Tonight is the annual Entrepreneur of the Year awards for Austin, Texas. I thought it would be interesting to make some predictions based on no inside information, but just my gut instinct. Tomorrow we will see if I came close at all. American Campus Communities, Bill Bayless. I know the company has been growing and Bill has been doing a great job. I think they will win an award this year. MessageOne, Mike Rosenfelt and [...]

I can’t find an Austin tie-in with this piece, but I have a personal interest in clean technologies. Over at the Oak Ridge National Labs they have developed this cool product for hybrid solar lighting. They place a solar dish on the roof, concentrate the sun’s light into fiber optics, and then the fiber optics carry the light where it needs to be. In the video, proponents say just 2 strands of the fiber is [...]

Here’s a startup company in Austin that you wouldn’t necessarily think of because it’s a professional sports franchise — The Austin Wranglers. Yet the organization has all the same challenges as any other startup company in Austin. If you’ve never seen arena football, it’s an incredibly fun and fast-paced sport. With a field only 50 yards long anything can happen at any time. Last weekend the Philadelphia Soul came to town, along with team owner [...]

There is a nice story in the Austin Business Journal today about Boundless Network. They announced an additional $4M in capital from existing investors Silverton Partners (Bill Woods investment company) and Austin Ventures. This brings the total investment to $8M. Boundless is bringing technology and infrastructure to a typically fax based business to enable professionals in the promotional products business to be more effective. I would equate the business model to being like the Mary [...]

So I’m scanning the news and see this item about Power Technology, a publicly traded company based in Austin. But their phone number is in Houston and their press release comes from Houston. Totally confusing. I did a little homework and here is what I came up with. The company seems to be in an interesting area, more efficient battery technology. They have a technology that can make lighter weight, longer lasting batteries. We’re talking [...]

BazaarVoice recently announced that they have achieved profitability, and company executive Sam Decker expanded on this fact in his personal blog. This is a huge milestone for the company, it’s management, and investors. So what is Bazaarvoice all about? At the heart of the value proposition behind BazaarVoice‘s product is the fact that consumers are more likely to buy when they can interact with a community of existing buyers (ratings, reviews, feedback). To build that [...]

Austin, Texas headquartered BSG Alliance announced yesterday the acquisition of The Concours Group, based in the Houston area. Wasn’t it only yesterday that BSG announced $20M in funding from Hummer Winblad and Foundation Capital? It was two weeks ago, but it seems like just yesterday. The Concours Group is a strategic consulting company. James Champy (co-author of the seminal book Reengineering the Corporation) was a key player in the formation of Concours after he sold [...]

There is a lot of buzz about Enterprise 2.0 these days. In short, businesses are trying to figure out how to apply Web 2.0 technologies to their business. Does that mean everyone in the company should now spend their day uploading digital pictures from their weekend to Facebook? Without any sort of context, good examples, or pre-packaged software to buy nobody really has a good idea of exactly what Enterprise 2.0 looks like or feels [...]

Slacker Slacker is a startup company with big aspirations to take personal music players by storm. Today you can listen to the streaming music service over the internet via their website. I’m kind of partial to the 80′s hits, but I’m showing my age. For those of you who would like some great music when you’re not sitting in front of your computer, never fear. Soon we will have the Slacker Portable Player (pictured here). [...]

Austin Tech Happy Hour Originally uploaded by Bryan Menell. Last night was the first Austin Tech Happy Hour at Molotov downtown. A great chance for people from the Austin technology industry to meet, network, and have fun. Over 100 people turned out to make new friends, and I heard a little bit of business being done as well. If you want to be notified of future ATHH events you can sign up at www.austintechhh.com or [...]