Category Archives: Consumer

Startup Showdown A Welcome Addition To ATC’s Second CEO Summit

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The second day of ATC’s CEO Summit wrapped up last Friday with the Startup Showdown, featuring Baytan Labs, MapMyFitness, Convergence Wireless, VivoGig, and Toopher. We captured some tweets along with commentary and have more coverage planned this week, so stay tuned. We used Storify’s tool to craft the original piece. You can see that version here.

Baytan Labs kicked things off by showcasing their Guardian Trace app, a local positioning service (LPS) for the iOS platform that addresses personal security. It uses Google maps and provides emergency contacts with the users last known location. I caught up with the Baytan team and heard from CEO Mike Davis on markets outside of personal security. They plan to market to enterprise customers as well, providing a cloud-based offering that employees can use to set up monitoring through their department, on a per-seat basis. As good as that sounds, the consumer is still the main focus, with a commercialization strategy that hinges on the home monitoring market.

The next pitch came from Convergence Wireless. They’re in the red hot energy efficiency sector, focusing on tech that delivers wireless-based automation around things like lighting controls. Local startup advisor Ben Dyer told us the company is well positioned with a solid portfolio of IP. We’re hearing it might skip the company build-out and license its IP to someone like Schneider Electric.

The third pitch was from MapMyFitness, a company positioning itself in the health and wellness industry. The guys did a great job conveying the market potential for its approach. They’ve built a solid social network around fitness enthusiasts but were quick to point out the other areas ripe for expansion. They emphasized the fact that there’s really no companies addressing the fitness and diet market on large scale. Their CEO said the number one thing prescribed by doctors to combat illness is 30 minutes of exercise. The other most prescribed was diet.

Needto.com was next up, a company positioning itself to disrupt a few spaces. Their marketplace serves the adhoc tasks and jobs market. At first glance, you’d think the company’s competitors are solely the Craigslists and Angie Lists of the world. But if you grasp where they’re headed, the competition is actually closer to companies like ServiceMagic and RedBeacon. They plan to take the best of what traditional directory services do, and throw in some Craiglsist-esque features to drive user participation and scale. If they can fill in some voids that some of the incumbents aren’t providing — like richer profiles and commerce, watch out. This space is ripe for disruption.

If you were there, there wasn’t any doubt who put on the best show. It’s tough to beat a guy that pulls out a blender. But it wasn’t all show for Toopher’s mobile authentication technology — they pulled out the win. Like some of its peers, Toopher’s market spans across a few sweet spots: identity theft and the broader market for newer security apps. Replacing older methods for logging into apps and services — like USB fobs — is the obvious one. They’re taking that further, though. Because they piggyback on existing logins with location services, your mobile essentially becomes an extra level of security by pushing each request to your phone and giving you the option to approve. Toopher likely has some additional work to do as it moves upstream, especially in larger enterprises and public sector environments. Simplicity and a strong mobile and security combination seem to working for them now, with more visibility sure to come with the ATC win..congratulations.

The last pitch came from Daniel Senyard and the Vivogig team.They describe themselves as a live music photography platform, but hearing Senyard and their head of strategy pitch, you can see the broader opportunities. They’re a content company that enables a huge audience segment (music fans) to create content. And increasingly that creation is happening in real-time and on mobile devices. Musicians and artists are in dire need of tools to get closer to fans, so while that might carry them, it’s easy to see how brands, events, and even sports franchises could tap into VivoGig’s stream. They’ve built a nice web front-end, but more importantly their capturing data. And that data is gold to companies building businesses around advertising and content. You might think of Facebook first, but I heard them mention a linkage to Billboard’s music group. That seems like a viable match. Being the source of data for artists to grow their brand is attractive, but the better bet might be providing real-time fan sentiment and content to the business side of the music industry.

We’ll be publishing some pieces on a few of the other panels, but before that, here’s a few items that were relevant to the competition. John Stockton (not the hoopster) at Mayfield Fund had a few zingers during the VC panel, not the least of which was captured by Doug Bain below.

One of the more colorful VCs was NEA’s Jimmy Treybig. His quote below was particularly timely as much of the second day’s discussion focused on how big the market opportunities need to be to even get the attention of many venture capitalists.

Lastly, let’s not forget the ATC Council team and their hard work. It’s these kinds of events that help connect the ecosystem of entrepreneurs, business leaders and passionate Austinites. Great job on a great event.

Software Talent Tops The List In Door64′s First Hiring Survey

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Austin’s burgeoning ecosystem of startups is in high gear, buoyed by the rise of cloud-based infrastructure, mobile development, and cleaner technologies. Behind that growth is a vibrant tech community of software engineers, analysts and project managers. But what about more established companies? What types of skills are hiring managers seeking? That’s what Austin’s largest tech community, Door64, wants to answer with the initial release of its Hiring Priority Survey.

“We all know, it is often one or two key holes in a company that can impede growth,” said Door64 founder, Matt Genovese. “We are stepping up and surveying the hiring managers of a set of sizable Austin area technology companies every quarter starting now with today’s survey results, to get deliberately granular about what these hiring shortages are.”

Door64 gathered more than 100 responses and whittled down the results to represent more than 50 managers with companies in full business operations. When polled on their top 3 hiring priorities from 15 specific categories, 56% cited software as number one, more than hardware, semiconductor and Information Technology (IT) skills – combined.

The IT component was the closest category after software, tallying a meager 20%. That shows enterprises are eager to get new apps and toolsets to market, with extra lift coming from the mobile space as iPads and smartphones continue to proliferate.

Digging deeper into the software category, four skills accounted for 40% of hiring priorities, with Java, User Interface / User Experience (UI/UX), Software Quality Assurance, and .NET skills topping all others. The UX needs aren’t surprising with the challenges of adoption in large enterprises, and as Door64 notes, neither is the Ruby on Rails results.

“Ruby is often used in the earliest stage build of technology companies, and startups were not included in the survey,” it said in a prepared statement.

Conversely, the data showed Java is still the front-runner in Austin’s enterprise market, as it garnered 16% of responses in the software category, good enough for 30% of total software needs. That seems to mesh with what’s happening on a larger scale. The bigger companies are tying together applications, building private and public clouds, and launching all sorts of mobile capabilities. Enterprise java is often the glue that unifies these disparate systems. And java demand likely won’t see a slow-down as business units continue push the consumerization of IT.

One other thing that jumped out was the SharePoint piece, Microsoft’s 800-pound gorilla for corporate collaboration. Door64 says only one or two companies even mentioned it. Some of that can be attributed to an organization’s size, but the cloud is also eating away at SharePoint. I’d guess companies are realizing the cloud model works pretty well for breaking off pieces of your collaboration needs, not to mention easing the the maintenance and integration often associated with SharePoint.

Two other skills, Database Architects (DBA), and PHP developers, also sparked little interest. It would be interesting to hear more details from the respondents on this one. With big data’s rise, I’d wager most good DBAs are transitioning to some of the open source data engines and honing in on the demand to make sense of unstructured data. Just a hunch.

Lastly, and highly welcomed, Door64 says it’s planning to formalize its findings and poll 100 or so local technology companies each quarter and publish those results to an Austin Index of sorts.

But wait, there’s more. They’re also applying the findings to the Austin Pain-point Job Fair coming up June 29 at the AT&T Conference Center at University of Texas. You might call it a data-driven job fair. How fitting. :)

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Traveling Through Time with SameTimeAs

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Today’s guest blog is  by Will Rodenbusch: “I’m from Austin, the greatest rising tech center in the world! I am a 29 year old code monkey who loves the great outdoors, travel, entrepreneurship, and almost anything that involves an element of danger. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me with my wife, Cora.  We are your typical Austin DINKs, out enjoying life.”

Last summer, my wife and I decided to take our lives on the road. I left my position at Solarwinds, an Austin startup success, to try my hand at entrepreneurship while Cora took on a new role at her current company, PGi.com, as resident “Digital Nomad,” traveling and working from PGi’s 30+ global offices. PGi is a virtual meetings company and so extreme remote working was a perfect fit.

While we have traveled for the last 10 months jumping between offices and wonders of the world, we have faced every imaginable remote working challenge. One of the greatest challenges is keeping track of what time it is and what time it will be in the offices of our co-workers and stakeholders.

What I mean is that if you type “What time is it in Austin, when it is 6pm in Kyoto?” into Google, you get some Japanese restaurant reviews and two links to timezone lists. These lists show you the current time but you still have to do the math to get the future time. It gets even more confusing if you want to know the time in multiple places: let’s say for a team meeting. There are other world clocks and schedulers out there but I found it was difficult and time consuming to get to the basic information I needed. So, I built a website to solve our problem: www.sametimeas.com. Here is a link to show you what you get if you ask the question above: http://www.sametimeas.com/at/6pm/in/kyoto/what-is-the-time-in/austin .

I call SameTimeAs my World Clock Time Machine. My goal is to make it painless to find the time in multiple places given the time in one place. The UI leverages some fun interactive components, but the site will happily accept anything that looks like a time and place.

SameTimesAs.com is only a few hours older than this post and this is the first public mention I have made of it. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I have a bunch of ideas about new features but I am also looking for ideas and errata. Please post any thoughts or ideas to http://www.facebook.com/SameTimeAs.

Socialware Brings Compliance Expertise to the Facebook PMD

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Socialware, the leader in social media compliance and relationship software, brings unmatched expertise in the financial services vertical as part of the Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. Drawing from experience working with more than 125 financial services firms, Socialware will help organizations in one of Facebook’s fast-growing verticals leverage the world’s largest social network for business.

The Facebook PMD program recognizes companies that have developed technologies in one or more of the following specialty areas: Page management solutions, ads management solutions, services and platforms for building socially enabled integrations, and/or tools for Page Insights analysis. The Pages Qualification from Facebook PMD program indicates that Socialware compliance and relationship-building solutions have demonstrated unique capabilities that help marketers scale and achieve efficiency.

“Socialware works with more financial services firms for compliant social media than any other technology provider, and we are the only vendor with a breadth of customers across asset management, broker-dealer, insurance and wealth management companies,” said Chad Bockius, CEO of Socialware. “As part of the PMD program, we will continue providing important knowledge and support to the organizations and individuals that are using Facebook to drive their social business programs.”

“Financial services firms see the benefit in leveraging networks like Facebook to grow their business, but there are a lot of considerations and measures to take to ensure these firms are in line with policies and regulations,” said Peter Delano, Senior Director, CEB TowerGroup Wealth Management. “Financial firms have to stay up to date on the continued enhancements to Facebook functionality to engage effectively with clients and to maintain compliance with internal policies and regulatory mandates.”

To learn more about Socialware participation in the Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program, visit the Socialware blog at http://blog.socialware.com/ to read “3 Key Themes from the Facebook Marketing Developer Conference.” To join the conversation on social business topics, visit the SocialTurns community http://www.socialturns.com/. For more insight and commentary on the effective and compliant use of social networks, please visit http://www.socialware.com.

Affinegy Goes Global and Expands Product Offering with Acquisition of Sagemcom

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Affinegy, a proven global supplier of service enablement and network management software solutions for the home, today announced that it has acquired Sagemcom’s TR-069 ACS Solutions business. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With the transaction, Affinegy has:

  • Grown its team by 40% and added two new locations – an engineering and business operations group in Dallas, Texas and a customer support, quality assurance and interoperability testing group in Poland
  • Acquired new products including Subscriber Manager and FrontLine which provide a highly scalable, redundant, carrier-grade TR-069 Auto Configuration Server (ACS)
  • Obtained five associated patents
  • Gained customers in Europe, Africa, Japan, Asia, and Central/South America

The acquired solutions are immediately available within the Affinegy Portal Platform:

  • Operations Portal  (formerly Subscriber Manager TR-069 ACS)
  • Care Portal  (integrating interactive TR-069 management from FrontLine into Affinegy’s proven Care Portal)
  • Home Portal
  • Connect

The Affinegy Portal Platform provides a modular and flexible solution that serves all phases of the Connected Home lifecycle from auto-provisioning, management and self-care to maintenance for IP video, voice, data, and other services. It supports a variety of devices including set-top boxes, eMTAs, advanced wireless gateways, routers, NAS units and femtocell and LTE devices.

Subscriber Manager was first released in 2004, shortly after the ratification of the initial TR-069 standard. The expert engineering team, which has continued to enhance and expand the offering as TR-069 and other related standards have evolved, has joined  Affinegy. Fixed-line and wireless service providers, including one of the world’s largest TR-069 data and VoIP service implementations, have deployed the software to more than 25M households.

At the Forefront of TR-069 Management Technology Operations Portal ACS supports the latest standards emanating from the Broadband Forum. As an example, full support is available today for IPv6, TR-181i2, TR-135 and TR-143, which are critical to managing the advanced services gateways and IP video CPE that are fundamental to subscriber acquisition, retention and growth in today’s ever evolving and rapidly growing IP services market.

The Universal Global Solution
The acquisition is significant for all broadband service providers (BSPs) – xDSL, cable and wireless. Affinegy’s software portfolio is now a universal solution that manages all connected devices – TR-069-enabled, customer-owned or service provider-issued. This means all subscribers, both new and existing, can be served with the solutions.

Other companies such as equipment manufacturers and premium care providers who provide devices and services catering to the connected home market can also use the solution to reduce operating expenses and grow top line revenue. Installations are automatic; self-care and remote management easy and scalable; and the customer experience satisfies their wants and needs, resulting in increased spend and extended customer loyalty.

“We are thrilled to add the BSS team, technology and customers to Affinegy,” said Melissa Simpler, CEO and Co-Founder of Affinegy. “Their team was among those that pioneered the development and commercialization of TR-069. Their solutions have been adopted worldwide, with a concentration outside of North America, which provides a strong infrastructure for Affinegy’s expanding global presence and new market segment solutions.”

A Simple Message From Tim O’Reilly: Create More Value Than You Capture

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Image from Flickr, Via InUse Consulting

Value is a term that’s thrown around quite a bit these days. And when it lives in the context of the corporation, it tends to get scrutinized even more.

If you’re familiar with media CEO and web visionary Tim O’Reilly, you know he’s been pitching a simple message around value for some time: create more of it than you capture. During last month’s SXSWi session, “Create More Value Than You Capture,” MIT researcher Andrew McAfee and O’Reilly analyzed its role in the rise of sustainable business, outsourcing, and machine-driven automation.

“Consider Microsoft, whose vision of a computer on every desk and in every home changed the world of computing forever, and created a rich ecosystem for developers. But as Microsoft’s growth stalled, they gradually consumed more and more of the opportunity for themselves, and innovators moved elsewhere, to the Internet.”

While it’s easy to beat up on big companies, the idea is that an ecosystem is essentially a company’s lifeline. And Redmond, for better or worse, is a classic example because so much of its software business rides on the integration and development expertise of channel partners.

“If you have too small of a group capturing value then the whole ecosystem breaks down,” he told McAfee. Soon after, O’Reilly eased up on the Microsoft example, saying it had never been an evil empire. Almost on cue, the other favorite evil empire, Google, surfaced. O’Reilly urged business leaders to stay focused on big, hairy, audacious goals, and described how some of the greatest companies always have a higher sense of purpose.

“As Google is increasingly dominated by economic concerns, they will become less successful,” he said. “Our job is to work for all of us, not for this or that interest group.”

From there, the conversation turned to areas where technology-driven disruption is occurring, something McAfee researched and co-authored in his book with Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against the Machine.

McAfee touched on the rise of automation and outsourcing, commenting that the gains from replacing people with machines and overseas labor is taking a toll on the economy.

“It seems the value is be going into the paychecks of CEOs, instead of back into society. More and more jobs are being taken over by machines,” said McAfee.

One of the scenarios mentioned was connecting Apple’s SIRI application to Moore’s Law. Both men agreed the result could be less human-powered customer service, especially in e-commerce environments.

The other business models mentioned revolved around peer-to-peer and collaborative consumption as the basis for unlocking value. Both strategies are built on the idea that there’s plenty of value within a community of users. Unlocking that value is where the magic happens, and what eventually leads to value creation and monetization, explained O’Reilly. He went on to reference Couchsurfing.com and AirBNB.com as examples.

Both panelists were asked to elaborate on other areas ripe for disruption.

Not surprisingly, manufacturing, government, and education were the top three picks from O’Reilly. And while manufacturing might be having the biggest renaissance, he seemed to think government could be the biggest opportunity of all. His comparison was one the tech-rich audience appreciated.

“Government should focus on being a platform provider instead of a solution provider,” he explained. As the session ended, a humble O’Reilly recapped some of his ideas, all grounded in his consistent message of working on stuff that matters.

“Find people as passionate as you are,” he said. “It’s important to create value for society and make the world a better place to fill in the needs.”

Loku Launches New Local App

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Loku.com, the site locals rely on for their insider knowledge, today announced the availability of the new Loku App for the Apple iPhone, Android and Windows devices. Using cutting edge HTML5 technology, Loku is the marketplace for local knowledge, allowing insiders to add tips, opinions, and commentary about local places and activities while also getting real-time buzz about the best of everything in their community.

Installing the Loku mobile app couldn’t be easier; because HTML5 technology makes the Loku app seem native, you can access it from your iPhone, Android or Windows browser. To get the app, simply go to Loku.com on your phone and add it to your homescreen when prompted.

Loku takes an authentic approach to local status. You build status on Loku just as you would in real life in your local community. A local can increase his or her ranking in many ways: spend more time in the area, visit more places, contribute helpful tips or comments, find what’s new before others do, invite newcomers to join, be informed, support local businesses, and spread the word about local happenings.

As Loku users explore further and their contributions gain approval, they are awarded expert ranking in their area. It’s about the little things that all add up.

Go Local
Loku makes it fun to share your local insights – and feel good about it, too. The key feature of the app is a stream of everything happening in your local community, pulled from the entire Internet, social media, and more. The “Go Local” tab can be used to explore what’s happening nearby, or what’s popular across the city, and add your two cents. The app flips between pages that feature every aspect of local culture: events, music, food & drink, news, photos, local blogs, and more.

The results are always fresh and changing to reflect your immediate surroundings. If you open the app, then walk a few blocks, you will see new things. Or if you open the app a few hours later, or on a different day. If you’re wandering in a new part of the city, the app doubles as a handy field guide, showing you what locals there care about, where they go, what they do, know, and try, without any intensive searching.

Locally Grown
Loku, founded in 2008 and backed by major venture funds, is a leader in online local discovery. Loku’s Beta site, Loku.com, was launched in October 2011 to critical success. Since October the site has been growing 50% month-over-month, with a large base of locals who love it. The mobile app release is another step forward in establishing Loku as a leader in local.

The Tech Behind Loku
Like Loku.com, the Loku mobile app employs an exclusive local analytics engine named “Sherpa” which leverages big data mining techniques to locate and uncover the interesting bits and pieces nearby. “With Loku in your hand, you have a window into the community that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else,” said Dan Street, Chief Executive Officer of Loku.com. “Our mobile app reveals what the locals care about like the free concert tonight, a new food truck opening, breaking news developing nearby, a happy hour going on, the popularity of an event, or the best dish at a restaurant. With this technology you can skip crowds of tourists, avoid the mainstream noise, and get a real taste of what’s local.”

Debut in Six Cities
Loku.com is debuting its HTML5 web app initially for San Francisco, New York, Austin, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC, with other cities to be added throughout 2012.

Dachis Group Launches Advocate Insight

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Dachis Group launched the second of it’s paid SaaS applications today, named Advocate Insight. It’s built upon the same big data platform that drives the Social Business Index, Social Portfolio Insights, and the Social Performance Monitor. The product helps to solve the problem of advocate identification for large brands with thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of advocates.

Last month at the Social Business Summit in Austin, company CTO Erik Huddleston gave a presentation about the challenges of advocate identification at scale. Large brands have, on the average, 11 people tasked with engaging with their ecosystem in social channels. That level of manpower can handle listening, and responding to direct messages and comments in the social ecosystem, but there is no possible way to understand all the people that are showing you some brand love. Engaging at scale is a big data problem.

Advocate Insight doesn’t just identify your advocates in the social channels, it also performs some analysis for you to understand additional attributes your advocates, such as how many followers they have, a measure of the sentiment toward your brand, and the strength of their signal over time. Additionally, the product utilizes sophisticated machine learning and natural language processing to sift out the spammers and false advocates.

A screen shot is below. The company issued an official news release today, and there was a blog post from CTO Erik Huddleston. If you’d like to know (for free) who your top 5 advocates are, check it out here. Note that this will only work if your company is one of the top 30,000 brands in the world, and covered by the Social Business Index. TechCrunch covers the story today as well.

Disclaimer: I am the Director of the Collaboratory at Dachis Group.

Famigo Closes $1M Seed Round

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Capital Factory alumni Famigo, an Austin-based start-up dedicated to creating a better mobile experience for families, today announces the closing of a $1M seed round of financing led by Silverton Partners, with participation from Zilker Ventures, Liahona Ventures and CapitalFactory. They have been seeing some terrific traction lately, including having Famigo Sandbox being named by CNET as Best App for Parents.

Famigo provides a platform that makes it easy for families to discover and safely manage mobile content across multiple mobile platforms, including Apple iOS, Android and the web. With this new financing, Famigo will advance its platform capabilities and extend its reach to millions of families around the world.

“The mobile explosion has uniquely impacted families: kids are increasingly adept at using new technologies and parents suffer from an enormous responsibility to vet every purchase and experience,” said Famigo CEO Q Beck. “It doesn’t have to be that way: Famigo helps parents identify quality content, enforce their personal guidelines and better manage the mobile lives of their families. Silverton Partners’ investment validates Famigo’s technology as well as the business opportunity in solving the overwhelming frustration and concern parents feel around mobile technology and the family.”

“With mobile technology now ubiquitous, nearly every family is challenged to create order out of the chaos of App Marketplaces to ensure a safe and appropriate experience for their children,” said Morgan Flager of Silverton Partners. “Famigo’s thoughtful mobile management solutions go far beyond anything offered through today’s apps and web services to meet the needs of mobile families. Silverton Partners appreciates their unique approach to the market and sees huge potential in their business.”