ChooseWhat guides entrepreneurs through the process of starting up a business.
And now the Austin Technology Incubator has announced a formal partnership with ChooseWhat.com.
The Austin-based company, founded in 2007 by Gaines Kilpatrick and Leo Welder, seeks to solve problems for small business owners such as how to get the best deal on a fax line or phone service provider or tax service. ChooseWhat.com has set up a special site tailored to the needs of ATI’s technology companies. My favorite piece of advice? How to choose a coffee maker.
Tag: Austin technology incubator (Page 2 of 2)
This year’s graduating class at the Austin Technology Incubator really encompasses a couple of years of companies, said Isaac Barchas, its director.
He skipped a graduation year last year, he said.
But the group of 21 companies have “tremendous diversity of focus from social media management to drug delivery to robotics controls.”
“What most of them do is hard and valuable,” Barchas said. “It’s not flashy and sexy.”
ATI focuses more on companies that serve business to business markets than consumers, Barchas said. ATI is the nonprofit unit of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Since its founding 23 years ago, ATI has assisted hundreds of companies and helped them raise more than $1 billion in funding.
“In general we work with technology companies rather than marketing companies that are enabled through technology,” Barchas said.
One such company is Calxeda, which Barry Evans founded at ATI. Calxeda makes high-performance low power semiconductors that power Hewlett Packard’s servers used in large data centers.
“Creating something out of nothing, that’s the audacious idea of the entrepreneur,” said Evans during his graduation keynote address.
In a little office by himself in 2008, Evans re-worked his business plan “a thousand times.” His favorite time of the day was when he ran out of coffee and he would venture into the hallway to meet with other entrepreneurs. And at night, he would cruise the incubator looking for a better chair, he said.
“ATI helped me create something that was special,” Evans said. “And something that I think will be big.”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology agrees. It named Calxeda one of the 50 most innovative companies in the world. (Google, IBM and Facebook also made the list.) Venture Capitalists also see the company’s value. They’ve invested $48 million in Calxeda.
“I thought Calxeda would be big, but I didn’t know what that would look like,” Evans said.
While dreaming up big ideas is nice, “there’s power in the doing,” Evans said. “Big, when you find it, is awesome.”
Calxeda has a lot of potential, Evans said. But the company tries not to wallow in its success. Its mantra is “TSBW – This Shit Better Work,” which it ends every meeting with, Evans said.
“When you are running a marathon and you finish two miles, you don’t say wow this is great, you think I’ve still got 24 miles to go,” Evans said. He says his company is in “corporate puberty.”
ATI contributed greatly to Calxeda’s success by plugging Evans into that startup vibe and introducing him to startup veterans, Evans said. He told the other graduates to make it their personal mission to give back and make Austin a great place to start a business.
ATI also showed a short video highlighting some of its alumni’s successes like Big Foot Network’s sale to Qualcomm.
Ed Taylor, founder and CEO of Collective Technologies, gave a short talk about his experience with ATI as its first company. In 1989, Taylor read an article in the San Jose Mercury News about Austin trying to lasso tech firms through the formation of ATI. The article said the whole city was behind the project.
“That was so different than San Jose where everyone is trying to cut your throat everyday,” Taylor said.
He called up Laura Kilcrease, the ATI director, and flew to Austin. She met him wearing a black and white dress and took him around town in a red porsche to meet everyone from the Mayor to George Kozmetsky, founder of ATI. Taylor moved his company to Austin.
The first offices were depressing and run down in an old warehouse building at Metric Blvd. and Kramer Lane, Taylor said. When Taylor was trying to land a Lotus software contract with IBM, the team wanted to do a site visit. The place was nearly vacant and a mess. But Kilcrease called a local office supply store, which agreed to lend a warehouse worth of Herman Miller office chairs, desks and other furnishings. Taylor convinced some of his contractors to sit in the chairs and act like they worked there. Pencom landed the contract. Taylor took the company public in 1997. He has since started two other companies in Austin.
“I still very much feel a sense of responsibility to pay back people along the way,” Taylor said. “Truly successful entrepreneurs always find the time to give something back.”
The Austin Technology Incubator, a non-profit organization affiliated with the IC2 Institute of the University of Texas, will host a graduation ceremony tonight for 21 of its member companies.
The event also celebrates the 23 years ATI has helped incubate central Texas companies. Founded by Dr. George Kozmetsky and first directed by Laura Kilcrease, ATI has worked with more than 200 status companies and helped them raise more than $1 billion in capital, according to this news release. Silicon Hills News will be there tonight to cover the event. So stay tuned for more information.
ATI graduates
View more presentations from Laura Lorek
In 2011, 13 companies moved to Austin with the assistance of the Austin Technology Incubator’s Landing Pad Program.
The companies included Amatra, BlackLocus, Convergence Wireless, Digital Harmony Games, Drivve, DXUp Close, SceneTap, Social Muse, Tactical Information Systems and V-Chain Solutions. Also, Ben Dyer, a serial entrepreneur, moved here from Atlanta with TechDrawl, and has since helped NightRaft and BeHome247 relocate here, according to this news release.
The Austin Technology Incubator’s Landing Pad Program helps companies relocate to Austin or establish headquarters here. It focuses on early-stage high technology companies in the biosciences, clean energy, wireless and IT industries. The nonprofit incubator is part of the IC2 Institute of the University of Texas at Austin.
“We are so proud of the business environment that exists in Austin, all the right ingredients for success, but via a supportive, community approach,” Robert Reeves, ATI’s director of IT and wireless, said in a news statement.
“ATI has always been focused on finding, welcoming, integrating and helping make successful new technology companies, whether from Austin or not,” Eve Richter, the city’s emerging technologies coordinator, said in a news statement. “Over the past few years, the Landing Pad concept has brought two dozen companies to town, and we are so thrilled ATI has really taken the program up a notch, formalizing it in 2011. The City of Austin is proud to support ATI in all efforts, including the Landing Pad Program.”
So many central Texas start-ups have taken off recently and some of them may need a boost to get to the next level.
This list of Austin and San Antonio incubators and accelerators help companies with a leg up in the marketplace.
Some of them have rigorous application and screening processes. Check them out to find the one that’s right for your venture.
Tech Ranch is a for-profit incubator founded in 2008 by Kevin Koym and Jonas Lamis. It offers co-working space for start-ups, consulting services and specialized programs to help entrepreneurs launch their ventures. Its flagship programs are Camp Fires, which are informal gatherings on Friday, Venture Forth, an 8-week program, and Pioneer Program, a weekly meeting coupled with monthly rent for office space.
Kevin Koym Press Kit
View more documents from Shennandoah Diaz
Capital Factory, founded in 2009 by Joshua Baer and Bryan Menell, is a seed-stage technology accelerator for startups. It runs a 10 week program that begins in May and runs through August. It ends with a Demo Day in September in which the companies pitch to potential investors, media and others.
TechStars Cloud is the newest accelerator for high-tech startups in the Silicon Hills area. It’s based at the Geekdom in downtown San Antonio. The inaugural class of TechStar Cloud companies kicks off in January. Each company receives $18,000 and access to another $100,000 loan. The 12-week program ends with a Demo Day.
Austin Technology Incubator, founded in 1989, has helped more than 200 companies. It’s part of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas.
Texas Venture Labs at the University of Texas helps accelerate startup companies in central Texas.
SXSW Accelerator 2012 – this is the fourth year for this competition which features 48 start-up companies pitching to an audience of investors and experienced entrepreneurs. The judges then choose 18 finalists who give a final pitch and then the winners are chosen.
One Semester Start-up at the University of Texas debuted this fall. The companies will pitch to investors and others on Thursday. Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise Bob Metcalfe, Joshua Baer of Capital Factory and John Butler, Director of H.K. Entrepreneurship Center at the University of Texas head up the program.
This Friday, Ash Maurya, founder of Spark59 and author of Running Lean, is putting on a one-day workshop at Tech Ranch Austin. The program, which costs $249, starts at 9 a.m.
Other programs designed to spur innovation among the entrepreneurial mindset include:
Cody Powell, "Matt Sullivan" and Q Beck of Famigo. (Matt was out sick)
By Susan Lahey
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
When people write about Austin start-up Famigo’s new tool, the Sandbox, they focus on the benefit: Parents can pass their mobile phones to children, touching the Sandbox icon, and restricting that kid to a safe world of age-appropriate games. In the Sandbox, he can never dial Mom’s boss, delete all her email or send a personal photo to her best client.
And really, that is a great benefit for an app. But that’s not what’s groundbreaking about Famigo. What sets this company apart is that, unlike many developers focused on doing cool stuff with smart phones, Famigo is committed to transforming mobile devices to something that works with families, the way families work. From its apps to its website, written in regular English, its focus is on the organic, dynamic, diverse, messy ecosystem known as a family.
“Most developers aren’t thinking about the individual,” said Bart Bohn, formerly lead advisor at the Austin Technology Incubator and currently co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Ravel Data. “Famigo is focused on a family solution, not a specific piece of content. That’s really unique. Q (Beck, Famigo cofounder) talks about the four quadrants: If you can engage both young and old, men and women, that’s a home run. That’s approaching a family as a family.”
Q Beck (and yes, it’s Q, like Harry S Truman was just S) learned about engaging families from the masters. A Texas native, he studied at Columbia University in New York and at Columbia College and worked in film for companies such as Nickelodeon and Dreamworks. He worked as a product development executive, choosing films to make as well as picking directors, casts and more.
He loves the family as an audience; loves how a movie like The Princess Bride or E.T. can draw family members into a powerful shared experience.
Then, one day, he was staring down at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef from a helicopter. His boss’s kids were sitting behind him, playing games on mobile devices, oblivious to their surroundings. And Beck had an epiphany. Just like great media can pull families together, sometimes media can isolate people. That’s when the seed of Famigo started to germinate.
Beck was a little disillusioned with the film industry: Too little opportunity to produce really original work; too many remakes and predictable plots. He wanted to instigate something powerful for families and push back against forces dividing them. He wasn’t sure how, but he could see that smart phones played a big role in people’s lives.
“These aren’t just phones,” he said, indicating his smart phone. They’re computers. For people born after 2000, they’re the first computer they’ll ever own. I knew I wanted to do something to make this emerging technology work with families.”
He pursued an MBA at the University of Texas. And in his second year, met cofounder Matt Sullivan who had just earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Both of them were interns at the Austin Technology Incubator. Beck and Sullivan knew what they wanted to do, but they needed a software developer to make it work: At a speed-dating event for start-ups at Capital Factory, an Austin-based tech startup accelerator, they met Cody Powell, a Dallas native who had been making “horrible websites” for his dad’s friends since he was 14.
They launched in 2009. At first Famigo created family friendly games for mobile devices, but then the founders saw that game apps were proliferating like kudzu. So they evolved to become the company that helps families find the best apps, the right apps for their kids’ age, the family culture. Famigo has programs that cull apps for various attributes. The good ones are then tested, evaluated and rated by actual human beings working for the company—often interns. Famigo keeps track of what games kids play and the more popular ones rise to the top of the parental review list. Famigo also sends parents a weekly email telling them what games—educational or otherwise—their kids are playing and recommending other games based on what kids already play.
Then, a few weeks ago, Famigo introduced the Sandbox.
As far as Keith Gaddis—father of three-year-old Francis is concerned—the Sandbox is a godsend. A software developer, Gaddis is usually in heavy demand from clients. So he couldn’t quite get why, suddenly, he just stopped getting calls and emails. Turns out Francis had gotten hold of the shiny phone with the colorful buttons and blocked everything. Gaddis was one of the 3,000 or so Beta customers for Sandbox and he chose an android phone partly because he could use Sandbox on it. (The Sandbox doesn’t currently work with iOS though Famigo’s other services do). As of about 10 days after launch, Gaddis is one of about 10,000 Sandbox parents.
“Francis will grab the phone, open it up– he knows what the icon looks like–so he just pushes the button because he knows that’s where his games are…..” Gaddis said. “Once he’s in there, he’s locked in (until a parent releases the phone with a special code).” Nor can kids click on ads on any of the apps. Pushing the ad icon takes them right back to the opening of the Sandbox.
“We supervise what he plays very carefully. This is big win for anybody who has kids who know how to use your phone.”
Most of the Famigo team is young and kidless. Cody Powell has one-year-old August. So the company has created a parent advisory board. Beck sees this as a plus. Back in the movie business, he said, if an executive’s six-year-old fell in love with dinosaurs, there was suddenly a directive from above to make lots of dinosaur movies. With Famigo, they’re not structuring the products and services for one family, but for all families. Families can decide what apps are appropriate or not for their own kids.
Famigo’s working on customizing the experience so each family member can have his or her own profile and set of games, creating a “virtual living room.” The important thing, Beck said, is creating a shared experience, the way Angry Birds has in many families, or Princess Bride did when he was a kid.
Some day, Bohn of Ravel Data said, Famigo’s focus on the customer may become a best practice in the industry, rather than a distinguishing characteristic: “They have that kind of brand potential.”
An explosion of demand for data on mobile devices has put a real strain on wireless network carriers and infrastructure.
Worldwide 5.7 billion people subscribe to a wireless device, said Roberto Padovani, executive vice president at Qualcomm.
“It’s truly the biggest platform in the history of mankind,” he said, during a Tuesday morning keynote address at the Texas Wireless Summit in downtown Austin.
The biggest growth comes from smart phones, Padovani said. The number of 3-G subscribers is expected to grow from 1.4 billion currently to 3.2 billion by 2015, he said.
The number of devices, applications and services and network capabilities continues to grow, Padovani said. Smart phone users will download an estimated 100 billion applications by 2015. Smart phone makers will sell 4 billion devices by 2015. And the days of the “all you can eat” data plans are going away.
“This is what is creating the perfect storm,” Padovani said.
The number of 3-G subscribers is expected to double every two years, he said. Today, 730 3-G networks exist in more than 200 countries. And more than 6,000 devices exist to connect to those networks, he said.
“3G brought connectivity to a point where we can consider it broadband,” Padovani said. “A lot of people will have Internet connectivity for the first time on a mobile device. The smart phone is becoming a dominant computing platform.”
Just this year, device makers launched more than 90 new smart phone models, Padovani said.
The growth in demand for data on mobile devices is coming from China, India, the Middle East and Africa, Padovani said. And sales of smart phones that cost less than $300 are growing at 40 percent annually, compared to 15 percent growth for smart phones that cost more than $300. And Google’s Android phone dominates the market with phones that cost less than $150, Padovani said.
But the growth in wireless devices is not just coming from phones but from everything from e-readers to blood glucose monitors to Mi-Fi devices and smart picture frames. And the wireless tablet market is projected to grow between 50 percent to 80 percent annually.
Data traffic growth doubled last year and is expected to grow ten to twelve times between 2010 and 2015.
“If you look at these numbers it’s just mind boggling,” Padovani said. “This is definitely challenging on the network side.”
Lots of opportunities for innovation exist for companies in the wireless industry, Padovani said.
Augmented reality and 3-D animated content on smart phones will put further constraints on the network, he said.
“The demands on the computing components of these devices is only going to get bigger,” Padovani said. “How do we deal with the spectrum crunch to support the explosion of data demands?”
The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates spectrum in the United States, is already exploring ways to free up more spectrum for the wireless industry, Padovani said.
Padovani was one of many speakers at the Texas Wireless Summit, which brings together companies, university researchers and venture capitalists. They gather to learn about the latest trends in the industry, said Kyle Cox with the Austin Technology Incubator, the event’s sponsor. About 200 people attended the day-long event at the AT&T Conference and Education Center. It’s the 10th annual Texas Wireless Summit and some companies exhibiting in the past have met funders at the event, Cox said. Austin-based companies showcasing their wares at this year’s event include Famigo Games, GameUp, Evernote, Digby and Digital Harmony Games.
Want to win at the Clean Energy Venture Summit or the South Central Cleantech Open in Austin?
It helps to have a solution.
Omni Water Solutions won the Clean Energy Venture Summit. The Austin Technology Incubator, Austin Energy and Pecan Street Consortium sponsored the event.
Omni Water Solutions pitched its portable water treatment system in front of a panel of judges from the venture capital industry. It competed against nine other companies pitching everything from a cell phone home monitor to a battery recycling company.
The Austin-based company uses “patent-pending Octozone technology” to purify contaminated water. The portable systems can be used during natural disasters or deployed to third world countries with poor water supplies.
Three other companies with “solutions” in their names also won during the South Texas Cleantech Open: CycleWood Solutions won first place, Silcon Solar Solutions took second place followed by Smart Office Energy Solutions.