Come join your fellow technology enthusiasts at Austin Tech Happy Hour tonight from 6-8pm at Hi-Lo downtown. Your first drink is free courtesy of Technology Navigators! If you’d like to be notified of the happy hours, you can sign up at the website or text "athh" to msgme (67463) on your mobile phone.
James Hong, co-founder of www.hotornot.com has written a great blog entry about a somewhat new twist to the Entrepreneur’s Dilemma. Michael Arrington gives his story a good setup on his post over at TechCrunch. So what is the entrepreneur’s dilemma? Well, the classic story says that people startup new businesses because they have exciting new ideas, and want to test them and try to make this new business a success. In the beginning you have [...]
After a pretty brief beta test, Thoof is now live. I was able to secure a beta test account and used it a bit during the test. I even submitted a story, which was actually a link to the blog entry where I wrote about Thoof. Through my website tracking I was even able to see that some people read the blog entry after clicking on the link on Thoof. I went back to my [...]
Regular readers of the blog will know that I am a big proponent of all technology development in Austin, not just chips, software, and infrastructure plays. So that’s why I really enjoy seeing news such as that announced today from the Medical Carbon Research Institute (MCRI). Here is a full report from dBusinessNews. MCRI is changing it’s name to On-X LIfe Technologies, Inc. in conjunction with a $32M financing of equity, debt conversion, and revenue [...]
It was announced that ClearOrbit was sold to TAKE Solutions, based in Chennai India, for $20.6M in cash. Reports say the company had taken in $15M in venture capital from various sources over the years, and sales were approximately $15M annually. I assume that includes the combined results of eBoomering by now, which they acquired in early 2006. By all measures this is a pretty underwhelming result, but lets keep some other things in mind. [...]
NetEffect (formerly Banderacom) is a company that has been around since 1999, and manufactures (get ready for the technical jargon) full iWARP 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. Lets just suffice it to say that everything in the data center runs on ethernet, 10 Gigabits is really really fast throughput between computers (or computers and storage), and iWARP is a protocol standard that enables RDMA to run over Ethernet.* These guys have taken down tons of venture [...]
Revver co-founder Ian Clarke launched a new startup about six months ago called Thoof. The website will deliver personalized news to you based upon a recommendation engine. As a user of Netflix and Amazon I’m really not big on their recommendation engines, as I think they are simplistic. If I order some romantic comedies on Netflix, it seems like they just recommend more romantic comedies usually with the same actors if possible. On Amazon if [...]
ReachForce CEO Suaad Sait says that traditional marketing is happy with 3% response rates to marketing and advertising. You would think people who are 97% wrong would be fired! True enough. ReachForce provides services to help target potential buyers with an organization based upon their role in the organization, not just their title. They can provide lists of more qualified buyers (which are 100% guaranteed), but they are really more than that. They’ve integrated their [...]
Friction Kills Websites If I have to fill out a long sign-up form, answer a questionnaire, wait for a return email to validate my logon, etc, the chances of me completing that process go down by the second. It’s called friction, and friction kills. Flickr has a sign up process which is not too bad, but after sign up there is very little friction. There is almost nothing there; upload a picture, view some pictures, [...]
In a June 6th job posting, Google says it is looking for a highly technical engineering director who can drive technical projects and provide leadership for a group of 100+ engineers in an innovative and fast-paced environment. No this is not my April 1 posting. Google spokeswoman Sunny Gettinger confirms that Austin offers an incredible lifestyle merging Texas and technology. There’s no question that Google could probably have their pick of talented engineers in Austin. [...]
