Today’s Q&A is with Jay Hallberg, co-founder and VP of Marketing at Spiceworks. The company’s product has been on the market less than a year, and already has over 160,000 users (and growing every day). They are pioneering the business of ad-supported business applications. Q: How did you first get the idea for Spiceworks? The idea for Spiceworks really came in two phases. First, we figured out that we could create much simpler IT management [...]
Guest blogger Ellen Wood is the co-founder and CEO of vcfo, inc. With over 800 clients to date, and offices in Austin, Dallas, Denver, and Seattle, vcfo has been an industry pioneer and continues to be a leading provider of financial, human resources and systems implementation services to companies ranging in size from emerging to public. Have you documented your stock position? Co-founders, early employees, and funding sources often have a slice of the early [...]
Last Thursday (October 25th) Om Malik, one of the top technology bloggers in the country, came to Austin to speak to friends and clients of PR firm Lois Paul & Partners. We couldn’t make it, as we were at Austin Tech Happy Hour celebrating the release of the Facebook plugin for Duels. But our friend Stacey Higgenbotham at The Deal attended, and had this writeup on her blog The Seed Stage. Perhaps he will be [...]
FiveRuns, an Austin-based company that is providing enterprise-class monitoring and management of Ruby on Rails applications, today announced $6.2M in funding from Austin Ventures. This brings the total to $9.2M. For more information on the company you can visit their website, or see our Q&A Wednesday feature from August. The company has also added some executive talent lately including Olivier Thierry as President & CEO, and Dean Cruse as the VP of Marketing. When we [...]
Oxygen Games announced that they launched a Facebook app for their popular online game Duels. It wasn’t long ago that Duels launched and caught the attention of top tech blogging site TechCrunch, which drove traffic through the roof. Keeping the servers up and running became a significant challenge. Now Duels has become the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) to integrate with Facebook, a unique benefit to their 50,000 users. What’s next? How about [...]
Cleantech Friday by Steve Guengerich Ok, dear readers: group exercise. What are your favorite cleantech blogs? With so much going on in Austin/Central Texas, I’m sure that many of you have some good feeds you regularly follow for insider observations, opinions, and wisdom from the field. Time to cough them up through a Comment right now! Just click on that third little thing-y to the right of the “Posted at…” timestamp, below this blog posting. [...]
According to a report released by Scarborough Research, Austin is the top blogging city in the U.S. with 15% of the population reading or contributing to a blog in the past 30 days. Austin was followed by Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Honolulu. The report says that the top cities have both tech-savvy and youth in common, with 37% of Austin adults being between the ages of 18 and 34. And of course we all [...]
Last week several partners from New York-based venture capital firm StarVest Partners came to Austin to meet and greet the technology community in Austin, and they did it Texas style at Lambert’s BBQ. It was great fun to meet people from the firm, and also some of the emerging technology companies that were represented. According to the partners, they are very willing to lead an investment in a company that they are interested in. This [...]
If you’re not watching the national tech news today, Facebook announced a $240M investment by Microsoft making Facebook valued at around $15B. You can check out all the blog activity on Sphere right here. Looks like Newscorp got a deal when it spent $580M for MySpace. Rupert looks like a genius. Again.
Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Boundless Network Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer Henrik Johansson. Boundless has been on an acquisition streak recently in their quest to revolutionize a typically low-tech industry. Q: How did you first get the idea for Boundless Network?My co-founder Jason Black crafted the model after working in the industry for over 10 years and growing increasingly frustrated with how dysfunctional it was in so many areas. Specifically, three characteristics converged to [...]
