Tag: UT

Helping to Commercialize UT’s Big Ideas at The stARTup Studio

October 18, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The October meeting of The stARTup Studio led by Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at UT.

The University of Texas at Austin is like a Thomas Edison lab of invention with its professors cooking up the next great ideas.

The 3-D printing industry started at UT with Carl Deckard, a graduate student in mechanical engineering and Professor Joseph Beaman. Also, Professor John Goodenough created the lithium-ion rechargeable battery.

During the last decade, UT’s Office of Technology Commercialization has helped license technology to start 64 companies, including 48 in Texas, according to its latest report.

To nurture big ideas, Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet inventor and UT professor of innovation, heads up a monthly gathering, called The stARTup Studio, along with Ben Dyer and Louise Epstein, who run the Innovation Center at UT with Metcalfe.

At the event last week, three professors presented their companies, Nova Minds, Heliotrope and Silicon Audio to a small group of industry experts, entrepreneurs, investors and other invited guests at WeWork on Congress. The UT Austin Office of Technology Commercialization, the Austin Chamber of Commerce and WeWork Austin sponsor the events.

“We’re not trying to get them to exchange their lab coat for a brief case,” said Epstein, managing director of the UT Innovation Center. “But we want to help propel their inventions to impact the world…Our job is to help them get to the next level.”

NOVA MINDS

Donglei “Emma” Fan, an assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering at UT, presenting Nova Minds.

At the event, Donglei “Emma” Fan, an assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering at UT, presented Nova Minds, an early-stage startup focused on innovative technologies for biomedical research sensing and drug delivery. Frank Zhu is the Chief Executive Officer and Fan is the Chief Technology Officer. Fan “is the inventor of “Electric Tweezers” that can precisely manipulate nanoscale materials in aqueous suspension by combined AC and DC electric fields,” according to her online profile.

Her company is developing high-speed motorized bio-nanosensors. When the materials are reduced through nanotechnology to the tiny size of a fraction of the width of a strand of hair, the sensors can be used for early stage detection of cancer.

Nova Minds is also developing technology for 3-D porous thin films. They could be used for wearable bandages to monitor vital signs or to monitor athletic performance.

In one example, Fan showed a slide with a picture of a young girl playing a violin and said the bandage could be attached to her arm to detect correct posture. Or it could be used to train golfers, she said.

For the next step, Fan plans to apply for National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research, known as SBIR, grants.

Heliotrope Technologies

Delia Milliron, co-founder of Heliotrope Technologies and associate professor of chemistry at UT. Photo courtesy of UT.

The next presenter, Delia Milliron, co-founder of Heliotrope Technologies, is the Chief Scientific Officer at the early-stage startup that is developing new materials and manufacturing processes for electrochromic devices focused on creating energy-saving smart windows.

“It’s a company,” Milliron said. “It’s not about research. Our goal is to make money and to build a highly profitable company producing smart glass.”

The company, founded in 2013 and based in Berkeley, Calif., created a dynamic window coating of nanocrystals to control light and heat transmission. The windows with the coating can switch between three states: transparent, heat blocking and heat and light blocking. The window can be powered for a year with a couple of double A batteries, Milliron said.

Heliotrope is developing its products for the residential and commercial glass market, with a market size of $16 billion worldwide for smart glass, growing at 5 percent annually. It is also looking into the automobile market.

“It’s a good time for this market play,” Milliron said.

Buildings consume 40 percent of all the energy in the U.S. in lighting control and for air conditioning and heat, Milliron said. The smart windows have the potential to greatly reduce energy costs and to save money and reduce the impact on the environment.

The company received a $3 million grant from the Department of Energy, $1 million National Science Foundation SBIR grant and it has received private seed stage funding. Milliron moved to Austin a year ago and is an associate professor in chemical engineering at UT.

“We see that this is the future for smart glass that this is going to become the standard,” Milliron said.

The biggest hurdle for widespread adoption right now is cost, Milliron said. Today, it costs $50 per square foot for Heliotrope’s smart window technology, they are working to get the cost down to $25 a square foot, she said.

Coe Schlicher, CEO of Silicon Audio, presenting at The stARTup Studio.

Silicon Audio

The final presenter, Silicon Audio, has been around the longest and already has a few products on the market. Neal Hall, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at UT, founded the company in 2007.

Silicon Audio created an optical seismometer that records at much lower frequencies. It began creating the device in 2008 and in 2012 showed a prototype to a company in the oil and gas industry, Hall said. The company funded the development and now the product is commercially available, he said.

In 2007, Silicon Audio created a very sensitive, high fidelity microphone for smartphones. The company found a partner for that technology, Hall said.

With capital from two successful projects, Silicon Audio is now developing a magnet-free small-scale radio wave circulator to be placed on a microchip in a cell phone, Hall said. The device has the potential to revolutionize radar and wireless applications, by allowing a cell phone to send and receive data twice as fast on the same channel simultaneously.

“It’s the future of 5G communications,” Hall said. Right now, the communications standard is 4G, but 5G communications is expected by 2020.

Coe Schlicher, CEO of Silicon Audio, said the company looks for a unique technology that is at the inventor level and then works to create a marketable product. Next, they usually apply for a government research grant to develop the product. They generally skip pitching to a venture capitalist and instead go directly to a customer, Schlicher said. That customer invests $2 million to $6 million to bring the product to market, he said.

But with the circulator, Silicon Audio is looking at getting outside funding, Schlicher said. Andrea Alu is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UT and his group members, invented the circulator technology. UT licensed it exclusively to Silicon Audio. Alu is the Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Audio RF Circulator, an affiliated company created in 2014 to bring his technology to market.

The circulator solves a real and growing problem, Schlicher said. Today, radio frequency bandwidth is limited and its availability is decreasing. Up until now, the only solution is to build more cell towers, Schlicher said. But Silicon Audio solves that problem and allows people to send and receive information simultaneously resulting in fewer dropped calls and jammed Wi-Fi signals, he said.

Silicon Audio’s RF Circulator costs ten times less, it’s 100 times smaller and 100 times lighter, Schlicher said.

Innovation is Key to the Future of Austin’s Healthcare Industry

September 16, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Panelists Nancy Harvey, entrepreneur in residence at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, Lanham Napier, former CEO at Rackspace and now a partner at BuildGroup, a growth stage VC firm, Mike Millard, executive director of innovation and commercialization at Seton Healthcare Family and Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, co-founder at 3Com, partner emeritus at Polaris Partners and now professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin.

Austin’s healthcare landscape is poised to change dramatically with the new Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas, said Josh Jones-Dilworth.

Dilworth is a member of The Fifty, a group of Austin residents who have committed to raise $50 million to help finance the new hospital. It is scheduled to open in 2017 and will be across Red River Street from the new Dell Medical School at UT.

The Fifty hosted a panel on “The Future of Care” focused on the venture capital industry, innovation and startups Tuesday afternoon at Athenahealth offices at the Seaholm Power Plant.

“This new ecosystem, if we do it right, is going to throw off a lot of new, interesting, world changing companies,” Dilworth said. “It will create a lot of jobs. It will make Austin a better place to live and do business.”

The new Dell Seton Medical Center at UT, courtesy photo

Seton, part of Ascension, the nation’s largest Catholic and nonprofit hospital system, is investing $245 million to build the Dell Seton Medical Center. The Fifty has pledged to raise another $25 million from the community to match a $25 million donation by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

The goal is to keep healthcare accessible to everyone in Austin no matter what his or her walk of life, Dilworth said.

At the event, Nancy Harvey, entrepreneur in residence at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, served as moderator. The panelists included Mike Millard, executive director of innovation and commercialization at Seton Healthcare Family, Lanham Napier, former CEO at Rackspace and now a partner at BuildGroup, a growth-stage VC fund and Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, co-founder at 3Com, partner emeritus at Polaris Partners and now professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin.

To start off, Harvey asked the panelists to mention one thing they would like to have in Austin healthcare today.

“I think I would just want one bill,” Millard said. “That’s where my bar is now, just one bill, not 30 pieces of paper every time when you go to the doctor.”

Napier said he wanted to see the doctor within one day of calling for an appointment.

“I would like to find a doctor who thinks his time is less valuable than mine,” Metcalfe said.

The panelists also want the healthcare industry to focus on big problems like prevention and to find cures for cancer, obesity, and diabetes and to focus treatments on personalized medicine tailored to a person’s genome.

“I would like to challenge the Dell Medical School to lower the BMI of the population of Travis County by 10 points to 20 points and that would do a world of good,” Metcalfe said.

The healthcare industry should also make sure it is building innovation into the new system, Metcalfe said.

To encourage innovation, Napier recommended that the artificial intelligence group at UT link to the medical school to use cognitive technologies around diagnostics.

“So much of medicine is diagnostic,” Napier said.

The healthcare industry is slow to change, decision-making is difficult and the major players have a lack of competitive understanding, Millard said.

“So even when you bring in innovation, they are incentivized to do exactly what they have been doing,” he said. “They are not incentivized to compete.”

The progress of science is slow in healthcare and it’s often entangled in bureaucracy, Metcalfe said. But he is optimistic.

“It appears to me that healthcare is about to go through the same transition that information technology went through in the early ’80s,” Metcalfe said.

Medical devices and drugs take a long time to develop because they go through an arduous trial and error process. But that is becoming easier through engineering, Metcalfe said.

“Science is becoming less trial and error and more engineering and I think that is going to compress the development times considerably,” he said.

Another solution to better healthcare is to have more corporations partner with the healthcare system to understand the customer better and how to get things done, Millard said.

“A lot of healthcare systems don’t know their customer,” he said.

The panelists talked about the need for cultural change within the healthcare system. For example, instead of spending millions of dollars to create a really nice waiting room, the hospital should be tackling the problem of why it has waiting rooms at all, Millard said.

“You cannot change culture,” Metcalfe said.

“You have to create a separate thing. Leave the old thing over there and eventually they will all die,” Metcalfe said. “And over here is the new thing. This is what happened in the Internet.”

In the ’80s, IBM and AT&T dominated the world with their monopolies. Metcalfe said he had to wait for IBM customers to die because they would not switch over and buy his products as CEO of 3Com.

“I tend to agree,” Millard said. “I often ask people should we just start over. I don’t think you can take these behemoth institutions and make them nimble.”

The other thing that needs to change to encourage innovation in the healthcare industry is to eliminate government regulation, Metcalfe said.

“The Internet developed in a space with a lack of regulations and fierce competition,” he said.

Louise Epstein Named New Managing Director of the Innovation Center at UT

September 4, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Louise Epstein, Managing Director of the UT Innovation Center, photo courtesy of UT

The University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering has named Louise Epstein as the managing director of its Innovation Center.

In the newly created job, Epstein will focus on entrepreneurial endeavors including managing the Longhorn Startup Program, which helps student and faculty led startups. She will also work closely with Bob Metcalfe, faculty director of the center and program manager of Longhorn Startup and Ben Dyer, entrepreneur in residence at UT.

“From entrepreneur to elected official, Louise brings a broad range of experience to the Innovation Center. Her commitment to the university and her initiative, focus and determination make her an excellent addition to the Cockrell School,” Metcalfe said in a statement. “She will surely inspire students and faculty, and I know she will provide strong leadership in taking the center to the next level.”

Epstein’s background is in investment banking and she founded Charge-Off Clearinghouse, a distressed debt company. Epstein also served on the Austin City Council. She also graduated from UT Austin and has served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the McCombs School of Business and as a fellow at the IC2 Institute.

For more on Epstein and her new job, please read this UT report.

UT Entrepreneurship Week to Feature Michael Dell and Rod Canion

January 16, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The University of Texas at Austin is a hotbed of startup activity.
Last year, the University claimed the number seven spot on Entrepreneur Magazine’s list of the most entrepreneurial colleges in the nation.
And the Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency, part of student government at UT, plans to showcase some of the state’s most accomplished PC entrepreneurs during its third annual UT Entrepreneurship Week which runs Feb. 28th through March 6th.
Michael Dell, founder of Dell, will speak on March 6th about how he started his company in a dorm room at the university in 1984 and how he took the company private late last year to create what he has dubbed as “the world’s largest startup.”
And the celebration of the PC industry also features a talk with Rod Canion, one of the cofounders of Campaq Computers, founded in 1982 in Houston. Canion’s talk is on March 5th. Canion and his co-founders previously worked at Texas Instruments when they set out to create Compaq. In 2002, HP acquired Compaq for $25 billion.
Brett Hurt, Entrepreneur in Residence at UT and founder of Bazaarvoice, will conduct the interviews. The event is being sponsored by the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship.

Billionaire Mark Cuban likes to “Party Like a Rock Star” and Invest in Startups

December 6, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Josh Baer, Bob Metcalfe, instructors with Longhorn Startup and Mark Cuban

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Since selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999, Billionaire Mark Cuban has invested in 80 startups.
But his entrepreneurial ventures began as a kid growing up in Pittsburgh.
“As long as I can remember I was an entrepreneur,” Cuban said.
At the age of nine and ten, Cuban packaged baseball cards and sold them to his friends.
At 12, he wanted new basketball shoes. His dad told him that his tennis shoes were just fine and when he had a job he could buy any kind of shoes he wanted. A family friend had some garbage bags he wanted to get rid of and offered them to Cuban. So Cuban sold them door-to-door to earn enough money to buy the basketball shoes.
Cuban recounted the story Thursday night before a packed audience of more than 800 people at the University of Texas Longhorn Startup’s Demo Day. The semester-long course for undergraduates at UT aims to teach them entrepreneurial skills and how to found a startup. One of its instructors, Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at UT, Ethernet inventor and co-founder of 3Com, interviewed Cuban at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium following pitches by 14 student-run startups.
During the hour-long talk, Cuban provided insights into his entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned along the way.
Early on, if it wasn’t garbage bags, it would have been something else, Cuban said.
At 16, Cuban’s mom introduced him to stamp collecting. He consumed information about stamps. At stamp shows, Cuban would buy a stamp from one dealer for 50 cents and walk down to the other side of the show and sell it for $50. Selling stamps helped him pay for school.

Cuban’s College Years

He left Mt. Lebanon High School early because he couldn’t take business classes. He went to the University of Pittsburgh and took classes. He earned enough credits to finish high school. He ended up transferring to the Kelley School of Business. He researched and discovered it was one of the top ten business schools in the country and it had the lowest tuition. At Indiana University in Bloomington, Cuban earned his undergraduate degree in business. He also did a year and a half of his MBA.
“I wanted to take all the hardest classes that I could my freshman and sophomore years and I promised myself I wouldn’t drink and then my junior and senior years when I was 21 I would take all the easy classes and party like a maniac,” Cuban said. “And that’s what I did.”
He also ran a bar in college, which went out of business.
After he left college, Cuban worked for nine months for Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh. He learned how to program there in Fortran. But he didn’t like banking much so he moved to Dallas.

Moving to Dallas

When Metcalfe asked him why, Cuban said “For fun, sun, money and women.”
He had friends who moved to Dallas. He liked the tropical climate. He lived in the village with six guys in a three-bedroom apartment and he slept on the floor.
“I loved every minute of it,” Cuban said.
He worked as a bartender at night. He bought a Texas Instruments 99/4A computer and taught himself to program. He really liked it. Then he got a job at Your Business Software, a retail store, selling Peachtree software and different applications. He did that for nine months and then he got fired. That’s when he started his own PC and software consulting business called MicroSolutions. They set up PCs and software for businesses and set up local area networks.

The crowd clamoring to get a picture with Mark Cuban and Bob Metcalfe at the end of Longhorn Startup Demo Day

At the same time Cuban ran MicroSolutions, a kid in Austin was launching a PC business, Metcalfe said. He asked Cuban if he ever ran into him.
That prompted Cuban to talk about the importance of history in understanding the world today.
“One of the things kids are missing today is a sense of history,” Cuban said. They Google something and if it doesn’t come up in Google, it didn’t happen. But there’s a ton of stuff that isn’t in Google, Cuban said. What kids don’t know is if the companies went out of business, their servers aren’t online anymore and they can’t find out about them. Entrepreneurs need to dig deeper to find information on people who have tried an idea and failed at it so they don’t repeat those same mistakes, he said.
Yet one of the most brilliant things Cuban learned from was this kid in Austin who would post the price of generic computer parts in PC Week Magazine. Cuban drove down to Austin and bought a bunch of computer parts directly from him. When he got back to Dallas, Cuban wrote him a letter.
“Michael, if you keep this up, things will go really well for you,” Cuban said. That kid, of course, was Billionaire Michael Dell. Today, they still crack up about it, Cuban said.
“How did you decide to sell your company to CompuServe?” Metcalfe asked.
“They offered, and I said yes,” Cuban said.
He wanted to retire by the time he was 35. MicroSolutions had $30 million a year in revenue and was very profitable, Cuban said. He sold the company to CompuServe for $6 million. After that he worked for them for a little bit. But then he got a lifetime pass on American Airlines, he retired and “partied like a rock star.”

The founding of AudioNet, later to be renamed Broadcast.com

Cuban and his friend Todd Wagner started AudioNet so they could listen to Indiana basketball games on the Internet. They started the company in the second bedroom of Cuban’s house.
Cuban had a $39 Video Cassette Recorder that recorded for eight hours. He would record radio stations and then import that programming into his computer and eventually post it to the Internet. They had 600 to 700 radio stations that they would post online. The company had tens of thousands of hours of audio content online and more than one million visitors daily coming to the site to listen to it.
Cuban and Wagner started AudioNet in 1995, the same year that Netscape went public. They sold it four years later to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock.
In 2000, Cuban spent $285 million of his fortune to buy the Dallas Mavericks National Basketball Association team from Ross Perot Jr.
Cuban always loved basketball. He didn’t play in high school though. He said he was five foot eight and weighed 240 pounds in high school. Today, he’s six foot three and weighs 205 pounds.
The Mavs are a different type of entity, Cuban said. The team is unlike any business he has ever run. Even though he writes the checks, the team belongs to the community, he said. In 2011, the Dallas Mavericks became NBA champions. To turn the team around, Cuban focused on putting players in a position to succeed.
In addition to owning the Dallas Mavericks, Cuban also stars on the popular television show Shark Tank on ABC which features entrepreneurs pitching venture capitalists with the hopes of landing an investment.
“It’s a lot of work,” Cuban said.
The so-called “Sharks,” successful businessmen and women who invest their own money, don’t know anything about the people who pitch to them, Cuban said. What takes just 10 minutes of TV time, though, can take two and half-hours of interrogation off camera, Cuban said.
The investors, or Sharks, are allowed to do due-diligence after they invest in the companies. In fact, one time Cuban made an investment in a woman’s company but her husband didn’t believe in paying taxes and hadn’t ever paid them, Cuban said. So he was able to get out of that deal.
Out of the 80 startups Cuban has invested in, 28 came from Shark Tank pitches.

Mark Cuban and the rest of the cast of Shark Tank, photo courtesy of Shark Tank

“Shark Tank has really ignited the entrepreneurial fire in a lot people,” Cuban said. “It’s really inspired a lot of people to start their own businesses.”
Out of his 28 investments, Cuban has had one company fail and another that should shut down, he said. But the others are either dragging along or doing very well, he said.
“Shark Tank is the most successful one hour selling platform in the world,” Cuban said. Lani Lazzari, owner of Simple Sugars, sold nearly $1 million worth of her body scrub products after being featured on the show for 10 minutes, Cuban said. He invested $100,000 for a 33 percent stake in her company. She recently turned down a buyout offer. She wants to get to $30 million in annual revenue, he said.
Now is an amazing time to start a business, Cuban said. With a laptop, phone, Internet connection and Amazon account, people can create any kind of business, Cuban said.

Entrepreneurs only fail because of lack of effort and brains

“The one thing in our lives every entrepreneur can control is effort,” Cuban said. Companies don’t fail for lack of anything but lack of effort and brains, he said.
The biggest error companies pitching to Cuban make is that they don’t have any sense of history, he said. Some entrepreneurs also underestimate the amount of effort it takes to turn their ideas into reality.
“It takes time, it’s a grind,” Cuban said. “There are no shortcuts. You’ve got to grind and grind.”

Mark Cuban meets the team behind The Zebra, an Austin startup he invested in but has never met in person until Longhorn Startup Demo Day.

Entrepreneurs need to learn from what’s been done before, Cuban said. He likes to retweet articles on business failures so people can learn from them. That information becomes more valuable because it’s harder to find, Cuban said.

The luckiest guy in the world

An audience member asked Cuban what he regrets not doing.
“It’s turned out pretty well – nothing,” Cuban said. “Someone’s got to be the luckiest guy in the world and luck has played a big part in the level of my success. And I’m just glad it’s me.”
To pitch Cuban, send him an email to MCuban@gmail.com. He reads the first paragraph and if he’s interested, he’ll read more and send the entrepreneur some follow up questions. If he likes the answers, then he might invest. He has invested $10 million in startups he discovered through email pitches and with $6 million worth of those investments he has never even met the entrepreneur, Cuban said.

Startup Grind San Antonio Features Bob Metcalfe

November 28, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Bob Metcalfe is the Professor of Innovation, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at the University of Texas at Austin.
He has taught an undergraduate course on entrepreneurship called Longhorn Startup for the past two years along with Joshua Baer and Entrepreneur in Residence Ben Dyer.
Metcalfe was also inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame this past summer for inventing Ethernet, a local area networking technology that lets computers communicate with one another. Metcalfe also co-founded 3Com and served as a publisher and pundit at InfoWorld. He worked as a full time venture capitalist for a decade as a partner at Polaris Ventures. He has also climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. His wife runs ultra marathons. His children both just qualified to run the Boston Marathon, which they have run previously. And Metcalfe completed his first triathlon last year.
In this interview, Metcalfe recounts how he tried to license ARCnet, a local area network protocol similar to Ethernet, from San Antonio-based Datapoint, one of the first local area networking computer companies. Datapoint wouldn’t license ARCnet.
For 10 years, everyone told Metcalfe that the IBM Token Ring, a local area network protocol that also competed with Ethernet, would become the standard. He persevered and continued to promote Ethernet, which did ultimately become the standard.
Metcalfe started 3Com with $27,000 from a real estate settlement. He even lent $3,000 to one of his partners so he could invest it in the company and then take a salary and pay Metcalfe back $300 a month for 10 months.

Mark Cuban and Cotter Cunningham to Speak at Longhorn Startup Lab

October 27, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Longhorn Startup Lab started out two years ago as a way to jump start undergraduate entrepreneurs at the University of Texas at Austin.
The program run by Bob Metcalfe, UT professor of innovation, and Joshua Baer, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Capital Factory, has graduated four classes so far. Ben Dyer, entrepreneur in residence at UT, officially joined the class this semester, but he has been helping out since its inception.
During the semester, undergraduate students create business plans, assemble teams and launch startup companies. They work with a group of seasoned veteran entrepreneurs who volunteer as mentors. Some even land financing at the end of the program from angel investors or venture capitalists. Many of the student-run companies are still operating today including Lynx Laboratories, which created 3-D imaging software, Clay.io, a platform for HTML5 games and Burpy.com, a grocery delivery service.
The fifth class, featuring 14 undergraduate startups, showcase their ventures at Longhorn Startup Lab Demo Day on December 5th. Each team will give a six minute pitch.
And this Demo Day will have two all-star entrepreneur speakers. Mark Cuban, founder of Broadcast.com and Dallas Mavericks owner and Cotter Cunningham, founder of RetailMeNot, the world’s largest online coupon and deal marketplace, will give keynote addresses at the event.
Baer officially announced the speakers on a Facebook post Sunday evening.
Metcalfe also announced the speakers on Twitter.

Cunningham opens, 14 Longhorn Startups pitch, then I get to interview, moderate your Q&A with Mark Cuban. https://t.co/H6Qlpe33Go

— Bob Metcalfe (@BobMetcalfe) October 28, 2013

Previous speakers have included Metcalfe, Baer, James Truchard, who co-founded National Instruments in 1976 while a graduate student at UT and Rony Kahan, co-founder of Indeed.com.
The event is open to the public and already hundreds of people have signed up to attend.

Disclosure: Burpy.com is an advertiser with SiliconHillsNews.com

Toopher Becomes an IT Portfolio Company at ATI

January 30, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The Austin Technology Incubator at The University of Texas announced that Toopher has officially graduated into its Incubator as an IT portfolio company.
Last December, Toopher closed a $2 Million Series A round of funding from investors including Alsop Louie Partners of San Francisco.
Toopher was started in 2011 by Evan Grim, a University of Texas PhD student in software engineering, and Josh Alexander, an adjunct professor teaching financial derivatives at UT’s McCombs School of Business. They developed security software that authenticates a person’s identity from a smartphone using its location-based technology so that they can log into online accounts. The software uses two forms of authentication to verify the user to prevent identity theft and fraud.
“Toopher is doing something that is very technically difficult, but is very easy for customers to integrate into their system, and is very simple to use,” Stewart Alsop, partner, Alsop Louie, said in a news release. “That’s what we look for: entrepreneurs that have solved a really difficult problem and have the opportunity to grow really fast.”.
“Toopher is revolutionizing authentication and finally making security work for us, utilizing the technology already in our pockets in ways mirroring our everyday activities and interactions” Kyle Cox, director of ATI’s IT/Wireless and Longhorn Startup Development Portfolios said in a news release. “It is great for Austin that this game-changing technology is coming from our students and faculty at the University of Texas, and we are excited for ATI to be part of the continued growth of Toopher.”
In 2012 cybercrime caused over $114 billion in losses and affected more than 550 million users with the bulk of those victims coming from the U.S.

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