Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich One of the most amazing “learning” tools I saw recently was on the The New York Times website. I’m guessing it was a sophisticated, customized application of Flash. (If anyone knows precisely, please add a reply and let us all know.) It was produced for the recent election, specifically for the Obama/McCain debates. What you will see if you run it is a terrific combination of text, voice, search, video, [...]
With a slight pause in Austin tech news during this short holiday week, we’re taking a look at what’s going on nationally to find something interesting to write about. Namely, the revelation that Facebook and Twitter have been in talks since mid-October about Facebook acquiring Twitter for a reported $500M (in Facebook stock, of course). According to the New York Times, Facebook walked away because the pricetag was too high. Writer Saul Hansell called the [...]
Active Power, inventor and manufacturer of the most energy-efficient critical power systems in the world, today announced two new orders from its OEM partner Caterpillar. The first is a follow on order for ten 900 kVA UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems. These systems are scheduled for delivery in first quarter 2009. The second order is for six 900 kVA systems with delivery scheduled for later this year. “We are pleased to see the continued market [...]
Guest blogger Josh Dilworth works for the public relations firm Porter Novelli, and is one of the most highly regarded PR minds among the Web 2.0 community. At the University of Texas at Austin’s Ready To Commercialize conference last week, supercomputing and parallel computing legend Danny Hillis gave a most excellent talk about the key ingredients necessary for successful innovation. It was an especially relevant topic for those in attendance, as the conference-going crowd was [...]
Guest blogger Tim Wright is the principal of WrightResults, and blogs at CultureToEngage. Today he has some great information for us about the value and necessity of employee engagement in a startup. Sometime between 1997 when it started and today, the Gallup Organization’s Q12 Survey made “employee engagement” one of the latest buzz phrases. In 2006, The Gallup Organization’s Q12 Survey had surveyed more than 4 million individuals. The baseline results: 29% of employees are [...]
Tech Ranch launches an incubator in Austin.
MindBites announces a strategic partnership with Thinkwell today, opening up their new education category.
Since announcing our participation as a network partner for Microsoft’s BizSpark program we’ve been signing up at least one startup a day into the program. I have received nothing but positive comments from entrepreneurs on how much they’re saving on software licenses with this program. On Thursday Microsoft is coming to town (registration here) for an event to celebrate startups and kickoff this great program. Our friends at the Startup District are helping to put together the [...]
Today we’re checking out Ready to Commercialize, a conference created by the University of Texas Office of Technology Commercialization. Many of us have pre-conceived notions about entrepreneurs being the guy in the garage trying to work on an idea that is going to revolutionize an industry. But we sometimes forget that right here in our own backyard in Austin, the University of Texas has an incredible number of faculty and graduate students creating new technologies [...]
Austin-based Bazaarvoice announced a new concept today named BrandVoice. Most people are familiar with how Bazaarvoice enables online ratings and reviews for major brands (Dell, HP, Toshiba, Epson) and retailers (overstock.com, HomeDepot, Golfsmith). With BrandVoice, the company is now tying the two together. For example you might go to the Costco website and see a review of an HP computer that was actually entered at the HP.com website by a consumer. For a new retail [...]
