The Austin Tech Happy Hour has been extra fantastic in recent weeks and this past Wednesday’s was not to disappoint. The crowd continues to grow and flourish making this week’s happy hour one heck of night.

The evening brought many fresh faces and a few excited companies to help kick off the evening. The five winning start-ups announced earlier at Capitol Factory’s Demo Day event were more than eager to share their ideas and opinions with the Austin Tech community. Interesting, to say the least. We anticipate their success and congratulate them for the achievement.

Manuel Rosso, formerly of Dell’s desktop group and IMVU Inc., a social media startup (co-founded by guru Eric Ries) has raised $2 million from Austin Ventures, the Statesman’s Lori Hawkins reports. The new company was incubated at AV over the last year, where Rosso served as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence. Austin Startup can additionally confirm that Rosso has hired ex-FiveRuns VP of Development and Technology Steve Sanderson as the VP of Product of the new company. Sanderson [...]

Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Rob Hirschfeld, the founder and CEO of Zehicle (http://zehicle.com/). Q: Give us the elevator pitch for you company? Zehicle connects people to their cars through their smart phones.  All cars since 1996 have a standard data interface and Zehicle figured out how to get that data to people’s phones.  We use the data to both give drivers feedback and can also share the data between drivers.  Ultimately, we’re connecting drivers [...]

The economic downturn has prompted credit scarcity, layoffs, and cutbacks. Despite the tumult, however, earlier this year twenty Austin business luminaries pumped $100,000 of their own money into the creation of Capital Factory, an Austin-based technology startup incubator that gives funds and mentorship to the most innovative startups.

Registration for this event is sold out. However, we will are streaming the event live so that everyone can participate. You can also visit our uStream page here. Live video by Ustream

Today marks the beginning of a new era for AustinStartup, as we combine our efforts with Startup District to form a single and definitive resource for surfacing and navigating the startup ecosystem in Central Texas.

The next happy hour is happening this Wednesday, but it will be at the same place (Molotov). This will probably cause some confusion because our events are always on Thursdays, but we’re sliding the date in order to coincide with Capital Factory Demo Day. A big thank you to Fish & Richardson and BuildASign.com who are sponsoring our happy hour. We’re inviting all the angel investors, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists from Demo Day to come [...]

I just got back from the Ubiquity Marketing UnSummit, which was created by Jason Stoddard’s new company Stagira. Putting together an all day event, with multiple speakers, and an out of town keynote speaker is a daunting task. A full day sounds like a lot, but the variety of viewpoints represented by the speakers could have easily taken two days. There were experts in social media marketing, branding, PR, and word of mouth. These people [...]

GameSalad, an online community created to support amateur and professional game development, launched as an open beta application earlier this year is now preparing for the official release of its long awaited iPhone publishing system. In the next few weeks, Gendai Games will be launching a new service that allows games created with the free GameSalad Creator tool to be marketed and sold on the iPhone App Store. GameSalad is an open platform that allows [...]

Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Paul D. Allen, the founder and CEO of PayMyRent.net (http://www.paymyrent.net/). Q: Give us the elevator pitch for you company? PayMyRent.net is an online service provider to rental property owners, landlords and/or community managers who need a single tool to assist with the day to day headache of managing rentals.  PayMyRent.net is a “one stop shop” for the entire rental process including finding and screening residents to fill a vacancy, managing [...]