Monthly Archives: May 2009

SupportKids on Life Support

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[Editors Note: Our comments section has been very active, with people affected by this issue using our comments as a way to support each other. We've shut off the comments, as this isn't the purpose of our comments section. If somebody is going to setup a discussion group (like www.ning.com for example), please email the editor and we will update this blog post and point people to your support forum.]

Austin-based SupportKids is laying off staff members, and is rumored to be shutting down operations. We called the company for a statement, and the main phone number goes directly to CFO Dianne Erlewine’s voicemail box. That’s probably not a good sign, but if you have any further information please leave it in the comments.

SupportKids is an awesome idea, and the company has a fantastic mission. Company founder Casey Hoffman was the recipient of Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award several years ago. Recent news reports say that the company has helped collect over $300M in owed child support.

The biggest complaint about the company was the way in which they priced their services. At first glance it appears they charge 34% of all back child support collected, but some consumers complained because they start charging 34% of all your child support immediately, whether they ever collect on back child support or not. This resulted in a class action lawsuit, plus complaints on a few of the “consumer ripoff” websites.

Hoovers reports that the company has 175 employees with revenues of $7.5M.

nGenera Closes $10M Series C

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nGenera Corporation, maker of a unique platform of Collaborative Enterprise Management (CEM) solutions, today announced it has secured $10 million in a new Series C financing round. Participants in the initial close of the round include Foundation Capital and Oak Investment Partners. This additional funding enables the company to increase its product development and expand the sales of its CEM solutions.

With a growing customer base and a portfolio of on demand applications, executive insight, and education, nGenera is well positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for CEM solutions to deliver significant productivity growth and profitable customer experiences in global companies.

According to Forrester Research’s Collaboration and Web 2.0 Technology Adoption, Q4 2008, more than 60% of firms surveyed are implementing or upgrading existing implementations of collaboration software in next 12 months. Moreover, their research entitled The State Of Real-Time Collaboration In 2009 supports this conclusion, stating that seven of every ten firms surveyed are planning to invest in enterprise collaboration in 2009.

“The additional funds will enable nGenera to accelerate the development our Collaborative Enterprise Management solutions, as well as to strengthen and expand our sales infrastructure,” said Steve Papermaster, Chairman and CEO of nGenera Corporation. “We are confident that bringing the power of web 2.0 collaboration into the core management processes of large, global enterprises is the way companies will achieve greater efficiencies both within their organization as well as across organizations boundaries.”

Collaborative Enterprise Management represents the next big leap in management process. The last leap was Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), with the adoption of ERP processes and technologies triggering a major wave of business innovation, productivity, and growth, by improving the repetitive, accounting and transactional information flow in organizations and their supply chains. With the leap to CEM, an ever-increasing number of management decisions must allow for non-repetitive processes that require the collective experience from a group of people, drawing from the data that exists inside and outside of the company’s ERP and other transactional systems.

“nGenera’s CEM Solutions delivers new ways of working and engaging customers through the web that we wrote about in Wikinomics,” said Don Tapscott, author of the best-selling Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital. “What nGenera has done is to combine the collaboration platform and applications with the expertise and education that experience is showing are necessary for companies to maximize return on investment.” CEM Solutions are available from nGenera today, including: Enterprise Collaboration; Customer Experience; Customer Interaction; Collaborative Selling; IT Transformation; Talent Management; Transformational Leaders; and Total Compensation. The company has hundreds of customers in the Global 2000, including AOL, Best Buy, Cisco, Cognos, Daimler, Disney, EMC, Fed Ex, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Owen Corning, Pfizer, and Verizon, among many others.

Sources of Funding :: SBIR

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If you are a Central Texas startup and want to know how the federal government provides you with research and development funding, the SBIR program may provide a partial funding solution. Through the years, some truly excellent innovations were started through this program

Ever since President Harry Truman investigated major fraud in World War II, the government has seen the need for small business funding and research. Without the levels of management that other bigger government programs need, the SBIR allows a researcher with a vision to try to win a federal grant. In many cases, the research has started some truly visionary.

Fred Patterson, the “SBIR coach” is slated to speak Thursday at the Central Texas Funding Forum, is known as the SBIR coach. He has helped his clients win over 100 SBIR awards in a 15-year period. Matt Scherer, the publicist for the Central Texas Funding Forum, said that getting 100 SBIR grants is as impressive as Kyle Busch winning 50 NASCAR races. The success rate for most SBIR grants is that for every 100 submitted, only 10 or 15 get the initial funding of $100,000.

If you are considering the SBIR program, you should read Patterson’s interview available at this special landing page. Or, you should hear his presentation at the funding forum at the Norris Conference Center. The cost is $105 if you mention Austin Startup at the door.

Two Austin Tech Companies Team Up

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At the Shop.org Online Marketing Workshop, Adlucent, the leader in retail Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Bazaarvoice, the leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today announced a partnership aimed at helping retailers leverage the voice of the customer in their search marketing programs. The two companies will work together to integrate product reviews and pay-per-click search to better optimize keywords and ad copy. This will help retailers attract more qualified traffic to their sites by using authentic consumer feedback and patterns to improve search visibility.

“Research shows that recommendations from ‘people like me’ are the most trusted form of advertising,” said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. “Working together with Adlucent, we can now enable our retail customers to integrate the authentic voice of the customer within their search ad placements to acquire new customers, drive sales volume, and significantly improve search marketing performance.”

Bazaarvoice provides a social commerce platform that is trusted by more than 350 companies globally. Adlucent leverages its Deep Search™ strategies and technologies to monitor and predict how keywords will behave. The combination gives retailers a unique advantage by combining customer ratings and reviews with keyword copy and campaigns to optimize search marketing programs. Initial results have shown that conversion rates can improve 65% on higher rated products resulting in a substantial increase in profitability on product-level SEM campaigns.

“Bazaarvoice is the leader in helping retailers listen to the needs of customers to improve online marketing and engagement,” said Michael Griffin, co-founder and CTO of Adlucent. “The company’s offerings combined with our Deep Search technology and expertise in paid search can help retailers leverage customer-generated content in new ways to attract more buyers to their sites.”

Adlucent offers pure performance-based search marketing services where clients pay only for generated sales, not clicks. With its proprietary Deep Search™ technology, Adlucent can accurately monitor and predict how keywords will behave, thereby minimizing testing costs and maximizing keyword profitability.

SolarWinds Prices IPO

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Solarwinds LogoYes, it was over a year ago that we wrote about SolarWinds filing their S/1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Back then the company was hoping to raise $250M through the offering. A year later the amount of money being raised for the company has been adjust slightly to between $85.5M and $103.5M depending upon where the IPO actually prices (or if it prices).

Still, this is a major coup for  SolarWinds, Austin, and the financial markets. Congratulations to everyone involved, and let’s hope that this is a sign that maybe we’ve hit bottom, and things are looking up!