Chris Shipley, Bryan Menell, JT Keating at the DEMO happy hour

In case you are just now reading this, don’t think you’ve totally missed out. You can still apply to launch your company at DEMO in the Fall.

One interesting change for the Fall conference is the introduction of the Alpha Pitch. Unlike the traditional DEMO 6-minute pitch, the Alpha Pitch is 60-seconds and it’s a less expensive route for companies that are not quite mature enough for a full launch at DEMO. If you’re not familiar with the DEMO conference, there are around 400 attendees that come to hear approximately 50 companies launch on stage. Attendees are some of the most notable venture capitalists, journalists, and analysts in the tech industry today. DEMO was a leader in demanding that companies abandon their slide decks in favor of showing the actual product. I guess that’s why it’s called DEMO and not SLIDES, right?

“Since the economic shift, we’ve seen a trend among market leading companies. They are investing in price optimization to maximize their market share without going too far and giving up more margin than they really have to,” said Tim Hamilton, SVP of sales and marketing, Zilliant. “This SDCE recognition reflects Zilliant’s commitment to delivering pricing solutions that enable B2B manufacturers to improve their performance in good times and bad.”

Eight years ago, Supply & Demand Chain Executive announced its first “100″ list of supply chain solution providers, consultants and other organizations that were helping lead the way in transforming companies’ supply and demand chains. This year the magazine focused the criteria for its “100″ feature on economic recovery.

“Our readers turn to Supply & Demand Chain Executive to learn about solutions and best practices for enabling the supply chain to weather the current economic storm in which we find ourselves, and also to position themselves for growth when recovery takes hold.” explained Andrew K. Reese, editor of Supply & Demand Chain Executive. “The corporate executives and line-of-business leaders who rely on the magazine want to know what the different supply chain solution and service providers are doing to help them meet these critical, corporate ‘life-or-death’ challenges.”

Supply & Demand Chain Executive has identified leading providers of supply chain services and technologies who are helping their customers and clients both respond to the downturn and, more importantly, position themselves for growth ahead. Based on submissions to the “100″ from end users and solution providers, the judging committee for the “100,” including the editorial staff of the magazine, in conjunction with the editorial advisory board, has compiled a list of leading supply and demand chain innovators.

For years, the industry has attempted to replace the traditional discrete tuner with an integrated silicon tuner to enable cost reductions, reduce complexity, harmonize across standards and improve consumer device form factors. To date, silicon tuners have not been able to achieve these goals and iDTVs still use traditional discrete tuners to achieve the best performance in real-world reception conditions. Simultaneously, the system complexity and cost of these solutions has increased to support reception of hybrid analog and digital broadcasts as well as regional broadcast standards and system requirements.

To exceed the performance of traditional discrete TV tuner implementations, the Si2170 silicon tuner integrates a highly linear RF front-end design incorporating a unique, merged low noise amplifier (LNA) and high-Q tracking filter to provide gain only around the desired channel frequency. This enables superior sensitivity and rejection of strong undesired channels and interference in severe broadcast conditions, translating into reception of more channels, reception of weak signals and improved picture clarity.

Silicon Labs’ patented and proven digital low-IF architecture enables the Si2170 to achieve the highest level of performance and integration while addressing the challenges created by hybrid analog and digital reception and multiple regional standards. The architecture allows many functions typically relying on analog and discrete fixed components to be implemented with cost-effective and programmable digital signal processing. This enables TV manufacturers to optimize system parameters and comply with all worldwide cable and terrestrial broadcast standards including ATSC/QAM, DVB-T/C, ISDB-T/C, NTSC, PAL and SECAM.

Additionally, the integrated ATV demodulator creates a universal interface to system ICs further simplifying the customers’ design and enabling coordination of tuner and demodulator functions to optimize reception of analog TV signals, eliminating visual beats or artifacts.

Designed in standard CMOS, the high level of integration of the Si2170 eliminates over one hundred discrete components including the tracking filter function, avoiding costly manual inductor tuning/alignment and resulting in significantly lower manufacturing costs. The Si2170 TV tuner not only enables a simpler design, reduced bill of materials, and lower manufacturing costs; the high level of integration also improves reliability, PCB production yields and reduces field returns. Finally, as TV makers continue to design thinner form factors, the PCB footprint of the Si2170 also helps to enable the next generation of ultra-slim flat panel TVs.

“Delivering a silicon TV tuner that offers not only cost savings but also performance advantages over discrete tuners has been an unmet design challenge for the industry,” said Tyson Tuttle, vice president of Silicon Labs. “The Si2170 TV tuner leverages our mixed-signal design capability and intellectual property to deliver on the long awaited promise. By designing the tuner in standard CMOS, we are also the only company able to offer customers a viable road map to cost-effective, hybrid single-chip TV receivers, integrating tuner and demodulator functions for both analog and digital reception, enabling a path to further system cost reductions and flexibility for customers.”

Hourville, a marketplace for people who sell their services by the hour, was featured in a great article written by Lori  Hawkins at The Statesman. Hourville was featured as part of the first ever SXSW Accelerator program in 2009, and then was selected as one of five company to be part of Capital Factory for 2009.

Our cameras were there as The Statesman photographer came to the Capital Factory to shoot some pictures for the story.

“Participating on Zilliant’s Customer Advisory Council gives us an additional opportunity to provide real-world insight into not only our own experiences, but also the needs and expectations of the industrial services market overall,” said Charles Snyder, EVP fleet operations, Sunbelt Rentals. “We expect to benefit significantly by collaborating with company leaders and industry peers to identify new opportunities for innovation and improvement, and look forward to being a proactive member of the Council.”

Zilliant’s Customer Advisory Council is made up of distinguished pricing executives from leading B2B companies in the distribution, manufacturing, high-tech, and industrial services markets. The Council was formed as an interactive platform for collecting direct input from customer thought-leaders on market trends, emerging opportunities, and best practices to help shape company price optimization and management standards. Sunbelt Rentals joins council members from Acuity Brands, HD Supply, Hubbell, Inc., Akzo Nobel, Ingram Micro, Parker, PPG, Reliance Steel and Aluminum Co., Schneider Electric, Shaw, Siemens Energy and Automation, Thomas and Betts, and others.

“Zilliant’s Customer Advisory Council demonstrates our commitment to work with customers to understand both their needs and the industry requirements,” said Laura Case, director, customer advocacy at Zilliant. “Sunbelt’s expertise and knowledge adds value as we continue to service the industrial/commercial market. We expect our Advisory Council to continue to grow and evolve, providing us with further opportunities to align our solutions with their pricing objectives.”

What is Uvumi.com?

Uvumi is a website that provides tools to help artists promote their work. We built the site on a special ajax platform that we designed in-house, and it allows visitors to stream music from the website while they browse around without interrupting the audio. You can queue up as many songs as you want in our player, skip around between songs or within songs, and create and save playlists for later listening, all while you’re browsing and reading artist profiles, leaving comments, checking messages, or whatever. While this feature is geared towards listeners and fans primarily, it also helps musicians who are looking to promote their work. For musicians, we offer a unique and logical band management feature that makes it easy to create multiple band profiles and invite bandmates to join, which is our attempt at creating a more accurate representation of real-world social networks among artists. We have solid features to help graphic artists and writers as well, like photo galleries and a blog platform, and we plan to expand our offerings as we grow. In addition, Uvumi has all the standard social networking functionality one would expect from a modern interactive website. Our mission is to empower artists, promote widespread consumption of art, and add value to the artistic community.

How did you get the idea for Uvumi?

I spent a lot of time writing songs and playing guitar in college, and I had a real interest in digital home recording. When I discovered PHP and MySQL I realized that these tools could be used to build all kinds of applications and interesting websites. I envisioned creating a website that would give amateur musicians like myself the ability to put home recordings on the internet and collaborate with other enthusiasts to share music and learn more about recording and producing. I was 19 years old, and I had to shelve the idea to pursue my education and earn a living. After building a web dev and consulting business over the next few years, I put myself in a position to finally tackle the challenge of my original idea, and I found partners who were as passionate as I about building a service that truly could add value to the art and music communities. We also identified a number of glaring shortcomings in other services we see as our competitors, mostly technical issues like the lack of a seamless music player, scary license agreements, and obnoxious banner ads. We are confident that we can provide a valuable service without compromising the community’s artistic integrity.

Why did you choose to locate this startup in Austin?

We did a ton of research before moving to Austin, but it was really a no-brainer. Besides its incredible technological infrastructure and its (well-deserved) reputation as an education hub, Austin is a mecca for art and music and is backed by its city-approved title as the Live Music Capital of the World. There’s also the relatively low cost of living, and the presence of so many famous ventures and artists. Since launching the site we have signed up prominent Austin artists such as Black Joe Lewis, Leo Rondeau, and Woodsboss, to name a few.

Who is your target audience?

Musicians, obviously, and artists make up our primary audience, but there are also millions of people out there between the ages of 15 and 44 looking for a trustworthy source of art and new music. Right now our focus is on Austin and the surrounding area, because we feel that Austin is our lifeblood and our core userbase and we want to focus on the local scene right now, but we also have strong interest in the art and music scenes in Portland, Ore., Seattle, New York, and pocket communities like Boise, Idaho. There is no limit to Uvumi’s potential to expand into new geographic audiences because there is art and music everywhere you go. We can give these artists superior online promotional tools than what they are being offered by our competitors, and also provide a cutting-edge media-rich interface for fans and enthusiasts to play with.

Where do you see Uvumi going? What are your plans for the service in the future?

As we are self-funded and currently struggling under the weight of such an ambitious project, we have a binder full of ideas that we hope to pursue in the future. I can’t really talk about our most exciting features that we have in the pipeline, but I will say that we intend to provide free promotional tools to artists that are unmatched in the current marketplace and which will essentially become indispensable to the average self-promoted artist or musician. Aside from our secret plans, we would very much like to integrate the service into venues like bars and clubs for musicians, zines and other publications for writers, and galleries and coffee houses for painters and photographers. We are currently looking for the right VC to work with us on our mission and on achieving our goals for the future, and I continue to seek out that person or firm on a daily basis. Our team has taken this idea almost as far as we can without real funding, and we are proud of what we have accomplished. I have no doubt that we can grow this idea into the future and eventually offer a superior and valuable service to the entire artistic community in Austin and beyond.

Where did the name come from?

Uvumi is a Swahili word that means “rumbling noise” or “humming sound”. We thought this fit nicely with our mission to foster the artistic community and our product, and we like the idea of using a word that few people have heard before. It gives us a chance to create new associations in the minds of our users, and to imprint our brand and logo on their memories. It’s not the easiest word to remember, but once you know what it is you’re not likely to confuse it with anything else. That, and we were able to register the .com, which is, of course, a big plus in this business. To me, though, the concept of Uvumi, of a humming noise or a low sound, provokes an image of crowds of artists, humming away at their creativity and exploring their art, then sharing it with each other and working together. That’s what Uvumi is all about. We want this concept to grow into a thriving online community of artists working together, writers and photographers collaborating on projects, graphic designers creating posters and album art for musicians, all working towards greater creativity and feeding off each other as they add value to their art and the community as a whole.

Collecting email and user files from remote offices or mobile users is problematic due to the combination of low network bandwidth and high latency. The challenges can be further compounded for mobile workers who use VPN connections. Organizations that use file copying software across an extended network typically over-collect what is necessary, as up to 90% of desktop data is non-responsive to a legal matter. They also face significant difficulties properly preserving all metadata, taking enormous amounts of time to complete data collection activities, and having no automated method to restart the collection process after a network interruption or if a remote user disconnects while a collection is in progress. The result is that either a member of the IT staff or a consultant needs to be dispatched to a remote office to perform custodian collection, or remote users are forced to ship their laptops into a main office for a few days. StoredIQ’s Desktop Agent solution prevails over all of these difficulties in a speedy, accurate and cost-effective manner.

“In the compressed regulatory investigation and litigation schedules we are seeing today, organizations need to begin their analysis in minutes, not days, and preserve and collect in hours, not weeks,” said Vivian Tero, Program Manager, Compliance Infrastructure, IDC. “The new StoredIQ Desktop Agent complements StoredIQ’s existing broad federated enterprise systems access and provides leading information management industry capabilities for remote offices and mobile workforces.”

“IT organizations are highly reluctant to add new permanent software agents to their standard desktop configurations due to the increased effort and cost to manage them,” said Keith Zoellner, Chief Technology Officer at StoredIQ. He adds, “StoredIQ’s temporary agent is designed for just-in-time deployment and self-removal upon completion of assigned tasks.”

StoredIQ locates, identifies, indexes and classifies unstructured and semi-structured data across the industry’s broadest range of storage, email, archiving, content, document and record management systems. StoredIQ provides precise search and analysis, enabling investigators to analyze and target data that is potentially responsive to litigation or investigations across the organization, regardless of where it is physically located. Using StoredIQ’s litigation hold policy, organizations can preserve potentially responsive data where it is located or copy the data without changing metadata properties to a retention platform. The potentially responsive data can be further filtered and de-duplicated before being produced in a review-ready format supporting Concordance, CT Summation, Native Format, EDRM XML or FTI Ringtail. Additionally, for large volumes of data, StoredIQ supports the ability to perform discovery exports, allowing legal teams to begin work in popular review systems before all enterprise data has been collected, eliminating the delay between collection and review.