Mutual Mobile Moves Into New Headquarters

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Mutual Mobile today announced their move to a new headquarters in Austin’s Capitol Tower Building to support the company’s rapid expansion in the US market. Having formerly occupied three different historic buildings in central Austin, the new 40,000 sq. ft. office space consolidates all Austin employees into a single location, with enough additional capacity to double staff size within the next 12 months.

According to a recent survey, Austin now leads the nation in terms of job growth, thanks in part to aggressive hiring by companies like Mutual Mobile. The company, which led Q2 tech hiring in Austin, has developed a reputation for attracting the best and brightest mobile talent in the industry. “Our goal is to make Austin the national epicenter for mobile design and development,” said Mutual Mobile CEO John Arrow. “Take a look at our parking lot and you’ll see license plates from across the country. We are attracting mobile talent to Austin at pace rivaling the semiconductor industry from 20 years ago.”

Mutual Mobile success is partly attributed to the unique holistic approach it takes to integrated design and engineering. The company is committed to a cross-functional organizational structure that places mobile strategists, developers, designers and support teams directly alongside one another to facilitate organic knowledge sharing. “Gathering the entire Austin team together in the same space fosters collaboration, increases innovation and shortens development times – resulting in superior solution quality and value for our customers,” said Arrow. “As our team continues to grow to meet the rapidly increasing market demand for mobile business applications, we’ll have the ideal space to accommodate everyone.”

While the company continues its exponential expansion in Austin, Mutual Mobile also has plans to further develop its global presence. Over the next year, an expected 70 developers and designers will join the India offices in Hyderabad and Bangalore to further fuel innovation and development capacity overseas.

“Ultimately, we want to be recognized as the leading partner in delivering mobile business solutions,” said Chief Operating Officer Tarun Nimmagadda. “Growing across geographies strengthens our hybrid delivery model, making high-quality mobile technology more affordable and accessible to our clients.”

InfoChimps Acquires Keepstream

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Two of my favorite companies have now combined forces. Today in my email I received a message from the founder of Capital Factory company Keepstream. I will re-post it here for you. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Keepstream is joining Infochimps!

We are excited to announce that Keepstream has been acquired by Infochimps, leading API provider and data marketplace! Keepstream co-founders Jim England, Tim Gasper, and Huston Hoburg are joining Infochimps in order to help them develop exciting new data products and improve the Infochimps web experience.

Thank you so much for helping us craft Keepstream into a top notch curation product. We wouldn’t be here without your valuable feedback and excitement for social media.

With this news, we have two significant developments with Keepstream we would like to tell you about. Firstly, we will be slowly closing down the Keepstream hand-curation product. The website will be set to “read-only mode” on September 30th. New user registration will be turned off and existing users will no longer be able to create or edit their collections. However, all collections will still be hosted online and be accessible atkeepstream.com for viewing. So don’t worry, those links you’ve shared will still work just fine. We will be exploring options for exporting collections or integrating with similar curation services. If you’d be interested in something like this, let us know by replying to this email.

Secondly, Keepstream Reports, located at http://reports.keepstream.com, will continue forward. It has the potential to be both a more automated way to archive social media as well as a way to create beautiful, actionable social media analytics reports. It’s currently in private beta.

We are really excited on how we can work together, you can look forward to many exciting developments soon to come.

Best regards,
Tim, Jim, and Huston

Capital Factory Demo Day

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Today marks the 3rd Capital Factory Demo Day! About 300 investors, entrepreneurs, and press have shown up to see the five companies that have gone through the program this year. Watch the live stream here!

Here is a brief summary of the five companies that went through the program this year.

StoryMix Media

Taking advantage of the trend of personal video exploding everywhere, StoryMix is helping people preserve their video memories. The company makes creating videos as easy as ordering a photobook. As the company founder puts it, “Who has 15 hours to create a home video that still looks amateur?”

The company is currently targeting the massive wedding market. There are 1.75 million weddings each year that don’t have a video. Yet 98% of brides recommend to other people that they get a wedding video. That market is an awesome fit for their product.

HelpJuice

“The auto-updating help page for businesses.”

All of us have gone to the help pages of websites, and typed in a question that we think is probably asked a thousand times. Something as simple as “How do I cancel my account?” yields no results, or worse — a bunch of totally unrelated information.

Much like cc:Betty, when you reply to an email from a customer all you have to do is cc:juicers@helpjuice.com and the company will figure out if it needs to create a new help article, link it better or improve it, or update an existing article. With the company’s 30 live customers today, they have saved over 1,000 emails. This tool can probably reduce your support email flow by 50%. Very cool.

SpeakerMix

They help meeting planners find awesome speakers for their events.

The paid speaking industry is a $10B market. But have you ever tried to book speaker for an event? It’s hard to know who to call, who is their agent, and you hear five different stories about how much they charge to speak. SpeakerMix de-mystifies that whole process, and in one case went from contact to contract for a brand name speaker in four days. Whether you are a professional speaker, or are looking to hire someone to speak at your event, you should check out SpeakerMix.

The company currently has 6,500 speakers in the system, and signing up speakers at a rate of 500 per month. It’s a great trajectory for growth, and a great website worth checking out.

SwimTopia

There are tens of thousands of swim teams in this country, with millions of kids involved. If you’ve never been to a swim meet it’s a crazy event. Minivans are pulling up to the pool, parents are dragging blankets and coolers to the event, and kids need to be in the right lane at the right moment to compete in their heat. There hasn’t been any technical innovation in this area in over ten years. Luckily SwimTopia is bringing modern technology to swim team management.

How big is the market? There are 2.6M young athletes in the US, and the merchandising and registration market for youth sports is $5B per year. While swimming is a large first vertical, it seems like there are many more for this company to explore.

GroupCharger

The company is launching their first product named AlumniCharger. Most of you reading this blog post are probably alumni of one university or another. But when is the last time your alumni association really, and I mean really, did something for you? Yet colleges and universities rely upon alumni as major donors. People that are involved with their alumni association are 3x more likely to give. There is some serious motivation right there.

How big is the market? There are 55,000 alumni associations in the US. I don’t know about you, but I had no idea there were so many. Current customers include UT, A&M, and OU (go Big 12!). This company is getting some great initial traction.

Meet Capital Factory’s 5 graduating startups (gigaom.com)
Bob Metcalf’s 5 Tips For Startup Success (centernetworks.com)

CineSkates Compact Camera Slider Delivers Fluid Video Shots

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Austin entrepreneur Justin Jensen has been getting some great press lately for his new camera accessory company. Cinetics™ is launching a professional-grade yet lightweight camera slider, CineSkates™, which allows filmmakers to capture stable, high-resolution video footage without lugging heavy gear. CineSkates™ combines cutting-edge skateboard technology with the flexible GorillaPod Focus™ Tripod, allowing the amateur or seasoned filmmaker to achieve fluid camera movement in space-constrained environments where traditional camera sliders, dollies and cranes are too cumbersome.

As a filmmaker himself, Cinetics founder and Austinite Justin Jensen had trouble finding camera equipment to capture a steady motion shot without having to carry bulky gear or even require an assistant. “Today’s cameras allow you to take high-resolution video in a small form factor, but the result can be shaky and distracting if you don’t have stability. I wanted a camera slider that was lightweight and mobile for professional events or even spontaneous shots, which became the design principles for CineSkates.”

Developed in an MIT MediaLab class, CineSkates is a unique set of wheels that attach to a tripod and enable the user to put their video in motion. They are designed to work specifically with the GorillaPod Focus™ tripod, and a ballhead, like the BallHead X, also from JOBY^®.

CineSkates adds captivating motion to product demo videos, wedding films, music videos and other high quality productions in a portable form factor. Filmmakers can produce shots that have previously been impossible or only achievable with bulky and expensive camera equipment, such as:

Arcing video shots that rotate around objects
Sliding video shots that push or pull the subject into focus
Rolling video shots that glide over the subject
Time-lapse video shots that move the camera slowly and smoothly
Panning video shots that scan a wide area
“Worm’s eye view” video shots that slide just above the floor

CineSkates are available to preorder through Kickstarter at cinetics.com/kickstarter for a limited time, reduced price of $150 and $275 for the complete CineSkates System that includes the GorillaPod Focus and Ballhead X.

Ditch the Valley, Run for the Hills!

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Austin Technology Council, along with Austin’s technology leaders, made a commitment at a May 2011 CEO summit, to take the best of our city live to the San Francisco and Silicon Valley areas to recruit top technology talent. Today, the Austin Technology Council proudly announces two Top Talent events in San Francisco and Sunnyvale, the evenings of September 13 and 14. Over 30 Austin area technology CEOs will represent their companies live, talk with candidates, and ideally fill some of the many technology jobs currently open.

“These events are about Austin making a pretty loud statement in the Bay Area,” said Julie Huls, president, Austin Technology Council. “Texas is a New Economy State, and we have a killer combination to support it: high-paying tech jobs, fast-growing companies, a low cost of living, and a relaxed way of life. Over 100 of our area CEOs were together in May at an ATC CEO Summit and one key call to action was to bring more tech talent to Austin. We are proud to deliver on that idea in a couple weeks in San Francisco and Sunnyvale.”

Texas overall, and Austin specifically, are among few geographies currently adding jobs, and Austin’s technology industry particularly has many job opportunities for programmers, developers, coders and engineers. The Austin technology community continues to thrive with new start ups and fast growing mid-stage companies. The city attracts entrepreneurs and business leaders who want to start and grow their businesses in Austin. But there are not enough technical resources to build out the solutions these companies envision, and commercialize products.

In a recent survey of Austin area technology CEOs, 71% of respondents stated there is a shortage of technically skilled talent at the present time in Austin. And more than 50% believe these talent issues have limited their organization’s productivity and efficiency. Of respondent’s plans for 2011 and 2012, the number one ranked activity was adding jobs.

Austin currently has several dozen technology companies hiring 40 or more new programmers each. Of over 30 CEOs representing their companies at the Top Talent Roadshow, current job openings include roles like: Data Engineer, Front End Software Engineer, Information Architect, UX Designer.

At present, companies confirmed for the events include: Affinegy, Bancvue, Bazaarvoice, CacheIQ, Catapult, Calxeda, Collider Media, Creditcards.com, Gazzang, Gowalla, Homeaway, Ihiji, Less Networks, Mutual Mobile, Phunware, Ravel, SailPoint, Spredfast, Vast and Whaleshark.

“In Austin, we’ve fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent, especially in engineering, programming and software development roles,” said Rod Favaron, serial Austin entrepreneur, and presently CEO of Spredfast, a white-hot social CRM company. This leadership role follows Favaron taking his previous company, Lombardi, through successful acquisition by IBM.

“We will not realize Austin’s fullest technology innovation potential until we infuse new talent into this city,” added Favaron. “The zero-sum-game hurts the overall tech community. So we’ve decided to come together to seek out new additions to Austin to help us all grow. Fortunately, it doesn’t require a lot of convincing. But we do think it requires the technology leaders of Austin representing the city, its value, our businesses directly to draw in the next generation.”

Memory app maker Evernote heads for the hills with a new Austin studio (venturebeat.com)
Survey Results From ATC’s CEO Summit Send A Clear Message. We Need More Skilled Workers. (austinstartup.com)
Q&A Wednesday :: Gazzang (austinstartup.com)

Austin Startup Week is Next Week

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Guest post by Jacqueline Hughes, who has been working tirelessly to organize Austin Startup Week next week.

It’s less than a week away from Austin’s first Austin Startup Week! When I started putting this together, I wasn’t sure I would be able to pull this all off. I decided to knock out as much as I could without raising money from sponsors, just in case I blew it. My goals were to recruit investment, talent, new companies as well as celebrate our awesome community. Now 3 months later, I cannot believe the amount of buzz that has transpired, or that we’ll be having visitors coming in from all over. Just this week I’ve spoken with people from Palo Alto, Portland and Boulder who’ll be coming in town to participate in the Week. I’ve spent the last few days talking with press, and I thought for this post I’d write something a bit more personal.

So, how did I get here? I’ve asked myself this same question a lot lately. Before 2010 I had never met a developer and couldn’t tell you what a “startup” was. I actually didn’t even know what a developer did. “You mean, websites don’t just come with a computer?” I’m a college graduate, yet I had absolutely NO idea that websites had code behind them. “Tell me more,” I said with *stars* in my eyes. You see, I’d always had these ideas stirring around in my head–how about an online co-parenting network? How about a location-based dating app for the iPhone?–but I didn’t in my wildest dreams think that I could turn them into a reality.

So what happened? I got on Twitter and dove headfirst into the tech scene, eagerly going to every event I could, soaking up knowledge and meeting hundreds (upon hundreds, literally) of people. I took a position as community manager of a coworking space in town and started chipping away at my own startup. My idea was to make a social calendar by aggregating events from other sites using their APIs (sounds a bit like Plancast, eh?). I spent 3 months of my life working with 3 developers whom I somehow convinced that this was the best idea ever! It was awesome! And then it failed. That’s when I decided that perhaps it was time to work with other startups for a while instead of building my own.

I started doing community management, marketing and PR for a couple of startups and eventually got to work with Plancast. Through them I learned about Boulder Startup Week, went out there mid-May, and voila! The idea for an Austin Startup Week was born. I figured that the best time to do this would be around Capital Factory Demo Day, so I approached Josh Baer who has been a co-conspirator in this adventure. Since then my life has been a whirlwind and there haven’t been enough hours in the day.

So how did I really get here, I ask. I mean, why am I doing this?

Ever since I discovered the Austin tech scene and the people in it, my mind has been open to endless possibilities. I’ve stumbled upon this incredibly exciting and dynamic universe full of innovation. The people here have been warm and welcoming, beckoning me in, sharing their stories and pushing me along my own path. They’ve become my colleagues, mentors and more importantly, my friends.

It has been these friends who’ve volunteered to help me put together Austin Startup Week. Some of them I’ve known for awhile, like Damon Clinkscales, Bijoy Goswami, Eve Richter, Olga Garcia, Kevin Koym, Keith Casey, and Carla Thompson; some are newer friends like Steve Golab, Dave Michaels, Cecy Correa, Winnie Hsia and Bryan Menell, who have all had a hand in organizing an event. And of course Josh Baer who has been crucial in the planning and creating of Austin Startup Week. I’m incredibly thankful to them, to the companies they represent, the people who’ve volunteered their time to speak, those planning on attending, the organizers of Boulder Startup Week and everyone who has had a hand in shaping this.

Austin Startup Week is the culmination of all my experiences – through the people I’ve met and events I’ve attended – in the tech scene. It’s my way of giving back to the community that has given me so much. And it’s a great opportunity for us all to show the world–and each other–what makes Austin such a great place to plant an idea and watch it grow. It hasn’t even happened yet, and I’m already excited for next year!

(Although I’ll probably listen to Josh’s advice and raise some money next time.)

Visit the Austin Startup Week website to view the event schedule, and take a look at the Austin Jobs board while you’re there!

Chaotic Moon Creates Labs Division

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Bryan Menell

Chaotic Moon, the world’s most proven mobile application studio, announced today the launch of Chaotic Moon Labs, a new division created to drive mobile innovation and serve as the center of Chaotic Moon’s intellectual property strategy. Steering the direction of the Labs will be whurley (William Hurley), co-founder and former CTO of Chaotic Moon Studios. Replacing whurley as CTO is key talent and Apple R&D veteran, Stephen E. Smith.

“The Labs were created to capitalize on our constant drive to accomplish the ‘impossible’ and to expand Chaotic Moon’s dominance in mobile by growing hardware and software R&D contracts already in place,” said whurley. “By creating a division to focus on these futuristic developments, we’re positioned to fulfill the company’s vision of ALL YOUR MOBILES ARE BELONG TO US™; expanding our reach to embedded solutions and cloud enabled technologies.”

Chaotic Moon Studios is the team behind multiple groundbreaking mobile brands such as News Corps’s The Daily, The Discovery Channel, Groupon and Best Buy. The studio provides everything from initial brainstorming and strategy, to custom development and publishing, to managing a company’s entire mobile presence in any marketplace.

With over 60 patents in process, Chaotic Moon Labs will incubate, develop, launch, and monetize internal hardware and software innovations as well as manage Chaotic Moon’s investments in other mobile companies. The Labs will provide Chaotic Moon’s other divisions with a unique advantage over competitors through its relationships with OEMs, carriers, and component manufactures.

“It was a no brainer move to put whurley’s unstoppable imagination to work in the labs and bring Steve in to take the engineering team to the next level,” said Ben Lamm, CEO of Chaotic Moon. “We expect great things from both teams, as they are being led by two powerful minds with the world’s best development and engineering talent supporting them.”

Infochimps Releases Unified Geo Data In One API

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Bryan Menell

I work with a lot of consumer startups that are dealing with location-aware information. From a programmer perspective, it’s just plain hard. Not only is it difficult to find a great source for quality geo data, but then you typically want to correlate it across multiple social systems (Foursquare, Yelp, etc). Some of my favorite code monkeys have just made this problem a little easier.

Infochimps is pioneering a somewhat new category, named data-as-a-service. Today they’re announcing the availability of the Infochimps Geo API (geo-spatial application programming interface). The Geo API enables developers to incorporate geographic data sources and features into their software applications by adding a layer of diverse and rich location information. The Geo API provides data from open sources such as Geonames, the National Climatic Data Center and the American Community Survey, as well as licensed sources such as Foursquare and Locationary.

To show how easy and cool the Geo API is, they had a non-programmer create a cool little sample application. The Travel Guide app helps users find notable travel spots for destinations around the world, placing Wikipedia and Foursquare venues on a map to show interesting museums, parks, and nightlife locations in any city in the world.

“This is a transformational development for the geo data market,” said Flip Kromer, Co-founder and CTO of Infochimps. “Up until now, developers have faced issues and barriers when working with geo data – everything from the difficulty in finding accurate, up-to-date data, to the lack of query-based standards. Infochimps’ goal in releasing our Geo API is to democratize the market’s access to a variety of geo data in an easy to digest form.”

The Geo API delivers an extensive set of features for building social, geo, and mapping applications, including:

Disparate Data Sources Unified by the Infochimps Simple Schema (ICSS) – Regardless of its original source, data is organized into a unified schema that makes integrating data from multiple sources quick and easy.
More Ways To Ask The Questions You Want with Multiple Locator Options – Standard geographic locators like street address, bounding box, quadkey, and latitude/longitude can be used to query any data source in the Geo API. Furthermore, any dimension that can be mapped back to a location, such as a Wikipedia Page ID or Foursquare Venue ID, can also be used to query.
Summarizer Tool Allows for Easy Roll-ups of Data –The Summarizer, a unique feature of the Geo API, manages the flood of data when queries return a large amount of matching results. The Summarizer makes data query results more usable by organizing data points into intelligent geographic clusters.

Here’s another neat example. Animated weather station data from 1892 – 2011. We’ve grown a lot of weather stations in the past hundred years.

The Geo API release continues Infochimps’ commitment to making data more accessible, while helping to push the market for application development forward through easy access to a rich variety of data sources and APIs, giving developers the ability to focus on building awesome apps.

To access the Geo API, developers can quickly register for an Infochimps API key and immediately begin building on the data for free, making up to 100,000 free API calls per month.

The Infochimps Geo API is available today with the following data sources:

Foursquare
Locationary Points of Interest
Wikipedia Pages
Zillow Neighborhood Boundaries
Bundle.com
Digital Element
US Census
American Community Survey 2009
National Climate Data Center
Geonames
Zip Codes
Political Boundaries
UFO Sightings

Austin Tech Happy Hour Next Thursday the 8th

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Bryan Menell

We’re excited to be part of Austin Startup Week with an awesome social event on Thursday, September 8th from 6pm – 8pm at Molotov Lounge. It’s a great opportunity to bring together the entrepreneurs, marketers, angel investors, UX experts, designers, developers, venture capitalists, and big data enthusiasts from around Austin (and perhaps beyond).

Online Ticketing for Austin Tech Happy Hour Sept 2011 powered by Eventbrite

Evernote in Austin

Posted on August 29, 2011 by CEO

The popular Evernote is coming to Austin.

A few weeks ago, I met with Rich Warwick, Evernote’s new vice president and general manager for Austin products, where I learned that Evernote was going to open a development lab in Austin, and that they will be aggressively looking for developers here in town. Mobility & Mac are core-focus of the Austin lab. I, being a mobility person, was pretty excited about the news: 1) I am a fan of Evernote, 2) they are opening a dev studio in Austin, and 3) a core focus of the Austin lab is Mobility! Awesome.

Today, Evernote went public with their Austin plans; see story (Statesman). The Startup company has been growing:

“We’ve been really expanding like crazy at Evernote, adding four or five people a week for the last couple of months,” said Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO. “We started this year with about 45 people total. We’re going to end the year with about 130. The plan is to do it again next year.”
:
The company has about 11 million users.

Note that both Rich and Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin are no strangers to Austin; during the early 2000′s they spent their time at Vignette.

On August 31st, they will run an Evernote Meetup at the W. If you are a mobile app developer and curious about joining the Evernote team, you should attend the meetup and also see their current job postings in the new Austin Studio.

Evernote, on a hiring spree, is coming to Austin (Austin 360)
Evernote software company plans new studio, aggressive hiring in Austin (Austin American Statesman)
Evernote Meetup Austin

ceo

AustinStartup

All About Austin's Emerging Technology Community