Tag: Geekdom (Page 3 of 10)

We Walk and Others Pitch at San Antonio New Tech

March 5, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Estrella Hernandez presenting We Walk at San Antonio New Tech

At Alamo Heights Junior School, Estrella Hernandez, 13, came up with an idea to get students moving.

She learned in sixth grade health class about the obesity epidemic in San Antonio and the city’s growing population of people afflicted with diabetes, a chronic disease associated with being overweight.

Hernandez said she wanted to create a solution to encourage kids to get fit. Her brainchild is We Walk, a mobile phone app designed to track kids movement like a pedometer. It also provides them with rewards for completing quests, or walks.

Hernandez presented her startup at San Antonio New Tech Tuesday night at Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space downtown aimed at fostering more startups. She was one of four people to present at the event, which takes place every month to showcase the city’s latest technology ventures.

We Walk’s program includes different types of quests, or walks including personalized quests as well as historic quests in which kids can earn double points for answering questions at the end of the walk. It also includes City Quests that tie into city-sponsored events like Siclovia, an event in which the streets are closed to encourage biking, walking and other activities.

We Walk has received initial funding from the 80/20 Foundation and SA2020. Sweb Apps in San Antonio is developing We Walk’s app, which Hernandez hopes to launch at Siclovia in two weeks.

A similar program on the market already is MapMyWalk, a mobile phone app that tracks walks, developed by MapMyFitness, an Austin-based startup recently acquired for $150 million by Under Armour. The company also makes MapMyRun an MapMyRide.

Hernandez also worked on We Walk’s website during the summer at VentureLab’s program for girls. She also worked closely with Geekdom mentors during the past two years to develop her idea. She’s now an ambassador with the Mayor’s Fitness Council.

David Barrick, co-founder of We-Walk presenting at San Antonio New Tech

David Barrick, co-founder of LightPhile presenting at San Antonio New Tech

David Barrick, the co-founder of LightPhile, focused on the stage lighting industry, also presented his hardware and software startup.

LightPhile has created a software interface for the iPad that communicates with its custom hardware device to control the entire concert lighting experience. The total cost is $500 for the iPad and $500 for hardware device. Customers can program lighting sequences into the software and then simply hit play to control the lights throughout a concert or presentation.
“It’s not complex at all,” Barrick said.

Barrick, a UTSA Electrical Engineering sophomore, has three years iOS development experience and his co-founder Logan Butler, who attends Baylor University, has experience in the lighting industry.

Also at San Antonio New Tech, Ryan Beltran, founder of Elequa, a water purification startup, also gave some information about Clean Tech Open, an accelerator and competition. He participated in the program last summer and he’s encouraging more San Antonio startups to apply to be part of it.

Lastly, one of the founders of Crmsyn pitched a customer relationship management software startup.

Geekdom Fund Invests in Three San Antonio Startups

March 2, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder Silicon Hills News

Photo courtesy of Geekdom.

Three new startups in San Antonio have received $25,000 cash investments each from the Geekdom Fund.

The two-year-old fund aims to jumpstart the city’s startup community by providing seed-stage funding to tech startups.

In February, the Geekdom Fund made investments in Nebulab Technologies and Lightphile. Last November, the fund invested in Remote Garage. All of the startups are based at Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space in downtown San Antonio.

The fund “seeks to enable these companies to build businesses around a problem worth solving and a market large enough for high growth potential with a team that can build a profitable business,” according to a statement from Cole Wollak with the fund. “The Geekdom Fund will make investments for which the expected social, economic and cultural impact from the investment being made will have a net positive gain on the broader startup community of San Antonio.”

But the fund aims to make a profit for its investors.

“We won’t invest in a company that we believe won’t make a return for the fund,” Wollak said. “Things we look at when making decisions are like any fund or accelerator: idea, market, team, stage and progress. We’ve said no to people for not having a complete team, we’ve said no to people for lack of execution, too small of a market, the whole gamut.”

Guillermo Vela, co-founder of Nebulab Technologies, got turned down before Nebulab received an investment. The idea behind the company spun out of a 3-Day Startup program in San Antonio and wasn’t developed enough initially, he said. But now, the founders have worked out the kinks and they presented a more polished pitch.

Five members make up the team: Vela, Arturo Covarrubias, Diego Castro, Simon Barnett and Jonathan Loo.

Nebulab Technologies is developing a web app for scientists to organize their data in a visual way, he said. It combines the visual appeal of PowerPoint with the functionality of Microsoft One Notes with the ability to drag and drop data files onto a blank canvas, Vela said. It’s cloud-based, collaborative and real time, he said. The product will help scientists share and communicate their scientific data and to add greater transparency to the process, he said.

“Our goal is really to facilitate the way scientists store and share information,” Vela said.

The Geekdom funding will help to evolve its product, Vela said.

“This vast majority is going to go to pay the lead developer a salary and to incorporate as well,” he said.

Previously, Vela worked as a brain cancer research at John Hopkins University.

Lightphile plans to use its funding to develop its software as well as with the prototyping cost of its hardware, said David Barrick, co-founder.

The company has made a $500 hardware device controlled by an iPad that acts as a lighting controller at concerts, replacing other hardware systems that costs thousands more, Barrick said.

His co-founder is Logan Butler and together the two have designed many lighting sets. They have 10 years of industry experience.

“We’ve never been satisfied with the lighting control experience,” he said.

So they created a solution. Now they’ve got a working prototype that they’ve tested and they’re working to create the final product, which will be Wi-Fi based.

“Our primary market is churches at the start,” Barrick said.

Jaakko Piipponen, co-founder of Remote Garage, received the Geekdom Fund investment late last year.

Remote Garage is a storage on demand service. It provides customers with a storage container and then its drivers pick up customers’ belongings and stores them and delivers them back whenever needed. The company charges by the cubic foot, and users can see their storage inventory online.

“Our typical customer is an apartment dweller with limited space and limited time, who just wants that extra space without the hassle,” he said.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Tips on Branding for Startups

February 20, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

What’s in a brand?

Billions of dollars, said Bill Schley, branding expert and co-founder of BrandTeamSix.

Rackspace’s brand “Fanatical Support” is worth one billion dollars per word, Schley said.

“They said we will answer the phone in one ring at midnight on Christmas Eve,” Schley said. And they did. And Rackspace became known in the IT industry for providing outstanding customer support, he said.

Schley spoke Thursday afternoon at Geekdom, a downtown San Antonio coworking and technology incubator, to a roomful of startup entrepreneurs and others on “Branding for Startups.”

Schley recently wrote the book “The Unstoppables” with a foreword from Graham Weston, founder of Rackspace. The book details the plight of entrepreneurs and dispels myths and shares the keys to success. Schley also wrote “The Micro-Script Rules” and “Why Johnny Can’t Brand.”

Schley spoke for an hour on branding and NowCastSA did this video of his talk.

But for those who don’t have an hour, here’s his top 12 tips.

1. The fact is your brand isn’t optional. Branding is something we do automatically, Schley said. It’s something we do unconsciously and for primitive reasons. Either you control your brand or your customers and competitors are going to brand for you. “You’re not going to like the tag line.”

2. What’s the one thing that sets you apart and sticks in your mind? That’s your brand.

3. You need to align everything you do with that idea so you perform the way you promise.

4. Find a category to be number one in. “People remember one big thing” Schley said. “They don’t remember 100 things.”

5. Create a Microscript – which tells a brand’s story in six words or less. That script can powerfully convey your brand in one idea. Examples include Rackspace’s “Fanatical Support.” M&Ms “melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”

6. Your brand needs to be superlative, important, believable, memorable and ownable.

7. You’ve got to be the best in what you do. Your brand has to be a must have and not a need to have, Schley said.

8. The No. 1 Rule is “Specific is Terrific.” For example, Rolex is the luxury watch, ESPN is the sports channel, Volvos are safe cars and Wheaties is the breakfast of champions. Even Superman has a microscript, Schley said. He stands for truth, justice and the American way.

9. When number one is already taken shift your brand to the left or to the right. For example, Subaru branded itself as SUV Wagons. People create this category by combining two categories, Schley said. The Patagonia Tooth Fish became Chilean Sea Bass and sold a lot more fish, he said.

10. You don’t have to be General Electric or Starbucks to do this, Schley said. For example, a massage business run by a Native American branded her shop as Native Palm and become known for that.

11. Branding is not optional. What this really comes down to is the ability to focus. The reason people can’t brand is for a very simple reason: it’s fear. “The narrower your focus, the wider and broader your brand goes.”

12. Your job is not to entertain. Your job is to put them in motion. Once you’ve got their attention, you’ve got to sell them something.

San Antonio MX Challenge Seeks to Solve Problems and Realize Dreams

January 24, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

The XPRIZE Foundation organized a four-day adventure trip to visit tech companies in California last February.
XPRIZE Founder Dr. Peter Diamandis wanted to showcase space and ocean innovation to a select group of entrepreneurs.
Part of the event involved a Zero G flight in which the passengers float about weightless for several minutes. That’s where software entrepreneur Christian Cotichini literally crashed into Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, during the flight.
When the flight ended, Cotichini, Diamandis and Weston met and dreamed up the idea for HeroX, a smaller, community-oriented version of the XPRIZE, which seeks to solve the world’s big challenges by creating and managing large-scale incentivized prizes focused on learning, exploration, energy & environment, global development and life sciences.
On Thursday night at an invitation-only event on the fourth floor of the Rio Plaza on the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio, the first HeroX challenge officially launched. It’s called the San Antonio MX Challenge, a two-year $500,000 prize to foster entrepreneurship between San Antonio and Mexico.

The team behind the San Antonio MX Challenge: Tito Salas, Emily Fowler, Christian Cotichini, Lorenzo Gomez and Graham Weston

“XPRIZE was a grand idea for very lofty things at an ivory tower aspiration level,” Weston said. “What I love about HeroX is it takes what we learned about offering big grand prizes and it brings it down to a city-level. We are not going to Washington, D.C. to change the world; we can change it in our city. The most important unit of economic action is the city. The HeroX prize is about bringing that innovation and technology to the city level.”
San Antonio has the opportunity to be the gateway to America for the entrepreneurs in Mexico and the San Antonio MX Challenge will serve as that catalyst to make it happen, Weston said.
San Antonio has so much of the infrastructure to offer entrepreneurs in the startup world, Weston said.
“Mexican entrepreneurs can come to America to launch their products and then go back to Mexico to build their companies,” Weston said.
San Antonio is the first city to launch a HeroX prize, but soon it will be everywhere, Weston said.
“HeroX is going to be in every city around the world from London to Lubbock,” he said.
HeroX democratizes innovation, Cotichini said, co-founder and CEO of HeroX. He sold his software company, Make Technologies, based in Vancouver, to Dell in 2011. He soon became immersed in studying the world’s problems. It almost made him become depressed until he read Diamandis’ book Abundance, which paints an optimistic view of the future. Cotichini then knew he wanted to be part of making that vision become a reality.
“This is the very first HeroX branded challenge,” Cotichini said. “The Internet is creating new models that allow us to be far more powerful as a species. These new models are going to change the world.”
Open innovation can change cities and companies. It’s a tool for anybody who needs innovation, he said.
HeroX is an online crowdsourcing platform that allows people to realize visions and live out dreams, said Emily Fowler, co-founder and vice president of possibilities for HeroX.
HeroX plans to launch hundreds of competitions worldwide.
Whereas the XPRIZE challenges offer prizes from $10 million to $30 million and last from five to eight years, the HeroX challenges offer prizes of $10,000 to millions and last from six months to a few years, Fowler said. Anyone can take on a challenge or offer one up, she said.
“We’re stimulating a new generation of entrepreneurs and it’s really interesting,” Cotichini said. “The millennial generation really gets the power of crowdsourcing and collaboration.”
One of those is Tito Salas, project manager of San Antonio MX Prize. He was born in Northern Mexico and graduated from the University of Texas with a double major in marketing and business management.
“The San Antonio MX Challenge wants to make it easy for Mexican entrepreneurs to move to San Antonio to launch their business,” Salas said. His role is to help provide Mexican entrepreneurs with Visas, mentors, business services, access to capital and more.
“We’re also looking to get together all of the entrepreneurs from Mexico in San Antonio and bring them to Geekdom to make something bigger,” Salas said.

Walter Teele, co-founder of ParLevel Systems .

Walter Teele and Luis Pablo Gonzalez are both from Mexico. They came to the U.S. to go to college. They graduated recently and launched ParLevel Systems, a company that connects vending machines to the Internet to monitor them remotely. ParLevel last year graduated from the Techstars incubator program. Teele and Gonzalez are building their company at Geekdom.
Teele sees the San Antonio MX Challenge as a way to fill a need that exists in helping Mexican startups.
“I think it’s going to give entrepreneurs in Mexico awareness that there are people here that want to support them and help them realize their dreams,” Teele said. “We don’t have a startup culture in Mexico. You have it here.”
Mexican entrepreneurs can benefit from the infrastructure that already exists in San Antonio, Teele said.
So far three people have expressed interest in registering for the San Antonio MX Challenge, said Lorenzo Gomez, director of Geekdom. The organization provides the criteria a company needs to meet to win the prize, but they don’t provide any seed stage capital or pre-determined solutions, Gomez said. Early registration ends on Aug. 25 and final registration is Jan. 14, 2015.
“The beauty of the prize models is it’s always the person that didn’t know they could win it that wins it,” Gomez said. “It’s probably going to be someone you never thought or maybe it’s someone that was very obvious. That’s one of the exciting parts of the prize is to see who steps up to solve it. It might just be one person with a magic Rolodex that makes it happen.“

Social Media Tips and Tools for Startups

January 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Christie St. Martin, community manager and digital media specialist for HeroX

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Geekdom, the collaborative co-working space in downtown San Antonio, kicked off a new speakers event Thursday called The Master’s Series.
“Our goal is to pummel you with amazing information,” said Lorenzo Gomez, director of Geekdom.
The first speaker, Christie St. Martin talked about social media tips and advice for startup companies.
Martin, formerly social media manager for JPMorgan Chase and L’Oreal, currently serves as community development and digital strategy manager for HeroX and is from Toronto. She’s helping to kick off HeroX’s first local prize San Antonio Mx Challenge.
It’s really important companies manage their social media presence online, St. Martin said. The job is one of the most important for companies and it should not be regulated to the social media savvy intern, she said. Tools like Hootsuite, social media management software, can help.
In the past, customers with a complaint would call or write a company, but today’s consumers often go directly to complain on Twitter or Facebook, she said.
“Real time interaction is 100 percent where you need to focus your time,” St. Martin said.
In her PowerPoint presentation, peppered with pictures of LOL Cats and dogs, St. Martin advised companies to be honest, be you, don’t panic and listen to customers.
“The stuff that is super important is you being a real human,” she said.
She advised companies to brainstorm all of the frequently asked questions from customers and to put them into a document. She tells them to use that document as a guidepost in answering queries online. But don’t just regurgitate the stock answers, she said. Personalize each answer and tailor it to the particular customer, she said.
St. Martin also advised startups to cultivate their influencers, which she defined as “someone who is active online and followed by your target audience.” These people can drive traffic to your website and ignite interest around your brand. She listed five common types of influencers:
1. The Networker (Social butterfly)
2. The Opinion Leader (Thought leader)
3. The Discoverer (Trendsetter)
4. The Sharer (Reporter)
5. The User (Everyday customer)
St. Martin also advised companies to post regularly on all of their social media channels. But she advised quality over quantity of posts. The social media checklist St. Martin shared with the audience is listed below. She also gave away copies of Rohit Bhargava’s book: likeonomics: the unexpected truth behind earning trust, influencing behavior and inspiring action.

NowCastSA livestreamed the presentation, which is embedded below.

Watch live streaming video from nowcastsa at livestream.com

San Antonio MX Prize Officially Launches

January 18, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The San Antonio MX Challenge has officially kicked off.
Silicon Hills News broke the story about the first local X-Prize challenge late last year when some members of the HeroX organization briefed the technology community about the contest at Geekdom.
Now the contest has officially launched at Geekdom, a collaborative co-working space in downtown San Antonio that serves as the catalyst for the local technology startup community.
The San Antonio MX Challenge seeks to foster greater collaboration between Mexico and San Antonio in the technology industry.
The prize is worth $500,000 and will be awarded to the individual, team or organization that creates a model to assist Mexican tech companies with opening offices in San Antonio.
“This challenge will be the catalyst between the San Antonio startup ecosystem and Mexican Entrepreneurs wishing to expand into the US,” Graham Weston, Co-founder & Chairman of Rackspace Hosting said in a news release. “We are already famous for this in San Antonio. Now we are going to show the rest of the world.”
The San Antonio Mx Challenge is the first to be launched through HeroX, a spinoff of XPRIZE, the world leader in incentivized prize competitions.
“I am proud to see the first competition launched on HeroX. It has been my dream for years to offer a platform that allows anyone to use incentive competitions to solve problems and drive innovation,” Dr. Peter Diamandis, Chairman & CEO of XPRIZE and Co-founder & Board Member of HeroX, said in a news release. “By bringing in solutions from anywhere, I’m convinced that competitions like this one will have a bright future both for social issues and for driving innovation faster than we can imagine.”
The criteria for winning the prize is listed on the San Antonio MX website. The challenge runs for 26 months and with early registration ending on Aug. 25th and final registration ending on Jan. 14, 2015.
A San Antonio MX Summit will also be held on Sept. 16, 2014.
The final winner will be announced on May 4, 2016.

Geekdom Gets a Hip Makeover at its New Digs in the Historic Rand Building

December 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

A mock-up of the new open community space at Geekdom, once it moves into the historic Rand building. Courtesy of Alamo Architects

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Converting a historic building into a modern-day tech coworking space to incubate hot new startups in downtown San Antonio isn’t an easy task.
But Irby Hightower of Alamo Architects and his team have managed to do just that. They took a former bank building and are transforming the seventh floor into a modern day workplace for geeks.
It’s a work in progress right now. In fact, it’s a hard-hat construction zone. But once finished, the new Geekdom at the Rand will have bike racks, showers, lockers, changing rooms, a nap room and transparent glass sliding doors on the offices to give the entire floor a wide-open feel.

Irby Hightower with Alamo Architects shows off the new design for Geekdom at the Rand building.

“The center offices open up from a smaller office to a larger office as a startup grows,” said Hightower. He presented drawings of the new space at a town hall meeting for members at Geekdom on Wednesday night.
The 1,200 square foot space will have 20 offices available for tech startups. Desks will rent for $200 a month. Community membership will remain at $50 a month. At the new site, the community space is larger and snakes throughout the floor.
An open kitchen also encourages interaction among the members. The entire place is built to encourage community collaboration.
The space also includes a large conference room and smaller conference rooms.
“The whole place really is meant to be one big community work environment,” Hightower said.
The new Geekdom is a little grungier than the 11th floor of the Weston Centre, current home of the site and a former law office.

A packed house turned out for the town hall meeting at Geekdom to unveil the new design for the site at the Rand building.

“We think that’s the right approach,” Hightower said. “The ceilings will have more character…It’s the kind of space you can experiment in and have more fun in.”
The space will also contain a lot of writeable surfaces and reliable high-speed Internet with lots of outlets for wired service as well as Wi-Fi.
The main floor of the building will also contain an events center with two Tricasters, portable live broadcasting studios, from NewTek for live streaming programming. The events center will also house a Ping-Pong table and other games.
The new Geekdom is expected to open on March 31st. It will feature the events center, the sixth floor for established tech companies and the seventh floor for new startups and community members.
In another 18 months, the entire Rand building will be vacated and will belong to Geekdom, said Lorenzo Gomez with Geekdom and the 80/20 Foundation.
They’ve talked about putting an electric sign on the roof of the building then with one letter that continues to flicker on and off, harkening back to the 1930s, when the building served as a department store.

Geekdom is a sponsor of SiliconHillsNews.com

TrueAbility’s IT Job Prediction Trends for 2014

December 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

TrueAbility Monday released its predictions for hiring trends for technology workers in 2014.
The San Antonio-based startup, founded in 2012, has analyzed data on more than 5,000 IT workers in the past year. It makes a cloud-based platform that evaluates the technical aptitude of IT employees by testing their skills online for job openings.

Team photo of TrueAbility, courtesy of the company.

TrueAbility, based at Geekdom, foresees an increase in demand for workers with configuration management skills and cloud computing skills.
In addition, companies will focus more on hiring the right people, than buying the right hardware, according to TrueAbility.
Workers who can demonstrate their skills and knowledge will trump those who might have years of experience.
For more predictions, visit TrueAbility’s blog.

Introducing AbilityScreen by TrueAbility from TrueAbility on Vimeo.

TrueAbility is an advertiser with SiliconHillsNews.com

Startup Grind Features Graham Weston of Rackspace

November 27, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

Graham Weston, co-founder and chairman of Rackspace Hosting, grew up in the greater San Antonio area.
At his first job, he worked in his dad’s cookie plant balancing the books from delivery drivers and occasionally packaging cookies. His dad owned Grandma’s Cookies and later sold the company to Frito Lay.
Weston’s first venture into entrepreneurship in grade school involved selling organic pork from his family’s ranch through advertisements proclaiming “Go Hog Wild” in the local newspaper. He also ran a photography business in high school.
In college, he would drive back and forth from Texas A&M in his VW Diesel Rabbit listening to get rich quick tapes in his cassette player.
His junior year at Texas A&M, Weston launched a successful real estate venture while going through college. He successfully protested his family’s property tax appraisal and then figured that there might be a business doing that for others. He founded a company that protested commercial property taxes.
Because of his property tax business, Weston was well positioned to see opportunities in real estate during the financial crisis of the late 1980s.
After school, Weston ended up buying one of the tallest buildings in downtown San Antonio, later named the Weston Centre at the age of 27. The building had fallen into foreclosure and then bankruptcy during the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s. He wanted to buy the KCI Tower, but wasn’t able to do it. Later the former National Bank of Commerce building came open. It was way more than Weston wanted to spend. But he raised more money and then bid against real estate mogul Sam Zell and won.
The Weston Centre later contained one of the first data centers for Rackspace. It housed some of the first websites on the Internet for YouTube and HotorNot and other Internet pioneers.
Rackspace, now a multi-billion dollar company, had a humble beginning.
Weston and his partner, Morris Miller, met three college students who bid to wire the Weston Centre with high-speed Internet access. The students didn’t get the contract, but Weston and Miller liked them. They asked them what else they were working on. That’s when Pat Condon, Dirk Elmendorf and Richard Yoo told them about their hosting business, which would later come to be known as Rackspace.
Weston recounted how they invested $1 million and in less than a year another company wanted to buy the business for $20 million. That deal fell through. But they knew they had a solid business, which was making money every month. They grew Rackspace by adding more servers and data centers and in 2001 they planned to take the company public, but the dot com bust occurred. They went through a few tough years, but they were able to persevere and succeed where many failed largely through Rackspace’s focus on providing “fanatical” customer support.
In 2008, Rackspace went public at $12 a share. Its stock closed Wednesday at $37 a share. The company has a market capitalization of more than $5 billion.
Today, Rackspace has more than 5,000 employees worldwide and is San Antonio’s largest high-tech employer with close to 3,000 employees in Central Texas. Rackspace also has an Austin office.

New Rules, New Tools for Startups and Tech Companies

November 26, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Duane La Bom with the Open Cloud Academy

The demand for high tech workers outstrips the supply.
So Rackspace Hosting came up with an innovative solution. The San Antonio-based company launched the Open Cloud Academy last year to put people through a rigorous training program that equips them to do jobs as network systems administrators and other technical positions.
“I can get you job ready in a matter of two to three months,” said Duane La Bom, director of training at Rackspace and director at the Open Cloud Academy.
La Bom spoke on a panel at FreeFlow Research’s New Rules, New Tools San Antonio event Monday night at Geekdom. The panel focused on new training opportunities to match skilled workers with jobs. It also touched on new ways to raise money for startups through equity-based crowdfunding.

Peter French, founder of FreeFlow Research

Peter French, founder of FreeFlow Research, also announced his startup has merged with John Hill’s Technology Connexus Association, a nonprofit technology research organization. FreeFlow Research will continue to be based at Geekdom and will also sponsor more events in coming months, French said.
The other panelists included Andres Traslavina with MyEdu, an Austin-based startup, Luis Martinez with Trinity University, Joy Schoffler with Leverage PR and CF50 and Nathan Roach with Greenhouse.
Originally, Rackspace planned to hire about a third of the graduates from the Open Cloud Academy. But to date, it has hired 68 percent of the graduates, La Bom said. The other 30 percent have found jobs with other companies, he said.
The Open Cloud Academy also focuses on helping military veterans find jobs in the commercial world and it adds some diversity to the typical candidates Rackspace hires for IT jobs, La Bom said.
“We wanted to get more females and more minorities into IT. The Open Cloud Academy was a way to do that,” he said.
The Open Cloud Academy classes costs between $3,500 and $4,000 and lasts between eight to ten weeks. Typically, Rackspace paid $12,000 to $15,000 to a recruiter for each technical person it hired. Now it can avoid those costs by training its own IT workers, La Bom said.
Traslavina with MyEdu said the startup helps students plan their careers by using academic tools and simple apps to make their lives easier. MyEdu can also unveil their innate talent and help them visually set up a portfolio of their projects, work experiences and academic credentials, he said.
“We focus on helping recruiters hire potential and not focus on the traditional hiring credentials,” he said. .

New Rules, New Tools San Antonio panel

Trinity University’s focus is on undergraduate education and its strength is in equipping students with critical thinking skills, said Martinez with Trinity.
“We match students with opportunities for real world experience plus the community here in San Antonio,” Martinez said.
San Antonio’s entrepreneurial community is like Boston in the 1980s, Martinez said. Lots of entrepreneurial ventures and innovate growth is happening in San Antonio right now, he said.
Rackspace has also partnered with high school programs to recruit younger students to pursue careers in Information Technology jobs, La Bom said.
And the Open Cloud Academy does not yet have specific funding for veterans yet, but Project Quest and Workforce Solutions Alamo both provide scholarships to attend the programs.
Project Quest covers 50 percent of the tuition costs for students who qualify and also reimburses them up to two months rent and provides money for utilities and childcare costs too.
The Workforce Solutions Alamo provides funding through a Federal fund.
To date, 20 students have received a full scholarship to attend the Open Cloud Academy under that program and another 45 received funding through Project Quest, La Bom said.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News