NexTech and FAS Technologies to Merge

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Austin-based NexTech Solutions, Inc., a publicly traded manufacturer of automated optical inspection systems used in the production of flat panel displays, and FAS Technologies, LLC, a Dallas-based company widely recognized for the development of the digital fluid dispense pump and spinless coating technology, announced this week that they have merged. The merger positions the newly combined company to become a dominant competitor in the flat panel display and semiconductor markets, opening diverse sales channels and broadening solutions on a global scale.

Tony Di Napoli, President and CEO of NexTech Solutions has stated "The integration of NexTech and FAS Technologies creates a new paradigm within our marketplaces by providing our customers better solutions and services. Since our inception, our goal was to build the fundamentals of a solid company and continue to deliver growth to our shareholders, and this merger is a significant step in achieving these goals."

The combination of these two Texas companies should be exciting to watch.

Monebo Closes Series B Financing

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Austin-based Monebo technologies today announced that it has secured Series B financing, but has not disclosed the amount. The round was led by Fairway Medical Technologies, a portfolio company of the Baylor College of Medecine venture arm. The money will be used to continue to commercialize the company’s products; the CardioBelt Wireless ECG System, and the ECGAnalyzer Interpretation Algorithm.

In conjunction with the financing, Leo Womack, the chairman of Fairway Medical, will join the board of Monebo. A quick search on the web finds that Leo is also a stockholder in Shumate and O.I. Corp which are publicly traded companies. He has been on the board of Fairway Medical since 1996, but begain his career as an accountant at Arthur Andersen & Co. He was a partner in his own accounting firm for many years, and is a CPA and real estate investor.

In October 2006 Monebo received a $500,000 grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

Builder Homesite Featured on Yahoo! Real Estate

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Newhomesource205 Builder Homesite is a consortium of 38 of the nation’s largest homebuilders. They have a website at www.newhomesource.com which is a consumer website for comprehensive information about new homes.

NewHomeSource has teamed up with Yahoo! Real Estate to provide a way for Yahoo! users to search new home listings from across the country. Above the fold on the Yahoo! Real Estate page is the search interface for real estate. There is now a specific radio button for "New Homes" along with apartments, foreclosures, classifieds, and the MLS. When you search for new homes, each featured listing contains the NewHomeSource logo, but the logo doesn’t link anywhere.

Other featured partners on the Yahoo! Real Estate main page include RealtyTrac for foreclosures, Lending Tree, Countrywide Home Loans, and Quicken Loans. This deal should bring a lot more eyeballs to the new homes of builderes in the consortium.

Austin Tech Happy Hour August 2nd

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Athh225 It’s been a somewhat quiet week for technology news in Austin this week, so let me take this opportunity to make you aware of Austin Tech Happy Hour coming up on Thursday, August 2nd. It’s a great place for technology professionals to come and mix, network, and make contacts. Plus there’s nothing like a few free drinks to make you forget about the rain.

This month’s happy hour is sponsored by Porter Novelli, which provides public relations services to some of the top technology companies in Austin, and around the country. It is one of the few technology-focused PR firms to have their professionals located in Austin full time. They are also a major sponsor of DEMO, just in case you’re headed to San Diego in September.

We’ll see you at Third Base on West Sixth Street from 6pm – 8pm.

Freebirds Acquired by Tavistock

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Freebirds210 One of Austin’s favorite restaurant start-ups, Freebirds World Burrito, a startup originally formed by two college students in 1987 with 4 locations locally, was sold yesterday to Tavistock Restaurants LLC of Emeryville, California.  Tavistock Restaurants owns eight restaurant concepts, including Freebirds, ranging from fast casual to fine dining, and is part of the Tavistock Group, a private investment company founded by Joe Lewis with business interests in life sciences, sports teams and events, manufacturing and distribution, oil and gas, financial services, restaurants, private luxury residential properties and master-planned real estate development.

After thriving for 20 years with 19 locations throughout Texas, Freebirds President Alan Hixon said officials have been planning for years to sell the chain to someone who could "take it to the next level" without changing its unique qualities.  "This is an exciting milestone for our company, and we look forward to growing the brand with Tavistock," said Hixon. "We’re also excited about the synergies of our companies. Both Freebirds and Tavistock share a strong commitment to providing customers with the best product and service possible. We look forward to sharing the benefits of exciting new growth opportunities this combination will provide."  According to Bryan Lockwood, president of Tavistock Restaurants, the goal is to open an additional 60 Freebirds within the next 5 years.

Congrats to Pierre Dube, Alan Hixon and the rest of the Freebirds team!

Keep Austin Fed

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I’d like to take a quick break from the startup news. This year I’m on the board of Operation Turkey. Planning for the big Thanksgiving day event begins early this year. We’re raising some money and awareness this weekend at the Keep Austin Fed Music Fest. [Google Map]

It’s Sunday, July 29th from Noon – 8pm at Bikini’s Bar and Grill.  Bands include The Hudsons, Avogadro’s Number, The Good Kings, One Degree of Separation, Ladyfingers, Vanessa Lively, and Fulton Read. Admission is free if you bring five of the following items:

  • Jackets, pants, shoes, socks, shirts for men, women and children
  • Toiletries (shampoo, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, deoderant)
  • Non-perishable food (dry stuffing mix, canned corn, canned gravy, etc)

Bikini’s Bar and Grill will be one of the locations for cooking and preparing the meals for the homeless on Thanksgiving, and they are also the site of the music festival. Help spread the word and Keep Austin Fed!

Spiceworks Selected as "Next Big Thing"

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The folks over at the Sand Hill Group are having their Enterprise 2007 conference this week at Pebble Beach. It’s the 10th year for this conference, which is designed for top level IT executives in enterprise software and technology. Spiceworks has a simple, downloadable IT infrastructure tool that is free of charge. You can download it and try it out for yourself on their website.

Austin-based Spiceworks.com was one of five companies named as the "Next Big Thing" along with Cast Iron Systems, Ketera, Seriousity, and Vocera. Which are probably names you have never heard of, but companies given this honor have been acquired for $2.5B, and two have filed for IPO’s.

Spiceworks was founded by a group of Motive veterans, and took in $5M in Series A funding from Austin Ventures. John Thornton (Motive investor) and Mike Maples Jr. (Motive employee) serve on the board.

There are a handful of Austin companies whose success is defined by eyeballs. It looks like Spiceworks had more reach than even the Slacker music service for a bit in July. iTaggit also had a significant blip in late June, perhaps with their announcement of new features.

Here’s a report from Alexa on their relative reach.

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Austin Startups Raise $172M in Second Quarter

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According to the Quarterly Venture Capital Report released today by Ernst & Young LLP and Dow Jones VentureOne, the venture capital markets are heating up again.  However, Texas does not appear to be the biggest beneficiary of this new infusion of capital. On a national level, U.S. companies received venture financings of $7.4 billion, an increase of 8% over the same period last year. Other stats from the report are that the median deal size in the second quarter of 2007 reached $8 million, up from the $7.4 million seen during the same time last year and the highest median seen since 2000. The quarterly deal count reached 717 deals, the highest deal volume since 2001.

The $233M raised in Texas during the second quarter is down 15% from last quarter and down 30% from a year ago. In the regional rankings, Texas has slipped to 8th among regions raising venture money, behind stalwarts Bay Area and Southern Cal and 5 others (New England, New York Metro, Washington State, Potomac and Colorado). The overall climate of the state is obviously not good news for a city that was recently named one of the five "Startup Hubs" in the US by Fast Company magazine.

Austin does seem to be on a bit of an upswing raising $172M, accounting for 70% of the venture capital raised in Texas. That’s up from $67M in Q1, but slightly down from the same quarter last year of $197M.   

Considering that Google, PayPal, HP and Apple are all expanding their presence in Austin, one hopes that the 1st quarter was just a hiccup and that the entrepreneurial spirit of Austin remains strong.

FameCast Finals Featuring 60 New Artists

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FameCast announced today the dates and named 60 finalists after three months of competition. Eight of those finalists are from Austin. There are 5 top acts in each of 12 categories. The winner in each category will go on to a final for a chance to win $10,000 and become the "Famecast Fenom."

We wrote about FameCast back in June when they announced that they raised $4.5M from Austin Ventures. A brief look at the Alexa traffic graph shows some major bumps in traffic at the beginning of June and again in mid July. But there is certainly no distinct trend from the lower left to the upper right hand corner. Although should FameCast achieve some kind of tipping point in popularity, or have one of their performances go viral, they could be spending all that cash on bandwidth. It’s rumored in the early days of YouTube that they spent $1M per month on bandwidth. We wish this same problem upon FameCast!

Blodget Covers Click Forensics

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Clickforensics321 Austin, Texas-based Click Forensics, Inc. was recently highlighted by Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street Internet analyst superstar.  The coverage from Blodget stems from a press-release issued by Click Forensics reporting that the percentage of fraudulent clicks industry-wide increased to 16% and that fraud on affiliate networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network increased to 26% in the second quarter of this year.

"Click fraud has become the new spam and it’s clearly a problem that is getting worse, not better," said Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics, Inc. "A significant percentage of today’s click fraud traffic can be attributed to two growing areas of concern for search advertisers – traffic that comes from botnets and from parked domains or made-for-ad sites. Advertisers running campaigns on content networks are especially vulnerable as they are increasingly targets of this growing pool of savvy fraudsters."

Click Forensics, which has received funding from Austin Ventures, is the leading provider of third-party technology and services that help online advertisers, agencies and search providers to better identify pay-per-click fraud.