Small World Labs announced a partnership today with Inovis in which the companies would work on an integration between Small World Labs social networking software and Inovis Business Community Management solutions. Inovis counts over 20,000 companies as customers. "The addition of Small World Labs social networking platform in conjunction with the Inovis Business Community Management solution portfolio represents significant opportunity for businesses to collaborate with their trading partners," said Michael Wilson, co-founder and CEO of [...]

In an update to our earlier stories about Google and PayPal coming to Austin, PayPal officially opened it’s offices up on Parmer Lane last week. You can see all the open job postings over there courtesy of our job partner, Indeed.com. As for Google, they’ve been looking for a "funky" location for their offices. The ABJ is reporting that they are close to signing up for the 2nd floor of the Scarborough building on 6th [...]

Did you know that the City of Austin has a focus on emerging technologies in Austin, and even an emerging technology team? They do, and it’s great to see the city looking at some cool emerging technologies, and even evaluating how they might be used by the city. www.austinisit.org We’re excited that the website has linked here to AustinStartup as a news and events resource.

According to the Quarterly Venture Capital Report released this week by Ernst & Young LLP and Dow Jones VentureOne, Austin companies are raising money at a clip not seen since 2001.  During the third quarter of 2007, 19 companies raised almost $220 million.  While this amount is up 4% from last year’s third quarter, the results may be a bit skewed, seeing how three companies raised over $120 million of this quarters funds (Heliovolt, Luminary [...]

I had a chance to listed to eZee executive Enrique Ortiz and John Sullivan talk about the future of Near Field Communicatiaons (NFC). It’s the technology behind the Speedpass at the gas station, and Wells Fargo’s new mobile payment pilot. You get your device (smart card, cellphone) within a few millimeters of the NFC reader, and it transmits your payment information to the device immediately. No need for a signature, or a PIN number. It’s [...]

HelioVolt is burning up the newswires these days. They recently received tax incentives from the City of Austin, and now they’ve added $24M to their round, bringing the total round to over $100M. This additive cash came from Sequel Venture Partners, Noventi Ventures, and Passport Capital. So what happened here? Kind of odd, right? We have no inside knowledge of the deal, but if you’ve shopped the deal to a lot of VC firms, some [...]

Editorial by Bryan Menell I’m not exactly an economist, but I’ve recently noticed some innovations that I think are really brilliant. The definition of a market price is whatever a willing buyer will pay a willing seller. But what about prices that are kind of on the fringe of the market. Perhaps a somewhat willing seller, or I could call it a conditional seller? There have been web concepts with conditional buyers before, for example [...]

The new kids in the Austin Technology Incubator, eVapt is trying to make life for companies that provide software as a service (SaaS) much easier. For instance if you’re readying your SaaS offering, you’ve got to think about your contract with your users. You will need to create a contract, and think about things like charging via flat fee, user-based fees, or usage models. eVapt also provides a dashboard for the various services it provides. [...]

Patton Medical makes a relatively simple device for frequent injection users like diabetics. If you need many injections in a day, your injection sites become bruised. Patton’s device basically creates a needle stick once, which allows multiple drug deliveries over the next 72 hours through a flexible tube. The website has some great diagrams and graphics. The release says the investors are anonymous, but we’ll see if we can do some research on that.

Silverton Partners threw a fantastic shindig last night for friends of the company. For those of you not familiar with Silverton, the company is the investment and philanthropic arm of former Austin Ventures partner Bill Wood. Silverton isn’t a traditional type of VC. As a matter of fact, they don’t even have a website that talks about their portfolio, philosophy, team, etc. The only website relates to Silverton’s philanthropic activities. The firm is quietly investing [...]