Tag: Geekdom (Page 4 of 10)

Five Startups Pitch at 3 Day Startup San Antonio

November 25, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Five startup teams pitched ideas at the latest 3 Day Startup San Antonio event last weekend.
Cristal Glangchai and the Venturelab team ran the event, which was the ninth 3DS San Antonio. Trinity University sponsored the event hosted at Geekdom.
Thirty-five students participated in the 3 Day Startup. They went through all the phases of starting a company, including the idea phase, market validation and research, prototyping, and pitch preparation.
“The event has been really eye opening,” said UTSA Sophomore David Barrick. “It’s been very hard. We’ve been shut down a lot by the mentors, but there has been very good feedback and constructive criticism, especially for our group.”
Mentors for the event included Cole Wollak, Richard Ortega, Michael Girdley, Pat Condon, Kaoru Fujita, Niraj Kumar, Nick Honegger, and Cristal Glangchai. They worked with each team to refine ideas and perfect pitches right up to the final pitch Sunday night. After giving their final pitch, a panel of Judges including Rackspace founder Dirk Elmendorf questioned each team’s presenter. The other panelists included Sweb Development founder Magaly Chocano, UTSA Entrepreneurship professor Anita Leffel, Trinity University Entrepreneurship Professor Luis Martinez, and Pressable founder Vid Luther.

The following five startups presented:

Code Venture

Presented by Trinity freshman Kylie Moden, Code Ventures is creating an iPhone and iPad app that teaches kids how to code at an early age. The app takes a story book approach, and entering the correct coding syntax for each lesson will make the story characters talk or interact. The lessons are designed for kids ages 7 to 12 and will help them take the very first steps into the coding world. The demo shown was programmed to teach Java, but Moden says the app could be easily adapted to other languages.
Code Venture’s app will give away the first lesson – or chapter — for free, with additional lessons costing $4.99. They will target the app to parents that are already professionals in high tech jobs, such as those at Rackspace Hosting and USAA. The app will also be marketed to the homeschooling community, which Moden plans to reach by going to homeschooled conventions and conferences.
Code Ventures is looking for a mentor specializing in CS education and a graphic designer.

Seat Check

Seat Check is creating an app based solution to a rather disgusting real world problem: dirty toilets. Trinity accounting graduate Sergio Giralt opened the presentation with a video of a public bathroom user’s worst fear – having to clean the toilet seat.
His solution, Seat Check, will use both a disinfectant wipe dispenser and an app which functions like a prepaid card. Using the app’s “bump” feature, a user will be able to make a wipe dispense from a machine without having to touch anything else in the restroom. The wipe can then be used to sanitize the toilet and can be flushed after use. The app will cost users 25 cents to 50 cents a wipe, depending on the deal struck with the venue location.
Seat Check plans to market the solution first to Regal Cinemas, but also wants to target restaurants, gas stations, and arenas. The startup is looking for an initial investment of $15,000 and wants to hire someone who can help build the actual product dispenser. The investment will help them move their first prototypes into the movie theaters.

Fashion Connection

Fashion Connection’s business model is based on a simple assumption: Men hate to shop. UTSA sophomore Rohit Saxena’s solution is to connect male shoppers with fashion experts who can help them shop — either through a video consultation service or connecting the shopper to a fashion connoisseur to walk them through the store.
The online consultation would start at $19.95 for 30 minutes and the connoisseur service would start at $39.95 per shopping session – though the startup did not define how long it would last. It would differ from similar services offered in other stores in that the connoisseur could be available to shop anywhere. Potential connoisseurs would have to upload a fashion profile of themselves to be considered by the startup and would be paid as contractors. The service would start in San Antonio and would begin advertising primarily in local malls.
Fashion Connection is looking for graphic designers and web developers to help them put their service together.

BodyH4X

Presented by Rackspace developer and running enthusiast Gus Ireland, BodyH4X helps athletes know when they are overworking themselves by providing a way to track their body’s cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress related hormone that can make the body covert muscle to fat as a survival mechanism, hindering athletic performance.
Every person has a specific cortisol baseline, and BodyH4X helps runners establish that baseline by using a mouth swab litmus test. After testing their levels, users will record them in the BodyH4X app by utilizing their smartphone’s camera to input the swab color and record a level. Additionally, the app will import data from a runner’s fitness tracking device, such as FitBit, to compare those levels with the athlete’s performance data. Ultimately, this will help athletes determine when they are losing performance to high cortisol levels.
Ireland plans to market the product to runners, bikers, and swimmers. The app will have a free version that tracks cortisol levels along with the performance data and a paid version which will give athletes predictions and warnings about their workout routines. The paid version is $25 a month.

Local Care Package

Local Care Package was started to create a way for distant parents to order packages of San Antonio products for students attending colleges in the city. Presented by Graphic Designer and Marketer Leslie Tolbert, the startup has already begun to form partnerships with various businesses around town to create the packages. Parents can choose from several pre-assembled packages or can select from a list of products. According to Tolbert, it is both a good way for parents to show that they care and a way for local businesses to find new customers. The packages will range in price from $30 to $100.
Local Care Package hopes to partnership with local universities and campus organizations to get their service advertised on flyers and newsletters that go out to parents. They will also work to build a team of drivers in San Antonio. They have already received their first order from parents in Honduras, who they connected with while doing market research.
Of the many startup ideas pitched at the previous eight 3DS San Antonio events, seven companies have gone on to receive a combined total of $2.6 million in funding.
While most 3DS pitches will not result in successful companies, panelist and UTSA entrepreneurship professor Anita Leffel sees the events as critical to producing future entrepreneurs.
“It gives them self-confidence,” Leffel said. “That is what I like so much about this type of program, why we did it at UTSA and will now do it every semester. I’ve watched people blossom.”
Pressable founder and panelist Vid Luther sees 3 Day Startup as having an important link to the Geekdom ecosystem, as many of those first 3DS participants still pursue startups at Geekdom.
“You see entrepreneurs over here that, while their ideas may not be the ones that they are pursuing today, they were able to make networks and connections that got them to build and work on the things that they are currently working on,” Luther said. “I think long term it’s very hard to tell how successful this will be but short term it’s a very good networking thing that allows you to do more than just your résumé.”

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

SparkFun’s National Tour Teaches Kids the Basics of Programming

November 16, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

On Geekdom’s projector screen, a buffalo and crab were prepared to move around a purple race track. SparkFun’s Jeff Branson gave the students the final programming directions for moving their animated characters.
“We have to be able to rotate to drive the buffalo, or in your case the flying pancake or whatever you’ve created,” Branson said. “I have to use my slider to drive my buffalo.”
This wasn’t Branson’s first digital rodeo. The SparkFun National Tour has already visited 70 cities on the way to San Antonio while teaching kids about programming, soldering, and building circuits. The SparkFun tour is an educational outreach mission of the larger SparkFun Electronics Company — based in Boulder, Colo. — which makes components for a wide range of prototype electronic devices as well as components for students, teachers, and inventors.
The San Antonio stop, which taught programming, was organized and funded by San Antonio nonprofit SASTEMIC – an educational organization working to organize and grow the local Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, known as STEM, community. SASTEMIC signed up for the event a year ago when they contributed $1,500 to the SparkFun Kickstarter campaign. Geekdom hosted the event.
Thirty-five students, ages 8-14, attended the event. While using Scratch, a drag-and-drop programming software, the students learned to program if-then statements and manipulate variables so that their animated character, called a sprite, could maneuver around a race track while avoiding another sprite. By the end of the day the students would have a simple game, which even included programming sprite collisions and creating a scoring system.
“When the crab runs into the buffalo, what do we want to happen?,” SparkFun Curriculum Curator Derek Runberg asked. “How about we lose one coin? What do we do when we want to subtract coins?”
To control their game, the students used a PicoBoard– a SparkFun-created multifunctional circuit board that has buttons, sliders, and sensors and can be programmed to work with Scratch. The kids had to program their software to work with their hardware. In this case, they used the slider to steer their sprite and a button as an accelerator. Once their character moved, they collected coins around their racetrack.
While the kids might not have noticed, the exercise required substantial problem solving as well as some intermediate math.
“It’s a very concrete way of teaching variables to kids at this age. In their standard math class, they just see a variable as a letter. In this they get to see that value change over time depending on what they are doing on the board,” Runberg said. “It makes a really good mental connection between something abstract and reality.”
Programming a racing buffalo or pancake might be more fun than work, but it’s the first part of a much bigger picture for SparkFun. The ultimate goal, according to Education Outreach Coordinator Jeff Branson, is to speed up the educational process for the next generation of programming talent.
“We feel like it’s the key to the future of innovation in this country,” Branson said. “It takes about 15 years to produce a significantly advanced engineer or computer programmer who is able to work at the levels of technology that are common in our society. If we start kids really young in these drag-and drop programming environments, by the time they get to the [Coding] languages, the vocabulary and the techniques are something they’ve already got. So it makes it that much easier, they learn that much faster, and we can push them into advanced territory that much sooner. ”
Parents such as Jay Tkachuk agree. While Tkachuk is Vice President of Online Services for Security Service Federal Credit Union, he has never been code-savvy and wants his kids to have that ability.
“To put it mildly, people who know how to code have special powers. I want our kids to not only be savvy how to use technology but to understand it on a fundamental level,” Tkachuk said. “We are trying to move away from the paradigm of just being users. I want them to be able to create or, if necessary, fix things.”
Both of Tkachuk’s 8-year-old kids, Kai and Michael, participated in the event.
“We were doing Scratch the cat, and we were making racetracks so they could race each other and see who would win,” Kai said. “I put the cat on the buffalo and I drew a Mario horse.”
The SparkFun National Tour will continue on to Houston Sunday and then will end in Victoria on Monday.
SASTEMIC plans to continue creating STEM programs, starting with a high school outreach program in January led by STEM Director Mark Burnett. The nonprofit organization purchased Geekdom’s Geekbus last summer, and will begin a high school pilot program next year using the resources of the SA Maker Space.
SASTEMIC founder and Chairman Scott Gray, who is also the President of Elevate Systems, says the programs are important to the San Antonio economy.
“The goal is to get the K through 12 kids excited about all of the STEM pathways so that they can progress and go to college and get degrees so we can hire them here in San Antonio,” Gray said.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Diabetes Management Platform: Dario to Debut at Geekdom

November 13, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Shir Even-Zohar’s parents are diabetic patients.
She knows firsthand that the main way to treat the incurable disease is to balance the body’s blood glucose levels, which requires strict glucose level monitoring. That’s not always easy to do.
That’s why Even-Zohar sees the need for a new medical device called Dario, a diabetes management platform that runs on a smartphone. LabStyle Innovations, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, developed Dario, a cloud-based, mobile health platform for diabetes and related blood glucose monitoring.
“This device will help them easily get their data on their phone and get their insights to learn how to better manage their diabetes in a very convenient way,” said Even-Zohar, a business development senior manager for LabStyle Innovations.
The market for the device is huge. Worldwide, more than 400 million people have diabetes and it’s on the rise fueled by the obesity epidemic. The main type of diabetes is type 2.
“Dario is the next generation in advanced diabetes self-management,” according to Even-Zohar. Dario helps people manage their diabetes better, she said. The software integrates with the all-in-one, pocket-sized, Dario blood glucose monitoring device. It comes with lancet, strips and a meter that connects to a smartphone, and a website application enabling patients, medical professionals and caregivers to access data with the aim of and as a result drives proactive intervention.
Next week, Even-Zohar will travel to San Antonio to introduce Dario to patients enrolled in a consumer focus study that will take place at Geekdom, a San Antonio coworking space focused on tech startups based in the Weston Centre downtown.
Geekdom members Alan Weinkrantz and Cynthia Phelps are heading up the local focus group on Dario. They’ve enrolled several people into the paid sessions but they are still looking for a few more insulin-dependent diabetic patients to participate. They are looking for people who are between 18 to 45 years old and who use a smartphone and have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. The participants need to use an insulin pen and test their blood glucose four times a day. The two-hour sessions start Monday and run through Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Health 2.0 will hold a public meeting at Geekdom to introduce Dario and Even-Zohar will talk about Israel’s medical-technology startup economy. The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. It’s free to attend but registration is required.
“San Antonio has a very large diabetes population,” Even-Zohar said. “We think at Geekdom we can meet great people who can help us understand their needs and evaluate a product that we are about to launch. If there is anything that we can improve, we want their feedback to make the best product possible.’
The free Dario app will be available for download from the Apple App Store on Dec. 12 this year in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. The launch of the Dario iOS App is the first step of LabStyle’s worldwide rollout of the full Dario platform. LabStyle received certification for Europe for the full Dario diabetes management platform last September. That allows LabStyle Innovation to market Dario in Europe. The company plans to file for 510 (k) Food and Drug Administration clearing to market its platform in the U.S. in the near future and anticipates regulatory clearance in 2014, Even-Zohar said. Currently the app is only available for iOS devices, but an Android compatible version is expected soon.
LabStyle Innovations, a publicly traded company founded two years ago, has partners in the United Kingdom and Italy to distribute and sell Dario.
“The app is a very nice tool to use even without our device,” Even-Zohar said. “It’s a way to introduce the product and get them hooked on our approach of diabetes management.”
In addition to San Antonio, Even-Zohar will visit Cleveland, Ohio. David Edelman with Diabetes Daily has set up some meeting for her there.
“This is a very innovative approach on how diabetes should be managed,” Even-Zohar said.

Codeup Seeks to Create New Developers in San Antonio

October 24, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 8 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

“Learn to Program. Get a Job Offer. Guaranteed.”
This is the not-so-humble sales pitch of Codeup – a for-profit code education startup founded by San Antonio entrepreneur and angel investor Michael Girdley. The startup offers a nine week programming boot camp located at Geekdom of San Antonio which will teach the programming skills currently sought for in the workforce. The startup’s first boot camp, starting Feb. 3, will focus on web development and will cover Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and JavaScript. The camp price tag is $7,430, and if the student does not receive a job offer within six months of completing the course they get half their tuition back. Enrollment has already begun.
Girdley justifies his guarantee with his business approach. Before launch, he collaborated with both small startups and larger companies in need of developers to find out exactly what skill-set they want to hire.
“We went and talked to them and got feedback on what they are looking for. We added a whole set of methodologies in terms of how to work as a team of programmers to the course after meeting with certain employers,” Girdley said. “Ultimately we have two customers. One is the student and the other is the employers. We have really worked hard to have them meet in the middle for everyone to be happy.”
Codeup’s classroom experience is designed to be as intensive and hands-on as possible. Students will learn concepts quickly in 15 minute intervals and then immediately implement them with exercises lasting 20 minutes. Each class will hold 20 students. Girdley will be teaching the classes along with Jason Straughn, Samantha Atkins, and Chris Turner. During exercises, all four instructors will be present to answer any questions. Classes will be eight hours a day and five days week.
To ensure that graduating students get hired, Codeup has formed agreements with 18 startups and recruiting companies who have agreed to consider hiring the graduates upon completion of the course. A few of the employers Girdley has talked to – whom he can’t name at this time – have such difficulty finding developers that they are willing to hire immediately after graduation.
Despite its growing tech talent, finding full time developers in San Antonio is a difficult task — both for large companies like Labatt Food Service and smaller startups such as Geekdom’s TrueAbility. Founder and COO Frederick “Suizo” Mendler welcomes an easier way to find developer talent.
“For us, it is a constant challenge to find folks that can operate at a fairly high level when it comes to the dev stuff. If they produce a good candidate then, yea, we’ll take a look at them,” Mendler said. “All the other developers we hire, we have to go out and hunt them down, go find them in weird places.”
Codeup will start out with only one class of 20, and that class is already starting to fill up. Codeup has received seven applicants since they went public a week ago and have already confirmed two spots. Texas State University Communications Graduate Leslie Tolbert was the first to sign up. She developed a love of programming in her last semester of college but was having trouble learning it all on her own.
“I really feel it’s an investment to myself to make this bigger commitment. It’s really hard to teach yourself how to program through all the other resources out there,” Tolbert said. “It was really appealing to me to have the option that Codeup presents to work with a team of peers…in a collaborative space with expert instructors available to answer questions.”
Tolbert was also able to take advantage of one of the three women’s scholarships Codeup offers, which will pay for half of the tuition. Two are still available.
As a for-profit company, Codeup will raise revenue by charging tuition and by charging a placement fee to the employer when they hire a graduate. The employer’s fee will be equal to 10 percent of the graduates annual salary. Codeup currently has no competitors in San Antonio, but would be competing with MakerSquare in Austin. While the model is similar to Rackspace Hosting’s Open Cloud Academy, the two will not directly compete because they are teaching different skills. In another similarity to the Open Cloud Academy, Girdley says applicants do not need any prior coding experience to be admitted.
“If you are a smart person and you are willing to work hard, you don’t need to know anything. Show up, we will take care of you.” Girdley said.

Geekdom was a sponsor of Silicon Hills News. TrueAbility is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News.

San Antonio Youth Code Jam Gets Kids Into Coding

October 16, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

San Antonio Youth Code Jam - photos by Kara Gomez, Open Book Studios

Code Jam San Antonio – event photos by Kara Gomez, Open Book Studios

You have probably heard of sports camps, science camps, or math camps — events designed to both spark interest and teach the subject material. But what about kids who like to write code? Up to a year ago, there was no such event geared towards young programmers such as Debi Pfitzenmaier’s son Aaron.
As a result, Pfitzenmaier founded the San Antonio Youth Code Jam — a three hour event designed to get kids and their parents hooked on coding.
On September 28, Pfitzenmaier held her second annual Code Jam event at Geekdom of San Antonio. Eighty kids and 60 parents attended the event and learned about game design, cyber security, and coding in Java and Python. Pfitzenmaier sees the event both as a fun opportunity for existing code enthusiasts and as a way to interest kids who have not been exposed to writing code.

Code Jam Photos by Kara Gomez, Open Book Studios

“This gives them an opportunity to see where they fit, what interests them the most,” Pfitzenmaier said. “The goal being that they go home and learn more. I’m trying to spark imaginations.”
Pfitzenmaier plans to focus the events on middle school students, but kids attending the event could be anywhere from ages 7 to 15. In a special effort to get more girls into coding, Pfitzenmaier reached out to KLRN – the local PBS affiliate – to bring their local SciGirls club to the last event and reserved 25 seats for them. Pfitzenmaier hopes the opportunity will relieve some of the social pressure girls face regarding tech fields.
“My daughter, for example, really likes science. But it’s not ‘cool’ to like science,” Pfitzenmaier said. “So it was important for me to, this year, find a way to bring more girls into Code Jam, and get more girls interested in seeing how they can participate in STEM fields and careers.”

San Antonio Youth Code Jam events take a free spirited, and somewhat chaotic, approach to code education. After the event introduction, kids and their parents could spend as much time as they wanted on each of the five different learning stations around Geekdom. A team of 45 volunteers from Denim Group, the U.S. Air Force, the University of Texas at San Antonio and other organizations helped teach kids at each station.
E-Line Media Learning Content Producer Katya Hott came all the way from New York to volunteer at the Gamestar Mechanic station. Gamestar Mechanic is an E-Line Media program that lets kids create 2-D games by manipulating characters on a grid, creating game levels, and giving their characters obstacles to face. While the program did not require actual lines of code, Hott wants to inspire the kids to one day make their own games and programs.
“Giving youth the opportunity to explore coding and programming as something they can study for a career path or extracurricular interest is really important,” Hott said. “Not every city has ready opportunities for kids to try out game design or try out programming in other settings to see if they like it.”
Some of the other stations had kids writing Java and Python. To get their feet wet in Java, kids could try out the Code Spells station. In this game, the user helps out friendly digital gnomes by making their wizard cast different spells with lines of Java Code. Denim Group CTO Dan Cornell, who volunteered at the station, was impressed at how quickly the kids learned the fundamentals of coding.
“The most important thing to take away is learning how programs are structured – a type of algorithmic thinking to solve problems,” Cornell said. “From my perspective, working with the kids, it was interesting to see how quickly they learned.”
Cornell hopes that teaching kids the basics will inspire them to develop a passion for coding.
“The people who are really good in the technology industry are the ones that are always forcing themselves to learn more because they are interested in it, because it speaks to something in them at a fundamental level to be able to build things and solve problems,” Cornell said.
To round out the experience, Air Force volunteers taught the kids about cyber security. Their station covered password strength, Facebook safety, e-mail fraud, and mobile device safety. To reinforce the material, kids took quizzes on a website that tested their knowledge of security threats in several different scenarios. A perfect score would get their name up on the wall, and Cyber Security Station Lead Sean Williams was surprised at the dedication the kids showed to get those perfect scores.
“They kept taking it over and over again until they understood what was going on and kept asking questions and stuff,” Williams said. “That made me feel like it sunk in and was worth it.”
While the Code Jam events are aimed at a youth age level, Pfitzenmaier says the event is about the parents just as much as the kids.
“What makes Code Jam very distinctive is the parents have to stay with their children,” Pfitzenmaier said. “What you will see is parents sitting side by side with their children, learning right along with them.”
Pfitzenmaier says that she wants the event to be a welcoming place for children who are introverted or have social anxiety issues to learn around other kids. Parents stay with the kids for the whole three hours, giving them a safety net in a somewhat chaotic social situation. It’s also a great place for parents to bond and learn with their kids over an exciting activity — especially if the parents write code as well.
“It gives the parents an opportunity to show their kids, ‘this is what I do all day long. And it’s fun!’” Pfitzenmaier said. “For the parents to sit there and engage in something that their kids enjoy – that’s huge.”
Pfitzenmaier will hold the San Antonio Youth Code Jam again next year and is currently looking at ways to create similar events in the coming months.

Full disclosure: Geekdom was a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Finding Your Noble Cause

October 14, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 6 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Nick Longo, co-founder and director of Geekdom, photo courtesy of TEDxSanAntonio

At TEDxSanAntonio, Nick Longo, co-founder of Geekdom, walked onto the stage, sat on a chair and started to read from a book labeled “Hope, Dream and Inspire.”
But the story he told wasn’t a fairy tale. In fact, it was Longo’s own entrepreneurial journey and how his experiences and those of Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, led them to create Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space for geeks in the heart of San Antonio. The two-year-old startup has come to be known as “a place where startups are born.”
“Every entrepreneur has a story,” Longo said. “A story of their success and a journey of their failures to get there.”
“I believe we are all entrepreneurs,” Longo said. “We were born this way. It’s in our DNA – some a little and some a lot.”
Kids learn from an early age how to become entrepreneurs from running lemonade stands, mowing lawns, working jobs and lessons in school, Longo said.
“Entrepreneurship is not just business,” he said. “Business is the mindset. Entrepreneurship is the heart set. Because of frustration, desperation or a passion you cannot let go.”
To succeed as an entrepreneur, Longo said he believes people need to find their “noble cause.” But they can only do that when they conquer their fears, he said.
Next, Longo shared “a little bit” of his story.
He recounted how he grew up poor in rough neighborhoods and lived in the projects. And when he was 12, he had a friend named Roman, who was a pale kid with black hair, “who everyone took turns picking on,” Longo said.
“We collected baseball cards together,” he said. “We added aluminum foil to the ends of walkie-talkies to talk to space and into the unknown. We were the different ones.”
Longo told a tale about going to Roman’s house one day and how he stole a $100 bill from Roman’s birthday card. He avoided going over to Roman’s house for the next few weeks for fear of being found out. Then Roman’s mother showed up at his house with all of Roman’s birthday cards in her arms. Longo thought he was in big trouble.
“She told me Roman had an asthma attack the night before and died,” Longo said. “And she handed me those cards and said he would have wanted me to have them. I was never able to say goodbye, never able to say I was sorry and never able to give him that $100 bucks back from his birthday card. I held those cards in my arms like they were him. I was lost. And to this day, I still have those cards.”
For the next 15 years Longo struggled and wandered to find his way. He tried to start different businesses.
“I was in the Air Force. I was a racing Greyhound trainer – the dogs, not the buses,” Longo said.
Then, in 1994, he opened a coffee house in Corpus Christi by maxing out his wife’s credit card.
“After a year, like a lot of other things I tried to do, the coffee house wasn’t really working,” Longo said.
He decided to offer free Internet access.
“What I didn’t know is we ended up being one of the first Internet cafes in the world and I ended up making the first commercial website in Corpus,” he said.
The story spread quickly through the local press and soon Longo’s phone was ringing off the hook with everybody in Corpus wanting him to create a website for them.
“So I started making websites for $500 to $1,000 a pop when I wasn’t making espresso,” Longo said.
No good tools existed for creating websites back then, Longo said. He created the websites but he realized that the work was really hard and time consuming because his customers wanted changes all the time.
“Then one day my world changed forever,” Longo said. “When someone asked for yet another change. I was angry. The coffee house wasn’t doing well and I was desperate not to fail again. In an outburst that could be heard a block away, I yelled these people need software so they can make their own bleeping websites.”
That’s when Longo realized that he should create software to let them do that.
“I found my noble cause,” Longo said. “I would empower and help people get on the web.”
With a dial up modem and a $500 home built computer, Longo set out to take on the software industry, but he didn’t know how to make software. That’s when he had an epiphany.
“No idea I had done alone had worked,” Longo said. “Maybe that was the problem all along. I needed to collaborate with other people that liked what I liked. That had the same passion, the same noble cause. I needed help.”
He teamed up with a regular customer who was a computer programmer. Together they created the Coffeecup HTML editor. They released it in 1996 and it was a hit, Longo said. He made more web design software. He helped “people fulfill their dreams just like I did. This was the noble cause that led me here.”
Next, Longo “skipped forward a few chapters” to recount how Geekdom was created to help entrepreneurs.
“A couple of years ago Graham Weston, the Chairman of Rackspace and myself got together and said wouldn’t it be cool if there was a place where startups were born – not the Internet but a physical place, a place where developers and designers and entrepreneurs could get together and work on their ideas in person,” Longo said. “We would call it Geekdom. You see in the urban dictionary it means a place where more than two geeks gather.”

Geekdom would offer memberships and desks at a low cost so everyone had a chance to meet their team, to build their dream, Longo said. Each member would be asked to give one hour a week of their time back to another member or do a workshop once a month on their expertise, he said.
“The noble cause of Geekdom is to empower people by creating a center where every kind of geek and entrepreneur can go to build a business,” Longo said. “A place where meeting someone in the hallway and sharing an idea would be happenstance and serendipity and something would get built right then and there.”
Geekdom is about creating an organic ecosystem that lets its members build and develop it, Longo said.
“I believe if we take people and place them together to collaborate and help each other they will change the world,” Longo said. “They will fulfill their noble causes.”
He also believes “mentorship is the new classroom.”
“We are all makers of something. Every person we meet knows something we don’t,” Longo said. “I learn from people that are likeminded that share my passions.”
Longo said he didn’t learn this lesson until after he sold his company and that he burnt out because he was working hard all the time.
“I needed someone to turn to who wasn’t there. I needed all of you,” Longo said. “There’s no reason to waste potential. Every person in the wrong job, or kid without a dream yet, can do what we do.”
It’s our responsibility to show them the way, he said.
“I’m an entrepreneur,” Longo said. “I was born this way. I was made this way. I cannot talk to myself or to the unknown for help. I can help you and we can help each other. So what would your story be?”
Longo ended his talk by pulling out a walkie-talkie with an aluminum foil antenna.
“Hey Roman, are we even yet?” Longo asked.

Full disclosure: Geekdom was a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Mind Blown Open at TEDxSanAntonio

October 13, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, welcomes the TEDxSanAntonio crowd to his company’s headquarters, known as The Castle.

TEDxSanAntonio spotlighted urban parks, courthouse architecture, mental illness, sex, death, jail, space exploration, entrepreneurship, antibiotic resistant bacteria and more on Saturday.
A record 500 people attended the daylong event at Rackspace’s headquarters. They listened to 18-minute talks on the overarching theme “Minds Wide Open.” The 19 speakers elicited a whole range of emotions from the audience including laughter and tears.
In addition to the talks, Julia Langenberg, an aerialist, performed an awe-inspiring dance routine in which she climbed, dangled and twirled on fabric hung from the rafters.
Myric Polhemus, director of human resources at H-E-B Grocery Company, encouraged leaders to embrace malcontents in their organizations to lead to greater innovation and creativity.

Nick Longo, founder of CoffeeCup Software and co-founder of Geekdom, shares his entrepreneurial journey at TEDxSanAntonio

Nick Longo, co-founder of Geekdom, a collaborative co-working space in downtown San Antonio, promoted the benefits of entrepreneurship.
“We are all makers of something,” Longo said.
This is for the fourth year for the local TEDx event, which is an offshoot of the exclusive invite-only TED conference held every year in Monterrey. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It is known as a place where people discuss big ideas. Susan Price with Firecat Studio organized the local event along with a group of volunteers.
Rackspace’s Chairman Graham Weston began by welcoming the crowd to Rackspace and acknowledging Jason Thomas, a hero and a former Marine sergeant who helped rescue people during 9-11.
Weston also introduced Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who spearheaded the effort to create BiblioTech, a bookless library filled with digital editions, on the city’s Southside.
Wolff announced the county would be installing a branch of the BiblioTech in the lobby of Rackspace, giving its employees access to all of its 10,000 digital volumes.
The juxtaposition of the first speaker, Anastasia McKenna, known as Miss Anastasia, a professional storyteller at the Twig Bookshop in San Antonio, following the BiblioTech presentation, was perplexing.
McKenna performed excerpts from the children’s classic book “The Gingerbread Man.”
“Joy is the sharing of books,” she said.
Then she pleaded with the audience to read books to their children and to minimize their time in front of screens.
“I want to see more books and less screens in the world,” she said.
People can touch the soul of a child with a book, she said.
“Stories can make a child believe anything is possible,” she said.
Tearfully, McKenna recounted the recent death of her niece and told the audience that no one knows how much time they have on this earth. Don’t plop a child down in front of a screen, when you could take that opportunity to engage them with a book, she said.
In an inspirational talk, Eric Fletcher, an author, speaker and marketing executive, told people not to let benchmarks and measurements lead to limits in their lives.
“Vision is not defined by what the eye can see but by possibility,” Fletcher said.

Jorge Amodio, a Geekdom member, shows off his DIY electronic TEDxSanAntonio name badge

Although his mother received the diagnosis that her son was legally blind at a young age, she didn’t accept it. She enrolled Fletcher in little league and had him participate in the same activities as his peers. That showed Fletcher a disability didn’t make him less of a human being and he shouldn’t allow benchmarks to define the boundaries of his life.
He encouraged everyone to look beyond the labels, boundaries and limits others might place on them and to create a life they want.
Jason Fischer, a psychotherapist, also told the audience that the most destructive word in the world is “need.”
In a rather controversial statement, he said there are no needs. Most people would argue that humans need food, shelter, clothing, love and some money. But Fischer doesn’t agree.
“We don’t need anything at all,” Fischer said, “Nothing is a prerequisite for happiness.”
The word “need” creates a negative emotional response in our psyches, he said. Just using the word can lead to unhappiness, he said.
“You never need to say the word need,” Fischer said. “Whatever you want is perfect. You can live your life accordingly to what you want.”
Except if you’re in prison.
Ryan Cox, an attorney, said one in 30 people are under court supervision or in jail in the U.S. with 2.3 million currently incarcerated.
“We are the largest jailer in the world,” Cox said.
And the problem is getting worse. Sixty percent of the people who leave U.S. prisons return to them within five years, Cox said.
“Our prisons are dehumanizing,” and that leads to recidivism, he said.
Cox said the U.S. should treat its prisoners better. He pointed to Norway’s prison system as one that the U.S. should emulate. They treat their prisoners with dignity and house them in cells that look more like dorm rooms.
“In the U.S. we already spend $40,000 per prisoner annually – we should get a better return on our investment,” Cox said.

Liza Long, an advocate for mental illness care, speaks out at TEDxSanAntonio

Liza Long, who penned the essay “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother” in a blog post following the attacks on Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 20 children and six adults dead, gave a heart-wrenching talk on helping children with mental illness.
Long’s teenage son, who she calls Michael, not his real name, has struggled with mental illness since the age of 8 and has been arrested and jailed as a result of his violent outbursts.
“When you’re the mother of a child of mental illness you’re not supposed to talk about it,” Long said.
One in five children in the United States has a serious and debilitating mental disorder today, Long said.
This year, 4,600 young people, between the ages of 10 and 24, will die of suicide, ten times the 437 deaths from cancer, Long said.
Yet the largest treatment centers for mental illness in the U.S. are in the Cook County Jail in Illinois, Riker’s Island Prison and Los Angeles County Jail, Long said.
The reason Long, a single mother of four who lives is Boise, Idaho, wrote the essay and continues to speak out about mental illness is that she wants to change the world and put an end to the stigma about mental illness.
Long received a standing ovation from the crowd.

Dave Sims of Rackspace made this video recapping TEDxSanAntonio.

Full disclosure: Geekdom was a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.

Promoter.io Featured on A Slice of Silicon Hills

September 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Every business understands the importance of creating loyal customers.
However, they may not know how many loyal customers they actually have or why those customers are loyal in the first place.
Founded by Chad Keck and Ricardo Reyna, Promoter.io was created to help companies guage customer loyalty by measuring their “net promoter score” – a customer loyalty metric invented by Fred Reichheld and explained in his book “The Ultimate Question.”
The net promoter score is measured by a customer’s response to a single question: “How likely are you to refer our brand to a friend or colleague?” Customers answer on a scale of zero to ten, and then specify the most important reason for their response in an open ended format. Customers who select nine or ten are “promoters,” and customers who select zero to six are “detractors.” The final score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
The questionnaire is normally sent to customers by email and is used by Rackspace Hosting, Apple, USAA and Southwest Airlines. According to Bain and Company, companies with a high net promoter score tend to outperform industry competitors.
Promoter.io is working to make this metric accessible to smaller scale operations and startups in a less expensive way. The startup handles the email questionnaires for its clients and aggregates the resulting scores and feedback on a dashboard so businesses can know why they are gaining or losing loyal customers and make better decisions with their products or services.
Promoter.io has just finished its inital pilot program with ten companies in which they sent out more than half a million questionnaires. Some participants received response rates of 15 percent to 50 percent, well above the industry norm of around two percent.
Promoter.io will be releasing their beta to the public in the next couple weeks. The startup has already raised $184,000 in seed stage funding from a handful of San Antonio investors, the Geekdom fund, and personal contributions.
Promoter.io is currently looking a front end developer and designer.

A Slice of Silicon Hills hosts Educational Nonprofit Venturelab

September 5, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

What is the best time for students to be exposed to entrepreneurship and tech careers? Early College? High School? San Antonio nonprofit Venturelab is giving kids hands on experience with entrepreneurship and product invention as early as age 10.
Founded earlier this year by Cristal Glangchi, Venturelab is an evolution of an earlier Geekdom nonprofit called ESTEAM. Venturelab still uses the ESTEAM framework – stressing entrepreneurship, science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. The nonprofit organization has numerous summer programs, weekend events, and after school programs for all levels of students from elementary school to high school to college and beyond. These range from the Venturelab MakerSpace camps that educate students at ages 10-14 to the 3 Day Startup Events that help young professionals build companies. All students receive training in creating business models, inventing products, and giving pitches to sell those products.
Venturelab also puts a special emphasis on inspiring women and girls to become entrepreneurs. All programs must have 30 percent of participants be women and some, such as the GirlStartup camp, are exclusively for women.
The nonprofit organization is funded by several private donors in San Antonio. It is currently looking for additional donors as well as volunteers for the 3 Day Startup in November.
If you would like to enroll yourself or your child in a Venturelab program, you can find the program list at its website.

Five Teams Pitch at 3 Day Startup San Antonio

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

Simon Barnett pitches ScriptFit at 3 Day Startup San Antonio

Five teams pitched Sunday night at Geekdom at the culmination of the latest 3-Day Startup San Antonio.
The teams included Menu, a software program to allow customers to easily order takeout from restaurants, MicroStoreIt.com, a matchmaking service for empty commercial warehouses and consumers, Ripcord, an iPhone app that sounds an alarm and gets help, ScriptFit, a marketplace for academic papers, and Team Me Up, a sports league organizational Facebook app.
More than 30 people participated in the weekend long event in which they brainstormed ideas, formed companies, did market research, created prototypes and business plans and then pitched in front of a public audience.
“This kind of event brings the idea of accelerated proficiency to life,” said Bill Schley, author of the Unstoppables, a bestselling book on entrepreneurship. He volunteered to mentor the teams throughout the weekend. “We can create millions of more entrepreneurs if we just move people in motion quickly. It’s all about taking that first step and overcoming fear.”
The 3-Day Startup program has already launched dozens of companies in Central Texas including Hoot.me, Famigo, Embarkly, Grapevine, Monk’s Toolbox, ParLevel Systems and more. Some of them have gone out of business, others have been acquired and some have gone on to raise money.
The experience of participating in a 3-Day Startup weekend can convince someone to ditch his or her day job and go all in on entrepreneurship.
“It was intense. It was great. We spent at least 12 hours every day working nonstop,” said James Rubino, a medical professional and python developer who led the five-person MicroStoreIt.com team. “It’s a great experience for anyone even toying with the idea of being an entrepreneur. This was a priceless experience.”
Stephen Dyer, a chief operating officer for Garrison General Contractors, pitched Menu, an online ordering system that connects to a restaurant’s point of sale software. He said the company’s idea changed throughout the weekend and after meeting with potential customers and getting feedback on their original idea of a ranking system for menu items. The team plans to continue to develop their idea and perhaps pitch it to the Geekdom Fund, a seed stage investment fund.
At the end of the weekend, 3-Day Startup San Antonio organizers give out gold cans of red bull as awards to teams and individuals who put forth the most effort. Simon Barnett, a senior at Alamo Heights High School, received a Play-Doh award because he was too young for Red Bull.
Barnett, a member of Geekdom, gave the pitch for ScriptFit.
“It pivoted a lot before we got to a final version,” Barnett said.
A few of the members of the six person team are going to continue on with the idea and plan to work with the University of Texas system to further develop it.
“This was definitely a great experience,” Barnett said.