This was the 12th annual IT Executive of the Year awards competition and is the premier recognition event for Central Texas Chief Information Officers and Technology Professionals. “This award is an important aspect of giving back to the technology community in Austin. The winners showcase four examples of incredible work being accomplished in Austin”, says Scott Foster, President of AITP – Austin Chapter.

Scott Foster, President of AITP Austin presented the awards to this year’s recipients:

• Public Sector/Non-profit IT Executive of the Year – Eric Hungate, Chief Information Offier, Texas Association of School Boards.
• Private Sector IT Executive of the Year – Dennis Strong, Sr. VP & Chief Information Officer, McCoy’s Building Supplies
• Information Technologist / CTO of the Year – Joshua Baer, Founder & CEO, OtherInBox
• Community Leadership – William Hurley, whurleyvision, inc.

Prior year winners include the senior IT and technology officers with DejaNews/Google, Dell, Hoover’s/Dun & Bradstreet, Vignette, Whole Security/Symantec, Activant, Austin-Bergstrom Airport, Collective Technologies, the City of Austin, the State of Texas, Texas Mutual Insurance, Texas Medical Liability Trust, Triactive, Travis County, City of Bee Caves, Temple Inland, Wayport, Freescale, Spiceworks, and Pervasive.

Meleski said his expo will feature some of Austin’s leading sleep experts. Scheduled speakers include Dr. Ed Ortiz on sleep apnea, Dr. Kristi Cannon,  neurofeedback, Dr. James Vance, neuroallergy therapy and Dr. Beth Carpenter, sleep and nutrition. As well, Meleski, who has a PhD degree from the University of Texas in human biology, will speak on the “Bedroom of the Future.”

The IntelliBED at RunTexs executive said the Brain Wave Fitness Expo addresses a new trend in sleep wellness. “Sleep is often overlooked as a key aspect of a healthy lifestyle,” he said. “Yet, when people address issues such as their nutrition, the type of bed and when they work out, they can help themselves get a better night’s sleep.” Meleski adds that he plans on hosting more Brain Wave expos in other cities. “It’s my hope that we will springboard from this first Austin Brain Wave Expo into other communities so we can help everyone in America improve their sleep.”

The acquisition marks Logitech’s entry into a very competitive videoconferencing market, which is outside of their traditional focus on the consumer market. Other major vendors in the space include Cisco, HP, Microsoft and Polycom. Lifesize built a reputation for top-notch HD-quality video at prices that some of the other players struggled to match. While this is a noteworthy move for Logitech, it’s also one of the most impressive exits of an Austin-based startup in recent memory.

In a letter to customers and partners, LifeSize founder and CEO, Craig Malloy said, “With Logitech’s backing, LifeSize will be able to scale more effectively to deliver technology solutions to more customers and partners around the world. And by closely collaborating on innovation, we believe that we can accelerate the realization of our vision.”

In an FAQ document about the acquisition, the company said that it would become a division of Logitech and continue to operate as they have since their inception, only now with the support and resources of Logitech.

The news has been well-recieved by the Austin technology community. LifeSize’s exit is a success both for the company and investors, but also lends further credibility to the quality and strength of Austin’s startups.

Q: Give us the elevator pitch for you company?

We are a hardware manufacturer of data center sensors that can detect threats such as ambient, power, and security.  We have engineers in India and Australia allowing us to compete within a global scale for software development; along with, relocating our manufacturing facilities to Singapore and El Paso, Texas to serve our customers in different regions of the world that our product offering covers, and drive down channel cost on acquiring these devices.

Q: How has the company been financed so far? Are you looking for additional capital?

Bootstrapped and no Angel Investors.  We have had several financing options with local financial institutions in times of need for capital and operation expenses, and have kept our revenue and sales above the “yellow line”.  Since our industry requires a heavy infusion of capital to keep up with the giants in the competitive space, acquisition, mergers, or closing its doors are the options that one has.  Yes, we are looking for additional capital to help offset from the purchase back in 2001 either being debt to capital recapitalization.  This will allow us tons of breathing room to create products in which we know that will help shape our market further 2-5 ahead along with channel partners requesting new offerings to help with their current sales model to bundle these sensors.

Q: What was your first indication that you really had something interesting here?

When we signed our first OEM agreement with a Fortune 500 Industrial component leader that then signed another of our OEM partners, we knew we had something good but had to ensure that we are delivering our message correctly and supporting our channel partners who are implementing our technology as a solution than just a standalone offering.  The sensor market to date has a market cap of 300-500M and the share of it “Intelligent Sensing” being 8-10% and growing

Q: How has customer adoption been so far?

It has been a steady adoption.  We have been in the business of educating our customers of the product offering that we have along with what is being seen and what will occur in our market.  Now that power, cooling, and energy are a “hot” topic, this is yielding channel interest along with having our product offerings integrated into other solutions.

Q: What can we expect to see in the future from your company?

We will be expanding our product offering into the power space with flexibility for price and distribution.  Also, we are developing our hardware platform to software since our partners are seeing this trend within the field and our industry is moving away from hardware to software implementation.  Since power reduction, green energy are the hot topics within the data center, we are looking for ways to tackle the problems at first so that competitive advantage will not have the best of us, also ensuring that we keep a close eye with our channel to know what they need from us.

Real estate has been one of the hardest hit sectors during the recent slow down in the US economy. However, that pressure created a unique opportunity for Chambers to redefine the structure of a successful real estate company to best serve customers in an evolving marketplace.

“Despite the struggles in residential real estate over the last two years, we believe PropertyMaps.com’s superior technology platform gives us the ability to enter into the market and compete on the national stage. We will leverage our technical expertise to connect consumers, agents and advertisers like never before, and we’ll do it in a more capital efficient way through strategic partnerships and acquisitions,” says Chambers, chief executive officer of PropertyMaps.com.

PropertyMaps.com provides the best real estate search tools and local information to help buyers locate homes. This combination of services allows for a smooth transition from searching online to working directly with an agent.

Unlike most real estate search sites, service at PropertyMaps.com doesn’t stop on the web. PropertyMaps.com is a licensed broker in the Texas and works with real estate agents across the country to provide the essential face-to-face service that customers desire.

“Working with local real estate professionals is a key component of our business,” says Chambers.

PropertyMaps.com is currently hiring top agents and partnering with independent brokerages across the U.S., and expects to have both an online information and offline agent presence in more than 1,000 cities by the end of the year.

The company’s growth strategy includes expansion into targeted international markets in 2010. “We will continue to evaluate other verticals in which we can apply the PropertyMaps.com technology and expertise and work to identify key strategic partnership and growth opportunities,” says Chambers.

I don’t like Twitter. I’ve never been coy about that. When it first launched, I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” When it exploded in use, I thought, “This too shall pass.” When Ashton Kutcher sent a picture of his wife’s ass to the world, I thought, “We have reached the point of no return.” And yet, here we still are. Oh sure, I tweet. I’m an emerging tech analyst; I have to. But I’ve never been happy about it. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, I’d be quite content. And several events over the last week left me wondering if we are indeed watching a technology fold in on itself. Is Twitter about to jump the technological shark? Or has it already? The evidence:

1) They’re boring me. A friendlier home page. A new Retweet button. The ability to make lists. The new features rolling out of the Twitter factory recently are incremental and yawn-worthy. Take the newest update, Twitter Lists, which allows users to build dynamic lists of people, grouped however their hearts desire. My non-techie friend @poliepete said it best: “Can’t you just create groups in Tweetdeck?” He’s got a point. There are a couple of small differences – these lists are public and other people can subscribe to them – but otherwise it seems another exercise in technosphere ego-stroking. Though Robert Scoble posits that the introduction of lists means no less than the end of numbers as we know it, my experience was anti-climatic. I cherry-picked a few people from lists created by others, but haven’t followed any list as a whole. It took me a long damn time to get my Tweetdeck right where I want it and I don’t need other people with disparate interests mucking it up. So a feature that caused a minor stir for a bit seems to have already faded. You can now group like-minded people together in Twitter. So what?

My point: Twitter isn’t exhibiting a desire to evolve. For a product that has achieved such explosive growth since its launch, it sure seems happy to rest on its laurels. It’s as if the sole difference between the first-gen iPhone and the 3GS was the ability to tag your contacts. Granted, the iPhone is about $300 more than Twitter, but free shouldn’t equal lack of innovation.

2) The kids aren’t using it. This is a point of contention among many. Depending on which survey you’re reading, Twitter use is either growing or receding among the youth of today. No one can seem to get a straight answer out of these kids. The Associated Press ran an interesting exercise in confusion a couple of weeks back, in a piece that I’m still trying to figure out. Titled, “Grudgingly, young people finally flock to Twitter,” the article states that the younger generation hates Twitter. But they use it to follow celebrities. Sometimes. Unless they don’t.

“Quite frankly, I don’t need to hear if someone stepped in dog poo on the way to class or how annoyed they are that they lost their favorite pen,” says Carolyn Wald, a University of Chicago junior who has not joined Twitter and rarely posts status updates on Facebook because “I don’t want to assume that people want to hear those things about me, either.”

I like the cut of your jib, Carolyn. Can I friend you on Facebook?

What was even more striking to me, though, was a little tweet (yes, I get the irony) sent out by my friend Laura Beck. She heads up the Porter Novelli Austin office and sent out the following last Thursday:

Btw, taught 2 mktng classes @ tx st wed, 60 kids, jr/sr, NONE use twitter, all think for us oldies. Interesting

To translate from 140-character speak, Laura taught marketing to 60 college students and not a single one of them used Twitter. I’d say sixty kids is a pretty good sampling; hell, major political decisions have been made on less.

My point: Twitter should be worried about this. They should be worried that Carolyn Wald thinks it’s only for dog-poop updates. Trusting that a technology – one that hasn’t had a major upgrade in feature-set, design or philosophy since it’s launch three and a half years ago – will somehow settle into a generation as it ages is a risky proposition.

3) The spammers are taking over. I don’t know about you but Twitter spam is starting to drive me batty. I blocked more than 50 people this past week alone, some of which sported some seriously gross profile pics. Even more fun, I attracted topic-specific spammers from certain tweets. After tweeting that I couldn’t decide between eating a cream-cheese-loaded bagel or yoga class (I never said my tweets were thought-provoking), I received a follow from “Health & Wellness” within minutes and Philadelphia Cream Cheese within the hour. It felt creepy and slightly stalker-ish. I’m in no way the first person to say this but Twitter still doesn’t seem to be listening. They must remedy the spam problem.

My point: Twitter is teetering on the edge of becoming one giant commercial. Just today, CoTweet announced a $1,500/month service for enterprises that allows major brands to store data about customer interactions on Twitter, as well as analytics that show their reach. In other words, it’s about to get much easier and more beneficial for Philly Cream Cheese to keep track of your bagel consumption.

4) So are the jerks. In an absolutely fantastic piece for TechCrunch, Paul Carr tells us the story of Tearah Moore, a soldier based at Fort Hood who tweeted during the horrific attack last week. This being Twitter, Ms. Moore didn’t feel it necessary to censor herself and so her stream is filled with all sorts of expletives directed at the shooter. Fine whatever, be angry at the lunatic who killed your fellow soldiers. What she did feel obliged to do, however, was post a picture of a “guy who got shot in the balls.” As Carr puts it,

“Rather than offering to help the wounded, or getting the hell out of the way of those trying to do their jobs, Moore actually pointed a cell-phone at a wounded soldier, uploaded it… and added a caption. Her behavior had nothing to do with getting the word out; it wasn’t about preventing harm to others, but rather a simple case of… ‘look at me looking at this.’”

My point: Do I even need one after that? No, Twitter isn’t entirely to blame for such gross behavior. But it certainly encourages it by its very essence. And I doubt it’s going to improve. In an age when first-on-the-scene witnesses are valued and utilized by national news organizations, we’re guaranteed to see more detailed and more graphic accounts from citizen journalists.

Wrap it up already! All of this adds up to a trainwreck of a technology looming on the horizon. One abandoned by sane users and left filled with snuff films, porn stars, and marketing come-ons. While writing this, I kept trying to think of an analogous product. One that started out as a pretty good idea but quickly became glutted with crap. The obvious example is email – but it’s far too necessary. Be honest with yourself: if Twitter folded tomorrow, would you miss it? Has it really become a value-add to your workday? Or is it another stream to monitor, another to-do list, another volley of voices to hear?

There is a nugget of value at the center of Twitter that has become lost, even to the company itself. Instead of thinking up new ways for us to pat each other on the back, Twitter needs to hearken back to its days of creativity and spark and give us something useful again. Change our workday, shake up our preconceptions – just do something. Stop waiting around for someone else to do it for you.

“As a Zilliant Advisory Council member, we have been actively involved in the innovation of the product solution to ensure the pricing needs of B2B manufacturers are addressed and delivered,” said Lynn P. Brenton, Senior Director, Hubbell, Inc. “We have been looking forward to the advancements in this release, in particular the best practice playbooks and mobile support, which we anticipate having a positive impact across our sales force.”

Margin Insight v7.0 utilizes Precision Price Segmentation, a scientifically-derived segmentation model, as a basis for analysis to identify actionable margin leaks with a level of speed and accuracy that is not possible with generic business intelligence tools on the market today. As a result, B2B companies gain deep visibility into margin erosion sources such as over-discounting, quoting errors, and cross-selling opportunities to immediately uncover pricing opportunities. Margin Insight is offered both on-premises and as a subscription-based service enabling customers to “pay-as-you-go” so costly investments of hardware and software purchases are eliminated.

UPDATE #2: Here is the SEC filing for the $2 million round.

The location-based social networking space continues to heat up, and two horses lately seem to be separating from the pack — Foursquare and Austin-based Gowalla (both launched at this year’s SXSW in March).

What’s proving to be the difference-maker for these two is the addictive, social gaming feature-set that each incorporates — including but not limited to checking in at various establishments or “Spots”, victorious “mayorships” that signify a high frequency of patronage (and often trigger special deals and coupons), breadcrumb-ish tips and trips that guide the uninitiated through new neighborhoods and foreign lands.

Foursquare undeniably has the early lead, mostly because of the credibility its founders and investors have brought to the table. But until a few weeks ago, Foursquare only supported select cities, which allowed Gowalla to secure a growing user base, especially outside of the US.

Foursquare is taking a mostly top-down approach to their expansion. Although users are highly incentivized to add new locations and associated information, the service is manually preloading local business information, with a bias towards accuracy and completeness.

Gowalla, in contrast, is taking a much more bottom-up approach — venue listings are largely crowdsourced.  This strategy of course requires a critical mass of motivated users in order to succeed at scale, but it comes with the advantage of location-agnosticism, allowing the service colonize new markets more quickly. Users are also much more invested in a service they have helped build from the ground up.

In the last 6 months, Gowalla has fared particularly well abroad, where Foursquare had no foothold…as yet. Rapid expansion and very healthy growth by both parties promise to level the playing field considerably. Foursquare’s recent addition of 15 Eurpopean cities shows that they’ve been paying attention to their Lone Star competitor’s traction. Gowalla likewise has been adding new features like integrated Twitter functionality for both Passports and Spots, in an attempt to replicate and extend Foursquare’s word-of-mouth spread, particularly at the local level.

Gowalla just added support the Android platform via the browser (instead of a native app). This is a scrappy move — functionality and location access are seamlessly ported over, with little UX degradation. A native app is in the works, but with Foursquare already on Android and about to add Blackberry support, time is of the essence. The smaller and mysteriously-funded (angel? VC? self-funded?) Gowalla (a product of Alamofire, the incubator-ish design studio that also makes Packrat) will be hard-pressed to keep the pace — clever technical placeholders, grassroots community support, and user-contributed content are their best bets. We hope to follow-up on the company’s funding status and funding ambitions soon.

In the meantime, Gowalla has certainly turned the head of many a jaded Austinite, in no small part because the company’s approach is in many ways a manifestation of the city it which it is itself located — a design-centric, obsessively agile, particularly scrappy gang of misfits with community love and enough gumption to bet against industry uber-seeers Tim O’Reilly and Fred Wilson.

Gowalla is also perhaps the most accurate measuring stick we have right now as to how well Texas companies can compete with their well-funded breatheren on either coast.

I had a chance to sit down with the founders of Socialware for an interview. I edited our talk down to under 5 minutes. Socialware is an alliance partner of ours, and is  creating a new category of software named “Social Middleware.” We discuss what need they fill in the market, as well as the business cases for enabling and managing the public social media networks in the enterprise.

Way back in the mid-90s, I trekked to Austin in hopes of finding a job. Armed with a newly minted bachelor’s degree and a stunning amount of naiveté, I was sure I’d find paying work to fund a capitol-city lifestyle of music and barbecue. But as my father used to say, my BA in psych and a nickel would get me… I can’t ever remember how that ends. Point is, I never did find that psychology job and eventually found myself living in the Dallas suburbs.

Well, it only took 15 years but I’ve finally landed in Austin. The reasons for the move are many but a key goal was to surround myself with a more vibrant tech network. I’m one of those lucky bastards, you see, who works entirely from home. My company, Guidewire Group, is based in Silicon Valley and thanks to newfangled Internet gizmos, I don’t have to report to an office to do what I love. There is a downside though, in that you spend a lot of time talking to yourself. In order to stay plugged in to a rapidly changing market – not to mention sane – it’s vital to get out and network. Meet people for coffee, socialize at happy hours, co-work in lively spaces – really any activity that gets me away from the screen and talking face to face with innovators only adds to my insight and expertise. And as an analyst, insight and expertise are non-negotiable.

I didn’t, however, want to jump too deeply into the pool of tech by moving back to Silicon Valley. A key mantra of mine and Guidewire Group’s is to always keep the consumer foremost. It’s far too easy to get sucked into the morass of early-adopter groupthink that seems unique to emerging tech. So living in a city that has multiple focuses, not just tech, was important to me. And, you know, there’s the barbecue.

So here I am, Austin, ready to wade knee-deep into the tech scene. What does that mean exactly? It means I want to meet with startups, as many as you can throw at me. I want to educate myself on the local market, write about you on the Guidewire and Austin Startup blogs, share insights and advice with entrepreneurs, and keep an eye out for companies that would benefit from more focused Guidewire expertise.

I want to get involved with the myriad tech organizations that are popping up around town. Thanks to my friend and local badass Josh Dilworth, I’m already hooked into Austin Startup and am on the advisory board for SXSW’s 2010 Accelerator program. What else should I know about? TechRanch, Conjunctured, Door64 – let’s sync up.

I want to check out the local semantic community. As someone who’s followed the semantics sector closely for several years, I’m looking forward to plugging into what I hear is a thriving scene.

In short, I’ve been locked in a suburban Dallas home office for 8 years – get me out of the house, Austin! Tell me about your co-working spaces, your wine-soaked happy hours, and your up-and-coming startups. I’ll cry uncle when I’m overwhelmed – but that’s likely going to take a long time.

Find me on Twitter, the Guidewire Group blog, or email me at carla@guidewiregroup.com.