Tag: San Antonio (Page 5 of 17)

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 on a Short List for Google Fiber High Speed Internet

February 19, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

A Google installation van in Kansas City, photo courtesy of Google.

San Antonio is on a short list of cities that may get Google fiber high-speed Internet access to the home.

“San Antonians deserve Internet speed that is faster than the third world and now we’ll have it,” Mayor Julian Castro said at a press conference at City Hall.

Google’s fiber network provides uploading and downloading speeds 100 times faster for businesses and homes than what most broadband Internet users currently experience. It also provides TV service with hundreds of high-definition channels. With 1 Gigabit Internet access, consumers can upload a 90-minute concert in 10 second or upload 300 photos in 12 seconds.

Google announced Wednesday the next step in expanding its Google Fiber network by inviting 34 cities in nine metro areas across the U.S. to work with the company to explore what it would take to build a new fiber optic network in their community.

San Antonio first applied to be a Google fiber city in 2010 along with 1,100 other cities. Since then, Google has officially launched its 1 Gigabit Internet network in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri, Austin and Provo, Utah.

To get the network, San Antonio officials must provide detailed maps for utility construction, access for Google to put its fiber on existing poles or conduit and a good permitting process to get the city ready for its fiber installation.

A formal announcement will be made later this year if Google decides to begin deploying its network throughout the city, Castro said.

Since April when Google announced plans for its super fast high-speed fiber network in Austin, AT&T, Time Warner and Grande Communications have all announced 1 Gigabyte networks in the city.

Castro said he expects to see the same kind of competition to emerge in San Antonio, the nation’s seventh largest city.

“I’m convinced in short order we’ll see the same kind of competition which is good for the consumer,” Castro said.

Castro announced last June that every school in the city should have access to gigabit speeds by 2020.

The installation of Google fiber in San Antonio will help spur the city’s growing technology industry as well as attract startup companies, Castro said.

“The implications of fiber to the home are widespread,” City Manager Sheryl Sculley said.

A high-speed fiber Internet network will impact everything from educational institutions to the development of entrepreneurs looking to establish new business models, she said.

“It will provide existing and growing businesses a competitive advantage in a fast-moving digital economy.”

Google fiber will also make the city more globally competitive, Sculley said.

“Ultra high speed Internet will enhance our ability to compete economically on the world stage,” she said.

The project is not costing San Antonio any money in incentives, Sculley said.

While Google wants to bring fiber to every city, it might not work out for every city, according to the company.

“But cities who go through this process with us will be more prepared for us or any provider who wants to build a fiber network.”

Mark Strama, head of Google Fiber in Austin, said the announcement in San Antonio will not affect the rollout of Google fiber in Austin. He expects the first customers in Austin to have the service by the end of 2014.

“Google believes that a faster Internet is better for everybody,” Strama said.

The other metro areas Google announced today for its short list are Portland, San Jose, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham.

Map courtesy of Google

Both Austin and San Antonio having high speed Internet will only strengthen this region as a technology powerhouse going forward, Castro said.

“I have no doubt that this region will be recognized the way the Bay area is recognized in California,” he said.

Google’s gigabit fiber is a game changer for San Antonio’s economy and will have as big an impact as the shift from dial-up Internet to broadband did, according to city leaders.

“We’re a city of small business owners,” said Ramiro Cavazos, CEO of the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “This investment in dark fiber gives us freedom to grow our economy even faster in the future.”

The New York Times did a story last December discussing how the U.S. is struggling to keep up with providing high-speed Internet and is falling behind the rest of the world and is at jeopardy of losing its competitive advantage. The article spotlighted San Antonio’s slow Internet speed and reported it’s no match for the Latvian capital of Riga on the Baltic Sea.

“Riga’s average Internet speed is at least two-and-a-half times that of San Antonio’s, according to Ookla, a research firm that measures broadband speeds around the globe. In other words, downloading a two-hour high-definition movie takes, on average, 35 minutes in San Antonio — and 13 in Riga,” according to the New York Times Story. “And the cost of Riga’s service is about one-fourth that of San Antonio.”

Ten Semi-Finalists Named for SXSW Pitch Competition

February 14, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Silicon Hills News, Austin Technology Incubator and Central Texas Angel Network have picked the ten semi-finalists for a South by Southwest pitch competition to be held March 9 at the Austin Chamber Offices.

They are:
Pristine.io
Embrace Customers
Spot On Sciences
Filament Labs
Mahana
EyeQ Insights
SegUrWay
Fosbury
Lucid Tour
Articulate Labs

“What an amazing group of applicants this year,” said Kyle Cox, Director, IT/Wireless & University Development portfolio for ATI . “Our round 1 judges had a difficult time narrowing the field down to the 10 semi-finalists. The caliber of these local Austin firms is up there with any nationwide competition out there.”

The winners were chosen not only on the strength of their ideas from an investor standpoint, but also on their ability to tell their story in a manner compelling to the media. Frequently, it’s the back story that makes a startup stand out. That may mean stumbling upon the idea in an unusual way, enduring a remarkable struggle to bring it to fruition, embarking on an epic customer validation journey and the like.

Each of the ten finalists will receive one SXSW Interactive badge and be given the opportunity to pitch in front of a panel that includes Pat Noonan of Austin Ventures, Monique Maley of Articulate Persuasion, and Gary Forni of Central Texas Angel Network. Round one will take place at 9:30 a.m.

The five finalists from that round will go on to round two at 11 a.m. where they’ll pitch before Venu Shamapant of LiveOak Venture Partners, John Stockton of Mayfield Fund and Tom Chederar of VentureBeat.

The prizes include:

A series of profile articles in Silicon Hills News, following the company’s growth journey.
A three month membership in ATI’s Landing Pad portfolio.
A free spot in CTAN’s next investor pitch day.
Three hours coaching from professional pitch coach Monique Maley
Three hours consulting from ValentineHR on issues like hiring and recruiting and compliance.

The top winner will get a series of Silicon Hills articles and one other prize of his/her choice. The second place winner will also choose two prizes from those leftover and the third place winner will take the remaining prize.

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

Silicon Hills News Launches a Kickstarter Campaign

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

This week, Silicon Hills News launched its first Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to create a slick print magazine to be released at South by Southwest Interactive.
At SXSW, Silicon Hills News is hosting a startup pitch competition in conjunction with the Austin Technology Incubator.
We plan to distribute the 32-page color magazine at the SXSW panel. The magazine will feature a dozen or so Austin and San Antonio startup companies along with information on technology resources in both cities.
The Silicon Hills News mission is to shine a spotlight on all of the innovation going on in the Central Texas technology industry. For the past two years and four months, we have worked tirelessly to cover the Austin and San Antonio region. We’re also evolving into a networking platform for the technology industry in Central Texas. We seek to foster collaboration among people doing interesting technology ventures. We do this through event coverage, news stories, tech profiles, calendar postings, job listings, resource listings, expert contributors and soon monthly, quarterly and annual events and a section devoted to aggregating all of the local technology news.
Veteran technology journalists with two decades of experience covering technology lead Silicon Hills News. Laura Lorek and Susan Lahey understand business, technology and news startups. We are also trained journalists with a strong code of ethics and adherence to traditional reporting values.
We also believe in being a part of the community we cover. We are storytelling entrepreneurs blazing a trail in the new media landscape.
But we need your help.
To produce 5,000 copies of the magazine, we need to raise $5,000 and another $2,000 to pay for stories and photos and $500 more for marketing expenses.
We can do all of this with your support of our Kickstarter Campaign. But you don’t just get a warm and fuzzy feeling for helping out another bootstrapped startup entrepreneur, you also get perks.
For just $120, a startup can advertise on our site for a year – that’s just $10 a month (that’s less than a case or 36 packs of Ramen noodles) even pre-seed stage entrepreneurs can afford that. The ad is for 140 characters with a link and it will run on the main page for a year.
Technology companies with a little more disposable income might consider the $500 full page ad in the magazine or the combo for $1,000 of an ad in both the print and digital version of Silicon Hills News. You also get invited to a happy hour where we will debut the magazine and give you some free drinks.
If you like the job we are doing, please become part of our mission and support our Kickstarter campaign at whatever level you like. We’ve even got a $1 offering. We appreciate you and your support. Thank you, in advance, for helping to make our first ever print magazine possible.

Rackspace Hosting Appoints Taylor Rhodes as President

January 14, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting has filled a top spot in its executive ranks.
On Tuesday, the company announced the appointment of Taylor Rhodes, formerly its Chief Customer Officer, as its new president effective immediately.
“Taylor is a proven operational veteran with outstanding strategic and leadership skills,” Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said in a news statement. “He has generated strong growth in all the businesses he has led. Our international business, for example, grew 30 percent a year under his leadership. His relationships with customers and his deep understanding of the market and where it’s headed will be invaluable as he steps into this new role. Taylor’s promotion represents a successful example of the company’s long-term talent-development plan.”
Last summer, Lew Moorman stepped down as Rackspace president, citing family reasons. Moorman had been with the company for 13 years. He still serves on its board of directors. Napier has served as acting president until Rhodes appointment.

Apps for Aptitude Releases Cards for a Cause

January 13, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Three San Antonio high school students last year created Apps for Aptitude, a nonprofit organization aimed at kids helping other kids combat illiteracy by creating mobile apps.
Joshua Singer, a junior at the International School of the Americas and Abhinav Suri, a junior at St. Mary’s Hall created the organization and brought Canzhi Ye, a senior at Reagan High School, on shortly afterward. Silicon Hills News did a story on the organization when it was just starting out. Since then, they have won some additional funding, secured nonprofit status through an affiliation with FreeFlow Research and brought on some more students to help with the development of their projects.
Cards for a Cause is Apps for Aptitude’s first iPhone app, Ye said.
“It is the premier way for students to study flashcards while making a difference in the community,” he said.
Apps for Aptitude plans to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from the app sales to local illiteracy fighting organizations.
“San Antonio’s illiteracy rate is astoundingly high, and we’re out to bring it down as much as possible,” Ye said.
The app provides access to the largest flashcard database in the world, Quizlet, according to Ye. The app also lets students study flashcards using a scientifically proven memory algorithm, SuperMemo2, he said. It also lets students print flashcards to use offline. It features a beautiful user interface designed for iOS7, Ye said.
The Cards for a Cause app costs 99 cents and will be available in the Apple App Store on Tuesday.

CyrusOne Buys 22 Acres in Austin for Data Center Expansion

January 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

CyrusOne, a Houston-based data center operator, looks like it’s set to expand further in Austin.
The company has announced the purchase of 22 acres in the MetCenter business park in Austin. The company currently has a 54,000 square foot data center there.
Last year, CyrusOne bought 54 acres in San Antonio and Houston and it owns 24 acres in the Dallas area.
Overall, CyrusOne has 920,000 gross square feet of space in Texas with 560,000 square feet of data center capacity, according to Gary Wojtaszek, president and chief executive officer.
“We estimate that the property we now own in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin is capable of yielding an additional 2.5 million gross square feet and 1.6 million square feet of data center capacity, effectively tripling what we currently offer at our Texas facilities,” Wojtaszek said in a news release. “Securing the ownership of 100 acres in Texas markets where we already have a strong presence allows for construction of what we believe is the largest multi-facility interconnected data center platform in the country.”
The company connects its data centers through its CyrusOne National Internet Exchange, which lets its customers host data at more than one location for backup data.
CyrusOne reports its customers include more than 125 members of the Fortune 1000.

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