We’ve been hearing rumors that eZee, one of the Austin Emerging 100 and a member of the Austin Technology Incubator, is ceasing operations. Nothing has been confirmed yet, but we’ll keep you posted if we hear something official.
Many of our readers have participated in the Moximity beta program ever since the launch, and it’s appearance in the iTunes App Store. Now the company has launched the companion website. You can check in at locations now from your laptop, and modify the radius of your search to see your friends. Depending upon your location on the map, you’ll see advertisements that are location-sensitive. The site is also integrated with Yelp, so you can see relevant reviews.
If you sync up Moximity with your Twitter and Facebook accounts, your Facebook friends will automatically become your Moximity friends, and your updates will get automatically posted to Twitter and your Facebook mini-feed. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Moximity yet, maybe because you don’t have an iPhone, this is your opportunity.
HomeAway, Inc., the world’s leading vacation rental marketplace, today officially broke ground for its new Gold-level LEED-certified offices under construction at 1011 W. 5th St.
The four-story, 86,000-square-foot mixed-use building is a development of Schlosser Development, and will also house modern home décor store West Elm and other retailers. The project represents Schlosser Development Corporation’s fourth phase of a five-block area at the intersections of Fifth and Sixth Streets and Lamar, dubbed the “Market District.” The HomeAway office is expected to open in summer 2009.
“We surveyed our Austin-based employees about what area of town they wanted our new office to be located— and an overwhelming majority voted for the Market District location,” says Brian Sharples, CEO and co-founder of HomeAway. “We couldn’t be happier to bring our headquarters downtown, especially to a development that accommodates our tremendous growth and is also so convenient for our team.”
Founded in 2005 with six employees, HomeAway now has offices in four countries and 354 employees, 150 of which are based in Austin. HomeAway tapped Mike Wiley, a real estate broker with Southwest Strategies Group, to find the 51,000-square-foot office space, which more than doubles the size of the current Austin office.
Brad Nelsen of Nelsen Partners designed the 1011 W. 5th St. building while CTA Architects Engineers, a firm dedicated to integrated and sustainable design, is responsible for the interior. The interior architecture is expected to earn the HomeAway office a Gold-level LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for Commercial Interior Design.
LEED certification is the building industry’s recognition of sustainability in human and environmental health and is based on meeting/exceeding standards in sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality. The HomeAway office’s Gold-level certification recognizes a high-achievement of green building, second only to a Platinum rating.
“By developing projects for diverse, locally-owned businesses such as Whole Foods, Pure Austin and now HomeAway, we have seen our vision of a downtown corridor to live, work and play come to life in the Market District,” says Brad Schlosser, president and owner of Schlosser Development. “We’re extremely proud to be a driving force behind the growth of this area.”
Thom Singer is the director of business development for vcfo, inc. He is also the author of three books on the power of business relationships and networking. He can be reached at www.thomsinger.com.
Have you heard? The international economy is not doing great. One cannot pick up a newspaper, read a website or hear a broadcast without stories about how the downturn in the economy is affecting everyone from Washington to Wall Street to Main Street and beyond.
People are scared. Businesses are assessing their credit availability and are avoiding making any large decisions until the first of the year. Hiring is slowing in many areas. Consumers are nervous about making big purchases, too, as they conserve cash – there is less money for businesses (vicious circle). Wall Street and Main Street are linked. The near-term outlook for everyone is bleak (I say “near-term because we should never forget that every down in the economy is eventually follow by an up-tick!) as everyone from the person on the street to our political and business leaders look for solutions.
So what does this have to do with networking? EVERYTHING!
If you want to recession proof your career you must have a network of personal and professional contacts that know and support you. Waiting to network until you are laid off or in need is a horrible strategy to protect your future.
All opportunities come from people. While a simple statement, it is one you must take to heart. If you lost your job tomorrow would you know where to start your search for your next career? Statistics show that most jobs are filled (directly and indirectly) through networking contacts. If your network is limited, you ability to discover opportunities is limited as well.
If you are concerned about how the economy might affect your future then it is time for you to assess your commitment to your business relationships. When you are in need and you approach people to make new contacts it is clear that you are in the game for your own reasons. However, when you are not seeking help and you establish a mutually beneficial long-term friendship, the other person will be there for you instinctively if your career gets sidelined. You will not need to sell yourself to others who already know about your unique talents.
You want to make sure that you establish strong business relationships before you are struck by any negative consequences of the faltering economy. To think that a “networking blitz” once you are in a bad spot will yield results is short sighted and plain wrong. Better to be an established and known contributor within your business community all along. If people know firsthand that you will be a great catch for any company, and that you will make them proud when they recommend you to others, then your phone will ring. If you are a stranger who is desperate, you may or may not get their assistance.
Establish the connections to the power of an extended network now, not later.
Your network is MORE important than ever in an uncertain economy!!!
On the opening day of the inaugural SpiceWorld 2008 user conference, Spiceworks announced that the user base for the industry’s first free crowdsourced IT management application for small and medium businesses has doubled to more than 500,000 in just nine months – making the Spiceworks IT Desktop the world’s fastest growing IT management application. In addition, Spiceworks announced it has doubled the number of advertisers running campaigns to its growing community of IT professionals.
“Spiceworks has become one of the largest and most active business networks of IT professionals in the world,” said Scott Abel, CEO of Spiceworks. “We’ve achieved this by letting the community of IT pros drive the features they need. As a result, Spiceworks is an essential part of their daily workflow, making the network an extremely attractive place for advertisers trying to reach small and medium businesses.”
The Spiceworks community of IT professionals represents over $60 billion in annual IT budgets. The active network of IT pros has crowdsourced ratings and reviews on more than 8,500 technology products and services, and has created more than 280 professional groups on technology, industry and regional topics. More than 60 world-renowned advertisers – including Microsoft, HP, and SONY – have run successful campaigns in the application and within the Spiceworks community. These campaigns include in-workflow advertising and community sponsorships that leverage social media in a professional environment.
The Spiceworks IT Desktop is a free IT management application designed for small and medium organizations with up to 250 employees. More than 500,000 small business IT professionals worldwide use the Spiceworks IT Desktop to automatically inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. It is the first business application to embed crowdsourcing and community collaboration features directly into an IT professional’s daily workflow. The Spiceworks application is supported by displaying relevant, non-intrusive ads on topics that are useful to IT professionals. The latest version of the Spiceworks IT Desktop 3.1, which includes new crowdsourcing features, is available for free www.spiceworks.com.
Austin Ventures, fresh off the close of $900M for a new fund, announced the commitment of up to $75 million of equity capital for the creation of AVRON Partners, Inc., a new supply chain services acquisition and strategic business development company. The new organization has been formed in partnership with Ronald T. Sorrow, co-founder and former CEO of RoadLink USA and former CEO of CSX Intermodal. Mr. Sorrow will lead the new organization as its President and Chief Executive Officer. The new venture will concentrate on acquiring and strategically expanding companies within the supply chain services, transportation logistics, and distribution sectors.
“Ron is an outstanding executive who has demonstrated success in both large, corporate environments, and entrepreneurial ventures in the supply chain and logistics industry. We are excited to bring Ron’s experience and perspectives to our initiatives in this space,” said David Lack, AV Partner.
AV’s relationship with Mr. Sorrow is part of a stated strategy to partner with talented executives with proven track records to build growth companies in attractive markets. AV has a dedicated in-house talent function that identifies executives that want a hands-on partner in building their next business. AVRON Partners will join AV’s portfolio of leading supply chain and logistics investments, which includes Newgistics, ReTrans and Port Logistics Group.
Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich
In his new book “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World,” Don Tapscott talks about a new generation “bathed in bits.” The research in the book identifies eight “net gen” norms that Don goes on to examine and extend into discussions about the coming transformation of institutions and society. Like any great major transformation, seeds of this change were planted years before.
It was nearly a decade ago that Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, famously said “There is no privacy..get over it.” Fast forward to a headline article this week in the NY Times – “Banks Mine Data and Woo Troubled Borrowers” – which speaks to the vast array of personalized information available for sale.
That NY Times article got me to thinking about the subject of this week’s FreshTech Friday post. What if there was a way for people to monetize the data about themselves? Rather than accept that others control the buying and selling of our data, what if the individual was able to get in on the action? Here’s some random thoughts to string together:
-ever since Seth Godin published the bible on permission marketing, the net generation largely accepts that the best we can do is barter our private data for little online trinkets, more or less valuable at a moment in time. Why not get cold hard cash?
-ever since David Pullman rocked the investment world (literally) with Bowie bonds, there’s clearly a proven market for an individual’s capacity to produce value over their lifetime (way beyond what the insurance industry’s actuarial tables would indicate). Why let rockstars have all of the fun?
-and ever since Facebook started morphing towards the social operating system and Google revealed that Personalized Search was their friendly way to let you know that – yes indeed – everything that you had ever searched for was filed away somewhere to be mined by you or them (or maybe…?), there is a vast new, highly personalized set of data that each of us creates and incrementally refines – for free! – every time we use these services.
Any marketer worth their salt knows that the name-of-the-game in mastering profitability of initial customer acquisition and retention is understanding lifetime value. And the more they know about you – your profile, your activities, and your relationships – the more they can personalize offers and the products or services that go with them.
What if there was a new kind of social network service, where you could receive a fee for your participation in the network? Sure, you’d have to agree to be audited, as well as truthfully and accurately complete a comprehensive profile (including things like your detailed health records, down to your genetic makeup, like that available from 23andme, along with a commitment to use the paid network as your primary (exclusive) social platform. But, why not if, in effect, all of that same “private” information about you is available already for a fee?
It’s the ultimate form of personal information arbitrage – and you’d be the direct beneficiary. So, rather than all of these clever new gps-powered services for the iPhone being the ones to charge advertisers for the ability to have their restaurants or coffee shops presented to you because of the free twitter stream that you generate while you are on the move, why can’t you be the one to receive the royalty for letting the advertiser know that you are going to be in the area and, by the way, happen to be awfully fond of lattes in the afternoon?
Rackspace is in Austin today hosting an event at Austin City Limits, complete with BBQ lunch! We didn’t really hear about this event ahead of time, so we couldn’t help them promote it. Don’t they know who we are? (totally kidding) For future reference, Rackers, keep us in the loop. Despite that, every mover and shaker in the Austin tech community seems to be at the event and twittering. Robert Scobel even came to Austin for this event (although to be fair they are one of his sponsors).
The online video for this event is pretty incredible. Large screen, high quality video. It was almost as good to watch it online as being there (except you cannot smell the BBQ). So what did they announce today?
Rackspace is making investments in cloud computing in a big way, allowing them to compete with AWS, Sun, Microsoft, and all the big boys. If you put the “fanatical support” twist on a solid cloud offering, this could be a combination that becomes a market leader.
Rackspace announced a partnership with Sonian for archiving. They believe that regulatory needs will require them to have a solid archiving offering, and Sonian is it. They are also rebranding the traditional Mosso cloud offering to be named CloudSites. Their saying is “code it, load, it, watch it scale.” The company boasts 80,000 Mosso customers today.
CloudFiles is a new offering, and they’re announcing full availability today. You don’t need a Mosso account, you just sign up for it. The cost is $0.15 per GB of storage, $0.10 per GB of upload, and $0.17 per GB of download. Infinite storage, full REST API’s, and also a web interface. Rackspace announced the acquisition of Jungle Disk today, and it sounds like CloudFiles is the former Jungle Disk offering.
CloudServers is the brand name for the scalable computing offering. They are on-demand, instant on, and instant off. With this, they announced the acquisition of Slice Host, who has been out on the market for a bit already doing cloud hosting.
In general I think it’s a good call to make $10M and $20M acquisitions of very focused and complementary companies if you’ve got the IPO money to make it happen. The mega mergers never seem to increase shareholder value. Now that Rackspace has some solid money to invest, they could grow into a very significant player in this market space.
Small World Labs, an Austin-based provider of enterprise social networking software and online community building expertise, today announced a partnership with one of Hollywood’s most successful writers and producers, resulting in “Showbizzle,” a unique form of Internet entertainment that blends traditional broadcast storytelling with the two-way conversions enabled by social media.
“We have seen many transformations in media from print to radio, radio to TV, TV to DVD, etc.,” said Charles Rosin, executive producer/showrunner of Beverly Hills 90210’s first five seasons whose writing/producing credits also include Northern Exposure and Dawson’s Creek, “but nothing compares to the shift that has been brought by having the digital generation embrace the technical innovations and the multiple platforms in which scripted entertainment is available. Hollywood has only started to address this generational schism,” added Rosin, who feels Showbizzle is positioned to become part of the next generation of popular shows and resources available to the digital audience.
Created with his daughter Lindsey Rosin, 23, a member of the Writer’s Guild of America, Showbizzle features original characters portraying young writers, directors and actors sharing their most compelling moments – from the highest highs to the most desperate lows – of life as a twenty-something living, working, looking for love, and trying to get ahead in Hollywood, through two-minute scripted videos, shot in the style of a reality TV show, with at least three new videos posted daily.
The biggest challenge for Lindsay Rosin, who wrote and directed most of the vignettes on Showbizzle, was balancing the broadcast centric world of entertainment and the two-way conversations people are increasingly demanding online. “My age group is a generation of broadcasters. We are used to having our voices heard so traditional media models can be frustrating. With Showbizzle we are trying to combine the power and drama Hollywood produces with the interaction my generation gets daily through sites like Facebook.”
Austin Ventures (“AV”), one of the nation’s leading venture and growth capital firms, announces the acquisition of three companies to launch Port Logistics Group (“PLG”). The investment was made in partnership with Robert Stull, a leading executive in the transportation logistics and distribution services industries. Mr. Stull will lead PLG as its President and Chief Executive Officer. With revenues of approximately $100 million at its launch, PLG becomes one of the leading nationwide providers of warehousing, distribution and transportation services in U.S. port cities. PLG develops and implements innovative logistics solutions to help the world’s leading companies get their products to market faster and more efficiently. The company will be headquartered in Houston, Texas.
“We are excited about our investment with Bob to build a national, port-focused logistics company. He is a skilled operator, an innovative executive, and a dynamic leader who has developed great teams and delivered strong results for his customers and his shareholders at every step in his career,” said David Lack, AV Partner. “These initial acquisitions are the first of many that we will make with Bob as PLG extends the reach of its port logistics capabilities for its customers.”
“After conducting substantive market research and having discussions with several companies, both large and small, I became convinced of the need for a nationwide logistics company that provides consistent, high quality service across a broad range of logistics services in our nation’s port cities,” said Bob Stull, CEO of PLG. “We have launched this platform with companies who are highly regarded by their customers for delivering superior service in their local markets. I look forward to meeting with other founders and entrepreneurs operating in port cities that share our vision and want to join us in this initiative.”