mobileTech Tuesday, by Steve Guengerich Last week, I presented an initial map of Austin’s mobile scene and wrote about how mobile tech has fast become the hottest area in the industry. The Christmas holidays have given additional think-time for others to further highlight this trend, much better frankly than I could do. One of the best posts from among the more widely read publications was one by Seth Weintraub in Fortune. In his post, Weintraub [...]
By nearly every account, mobile is the hottest area in tech. Looking at the data – from sales growth rates in hardware, led by Apple, to download volumes of software, represented by the ubiquitous app - the numbers are skyrocketing. Anecdotally, the man who coined ‘web 2.0′ for the last trend, Tim O’Reilly, remarked in a recent NPR story “The biggest thing that’s next, that’s on everybody’s mind, is the transition to mobile.” Fortunately, Austin is [...]
A group of seasoned Austin technology entrepreneurs and executives are announcing the formation of their new company, Mass Relevance, to help consumer brand use real-time social content to drive engagement on television, the web, and in the mobile world. The team has already secured nearly $2 Million in Series A financing from Mike Maples new firm FLOODGATE, and Austin Ventures.
Infochimps, a marketplace to buy, sell and share any list, spreadsheet or dataset in the world, today announced the acquisition of Data Marketplace, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that helps people find, buy and sell data online. With the acquisition, Infochimps is absorbing Data Marketplace’s domain, brand, datasets and technology platform into Infochimps’ holdings, and while the purchase price was not disclosed, it has been reported as an all-cash transaction. “We’re excited to be extending our [...]
As consumer technology companies begin to get off the ground and make forecasts, there is the inevitable user adoption hockey stick that rockets the local user count to ridiculous heights with no market budget but significant “viral effects” and “social media.” We thought we’d re-post an item from the Do512 Blog, a real company that has hit the 100,000 user mark, and is also talking publicly about some of their statistics. How do yours measure [...]
SpeedMenu announced today that their mobile menuing, ordering and payment software has entered the beta testing stage with Micros Systems Point of Sale (POS) software. SpeedMenu enables patrons at participating establishments to connect to their tab, order items and pay for their tab – all from their cell phone. Dan Janjigian, CEO of SpeedMenu said “Due to the size of the Micros installed client base, SpeedMenu will begin offering service in every city around the [...]
The Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) and the State Energy Conservation Office (SECO) are announcing a program to launch two new clean energy incubators at Texas universities. This program will make two awards of $200,000 each to build clean energy incubation capability. Interested parties should go to the program website, http://www.ati.utexas.edu/cei-rfp/, for more detailed information. This program is designed to help university commercialization programs and/or existing university incubators create dedicated clean energy incubators. The goal is [...]
Gazzang, Inc., the cloud infrastructure software company, today announced it has secured $3.5 million in Series A funding to develop management solutions that help secure open source software such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl (LAMP), and accelerate enterprise adoption of public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Austin Ventures was the lead institutional investor, accompanied by a group of smaller individual investors. In addition, software industry veteran Larry Warnock, who led the acquisition of Phurnace Software [...]
