kulik thought his business model and story were ideal for crowdfunding.
And Henderson pointed out that just having leverage makes for more leverage. Producers of the Veronica Mars television show raised nearly $6 million on Kickstarter to bring the show back to TV. It was the most successful campaign in the history of Kickstarter.
“So you’re saying that instead of all of us using it,” said Goswami, gesturing to the room full of entrepreneurs, “it will be used by people who already have all the leverage.”
“That’s an ethical question,” Kulik responded.
There are times, panelists said, when crowdfunding isn’t the best way to go. For example, Henderson pointed out, all the content generated on Kickstarter to build up a campaign belongs to Kickstarter—which receives a 5 percent commission on funds. Frequently it would be a better decision to have all that content on a company’s own website for SEO purposes. Frequently a company would do better just to create it’s own rewards campaign and build with customers.
It depends, Kulik said, on the industry and the business model.
One participant owns a bakery, Totally Nuts, that sells grain free gluten free, sugar free baked goods. What kind of reward, she asked the panel, could she offer crowdfund investors?
“Give them an experience,” Kulik responded.
Like a dinner? The baker owner asked.
“Invite them to a board meeting. Bring them to work in the shop for half a day.”
“They would want that?” the owner asked, incredulous.
“Sixty-three percent of people fund because they want an experience and they want to help,” Kulik answered.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Women entrepreneurs must stop hanging back, letting fear win, believing that being partners and parents precludes them from being successful business owners. They must push themselves to create businesses with scaleable ideas that can grow into multimillion or billion dollar companies. Those were a few of the key points panelists made during the Women in Technology Leadership and Entrepreneurship Forum RISE session Thursday.
Then there was the recommendation from Terry Chase Hazell, chair of the $400 million Texas Emerging Technology Fund Advisory that if you find yourself—like she was–seeking funding when you’re 8.5 months pregnant, don’t permit yourself to absentmindedly play with your belly button while you’re pitching.
The panel included Hazell, who has founded two successful biotech companies and recently founded Avinde accelerator; Meg Wilson, lecturer at IC2, UT’s international technological innovation think tank who has taught the executive master of science in Technology Commercialization at UT since it started in 1996. She’s also led science and technology advisement for two Texas governors; Rebecca Austen, who has worked to create and develop startups within IBM for decades and now manages skills and certification for IBM Systems & Technology Group sellers and business partners worldwide. Jani Byrne moderator, spent nearly a decade as IBM’s Director of Strategic Ventures and currently is Director of Marketing for Global Mid-Market, Enterprise & MSPs.
There were about 20 women in the audience at the IBM campus and Mike Hope, an app developer who was using RISE to “push himself out of his comfort zone.”
Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone was the theme of the session. Byrne talked about finding “the gift of courage” by paragliding off a mountain. Austen skydived. Hazell talked about being pushed toward courage in a different way, when her mentor yelled her and hung up on her after Hazell expressed hesitation to take on the Texas technology fund, following some negative news coverage.
“She said, ‘This is exactly what you need to be doing. So go do it. Stop acting like a girl. If you were a man you would leap at the chance to handle something like this….’ Boy she made me mad. But then I said ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’ It’s been a wild experience.”
Many women entrepreneurs think in terms of starting a small, service based business that’s not scaleable, she said. But then you’re working 70 hours a week and if you get sick, or pregnant, the business tanks.
To start a global, multi-million dollar company, you have to solve a problem that intersects with your passion. Without passion, you’re lost.
Keisha Bickham, one of the participants who works as management engineering director at St. David’s said she had numerous ideas for businesses based on her frustrations at work.
“I think every day, ‘Man, if somebody would just fix this…and this, if somebody would just fix this.”
A big company, Hazell said, has to start with a product people need that can be produced relatively inexpensively with large margins and that becomes less expensive to produce as volume rises. As an example, she mentioned the home blood sample kits sold by Spot on Science, winner of Wednesday night’s RISE fast pitch competition.
One possibility is to take technology that has been left behind in the U.S., say in healthcare or communications, and bring it to countries that haven’t arrived at that technology yet.
“We know that in getting the health care industry over this hump of automation and the proper degree of computerization there are a number of business opportunities,” Wilson said. “The opportunities are tremendous and so are the failures and so are the problems. There’s lots of competition. You can have an awesome software system for a medical practice that takes care of the billing and the patient records and the security and privacy issues but if you don’t properly scope the history and the competition, it’s not going to work. There’s an awful lot of information out there. The problem is to filter it so you can put it into a scaleable model and work it.”
It’s also key, when thinking about a global company, Byrne said, to thoroughly understand the culture of the country where you want to expand.
“What’s great in Austin, Texas may not fly in the middle of France in China in Africa. You have to spend time in that culture, really understanding the differences in the needs, how their day works. Here we start the day early and then we have happy hours.”
But when she was involved in a conference in the Middle East, she said, they tried to start at 8:30 or 9 a.m. but nobody showed up until 11 a.m.
Austen said, in working to create new companies within IBM, they had to work to find names for companies that didn’t signify something negative in the target country.
One participant asked about the risks of starting a business, knowing that marriage and children were in the offing and wondering how those would impact success. All the panelists agreed women shouldn’t let the idea of being partners or parents stop them from dreaming big. As CEO of her own company, Hazell said, she could bring her baby to work and nurse in the office.
“If the CEO is doing it, it’s company policy,” she said.
Women get daunted by the statistics, Hazell said.
“When we talk about odds,” she said, “women get fustigated with the statistics: Only so many businesses get over a million, only three percent of women entrepreneurs get funded….If we listen to statistics, we don’t do anything.”
“Statistically, you know who is most likely to kill you? Your significant other. But we still date! We have to pick the statistics to listen to and which ones not to. There are certain odds of not raising capital when you’re a woman. That doesn’t mean your particular odds are impacted. So pick a scaleable model, something that will work, and go date! He’s not likely to kill you.”

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
San Antonio’s medical technology industry can spur innovation and lead to new jobs in the local economy.
The Texas Technology Development Center (T3DC) hopes to encourage that by focusing on research, entrepreneurship and investment.
“Of all things, innovation is the single greatest economic driver in any economy,” said T3DC President Randall Goldsmith during the organization’s second quarterly luncheon. “What we bring here today is an example of what we are doing in San Antonio to grow our economy.”
The invitation-only luncheon attracted 200 people to get an update on the latest medical technology in San Antonio.
At the event, Cory Hallem, executive director with the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship, explained how his organization helps students get real entrepreneurship experience and even start their own companies.
“It’s really adding on to that education side through experiences, research, and support,” said Hallem. “How do you put a process in place that helps unlock the inner entrepreneur in someone who hasn’t done it before?”
The center helps students unlock their potential in a number of ways. They have a Technology Entrepreneur Boot Camp twice a year that teaches students how to start a tech company in a single day. CITE also holds the biannual $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition – the largest undergraduate competition in the country. Additionally, the center has a Graduate Certificate in Technology Entrepreneurship and Management program for students involved in research. The program trains Ph.D. students how to launch a tech company in concurrence with their technology research. UTSA actively pairs students who wish to produce a viable product prototype with faculty and mentors that can help them accomplish their goals.
According to Hallem, UTSA now has over 100 active companies created by students and faculty. In the last three years, UTSA student startups have raised of $1 million in startup funding. One of the student companies has even been offered a tryout for the ABC show Shark Tank.
The second presenter, Lapara Medical, was born in the CITE program and won CITE’s $100,000 Student Technology Venture Competition last November. The startup is developing a laparoscopic cooling device to solve a problem present in kidney transplants and kidney tumor removal – called a nephrectomy.
“This problem stems from partial nephrectomies, where they go in and remove the tumor while leaving the rest of the kidney functioning,” said CEO Duncan Hughes. “They have to clamp the artery to that kidney. Doing so cuts off oxygen flow to that kidney and effectively gives the surgeon 30 minutes to perform the surgery.”
After 30 minutes, the kidney starts to die due to lack of blood flow. If the surgery cannot be completed in this time – and 75 percent of such surgeries cannot – the surgeon must cut the patient open and actually place ice packs around the kidney to keep it alive.
Lapara Medical is developing a laparoscopic cooling system that can be inserted into the body through four small incisions. The device will cool the entire kidney to exactly 15 degrees Celsius, which guarantees the surgeon up to two hours and 30 minutes to complete the surgery without needing to open up the patient. This approach reduces the risk of infection and complications, and greatly reduces a patient’s pain and required hospital stay after the operation.
“We are able to go in and actually change how a surgery is done and really bring change to this market,” said Hughes.
The startup’s cooling device will also be used for kidney transplants and can be adapted to other organs as well. The startup plans to turn their focus on liver surgeries and transplants in the near future.
Lapara Medical is seeking $270,000 in seed round funding to finish developing their prototype and entering into the first phases of testing. Hughes predicts the company will be worth around $300 million within five to seven years of operation.
The final presenter was San Antonio startup Cardiovate. Created by UTSA biomedical engineering Ph.D. graduate Jordan Kaufmann, Cardiovate has created an intravascular tissue regeneration stent graph for aneurism repair.
Aneurysms are an abnormal widening of a blood vessel due weaknesses in the vessel’s wall. If the blood vessel bursts, severe hemorrhage can occur. Aneurysms are often treated by a surgical procedure which inserts a stent graph inside the artery to reinforce the walls and prevents the blood vessel from ballooning. As the patient ages, these graphs move or leak – requiring the patient to have additional surgeries or causing the patient harm if not detected.
“No one wants to have as second surgery, so we looked at this as a problem we could address,” said CTO and President Jordan Kaufmann. “There are currently no tissue repairing stint graphs on the market. At this point, we will be the first one to enter.”
The new stint graph Cardiovate has developed is microscopically engineered to grow into the cells of the artery and create a lasting tissue that will not move or leak. Over time, the graft material is actually absorbed by the body, leaving only the sealing tissue in the reinforced artery. Because the tissue is flexible and adapts to changes in the body, patients should not need additional surgeries.
Kaufmann created Cardiovate with the support of UTSA College of Engineering Dean Mauli Agrawal, and UT Health Science Center Division Chief Steven Bailey. Cardiovate won last year’s University of Texas Horizon Fund Student Investment Competition which came with a seed funding check for $50,000. Agrawal and Bailey have joined Coffman as founders and contributed another $10,000 to the startup.
Cardiovate is currently looking to raise $700,000 for their seed stage of funding and has recently moved to the UTSA incubator for more lab work. The startup plans to ultimately merge with or be acquired by leading competitors Medtronic or Cook Medical.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Spot On Sciences, a company that makes a device that enables patients to collect and store blood samples wherever they are, was the hands-down winner of the RISE Fast Pitch competition at the Belmont Hotel Wednesday night.
Founder Dr. Jeanette Hill who has a PhD in organic chemistry and worked for years in the pharmaceutical industry, told the packed audience that 80 percent of healthcare decisions are based on diagnostic tests. But it’s very difficult for homebound, rural and economically disadvantaged people to get to labs where they can get blood drawn. But with Spot on Sciences’ unique flower-shaped form to collect the blood, it dries much faster than traditional sample and can remain stable at room temperature for years. A QR code at the back is used to identify patient information.
Spot on Sciences received the $3,000 cash prize—tripled from 2012’s prize—a Dell Ultrabook laptop and American Airlines points worth three round trips. The company also won 2,000 extra points because it was the audience’s favorite as well.
The next favorite was Yard Bar, a combination dog-park/restaurant venue where dog owners can bring their dogs, relax in a comfortable atmosphere and order food and drinks while Yard Bar staffers keep the canine peace and scoop the poop. Yard Bar would charge $150 for an annual membership or $3 a day.
Other contestants included:
Brobe: A garment designed for women who have had mastectomies, but which can be used after any kind of surgery—including breast augmentation. The garment has pockets in the breasts for ice packs, allows for medical drainage tubes and otherwise accommodates surgical patients.
Eye in the Sky: A marketplace for musicians to sell their work, find gigs and and create events without going through record companies.
Foxy Soft: An interactive online game mixing traditional gaming activities such as fighting battles, going on adventures and building and decorating homes with sex.
Itography: A company that lets retailers gamify their online and mobile ads for greater effectiveness and social sharing, rewarding players with prizes from the retailer.
Gellify: A marketplace that wants to be the Yelp, Craigslist and Angie’s list where party and event planners and producers can find venues, food, photographers, musicians and more.
Purse and Clutch: A company that purchases and resells purses made by impoverished people in developing nations for lower prices than many fair trade shops.
ReQwip: An online marketplace for used sporting equipment that provides a resource both for consumers and resale retailers to display goods online.
RideScout: A company that aggregates information about public transportation, ride share opportunities and commercial transportation companies in one site, charging only the commercial vendors.
Each contestant got one minute to present and two minutes for questions from the judges.
Prior to the competition, Josh Baer from Capital Factory interviewed Jason Seats, managing director of TechStars Austin about that organization’s plans to open an entrepreneur class out of Capital Factory. The program is one of several, including TechStars classes in Boston, Boulder, Chicago, New York City, Seattle, Wash. and London, that provides $18,000 in funding to participants, with the option of a $100,000 convertible debt.
“I would love to recruit Austin companies but I like to work with half regional and local and half imported teams,” Seats said. “One of the goals and objectives is over time to become an importer of tech startups in the area.”