About Bryan Menell

Bryan is the Managing Editor for AustinStartup and the Director of the Collaboratory at Dachis Group. He is a co-founder of Capital Factory, on the board of Texchange, and runs the popular Austin Tech Happy Hour with his wife. He advises early stage technology companies including Socialware, SpeedMenu, and AudiencePoint.

Facebook Buys Gowalla in Talent Acquisition

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Facebook has been poking around several Austin startup companies lately looking for talent acquisitions, and rumors are swirling that they’ve found a taker in beleaguered Gowalla. The company caused great excitement in the Austin tech community years ago when they relocated from Dallas to Austin, and garnered venture capital from top tier west coast venture and angel investors, spurning offers from locals. But no matter how hard they tried, they could never emerge from the shadow of Foursquare.

The check-in space seems to have turned into a “winner take all” market. The competitive landscape is littered with also-ran companies like Loopt, Whrrl, and now Gowalla. Sometimes you can hope for some industry consolidation, and the marketplace winner (Foursquare in this case) will go buy up smaller competitors. But not in this case.

The company attempted to pivot recently, with CEO Josh Williams presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt and talking about how Gowalla was turning into a travel and storytelling app. If there was still cash remaining in a company with no visible sign of revenue, there would be some runway to give it a shot. This is purely a guess, but either they’re out of money or they decided to give whatever remained back to investors.

Like most talent acquisitions, the team is expected to relocate to Palo Alto to be closer to Facebook headquarters. The speculation is that the team will work on the new Facebook Timeline. Not really a huge loss for the community, as Gowalla and it’s staff were mostly invisible and absent from the local tech scene, which is very odd for a “social” technology company.

Put yourself in the role of Gowalla CEO. What is your Monday morning quarterback advise that could have changed the fate of the company?

Facebook Buys Gowalla to Boost Timeline Feature (blippitt.com)
Facebook buys location service Gowalla (salhajri.wordpress.com)
Facebook Reportedly Acquires Gowalla, No Confirmation From Either Company (insidefacebook.com)
Facebook acquires Gowalla to help with Timeline (digitaltrends.com)

Snoball to Revolutionize Online Giving

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Snoball Inc. today announced the launch of a revolutionary online platform designed to affect change through viral social giving. Snoball is the first to offer a user-friendly web interface enabling anyone to define and automate donation parameters, making giving social and easily replicable. The underlying foundation of the company’s approach is the “Snoball” effect.

Through snoball.com, users anywhere can create momentum around donations for their favorite charities. When a user creates a Snoball account, they instantly have the ability to donate to over 1.6 million non-profits, with all of their giving managed in one central location. Using the platform, users can create a parameter for giving known as a ‘Snoball.’ Snoballs define a specific condition of a donation and can be tied to a user’s interests. For example, a Snoball may be defined as: “Every time the Dallas Cowboys win, I will donate $1 to the American Red Cross,” or “When I check-in at my favorite coffee shop using Foursquare, I will donate $2 to the local area food bank.” The specific event, donation amount and time interval are defined by the user.

Once a Snoball is defined and enabled, the platform’s underlying patented technology takes care of the rest, triggering the specified donation at the pre-defined intervals for the life of the Snoball. This can ultimately transform a one dollar donation into millions.

“We’ve created an entirely new way for people to give,” said Snoball Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer John Ludlow. “Snoball’s unique platform harnesses social media in a way that moves people into action for a specific cause,” said Ludlow. “By incorporating giving into our daily lives, everyone wins: charities, non-profits, organizations and the people they help.”

Snoballs can be tied to virtually any sports statistic, social media event, entertainment, or even the weather. Every user defined Snoball can be shared across social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, encouraging friends to support the cause or create their own parameter for giving. As Snoballs get shared among users, donations begin to grow virally generating the Snoball effect. By providing an opportunity for millions of users to make smaller, more-frequent donations, Snoball has the potential to radically change the way charities and non-profits operate. An influencer, such as a celebrity, can leverage the Snoball platform to ask fans to join them in giving to a favorite cause. In addition, the Snoball platform provides centralized management and reporting of charitable donations for tax purposes.

Snoball is free for everyone – companies, non-profits and individuals. The cost to run Snoball comes out of the donation itself – approximately 5% of every donation goes to cover administrative costs and credit card processing fees. Users can rest assured that 95% of every donation goes directly to their specified charity.

Snoball.com is operational today, serving individuals, organizations and non-profits.

Austin Tech Happy Hour Tomorrow

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Registration closes today for Austin Tech Happy Hour. You can save a few bucks by registering today, or you can pay $10 at the door.

When: Thursday, December 1st from 6p – 8p
Where: Molotov Lounge

MadeInAustin Launches to Keep Tech Talent in Austin

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Bryan Menell

This guest blog post was written by Jacqueline Hughes.

Lately there has been a lot of buzz in Austin around recruiting talent to our city. The Austin Technology Council recently took to the road with 30 CEOs in hopes of bringing some top technology talent our way from California. I get at least an email a week from friends and companies unable to find developers to join their startup. Occasionally, I know someone who is looking (yay!). More often than not though, I refer them to the numerous monthly meetups and events where people go to share and improve their skill set. The abundance of well-trained, talented developers who I’ve met via these monthly meetups bear much of the responsibility for the success we’ve had in our startup community.

But even with all the great talent within our walls, there are still challenges filling positions within our startups. It’s important that we continue to nurture new waves of talent to continue to bolster our growth. Enter MadeInAustin. The program will connect tech students/recent grads from area universities with the fast growing local tech startups and companies, and is designed to keep the talent most needed in Austin and to grow the tech industry.

“In the past few months, we have heard stories of Tech CEOs stealing local talent from each other or doubling their relocation efforts. We believe a better solution is to engage the recent graduates and current students in the local tech community, so less leave Austin for jobs when they graduate,” says Jay Whitchurch, CEO of campus2careers, an Austin-based company leading the program’s coordination. An estimated 80% of area Engineering, CS, and other key students needed to grow the tech industry leave Austin when they graduate. “If we are successful with this program, we think we can drastically change those numbers and build a more sustainable talent pool for the city of Austin.”

The program includes a website (www.madeinaustin.org), which will inventory local startups and fast growing tech companies looking to recruit tech talent, and two career fairs annually. The first MadeInAustin Fair will be held tomorrow night from 6:00 – 8:00 PM at the AT&T Conference Center. It will connect the 100+ fastest growing tech companies with an estimated 300-400 Engineering, CS, MIS, and MBA students, as well as recent grads from school such as UT, A&M, Texas State, Baylor, Rice, and St. Edwards. Companies looking to hire students for internships or recent grads for full-time positions can register for the fair at www.madeinaustin.org.

In addition to campus2careers, the program is being coordinated by myself, Capital Factory and a dozen other tech or startup organizations in Austin. MadeInAustin is sponsored in part by American Express, Constant Contact, Dell, Twilio, BuildaSign, 97 Degrees West, Circular Energy, Rackspace vConstruct and Study Breaks. These businesses will be offering exclusive services to the tech startups and students attending the upcoming fair.

Austin Tech Happy Hour December 1st

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Bryan Menell

It’s hard to believe the end of the year is almost here! This will be our last event for 2011, and it will be on the 1st of December. We’ll sneak this one in before all your holiday parties get into full swing. Come begin your holidays by celebrating with all your friends from the Austin technology community.

Since this event is at a bar, you must be 21+ in order to attend. All attendees will get 2 drink tickets. If you don’t pre-register, you can pay $10 cash at the door.

When: Thursday, December 1st from 6p – 8p
Where: Molotov Lounge

WP Engine Closes $1.2M Series A

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Bryan Menell

WP Engine, the WordPress hosting and security service for bloggers and small businesses, today announced the closing of their Series A round of venture financing.

The $1.2 M investment was led by Silverton Partners from Austin, TX, and includes angels Eric Ries, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel, Rob Walling and others. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also participated with a strategic investment.

Automattic today also announced VIP Support for Web Hosts, a new partner program for web hosts that excel at hosting WordPress sites and blogs. WP Engine is the launch partner for the program.

Kip McClanahan, a partner at Silverton, joins WP Engine’s board of directors.

This round of funding allows WP Engine to further recruit for and scale its product and customer happiness teams, which are comprised of the very best WordPress developers and consultants. The company also plans to ramp partner relations with other elite WordPress service providers.

WP Engine has grown rapidly since its launch in 2010 and now has an install base of over 30,000 personal and professional WordPress blogs.

WP Engine leads the managed WordPress hosting segment with fastest page-load times, scalability, security and a staff of WordPress experts. Additionally, WP Engine provides all customers with a managed CDN for static content delivery, full daily backups, a complimentary staging area, and consultation on themes and plugins.

“We’re devoted to providing the absolute best customer service and the investment from Silverton allows us to expand the WP Engine platform with the right people to support our growing customer base,” said Jason Cohen, founder and CEO of WP Engine. “Our roadmap balances building out the features, add-on services and high-touch support teams that customers ask for the most, while avoiding services creep, which is critical. We want to remain the fastest and simplest WordPress hosting company, period. Trust in this business is everything.”

Because of the one-stop approach, WP Engine works closely with a network of top WordPress consultants to provide them with the tools they need to get client sites up and running faster than they could alone.

“We’re excited to add WP Engine to our portfolio of leading Texas technology companies,” said Kip McClanahan, a Partner at Silverton. “WP Engine is helping to build out a high-touch platform and services ecosystem for bloggers and consultants, so everyone can focus on what they do best. There is a big opportunity between the plethora of lightweight, downstream hosting companies that casually talk about WordPress on their marketing pages, and Automattic’s VIP program, which is for only the largest sites and services. WP Engine is for anyone who is serious about WordPress, but not yet ready for VIP.”

WP Engine was founded to be the fastest and easiest way to keep your content or commerce-based blog up and running at optimal speed. Key features include:

Page-load acceleration
Top-tier security and immediate resolution of any breech
Scaling through spikes
Theme and plugin consulting
One-click staging and backup
Month to month payment without lock-in

New users with any size blog (even into millions of page views) can sign up for a 15-day free WP Engine trial at http://wpengine.com/pricing/. Monthly plans start at $50 per month.

SceneTap Announces Launch Date, Moves to Austin

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Bryan Menell

SceneTap, a technology and nightlife company that gives consumers real-time info on the local bar scene, announced today that its launch in the Austin market will take place on Friday, Dec. 9, 2011. SceneTap has also relocated its headquarters to Austin, though the company will maintain a strong Chicago presence.

A free app for iPhone, Android and the Web, SceneTap uses anonymous facial detection technology to provide consumers with real-time information on the local bar scene, including male-to-female ratio, average age, crowd size and drink specials. The company will launch in Austin in a tiered rollout that extends into the New Year, including technology-based scavenger hunts and a blowout event on the weekend of Jan. 21, 2012.

“With an active student population, a tremendous nightlife scene and an impressive startup community, Austin is a natural fit for SceneTap,” said CEO Cole Harper. “It’s an ideal market to showcase the next stage of our product offering as we prepare to launch in other markets, such as Boston, Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles.”

Enhancements timed for the Austin launch include improved user navigation and design, a new section for local events, improved data, more advanced and customizable admin capabilities, and automated marketing features. SceneTap developers have also been working on the next phase of the user interface, which entails notifications.

“Imagine you’re at home and you get a message from your favorite bar that it’s the optimum scene for you to go out,” Harper said. “Or you own a number of venues, and SceneTap tells you it’s time to send a few staff members home to help save you money. For us, it’s all about adding value.”

SceneTap launched in Chicago in July to provide customer analytics to venue operators who want to measure the effectiveness of their marketing and advertising – specifically, the foot traffic, gender and age of customers – anonymously and automatically. SceneTap serves as a marketing tool to bring customers in the door and optimize reach and profitability.

Bar-goers also use SceneTap to find the right spot to go out. They can download the free iPhone or Android mobile application or visit the website (www.scenetap.com) on their computer or mobile device to take advantage of several features.

Ash Maurya’s Running Lean Workshop

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Not a month goes by that I don’t speak with an entrepreneur that is busily writing code, planning for the day they are going to unleash it upon some lucky customer. That fortunate soul will certainly find that this hand-crafted website solves all their problems. The only problem with this whole story is that the entrepreneur in this story has never actually spoken with one of these fabled customers.

Even today, many people are writing code and developing software that nobody wants. It happens all the time. How do you stop this? Go Lean!

On Friday, December 2nd Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean, will be holding one of his workshops on how to build a lean startup.

A full description of the workshop, and the registration form can be found here.

Increase your chances of building a successful product. Go lean!

Q&A Wednesday :: TweetTV

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Bradley Markham, founder of TweetTV. They’ll be pitching at the Social TV Summit in New York this week.

Q: Give us the elevator pitch for your company?
tweetTV (www.tweet.tv or www.tweetTV.com) is real-time social TV. It’s part TV discovery tool and part TV communication platform. We’ve created a real-time, localized TV Guide that helps users discover what to watch on their TV by ranking currently airing programs based on their real-time“tweet rate” on Twitter. This helps answer the question “What are people watching on TV right now?” The guide is constantly shifting to show which programs are trending at any given time, and their localized channel numbers. We can show local trends, intra-network trends, and more. Plus, on the TV discovery side, we’ve invented a unique search tool that lets users dig down to see what’s popular on TV based on any combination of networks, genres, and program types.

But that’s just the beginning. When a user clicks on a TV program, he enters into a “tweet room” where he can see and reply to all of the tweets related to the program (beyond generic #hashtags ). We’ve created a full-fledged TV oriented web-based Twitter client for TV that goes beyond just seeing and replying to TV-related tweets. Our intuitive interface allows for actual tweet-based conversations and allows users to filter TV tweets by friends, experts, Network/Cast, etc. If that wasn’t enough, we’ve integrated multi-user video chat so our users can see and chat with each other publicly or privately while continuing to engage in tweet-based conversations, view program info, and further participate with others about the TV program they’re watching.

For TV Networks, tweetTV offers unique engagement tools such as Featured Tweets, and easy, customizable content integration so that networks can easily put their talent and content in front of their social TV viewers in a very direct, accessible way.

Q: How did the company get started? Who had the idea? Was there an “A Ha!” moment?
About 3 years ago, our founder, Bradley Markham, noticed that several of the Trending Topics on Twitter were related to TV shows. The ‘A Ha’ moment came when he realized that it’s not enough to just say “x is trending”. The question to be answered is “Trending against what?”. He realized that he could create a platform that would show trends within channels for anything that people were tweeting about (TV being the obvious first choice).

Q: Who are the founders of the company?
tweetTV is founded by Bradley Markham. Born and raised in Crockett, TX, Bradley later attended Stanford University where he graduated with honors and a degree in Science, Technology, and Society with a specialization in internet business. He then went to work at Google, where he served as an optimization specialist in the Google Adwords department in the days when Adwords was a brand new advertising medium. He has since owned, operated, and sold several small-market web businesses, including FreeTVonline.com, DoggySpace.com, and Wordze.com

Q: How has the company been financed so far? Are you looking for additional capital?
tweetTV has been completely bootstrapped thus far. We worked on the website for 2 years before releasing our public beta just last week. We’ll be pitching tweetTV on the “10 Great Ideas” panel at the Social TV Summit in New York on November 16^th. We are now actively seeking seed capital and encourage interested investors to contact us.

Q: What can we expect to see in the future from your company?
We have tons of exciting things in the pipeline, only a few of which we can mention. First, we’re going to be introducing free, front-facing social analytics for all TV programs. Also, we’re just starting to talk with TV networks about unique partnerships where we can integrate their content feature their tweets for the programs of their choosing. We’re working on mobile apps. And because our technology allows us to identify and display trends within channels, look for us to branch out beyond TV and create other web-based interactive popularity guides (think news, shopping, etc).

SXSW Accelerator Deadline Approaching

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Bryan Menell

How would you like to launch your startup into the stratosphere at the hottest of all hot tech conferences, Southby? Who wouldn’t? Well, it won’t happen if you don’t get off your tail and apply this week. This is your chance to get seen by thousands of interested people, investors, bloggers, press, and media of all kinds.

The fourth annual SXSW Accelerator will take March 12-14 at the 2012 SXSW Festival in Austin Texas. A live audience, as well as a panel of expert judges will be discovering advancements in social media, mobile applications, web entertainment, and more. The best part? Product demonstrations by the most ambitious talents in the world with the most creative new ideas to change it. We will catch a glimpse of the industry’s future, with a guided tour by our emcees and judges.

This competition will be unlike any other. On March 12, forty-eight companies battle for your taste-making, trend-setting attention, leading to a fireworks display of innovation. Connections will be made and careers launched. On Tuesday March 13, the top eighteen companies will be invited back, and at the end of the day winners of SXSW Accelerator will be announced. The Music Accelerator follows on Wednesday, March 14th with a full day of programming where eight music technology startups companies pitch their product or services.

For more information and to apply, go to http://sxsw.com/interactive/startupvillage/accelerator.

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Facebook Buys Gowalla in Talent Acquisition

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MadeInAustin Launches to Keep Tech Talent in Austin

Austin Tech Happy Hour December 1st

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WP Engine Closes $1.2M Series A

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SXSW Accelerator Deadline Approaching

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