Last week we featured a poll to ask people what Austin company would be the next to file papers for an initial public offering (IPO) of their stock. "Someone Else" received the most votes with 31.6% of the vote, yet only one write-in was created for Site Controls, makers of Site-Command – a software platform for energy monitoring and management for retail, restaurants, and convenience stores. HomeAway.com received 26.3% of the vote, leading all the [...]
Cleantech Friday by Steve Guengerich For anyone interested in cleantech – the industry, the companies, and even the underlying principles – you really have to put the Austin Cleantech Forums on your event calendar. Clean Energy Incubator director, Joel Serface, made the issue of re-energizing the broad community of cleantech entrepreneurship in Central Texas one of his priorities when he came to the University of Texas. The evening events have not disappointed, with the next [...]
Famecast, an AV backed company which we described as “Like American Idol online. Only with more categories than just pop singers. There is spoken word, short film, comedy, and other "stages"” has begun the third season of its online talent contest. According to the company, artists can upload their videos at www.FameCast.com through Sept. 3-15. FameCast plans on awarding $120,000 to deserving artists in this third season, and is on track to distribute nearly $500,000 [...]
The folks at SXSW Interactive just announced the launch of it’s Panel Picker for the 2008 festival. Last year was the first year that SXSW allowed the community to pick which panel topics they were interested in. According to Hugh Forrest they have "about twice as many submissions to the Panel Picker this year" as they had last year. AustinStartup will be liveblogging the event in 2008, which is emerging as a great launchpad and [...]
Today we kickoff another weekly feature that we’re calling Q&A Wednesday. We start off with a Q&A with Dean Cruse, VP of Sales and Marketing at FiveRuns. Five Runs provides enterprise management for people developing in Ruby on Rails. The company is doing some tremendous things for the Ruby on Rails community. Q: Even non-technical people are starting to hear more about Ruby on Rails. Why is it important to offer enterprise class management services [...]
Another Austin-based company with Jimmy Treybig on the Board of Directors has closed a large financing round. Treybig, who sits on the board of Heliovolt, is also the Chairman of Luminary Micro . The company, which focuses on ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontrollers for the embedded and industrial markets, announced today that it has closed a $25 million round lead by outside investor Adams Street Partners of Chicago, Illinois. Additionally, Tom Berman, a Partner with Adams Street [...]
eZee is an Austin-based mobile solutions startup that should be making a splash soon. The company was accepted into the Austin Technology Incubator and, according to the blog of CTO Enrique Ortiz, moved in last week. I would expect to see a demo, a launch, or some sort of presence from them at the upcoming Texas Wireless Summit. eZee has a very experienced management team, led by John Sullivan who previously founded Outtask, Inc. which [...]
ON Networks, which we wrote about here last month, just announced that media giant Allan Grafman has joined the board of directors. Grafman has been in the entertainment industry for 30 years, and was formerly the CFO of Hallmark Entertainment, and has held executive positions with Tribune and Capital Cities/ABC. This is a major deal for ON Networks, which has been rolling out new programming at an amazingly fast pace. ON Networks is a relatively [...]
For those of you that read the blog in an RSS Reader, please check out the homepage and on the top right hand side you will see our poll for the week. We’d like to know who you think will be the next Austin IPO. Please cast your vote. If your answer is "None of the Above" then please add a comment to this entry tell everyone who you think it will be. We’ll post [...]
Staktek, the Austin-based publicly-traded company previously financed by Austin Ventures, announced today that it will be acquiring Southland Micro Systems, an Irvine, California-based provider of memory products and services. Terms of the transactions include a payment of $18 million in cash at closing and the assumption of $5 million in debt; additionally, Southland stockholders will be entitled to receive additional compensation pursuant to incentives related to certain financial projections. Staktek will seek to increase its [...]
