Monthly Archives: September 2009

Ringful Launches PreventiveCare.mobi at DEMO

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Ringful, a personal healthcare startup is pleased to announce its selection to participate in DEMO conference’s first ever AlphaPitch, which according to DEMO co-producer Matt Marshall, features the “coolest, earliest-stage companies.”

At DEMO, Ringful will launch a mobile healthcare application suite, available at http://PreventiveCare.mobi/, which turns any mobile phone, from the iPhone to low-end voice-only phones, into a connected personal healthcare dashboard, resulting in reduced healthcare cost and insurance premiums. PreventiveCare.mobi applications all feature connectivity into existing personal health record systems (PHRs), such as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, to enable data sharing and monitoring between patients, doctors, and family friends. The latest entry into the PreventiveCare.mobi suite is the Healthy Heart Journal iPhone application, sharedin private beta at DEMO.

The AlphaPitch presentation is the latest demonstration of Ringful’s technology. Ringful previously was invited to showcase its Asthma Journal app at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference. The Asthma Journal app demonstrated Ringful’s innovative capabilities enabling asthma suffers to better manage symptoms and medications, and to share data with family, friends, and doctors through Google Health and Facebook Connect. Asthma Journal, as well as Pollen Journal, an allergy checker, is live and available on iPhone through the iTunes App Store.

The Pollen Journal is also available in the Google Android marketplace. Ringful aims to become the gateway connecting all patient health records to all mobile devices. The startup has tapped into the huge need for better personal control and management of health, demanded by individuals wanting to take control of their health, and also by employers and insurance companies looking to reduce cost via preventive care. This need, combined with the lightening rod issues around healthcare in general in this country create huge demand for applications such as those being developed by Ringful.

“We are so excited to be selected by DEMO to present at the new AlphaPitch,” said Dr. Michael Yuan, Ringful co-founder, book author, and a well-known mobile technologist. “We know that consumers can become better at managing their health and chronic conditions with easy access to information. The PreventiveCare.mobi application suite allows quick and convenient monitoring of symptoms and patient compliance to improve the effectiveness of treatments and share the information with selected caregivers. The whole healthcare eco-system benefits with improved  care and reduced cost.”

Each PreventiveCare.mobi application, current and in the future, is designed to be a simple data entry and analysis tool, enabling a user to monitor their own health and driving adoption of personal health records. “Our applications are built on the premise that simple metrics deliver powerful impact,” said Dr. Koushik Shaw, Ringful’s Chief Medical Officer and a renowned urologist surgeon. “By finally giving consumers easier access to their personal health data, not only is tremendous time and money saved, data made more accurate, cycles made more efficient, but most important, improvements in patient’s health and wellness.”

Austin Companies Launching at DEMO

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It’s the time of the season to launch companies. Between the TechCrunch50 and DEMOfall, over 100 companies are launching themselves, or products this month. Here’s a rundown of companies of interest, and we’ll have more details as they launch.

  • 80legs – Some friends from Houston are doing some interesting things with grids.
  • EthicsEd – MicroAssist is launching a great e-learning product.
  • Piryx – Some key execs have moved to the valley, but we’ll still claim them.
  • ge.la.to – They were a Technology Spotlight company at tech happy hour not long ago. They’re doing some cool things to the world of online dating.
  • InfoChimps – They were a Capital Factory finalist, and now they’re launching their marketplace for large data sets.
  • Melior – They will be launching gurustorms!
  • Ringful – They have developed a whole host of applications.

GDC Austin, Jesse Schell, and Youth Gaming

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GDC Austin is in town this week over at the Convention Center. It draws 3k developers, designers, writers, and other creatives from all over. The focus this year is on connected gaming space, encompassing MMOs, virtual worlds and social networking games. This year’s event has more than 130 lectures, panels, keynotes, and round table discussions, presented by 230 speakers and a bustling expo floor with more than 80 exhibitors and sponsors. Thus far, we have had keynotes from John Smedley of Sony Online Entertainment and  J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce of Blizzard Entertainment. Tomorrow we will be hearing from Sebastien de Halleux.

One hot topic at the conference has been youth gaming. In his opening keynote, John Smedley talked about Free Realms, a kid focused MMO. While it only launched in April, it is already up to 5M users. This is largely because it is a free game that relies on micro-transactions for monetization. Three of the major challenges that John sited were that kids have 5 minute attention spans, boys and girls require very different missions, and all aspects of the game, especially the marketplace, need to be simpler than an adult MMO. One thing he mentioned that was particularly interesting was that 75% of the game’s traffic came from TV advertising.

The panel that followed Smedley’s keynote was about Reaching A New Demographic: Kids AND Their Parents. This is the demographic that Austin based FamiGo is targeting. One advantage of this demographic is that it may be easier to monetize than just kids because the parents have control of the credit card. The greatest challenge is figuring out how to make something entertaining for all ages. Jesse Schell of Schell Games was one of the folks on that panel. I caught up with him today and asked him a bit about his company and the industry.

Jesse Schell of Schell Games

Bonus: Here is a surprise photo that was taken of me at some point. (I am appreciative of the angle as it obscures my baldness.)

Navigating the AppStore

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The iTunes AppStore continues to experience explosive growth, and if it hasn’t already been said, has changed the face of software distribution forever. While not without its faults, the AppStore is a great platform to launch new ideas, extend existing product functionality, and cost-effectively promote brands and engage consumers. Saltlick Labs’ Colin Anawaty offers advice for successfully launching and sustaining apps in one of today’s most competitive markets. Saltlick Lab’s most recent release is Little Black Book.

The Basics
It costs $99+tax to get setup to publish on the AppStore but this process usually takes a few weeks before all the contracts are approved and you’ve been cleared to accept sales on the store. Make absolute certain that the bank you sign up with supports SWIFT codes. A SWIFT code is for international transactions so most local, state, and internet banks do not offer SWIFT codes. Stick with the majors.

Note: You may submit your application for approval before your contracts are cleared for publishing. If the application is approved before the publishing contracts, all pending contracts are pushed to the front of the line.

AppStore FlowchartApplication Approval:
On average ~90% of applications submitted are approved within 14 days but you can be 100% certain at some point your app will be rejected for the most trivial reasons. We’ve approached rejections two ways:

  • Immediately resubmitted the app and made a strong case why we disagreed.
  • Quickly corrected the issue and addressed the corrections in a brief email response.

Generally you’ll receive a response within 24-48 hours, but often on the same day if your response is timely, polite, and to the point. Do not forget to include the case number.

Market Timing
If you don’t plan around the AppStore’s quirks, launching your application can be a disaster because of the uncertainty surrounding the approval process. Flexibility is key. When submitting your application, I suggest adjusting the Availability Date to one year forward so upon approval you then have the freedom to pick an exact date to coordinate your marketing attack around. A strong app launch is critical to a lucrative sales month as long as the AppStore continues to slant toward hit-driven sales.

app-store_date

Sales Tracking & Analytics
For the first 6 months of our business, I spent many painstaking hours converting the AppStore sales data into usable spreadsheets. Unfortunately, a lot of data was left out of the official sales data from Apple such as Top Chart position and movements, consumer review consolidation, and more. AppFigures.com is one of the most impressive web services I’ve found for automating sales data. The service crawls your account and applications automatically, breaks down sales by country, displays current Top Chart position and movements across every country’s store, and delivers a summarized email by 9am. We track 5 applications for less than $5 a month, and the time saved amounts to thousands of dollars.

Not only should you track sales data but also usage and interaction with the application. There are numerous analytic services coming to market to give developers and marketers a thorough understanding how consumers use their product. I recommend Pinch Media, it’s currently the most feature-rich mobile analytics platform and takes 10-20 minutes to plugin to your app.

Top Charts
The overall and categorical Top Charts are driven strictly by volume so there is no correlation to revenue, which by no surprise explains the pricing pressure to $.99. The AppStore economy created the “hit driven” model in software sales and love it or hate it, it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future.

iTunes 9 shows significant signs of improvement overall, and the introduction of Top Earners should pull the premium and niche applications above the overload of spam and gimmick apps cluttering Top Paid charts. Currently the Top Earners section only features apps out of the entire store but with a few hacks, you can expose the data categorically. This suggests that the functionality is already in place and hopefully will be exposed to consumers in the near future.

Application Updates
Updating your application has proven to be one of the most successful methods for generating sales simply because consumers can easily find your app amongst the noise. But to drive your application back to page 1, you’ll need to be on top of the the approval process and adjust the Availability Date to the current day. It’s a bit hacky and works like this:

  • Each morning, regardless of whether or not the application is approved, go into your Developer Center and edit the app so the date is accurate.
  • Doing this will ensure that when your app is approved it will be pushed back to page 1.
  • Do NOT set the date to a point in the future or you’ll temporarily remove your application from the store.

Abusing this feature by updating your application constantly is spammy. You’ll annoy consumers and contribute to the increasing volume of spam and unprofessional behavior. Respect!

Customer Reviews
The consumer reviews can work against you because more often than not, happy customers do not leave comments and many upset consumers don’t bother contacting you directly. I blame the latter as the result of many developers not committed to quality service and consumers are jaded. In addition, because there’s no real identity verification system, competitors have been caught leaving negative remarks and cross-promoting their app. Trying to have these comments removed by Apple is virtually pointless.

On the flip side, it’s important to distinguish and address the honest and often critical feedback. When I come across a review by a disgruntled customer, I rely on Google to track the user down and reach out; sincere reviewers typically post under the same username elsewhere on the internet. Certainly this is the most unscalable aspect of your business but by surprising customers with great support, you build trust and loyalty which can turn them into product advocates.

Last Words of Advice
Be passionate about the products you build and strive to give customers a quality level of service. If your company is focusing solely on the AppStore, it’s easy to get caught up overextending yourself by releasing product after product or worse, rushing an app to market before reaching the Apple-factor. As long as the AppStore remains hit-driven, aim to make your product and launch memorable — first impression is a big deal amongst 75,000 applications.

If you have any additional questions, please leave them in the comments below.

Tech Entrepreneur Goes Gadget

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Austin entrepreneur Thomas Marriott was trying to find a multi-function iPhone carrying case, and just didn’t see anything on the market. So what did the former GameWager co-founder do? He decided to explore the market opportunity. The result is the Pocketpack, which can be purchase at www.killthewallet.com.

Thomas and his team did some good old fashioned market research by hanging out at the Apple story for hours on end, and asking people what they would want in a multi-function iPhone accessory. “We had a vision, but each step of the way we got market feedback and validation. In the end, that allowed us to put less capital at risk, and make sure the product was more on target,” said Marriott. At one point, they were escorted out of the Apple store.

Pocketpack_lightweight2The team was constantly asking themselves, “what is the minimum viable product we can ship that can still give us customer feedback and validation” which is a hallmark of agile techniques. Asking customers what they want does not always produce a breakthough product. Thomas quotes Henry Ford who once said,  “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

The product aims to be a balance between functionality and size. Multi-function is great, but people really enjoy the sleekness of design of the iPhone, so you can’t add too much. Thomas and his team are going to China next month to watch the first units roll off the production line.

If you pre-purchase the product now, you’ll get free shipping. Thomas expects to design and ship more mobile accessories in the future.

Is the Labor Market Recovering?

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Our guest blogger today is Greg Garrison, the president of vrecruting – Recruiting solutions from vcfo. He has over 17 years experience in the recruiting and staffing industry, and is regularly quoted nationally as a thought-leader in employment trends. He can be reached at ggarrison@vcfo.com or 512-450-6569.

The Labor Market and the Economic Recovery

Last week The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the August employment report. Many believe the findings were positive for the recovering economy while others perceive a more somber picture. Are the labor markets recovering, or not?

Regardless of how the numbers are interpreted, the labor market appears to be in for a long and gradual recovery. It will literally take many months and quarters to put the sheer volume of the unemployed back to work.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that August job losses in the U.S. came in lower than the previous month. In fact, last month’s job loss numbers were the lowest we’ve seen since August 2008. In recent months we’re losing fewer jobs. This is indeed good news and an indicator the economy is slowly recovering.

The bad news is that we still lost 216,000 jobs last month. Though we’re not losing jobs as fast as we once were, but we’re still hemorrhaging jobs at a substantial rate. The national unemployment rate continues to climb and is now at 9.7%, the highest it’s been in over 25 years. Many economists believe we’ll surpass 10%.

The Numbers

The data clarifies the fact that unemployment numbers are significant and will take a reasonable amount of time to overcome.

  • Just under 15 million people are without work and are seeking a job
  • 7.4 million people have lost their jobs since this recession started
  • 25.5 percent of teenagers are unemployed – this is the highest level on record
  • 10.1 percent of men over age 20 are unemployed
  • 7.6 percent of women over age 20 are unemployed
  • 24.9 weeks is the average duration that unemployed workers are with out a job

The Recovery

These numbers are vast and deep, more so than many of us have ever seen. Again, it will take quite some time to put this volume of unemployed folks back to work. It begs the question of how the economic recovery will look. Many companies are obviously not hiring and are trying to get “more out of less” these days. CEO’s remain hesitant to increase their headcount and are looking to maintain a smaller yet more productive workforce.

The recent Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers also indicate that worker productivity is at an all-time high. This leads some economists to speak of a “jobless recovery”. Can companies grow and the economy recover if companies don’t refill the jobs eliminated by the recession and put the unemployed back to work?

Clean Energy Venture Summit 2009

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Fall is always the time of year for the Clean Energy Venture Summit, October 14-15 at the incredible AT&T Conference Center on the campus of UT. This summit provides clean energy technology companies and entrepreneurs a venue for presenting their innovations to venture capitalists, angel investors and strategic investors that currently invest in clean energy, along with experts from Austin Energy, corporate partners, utility executives and government leaders. This year’s theme “Bringing the Smart Grid to Life” directly relates to efforts from the Pecan Street Project. The Pecan Street Project (PSP) is Austin’s city-wide clean energy laboratory, the largest in the nation, and the only place where researchers and entrepreneurs can come to develop, test and implement the smart grid.

Eighteen companies will be giving 5-minutes pitches to a panel of judges. The top 5 will be given the chance for a 10-minute pitch, and will have Q&A with the judges. Some of the venture investors coming this year include Battery, G51, Accel, S3, DFJ Mercury, and NEA to name a few.

If you’re into CleanTech, this is the event in Central Texas each year.

You can register here.

Wednesday Q&A :: DoubleHorn Communications

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Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Tab Schadt, the founder and CEO of DoubleHorn Communications (www.doublehorncommunications.com/).

Q:   What commitments or beliefs drive DoubleHorn Communications on a daily basis?

1)      We remind ourselves daily that we are Texas Owned, Texas Operated, Texas Focused.  In other words, we avoid casting a wide net and not delivering on fundamental expectations of small business customers.

2)      We maintain an excellent and unwavering approach to customer service.  Period.

3)      We own and constantly develop our technology platform only while maintaining a high level of quality live support.

4)      We subsidize required capital to enable customer adoption and satisfaction. The main objective is to ensure quality and save customer from having a cash outlay.  Depending on each customer’s unique service needs they may receive IP-phones, routers and switches at no charge as part of our managed service portfolio.

Q:   What are the market focus areas and key services for DoubleHorn Communications?

DoubleHorn Communications focuses on the Texas small business market, or as we have coined: “DASH” markets (Dallas Austin San Antonio Houston).  Our service delivery model, applications and network architecture were built from ground-up with specific focus on Texas based small businesses.  While our footprint is national and strategic partnerships are with Regional and Fortune 500 companies, we maintain a disciplined focus on the Texas small business market.

We provide IP based managed and hosted communications services including:  High Speed Internet, VoIP, Hosted PBX, Metro Ethernet, SIP Trunking, Hosted Exchange Email w/ Mobile sync, Data Backup & Recovery and Business Continuity to name a few.  In addition, we are consistently activating our specialty add-on services like Conferencing, Mobile Office and Contac Center.   We include all IP phones and hardware at no charge as part of our managed service offering.

Q:   How has customer adoption and retention been over last several years?

DoubleHorn Communications has experienced tremendous growth over last four years.  We literally earned our first small business customer in 2005 and presently have thousands of managed IP-phones, routers and switches placed amongst hundreds of different types of small businesses all over Texas.  More amazingly is the consistency in which we have grown across multiple cities within Texas.  Our growth and repeat success in fundamental areas underlines the need to have a consistent market focus in good or bad economic times.  We believe this discipline and loyalty towards the small business market in Texas is beginning to ignite our growth in a whole new way.

Fortunately, our customer churn rate has been very low.  This does not surprise us from an operational or service confidence standpoint, but, we do feel fortunate that the recent economic times have not caused more loss.  We believe that working with customers and providing as much assistance as possible has and will continue to produce returns and hopefully enable them to prosper, which is good for everyone.  We have also found that without upfront and constant communication this approach is not effective.   Luckily, the frequent communication needed for financial controls ties in to our overall customer service model.

Q:           What separates DoubleHorn from your competitors?

This answer is pretty straightforward and may seem trite or cliché, but it is true.  DoubleHorn’s customer service and focused product set is second to none within the ISP, Telecom or general small business services arena.  We truly acknowledge that we are only as good as our valued customers believe we are.  The fact we are technically inclined as an organization and are active with network management and application development takes a back-seat to producing a loyal customer base.

An example of our customer service dedication would be our ‘Guarantee that a live person will answer the phone during business hours, within four rings’!  When a small business owner knows we will do whatever it takes, not just words, this makes us different.  Fortunately these acts of commitment are not expensive or complicated, they just takes ownership and daily focus.  This is not easy, but does separate us from the pack.  We also have a ninety-day guarantee and ongoing service level commitment.

In addition, our training and installations are conducted by cross trained full-time employees.  We manage down to the second and millisecond in some cases all provided equipment and network connectivity.  We also assign Divisional VP’s to make unique customer introductions followed-up by an assigned Service Delivery Manager.  The list goes on and on, the main point is these are daily high-touch habits that support our own technology platform.

Spawn Labs Launches at TechCrunch 50

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We’re reporting here live from the TC50 show floor. You can watch the livestream here, with video of the presentation also embeded below.

Among today’s demos was Austin-based Spawn Labs, which makes it possible to play your Xbox 360, Xbox, PS2, PS3 and Gamecube from anywhere in the world with a broadband internet connection. It is essentially a Slingbox for games.

Much of the details were revealed on-stage, but we’re including some of the additional use-cases below to give context:

During the demo, Spawn Labs CEO David Wilson showed us how he was playing Soul Caliber 4 over the internet, connected to his XBox 360 back home. That is cool in and of itself, but there’s more to it. At home, a gamer can play on their console or TV, while multiple friends can join the game remotely. When traveling, any gamer can play any of their Spawn Labs-connected consoles through a broadband connection; regardless of distance, a gamer and several friends can play a game together from multiple broadband-connected endpoints.

You can also see your friends’ game consoles on the Spawn Labs portal. From the portal you can send invitations to people to play on your console, tell you what game is loaded, see if someone else is playing it, and if your console is available or busy. The spectator mode allows your friends to see all your cool moves, either live in real-time or recorded and saved.

If you’re trying to play a game over the internet, there is always a big issue of network traffic and latency. Studies show that latency is noticeable to users when the round-trip takes greater than 85 milliseconds. Spawn Labs says that their device currently runs about 100 milliseconds, but they have some ways in the short term to get it down to 70 milliseconds. When internet traffic gets too crazy, the device will automatically downgrade the video quality from HD to lower definition.

The unit is priced at $199, and as of today’s launch Spawn Labs is taking pre-orders. The product will be available in November, and orders will be filled on a first-ordered, first-served basis.

Presentation notes:

CEO David Wilson did very well. Had a live XBox game (Soul Caliber) being played live onscreen. It was impressive, in real time, and with no image degradation or perceptible lag or latency.

Nice tweets from the likes of Sean Percival: “Spawnlabs is brilliant, play xbox at work!”

Some unfortunate product issues emerging now towards the end — not working, not sure why. Up next: judge commentary and questions.

Calcanis: “Slingbox for XBox” — what do you think?

Jason Hirschorn: I was at Slingbox, what about a “carousel” approach, or is it just only whatever single disc you have in the console? Answer: for now, just what you have in the console. We’ll get there over time, we have thought a lot about this.

George Zachary:  a bandwidth issue, or a latency issue? I used to encounter this when I worked at Nintendo. Answer: latency is there, but barely detectable.

They are at 85 milliseconds of latency, think they can easily get down to 70. Geography does matter.

Follow-up from George: Targeted at in-home networks where there is no latency, or everywhere? Answer: we’re doing both, and all of the above.

Slingbox started at same price — $199.

Don Dodge: assume it works, latency is not a problem, etc. Bet is that consumers will pay $199 to play remotely. How badly do gamers want to play remotely? Answer: strong response thus far, from individuals to developers.

Dodge follow-up: integrate with any game? Answer: on supported consoles — Xbox 360, Xbox, PS2, PS3 and Gamecube. Another follow-up: also assumes that you take controler with you, plug into USB? Answer: you can, but you also use your keyboard, etc.

Yossi Vardi: What about the iPhone as a controller? Answer: Conceivably — yes. But not yet.

Arrington: Best Buy — you’re right here. Raise your hand. How many of these can you move? David, you need to meet them immediately after this.

David: thank you. That would be great. We are in discussions with several retailers, and we do think that it will sell.

And, we’re out!

Video of the demo:

CrunchBase Information
Spawn Labs
Trailblazer Capital
Information provided by CrunchBase

NetQoS Acquired by CA for $200M in Cash

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It’s a story that has been 10 years in the making. Husband and wife team Joel Trammel and Dr. Cathy Fulton could foresee that internet traffic would continue to grow substantially, data centers would consolidate, and there would be network congestion. As that happened, enterprises would be keenly interested in performance management. Thus, NetQoS was born.

Recently, NetQoS was named to the Inc. 5000, ranking #2081 with $56.5M in trailing revenue. Being acquired for $200M in an all cash deal is certainly a healthy  mutiplier on their revenue. One of the most notable, and largest acquisitions for an Austin-based IT company was the 1996 acquisition of Tivoli by IBM for $743M back in 1996. This deal isn’t too far off, especially considering that Tivoli had gone public, so IBM had to pay a premium to tender public shares.

News releases say that pretty much all the company’s 260 employees will continue to remain with the company. I’m sure a few functions may centralize like accounting, and of course PR and marketing. There won’t be the corporate cutting like they’re experiencing at Vignette right now.

We’re awaiting a return call from company representatives to hear more about the Austin impact.