So they’re technically not really an Austin company, but Rackspace announced some pretty major second quarter revenues today. $84M and growing each quarter puts them in the $350-$400M annual revenue range. Rackspace joins the small list of private companies that are announcing revenue numbers, even though they are not required to do so. Usually this means they are conditioning the market for some sort of financial event. Given the wave of liquidity lust that’s going [...]
Cleantech Friday by Steve (and Lauren) Guengerich After last week’s visit with Peggy Liu and her first-person account of the cleantech opportunities and challenges in China, I sought a similar first-person account of the other big Eastern hemisphere emerging power, India. ME (last week): “I want you to go ‘on assignment’ for me. Take pictures of everyday energy and sustainability-related issues where you live/study/travel…things like the water supply, vehicle emissions, recycling, sustainable architecture, electric [...]
We’ve covered TechTurn quite a bit in the past several months. Founder Jeff Zeigler won an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, and the company was also listed in the Going Green 100. Now they’ve announced that they’ve hired David Wright on the executive team as VP of Product Sales and E-Commerce. (Isn’t all commerce pretty much E-Commerce these days? Kind of a silly title.) Without a lot of fanfare this company has [...]
Grant Slater of the Associated Press wrote a great article about EEStor and Patent No. 7,033,406. If this new capacitor technology is everything that they’ve hyped it up to be (drive your electric car 500 miles on a 5-minute plug-in to the wall) it is game changing on many levels. On the plus side is all our hopes and dreams of more efficient energy storage. One of the top venture capital companies in the country, [...]
In today’s Q&A Wednesday we’re talking with Michael Wilson, co-founder and CEO of Small World Labs. Michael has bootstrapped the company for the past two years, accumulating an impressive list of clients along the way. Q: How did you first get the idea for Small World Labs? I had heard of MySpace and Facebook and became a member of each (and other sites like them) very early on. As a member, I immediately saw these [...]
The Austin Wireless Alliance has announced a happy hour, networking event, and discussion about Wimax on Tuesday, October 2nd. Speakers will be Dr. Jeff Andrews, author of the best selling book "Fundamentals of Wimax" and Mike Wolleben, CEO of Austin startup company Wimax.com. They should just be getting back from Wimax World this week in Chicago. If you’re interested in Wimax, this is the place to be! The event is Tuesday, October 2nd at Dom [...]
We’re right in the midst of the Solar Power 2007 conference and expo in Long Beach, California this week. They’re claiming that it’s the largest solar industry event in the U.S. Last Thursday the show organizers closed registration saying that they had filled the capacity of the Long Beach Convention Center. It’s either really true, or some clever marketing. Making news was media mogul and well known billionaire Ted Turner. You can watch the 21 [...]
Silicon Valley Bank has published a very interesting white paper titled After The Bubble: Analyzing the Landscape on the topic of formal valuations of technology and life science companies. It contains some very intersting findings. Of particular note: Life sciences has seen the number of A rounds increase 34 percent since 2003, and almost a 50 percent increase in the total A round dollars (compared to technology’s 24 percent and 18 percent increases, respectively). There [...]
Austin-based FluidInnovation is at DEMOfall this week launching the first virtual game that lets players act as venture capitalists to predict the success or failure of real technologies. The team has been working incredibly hard to prepare for the launch of the product tomorrow when CEO Chris McKinzie and DEMO veteran Paulo Vieira take the stage. The Virtual Ventures game can certainly be entertaining for people interested in technology, but it’s also a great companion [...]
The once high-flying United Devices, which develops grid computing and cluster software, has announced that it has merged with a Chicago company, Univa Grid Computing. The combined entity, “Univa UD,” will continue offer a comprehensive set of cluster and grid solutions based on open source and proprietary components. According to Jason Liu, president and chief executive officer of the newly-formed Univa UD, “Customers will finally get access to industrial-strength open source products that are both [...]
