The writing was on the wall for SolarWinds, and now the writing is also on the S/1 statement on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothers are handling the offering. Not a bad group of underwriters for an Austin IPO. Looking at the numbers, the company hopes to raise $250m throught he offering. The company made profits of $13.6M on revenue of $61.7M in 2007. Now let’s see [...]
The instructional video space is hot right now, and Austin is homebase for two of the emerging companies in the space; ExpertVillage and MindBites. In mid-2007 Demand Media (which recently acquired Pluck) bought ExpertVillage. In January, 5Min landed 5Million for their website. Last month former Google Video/YouTubers launched HowCast with an $8M investment. Today, MindBites is launching and announcing $1M in a Series A funding from True Ventures. True isn’t exactly a household name for [...]
Small World Labs, a leading provider of enterprise social media solutions and online community building expertise, today announced it has received more than $1 million toward a Series A funding round which it will closeout in the next 60 days. The funding will be used to further enhance Small World Labs’ leadership in community management as well as augment its technology platform. You can read our Q&A with CEO Michael Wilson here. “By combining proven [...]
At the SXSW Interactive festival, I had the chance to sit down with Guy Kawasaki and talk one-on-one about startups, the new VC environment, and his new website Alltop. Guy and I first met at Apple’s first Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose in (I think) 1987 when he had just left the position of Evangelist at Apple, and started 4th Dimension. In this second part we talked about young CEO’s, and the potential acquisition [...]
The big brands are quickly learning how to market using the social networking tools of the day. Case in point, a new Facebook application namd Alter Ego that is just plain….well….cool. And you can see the Burn branding all over it, which is a Coca Cola brand. In Alter Ego you can create an alter ego for your Facebook account. Your alter ego has a cooler name than you do, has a cool flat to [...]
If you’re looking into funding for your company, check out the Central Texas Funding Symposium coming up April 18th. Created by Business District Magazine, the event is a one-day conference for entrepreneurs ready to go to the next level of funding. Early registration is discounted to $95, so take advantage of it now. The event also includes a fast-pitch competition. If you’ve been trying to get your idea in front of the Central Texas Angel [...]
It’s official, Mumboe is now out of beta and officially launching. Momboe is a web-based application that helps companies take the mumbo jumbo out of managing their contractual agreements. The company is running with the highly popular “freemium” model, so if you’re interested you can sign up for an account today. The company is presenting at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View this week. “Mumboe is part of a new generation of web [...]
At the SXSW Interactive festival, I had the chance to sit down with Guy Kawasaki and talk one-on-one about startups, the new VC environment, and his new website Alltop. Guy and I first met at Apple’s first Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose in (I think) 1987 when he had just left the position of Evangelist at Apple, and started 4th Dimension. In this first part we talked about startups and VC’s. Guy was an [...]
Yahoo will be announcing today that they are going to be supporting the semantic web and microformats. TechCrunch has some good coverage on the topic. Scobel calls it “game changing.” SearchEngineWatch also has some commentary. Expect the tech news and the blogsphere to light up with comments on this today.
Our Q&A Wednesday today is with Ranjit Nayak, the founder and VP of Marketing for eVapt. It’s an early stage company in the Austin Technology Incubator that is finding ways to make Software as a Service (SaaS) companies more successful. How did you first get the idea for eVapt? Having worked for a decade in the enterprise technology sector, we saw that enterprises were having a difficult time keeping track of how various software applications [...]
