When your software is used by over a million IT professionals daily, there is an incredible opportunity to tap into their knowledge to identify needs, trends, and budgets. Spiceworks just completed their semi-annual report on technology usage, staffing, spending trends. The IT industry continues to show strong signs of growth as technology budgets, cloud services usage, virtualization adoption, and IT staffing plans among small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) all showed their strongest gains in more than 18 months, according to latest new report by Spiceworks™, Inc., the largest social business network for IT with more than 1.4 million SMB IT professionals.

If you came to Austin Tech Happy Hour last Thursday, you may have been able to catch a sneak peak of something pretty cool as part of Technology Spotlight. Whurley was showing the concept for OpenAustin.org in advance of its official launch today. You may remember some of the discussion surrounding the City of Austin giving a contract worth between $700K – $1.5M to a web developer on California for the creation of the city’s [...]

The big brands are quickly learning how to market using the social networking tools of the day. Case in point, a new Facebook application namd Alter Ego that is just plain….well….cool. And you can see the Burn branding all over it, which is a Coca Cola brand. In Alter Ego you can create an alter ego for your Facebook account. Your alter ego has a cooler name than you do, has a cool flat to [...]

On Friday afternoon, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Financial released data showing that venture funding across the US was up, with 963 companies raising over $7 billion in the fourth quarter.  Most interestingly, out of the top 10 deals in 2007, only 3 were in California (local company Heliovolt raised either the 4th or 6th largest amount depending if you include its follow-on round). Austin also had a significant quarter, with 23 [...]

I just thought I would share this excerpt with you. It came from an article discussing how overly pessimistic most researchers are on the pace of new discoveries and the evolution of technology. On October 9, 1903 two interesting things happened. The New York Times wrote "Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings… the flying machine that will really fly might be [...]

If you’re not familiar with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, their mission is to advance entrepreneurship and improve the education of children and youth. Their website contains great information about entrepreneurship, investing, and innovation. They recently released a report named Returns to Angel Investors in Groups, which says in short that organized angel investors saw an average 27% IRR, compared to historical VC returns in the mid teens. Some of the key findings: The distribution [...]

According to a report released by Scarborough Research, Austin is the top blogging city in the U.S. with 15% of the population reading or contributing to a blog in the past 30 days. Austin was followed by Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Honolulu. The report says that the top cities have both tech-savvy and youth in common, with 37% of Austin adults being between the ages of 18 and 34. And of course we all [...]

Thoof founder Ian Clarke has been posting some interesting statistics about Thoof users over on the Thoof blog. The first posting included some statistical differences between Mac and Windows users. Now it’s about Yahoo Mail users vs. Gmail users. For instance, Yahoo mail users have a 4% bias towards stories on personal finance and a 6% bias toward articles about savings than Gmail users. The posting is going viral, slowing down Thoof servers, and putting [...]

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, reporter Teri Agins takes note of Austin’s growth in high-end retail. Local Austin entrepreneur and investor Eric Simone was on to this trend a while ago, with investments in local clothing startup Erebelle and the retail store Girl Next Door, which recently moved to the 2nd Street district. Don’t worry, Eric is still a tech guy at heart with his early investment in Bazaarvoice.

The BBC ran an article about animal cloning, and featured Austin company ViaGen. It must be a pretty tremendous prize bull to pay $15,000 to clone it. Pigs are only $3,000 to clone. According to Blake Russell, VP of sales and business development, "The technology is currently in a rapid state of development and will meet the needs of large agricultural numbers around the world very, very soon." Currently the FDA doesn’t allow animal products [...]