BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
The Austin Startup session on Why Austin skewed aspirational Saturday morning as Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin and Kevin Koym of Tech Ranch explained that Austin is the city where you can “be yourself,” where people “look you in the eye and smile at you” and where the culture invites diversity of ideas and interests.
To make that last point, Koym discussed different technologies being explored in Austin from Arduino to Wiki Weapon to E-nose which detects and analyzes the chemical makeup of an odor to self monitoring devices.
“There are so many ideas that you wouldn’t see in Silicon Valley because it’s so expensive there you can’t take the risk,” Koym said. “Someone comes up with great idea and you have five teams doing the same thing. What a waste of effort.”
Goswami pointed out that, in Austin, there are myriad experiences to sample and, “if you like it, you hold onto it. If you go to the Continental Club and try two-stepping and you like it, the next time you go back you have a community.”
The session wasn’t entirely aspirational. Susan Davenport of the Chamber of Commerce and Jim Butler, manager at the City of Austin shared all the statistics so often quoted about the strength of the local economy and the growing resources for the entrepreneurial community.
One attendee expressed interest in moving his 12-person company to Austin and asked what first steps would be. Davenport explained that the Chamber can walk new businesses through all the steps from getting registered with the state, looking for office space and real estate for employees as well as introducing business owners to the community, which includes 75 organizations to support entrepreneurship.
“We find out what your needs are and come up with a strategy to meet those needs,” she said. Butler added that part of the city’s job was to help entrepreneurs with information about mentoring and financial resources.
Another question was posed by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur inspired to possibly move to Austin but wondering about VC opportunities and recruiting of talent. Davenport talked about the chamber’s effort to recruit talent and the fact that 72 countries attend SXSW and “we’re taking resumes all through the conference.”
Koym pointed out that Austin is six hours from Monterrey Mexico where development help can be found for $10 an hour and, from his experience, “Mexican developers kick ass.”
The VC question received a more fudged answer.
“We don’t have as strong a picture in the VC class,” Koym said. “I do believe we have more millionaires here per capita than almost anyplace else…if you’re looking for angel investment you can find that. It’s not necessarily in a formalized group…but you can find the guys who say ‘I’m going to take the risk with you.’”
Tag: SXSW (Page 3 of 5)
BY SUSAN LAHEY
Silicon Hills News Reporter
The pitch was: Move your company to Austin for free. Five companies in other parts of the country or the world competed for a $100,000 package that included:
• A $35,000 investment from CTAN.
• Three months rent in a 3 bedroom house from HomeAway.
• Six months of co-working at Capital Factory , server hosting from Rackspace and local groceries from Greenling.
• Moving services from uShip
• Two badges for SXSW 2014
The winner, and welcome to Austin, was a company called Meritful. Meritful is like LinkedIn for college students. Students load their information on the site for free and companies—who are finding the cost of recruiting increasingly prohibitive–can find candidates on the site. Meritful allows students to interact with professionals, share their projects, build a resume and seek advice and direction and allows companies to check out prospective future employees. For companies, the cost is related to their size. A business of up to 100 employees would pay $5,000 annually, which founder and CEO Azarias Reda pointed out is roughly the cost of an intern and significantly less than companies spend recruiting currently.
Meritful will be moving from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Reda met his cofounders in graduate school. They learned about the competition from Josh Baer of Capital Factory and AngelList and the team drove 20 hours to get to SXSW.
The competition’s runner up was Pictrition, an app that lets consumers keep track of their nutrition just by taking photos of their food and submitting the photo to the Pictrition community rather than logging food items, calories or nutrition points. Pictrition includes competitions, leaderboards and reward coupons from health-oriented companies including Whole Foods. The company takes a percentage of each reward based purchase. The company is also working on corporate wellness programs. Pictrition currently is in Dallas.
Other competitors included Paceable, a CRM and project management tool that works with Gmail, Rock Your Paper, a company from Bangalore, India that wants to be the iTunes store for scholarly papers, saving researchers and institutions such as universities, from having to purchase whole journals, and Inaika.com which provides services to find instructors of all stripes through videos published by the instructors but also allows fans to subscribe to the videos of instructors all over the world they find inspirational.
Judges for the competition include Jason Cohen of WPEngine: Bril Flint, chairman and Rick Timmins, Director of CTAN; and Bill Boebel, formerly of RackSpace and now an angel investor and managing director of Capital Factory.
It’s almost time for South by Southwest Interactive and that means you should prepare for information and sensory overload.
A blog once termed SXSW as TED.com’s crazy cousin from the South. It’s also been called Spring Break for Geeks. But I like to refer to it as the Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Information Overload. People come here from all over to drink from the fountain of geek wisdom. And we’ll be gulping down our share this week. So I thought I would share with ya’ll information on where Silicon Hills News, the premiere technology news startup covering Austin and San Antonio technology scene, will be this week.
SXSXedu kicks off on Monday and runs through Thursday culminating with a keynote speech by Microsoft Founder turned Global Philanthropist Bill Gates.
The Global Coworking Unconference Conference, known as Juicy, starts on Tuesday at the Austin Music Hall with a formal day of programming and continues on Wednesday with a full unconference day.
The SXSW Startup Crawl 2013, presented by Rackspace, starts at Capital Factory on Thursday at 4:00 p.m. and runs through 10:00 p.m. More than 14,700 people have RSVPed to attend the event, according to Joshua Baer, its organizer. And dozens of startups companies are on the free shuttle route.
Also on Thursday is the day-long Social Business Summit at the W Hotel put on by the Dachis Group. This is an invite-only conference.
And we’ll be picking up our badges early for SXSW to avoid those long lines. This year, SXSW offers remote pick up at the Palmer Events Center on Thursday and Friday as well as the Austin Convention Center.
Once SXSW kicks off, we’ll be covering a ton of Austin and San Antonio related technology and startup news. We’ll have at least five posts a day on the Interactive Conference so stay tuned for the best local technology news coverage around.
On Friday afternoon, we’ll be at Getting Started with Angel Investing, 5 Austin Companies that Can Get Profitable on Less than $1 Million and Move Your Company to Austin for Free.
Friday evening we’re heading to Champions Bar where Rackspace has set up its SXSW Interactive Headquarters for its Open Cloud Experience, starting at 6 p.m..
And you can also interact with us on Saturday at Which Comes First: The Story or the Money? Susan Lahey, reporter with Silicon Hills News, will be moderating a panel on Central Texas technology media coverage. The panelists include Bryan Menell of AustinStartup.com, Colin Pope with the Austin Business Journal and Kirk Ladendorf with the Austin American Statesman. The panel starts at 3:30 p.m. at the Hilton Austin Downtown in the Austin Chamber offices at 500 E. 4th St.
Here’s some other useful guides for SXSW:
This guide on the Austin Startup Group on Facebook is put together by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. Jacqueline Hughes, one of the founders of Austin Startup Week, created the list. The document has a ton of local startup events – some that require badges and others that do not.
Startup America has a jam-packed agenda aimed at Startup Companies throughout SXSW Interactive.
Mass Relevance has a VIP All Access Guide to SXSW with information on the best bars and food trucks and other eateries as well as parties and conference sessions.
Gary’s Guide bills itself as the ultimate guide to SXSW with listings of more than 300 parties and events.
The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce also has a great list of local events spotlighting the technology industry.
Women 2.0 has created an unofficial guide to SXSW with some great events.
AT&T is a super sponsor of SXSW and they’ve got a guide to everything the company’s doing at the show.
This week, Andrew Moore talks with Frederick “Suizo” Mendler, co-founder of TrueAbility.
The San Antonio-based startup, founded by four former Rackspace employees, known as Rackers, has created an online testing and assessment system for technical job candidates. The TrueAbility test gives recruiters and employers an accurate view of a job candidate’s technical skills.
TrueAbility, which recently raised $750,000, is also part of the TechStars Cloud program taking place at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio. And it’s one of the finalists in the South by Southwest Accelerator program.
San Antonio-based TrueAbility made the finalist list for the SXSW Accelerator in March.
TrueAbility, one of the TechStar Cloud companies based at Geekdom, is the only startup from Central Texas to make the list. A few Austin companies made the alternates list including Clay.io and Spot On Sciences.
TrueAbility will compete in the Innovative Web Technologies category on Monday, March 11 and Tuesday, March 12 at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Austin.
“TrueAbility helps companies hire only the best technical talent by assessing a job candidate’s technical skills in a live server environment–from anywhere in the world,” according to its description on the accelerator page. “TrueAbility shortens the recruiting process and delivers objective, easy-to-use pre-hire data that helps businesses hire great techs.”
TrueAbility’s team is made up of Luke Owen, Frederick “Suizo” Mendler, Marcus Robertson and Dusty Jones. The company recently closed on $750,000 of seed-stage funding.
SXSW reported that more than 500 companies applied for the fifth annual SXSW Accelerator.
Like countless pioneers, the quintessential Austin technology, music and film conference, South by Southwest ventures West.
SXSW announced Tuesday that it plans to host SXSW V2V in Las Vegas next August 11th to 14th at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. The show will focus on entrepreneurial innovation. The four day event seeks to bring together startup companies and entrepreneurs with venture capitalists and mentors. The schedule can be found here.
Badges to attend the show are on sale now at the early bird rate of $695 through Dec. 14th and the prices go up from there with a walk up rate of $1,050.
The show will select some of its speakers and presentations from those submitted through its SXSW Panel Picker process. But SXSW V2V is also accepting new applications to speak through March 29th. The event is also seeking mentors and coaches.
The SXSW Las Vegas conference also features V2Venture, a two day pitch event focused on innovative startups. That program will begin accepting applications in January.
“With the growth and popularity of the startup-related programming across the SXSW family of events, it is clear that there is enough momentum to create a wholly unique and independent event focused on entrepreneurs,” SXSW V2V Producer Christine Auten said in a news release. “SXSW V2V will follow the same general strategy we have followed with other SXSW experiences. It is about turning creative ideas into reality — bringing visionaries to Vegas.”
“Las Vegas is repositioning itself as a hub for innovators and digital creatives. We are excited about all the new energy in this city. This is the perfect place for this small, offshoot event to find its voice and grow as the Las Vegas tech scene emerges onto the national scene,” SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest said in a news release. He visited Las Vegas and spoke to the technology community there last summer.
As further proof that time flies, South by Southwest just announced it is open for business today.
That means you can register for the conference, which takes place next March 7 through March 16, but it’s going to cost you.
Badges to attend SXSW 2013 are $100 more than last year’s early bird prices for every type of badge. An interactive badge that entitles the holder to attend all the sessions, parties and other events related to the interactive conference costs $695 for 2013, up from $595 for 2012.
A platinum badge that provides access to the music, film and interactive conferences costs $1,195.
A few years ago, Ben Metcalfe reported in a post on his blog that he liked the price increase. In 2011, the price for an interactive badge rose 15 percent to $450 from $395. He argued that the price increase weeded out people who really weren’t serious about attending the event.
And despite the price increases in previous years, SXSW Interactive continues to have record breaking attendance every year. This year, conference organizers expect 40,000 people to attend the event. SXSW has become one of the most high-profile conferences for startup companies looking to gain the national spotlight. In years past, Foursquare and Twitter have found traction with the iPhone and iPad toting early adopter audience. But in the last few years, no clear app has emerged as the next big thing at the show.
SXSW’s mix of media, music and film has also made it one of the most entertaining high-tech conferences. Every year, the parties get bigger and better and have become an important part of the show. In recent years, the SXSW Interactive conference has focused heavily on the startup community with events like Startup Bus competition and the SXSW Interactive Accelerator competition.
So what do you think? Will the price hike lead to quality over quantity and a more manageable event?
The crowd at SXSW’s Panel Picker Meetup at Molotov’s on Monday
It’s also the deadline for film and music panels.
Last Monday, SXSW held a meetup at Molotov in downtown Austin that several hundred people attended. I met Tammy Lynn Gilmore with SXSW Interactive there.
She’s posted some tips on the SXSW Interactive blog how to submit a great idea. One of the tips is to keep your idea focused. You have about 35 minutes to speak and then take questions and answers. So you don’t have time to ramble on about all kinds of things.
My big takeaway from attending the show numerous times, is to be original, be humorous where appropriate, put on a great show and leave them wanting more.
That kind of talk takes planning. So it’s great SXSW has everyone thinking about their talk so far in advance. Good luck. Now I’ve got to go submit my panel idea.
BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
“Those who tell stories rule the world” – Plato
Lyn Graft at SXSW Storytelling for Entrepreneurs
He risked everything and his hard work paid off.
And Schultz, by all accounts, is a great storyteller who can articulate and share the passion of his vision.
That’s an essential part of storytelling for entrepreneurs, says Lyn Graft, chief storyteller and founder of LG Pictures in Austin. He has produced more than 450 videos for companies like CNBC, Microsoft, Dell, SXSW, Sweet Leaf Tea and RISE Global. He has filmed 300 entrepreneurs including founders of Starbucks, Whole Foods, Paul Mitchell, Playboy, Baby Einstein, Clear Channel, Craigslist, BET Television, The Knot and Tom’s Shoes.
Graft shared his knowledge of storytelling recently at a panel at SXSW in Austin.
“It’s about leaving an impression with the person you are talking to,” Graft said. “That’s the art and core of storytelling.”
Graft, who has founded eight companies, has pitched more than 200 people on his ideas and he’s been turned down 95 percent of the time, he said. The competition for startups is stiff, he said. What sets a company apart from the crowd is its story.
“We are all unique,” Graft said. “Your story should be unique. We’re all competing against deep-pocketed companies, what do you have that differentiates yourself?”
A good story has a beginning, middle and an end, Graft said. He recommended everyone listen to author Nancy Duarte’s TedX Talk on “common structure of greatest communicators.”
“You want to transport people to where your vision is,” Graft said.
Another great way to tell a story is to set up the problem, present the opportunity and provide the solution, he said.
A great story leaves the audience with a physical reaction like goosebumps, Graft said. He looks for the “GBM” or Goose Bump Moment in a story. How do you create that? You’ve got to reach down deep into your passion and tell why you do what you do, he said.
“Bottom line: speak from the heart,” he said.
It’s also important to know your audience and figure out how can you reach them.
And avoid ugly babies, Graft said. That means find the beauty in every story that you tell.
Learn from great storytelling entrepreneurs, Graft said. For example, Austin’s Clayton Christopher, founder of Sweet Leaf Tea and Deep Eddy Vodka, has the amazing ability to turn everything into a story, Graft said.
Stories don’t have to be complex, Graft said. “Fred Smith’s story: I can get your package there overnight. That’s the story of FedEx.”
Graft recommended other great sources to find entrepreneur storytellers: TED, TEDx, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. and Fast Company.
If you have a good story to tell, tell it, but you can’t fake it, Graft said.
“You can only put so much lip gloss on a pig.” Graft said.