What kind of investment help can Austin and other Texas startups get in the future after the stock market collapse. With the Central Texas Funding Forum coming next week (use discount code bd400 when registering), we asked Hall Martin, the director of the Austin Entrepreneur Network, about the changes in the local investment community. Q: What kinds of changes has the economy brought to the investment community in Austin? With the stock market down anywhere [...]

Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Ash Maurya, the founder of Austin-based WiredReach which makes CloudFire, BoxCloud, and CloudStack. Ash launched CloudFire a few months ago, and we decided to check in with him, the company, and how the product lunch has been going.

iPlotz is a fantastic little Flex application that let’s you create wireframes for your web or iPhone applications.

The next Austin Tech Happy Hour will be on Thursday, May 7th from 6pm – 8pm at Molotov. We’ve reserved the entire location just for our event, and with a little luck the rooftop deck will be a great spot to enjoy the Spring weather. We also have extremely strong free WiFi at Molotov, for those who might want to Twitter, browse, or do live streaming. The photos from the last happy hour are up [...]

Driven by increased market demand for identity governance solutions, SailPoint announced today it has continued to grow rapidly through the first quarter of 2009, adding several new customers, including a Fortune 25 company, and extending its customer base into two new vertical markets. SailPoint’s customers now include 10 of the world’s largest 100 companies in industries spanning banking, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, energy and telecommunications. In addition, SailPoint expanded its European partner network with new sales [...]

Offers.com launched the My Offers Locker and Locker Alerts today, making it even easier to track and manage all the best online offers. Now users can sign up for a free Locker, then save offers and stores to get real-time updates that can help them save time and money. To create their own My Offers Locker, Offers.com users can simply sign up with an email address and password, then save items to their Locker. When [...]

The Idea to Product® UT Competition will be held Friday and Saturday, April 24th – April 25th, 2009 at the ACES Building at the University of Texas at Austin. The competition kicked off at 9:15 AM today with the Challenge (Semifinal) Rounds and 9:15 AM on Saturday (The Marvin Selig Finals). As you may already be aware, the I2P® UT Competition is an early-stage technology commercialization plan competition hosted by the Murchison Chair of Free [...]

Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today announced that its breakthrough ShoutIt! feature has been enhanced to allow users to publish product reviews, answers, and stories on Twitter. With a single click, consumers can now broadcast their product opinions and experiences on Twitter where they are immediately available to all followers as a simple URL that links back to the site. Retailers and manufacturers gain the ability [...]

MindBites, the web marketplace and publishing platform for video instructional content, today announced that it has added functionality to offer optimized support for the uploading, selling, and playback of screencast-based tutorials. With this additional capability, the company expands its publishing and commerce platform to enable the first web marketplace for the buying and selling of screencasts, further empowering the market for technology instruction. “We’ve always viewed screencasts as an ideal content medium for MindBites, since [...]

Capital Factory, an early stage technology incubator in Austin, Texas, announced investments in five emerging technology startups selected to participate in its inaugural 2009 summer program. Each company will receive a cash investment of up to $20,000, more than $20,000 in free services, and mentorship from some of the top entrepreneurs in central Texas. Capital Factory recognizes five additional finalist startups that were top runners among the program applicants as well.