We had an opportunity to ask Howard Charney, from the Office of the President at Cisco, a few questions before he speaks at the upcoming Innotech Austin conference.

After recently acquiring Austin-based NetQoS, CA Technologies announced today a definitive agreement to buy Hyperformix, a leading provider of capacity management software for dynamic physical, virtual, and cloud IT infrastructures. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. “Virtualization capacity management is among customers’ most critical IT management needs,” said Roger Pilc, general manager of CA Technologies Virtualization and Automation customer solutions business. “An important aspect of our virtualization and cloud strategies is to help customers [...]

Austin-based OSHAtrac launched today, the brainchild of George Launey, a certified occupational health nurse specialist. In the process of his daily work, he discovered a need for simple OSHA compliance for smaller organizations that could streamline costs, maintain compliance, and deliver business benefits. The opportunity in the market pushed George to make the transition from registered nurse to software entrepreneur. His journey and experience are definitely typical. “The transition to tech entrepreneur has been my [...]

Austin-based OtherInBox announced that they’ve raised an additional $1.5M in angel-level chunks from people such as Dave McClure (of 500 Startups fame), Kenny Van Zant (an executive at Solar Winds), and Naval Ravikant (VentureHacks and AngelList). This brings the total investment in the company to around $4M, none of it from institutions. The company’s software product has a standalone form, and also works with GMail and Yahoo! Mail to help organize your email inbox. Organizing [...]

How many times have you been at a technology conference, you meet a nice guy or gal, and chat for a bit. When it gets to the point that you’re explaining what y’all do for a living, the other person says: “well, I just do the boring enterprise stuff…”

I’m happy to report that I didn’t hear this line even once at DEMO this last week in Santa Clara. On-stage there was an entire enterprise session that didn’t once apologize for being “boring enterprise technology.” In fact, it was quite the opposite. There was a great deal of pride in the enterprise segment.

It’s almost time for Innotech! This annual conference is the largest technology convention in Austin, save the South by Southwest conference which is really a national event. Each year Innotech organizers bring terrific, timely content and relevant national speakers to the Austin Convention Center. There is also a separate eMarketing track for digital marketing professionals. This year, Innotech will be on Thursday, October 28th. You can register for Innotech here. We also need nominations for [...]

Here is the video that we produced for Demo Day. It has some short clips about what Capital Factory is all about, and words of wisdom from some of the participants from the 2010 program. We will have video of each company’s pitch coming soon.

At Wednesday’s Capital Factory Demo Day, one of the major takeaways for me was that many of us don’t really know what a lean startup is, or how one is successfully managed. This idea was brought to my attention during Ash Maurya’s presentation called “How to Identify a Lean Startup”.

This weekend is Startup Weekend in Austin. While you’re probably heard of other weekend rapid startup events in Austin previously, this is actually the first official Startup Weekend in Austin. This is an un-conference style event where anybody can show up who wants to be involved with starting a company and launching it in just 3 crazy long days! The event is going to be held at CoSpace. The tickets link is broken right now, so I don’t have that for you but I’m sure you can buy one there, and it will basically cover your pizza and a t-shirt or something like that.

Each year Texchange hosts one big blockbuster event with a fantastic speaker that is open to the public (other events are for members only). This year, we’re bringing Gary Vaynerchuk to Austin to speak at the AT&T Conference Center at UT. Gary first came to internet stardom with his video blog Wine Library TV. Gary’s informal and enthusiastic approach to wine tasting and collecting led to numerous appearances on national television. Gary has grown his retail wine website business from $4M to $60M in the past 10 years, largely by using social media marketing.