“With Social Coupons, we now have a way to ensure companies, using our Social Sweepstakes to get new fans and followers, have a way to generate new measurable sales after the sweepstakes is over,” says Harlan Titus Beverly, CEO of Karmaback, Inc for formerly the founder of Bigfoot Networks. Karmaback is a member of the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI).

Organizations using the Karmaback Social Sweepstakes platform can begin a social coupon in seconds through the intuitive setup control panel. The social coupon is then posted to the company’s Facebook fan-page and/or Twitter page, and a link is provided to enable posting the coupon to the company’s website. The viral features of Karmaback’s platform, such as Facebook_fanshare rewards and Twitter share, ensure that the coupon reaches beyond simply core fans to other interested and engaged consumers. Karmaback rewards the community’s participation with Karmaback reward points, which can be redeemed for additional social coupons, chances at social sweepstakes, free product offers, and more.

With the Social Coupon feature, Karmaback measures every click, claimed coupon and viral sharing of the coupon to accurately measure true engagement and number of new Twitter followers and Facebook friends. Companies can also add a feature that requires users to redeem Karmaback rewards points to participate, which helps to protect the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP).

Publicly launched in June 2010, Karmaback’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform allows companies to quickly and easily deploy branded sweepstakes on Facebook, Twitter, and websites to encourage viral growth in Twitter followers and Facebook likes. Utilizing the viral nature of social media sweepstakes and now social coupons, companies can organically grow their social media community while rewarding the community’s engagement.

[Update: The company confirms this is new funding, and was raised from start to finish in 3 months]

Caringo’s CAStor object based software scales from terabytes to petabytes using off-the-shelf, commodity server hardware from providers such as IBM, Dell and HP, and lowers cost of ownership from acquisition through operations. Based on a ‘set it and forget it’ philosophy, CAStor automatically and dynamically balances load and storage matching usage patterns to node specifications. Data integrity, authentication and retention are built into the architecture for compliance and common sense information protection. CAStor, long considered a ‘disruptive’ product, and its companion technologies Content Router, Content File Server and CloudFolder, excel at storing, managing and accessing the vast amount of digital content generated by enterprises.

“During an economically difficult time for many technology companies, when several vendors have scaled back or even gone under completely, this investment round is an endorsement that Caringo is on the right path to success and future growth,” said CEO Mark Goros. “We look forward to a successful expansion phase thanks to this investment.”

“We’ve got around 10,000 users in our beta program today, and the rate at which we’re adding users is increasing to almost 1,500 per week,” CEO Hank Weghorst reported. The company database contains data on millions of companies, but users are adding data on almost 2,500 smaller companies per week.

The data feeds brought into Workstreamer have also been getting interesting, and making your picture of the company you’re interested in more complete. Some recent additions include official company Facebook posts, job posting data from Austin’s own Indeed.com, web traffic data from Compete.com, Jigsaw data, and much more. The daily email from Workstreamer has put my Google Alerts to shame.

Austin technology veterans Hank Weghorst and Suaad Sait have shown through their 10 week beta that they’re agile, responsive to user feedback, and rapid in rolling out new features. This Series A funding from Austin Ventures will give them some additional runway to continue product development, and to begin planning and launching their premium service offering.

Someday Workstreamer is going to be a great acquisition target for a company like Hoovers or Thompson.

The official news release can be found here. The Austin Business  Journal also covered the news.

There must be many ways to maximize price (and therefore margin) if you can understand something about a web visitor. What time of day are they shopping? What other products have they looked at? Which products are already in their shopping cart? How did they arrive at our website? These are some things to think about when pricing products dynamically, but I’m sure Zilliant’s products are not just focused on realtime web.

The company announced that is just completed $13M in financing from existing investors SMH Private Equity Group, ABS Ventures, Austin Ventures, and Trellis Partners. Doing some research shows that their last round in 2007 was Series F, so this must be Series G. Word on the street is that the company is growing and profitable. So why raise money?

We have no inside information, but that never keeps us from speculating! A couple things could be happening. The company could be preparing for an IPO. It’s common for even profitable companies to raise a large round in preparation for an IPO. The cash looks good on the balance sheet, and venture investors want to pile on money at low valuations before the valuation increases by 10x as a public stock. Secondly, the company could be in a more rapid growth mode than their cash flow and previous investment could handle. Or both things could be happening. It’s always good to go public on the back of a solid growth trend, and venture investors from the early days want to close out their 2000 – 2002 era funds by liquidating their holdings and completing their obligations to their limited partners (LP’s).

“Our customers are experiencing significant improvement in their financial performance using our price optimization solutions,” said Greg Peters, CEO, Zilliant. “This financial commitment from our investors will help us capitalize on increased market demand, and accelerate our market lead.”

Which leads me to the subject of this month’s FreshTech post, because if there’s anyone that would know something about “having your back,” it would be my neighbor Dave Thomas. You see, in addition to being a fine example of a veteran software engineering leader, my neighbor Dave Thomas is also one of the top trainers in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (or BJJ) that you will find anywhere.

Through the years, while Dave has developed his credentials in his day job as a software manager at some of the more notable Austin-based, venture-backed software startups – Vignette, VTEL, NovusEdge, and TrustWave (formerly Mirage) where he is now – he has also pursued his passion as a teacher of a branch of martial arts that has experienced explosive growth in the U.S.

This explosive growth has in no small part been due to the popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (or UFC) league, brought to the forefront in the past decade through the entertaining, if testosterone-heavy, Ultimate Fighter reality program on the Spike cable TV channel. In fact, for the semi-curious as well as die-hard fans of UFC, you’ll get your first opportunity to attend an Austin-local event on September 15, with a full program beginning at 8 pm, central, at the Frank Erwin center.

But, while the pay-per-view title fight might be what gets all of the attention, the thing that Dave loves is the preparation and training…the jiu-jitsu teaching. And, naturally, he has found a way to combine his interests in technology and teaching in a couple of ways. One is through an outstanding teaching tool that he developed called the BJJ Technique Catalog, or BJJ Tech.  It’s among the highest trafficked sites in its category, providing training videos, tips and techniques.

But, the other way Dave has found to add a dimension of his software product development and startup experience into the mix is through the development of the web service, 1TeamWeb.  1TeamWeb is a cloud-based application suite for managing any type of team-oriented membership, including sports teams, clubs, groups and paid memberships – literally everything from neighborhood little league programs to the book-lovers-who-ride-Segways club.

Not surprisingly, given his background, Dave built the technology on an open source stack for the infrastructure and incorporated from the very beginning the framework for a robust administrative component that would allow the service to scale as large as needed. It also incorporates nifty features like barcode scan check-in so that team members can carry a little swipe-able card (attached to key ring, whatever…just like the grocery store) to record attendance. And, there is a secure, members-only component that allows team or group members to manage their accounts.

In obvious keeping with the rule of “necessity as the mother of invention,” Dave first felt compelled to build 1TeamWeb because he couldn’t find anything else on the market that met his functionality needs and price range. The competitive software alternatives run in the hundreds and thousands, just to get started, and lack the ability to add-on features that an open-stack product provides.

Fortunately, as a software guy, he was able to do something about it by building his own. But, as the founder and owner of a gym, Dave began to see that the application had broader applicability, well beyond the jiu-jitsu niche.

Granted, 1TeamWeb is a second entrepreneurial priority at best, behind his first love and commitment to teach. And, of course, there are the professional, career responsibilities to his employer and software team he manages, which as well all know requires a focus and commitment well beyond a baseline of 40 hours per week. Throw in an active family life and you quickly find that a venture like 1TeamWeb is a burning-the-midnight-oil-venture, labor of love.

But, for me, this labor of love is just another great example of the FreshTech ventures that pop up in Austin all of the time.  It’s one of the things I love about Austin, where the chances are good that your neighbor, or the guy sitting next to you in the cafe, or the gal sitting in front of you at church is in the process of putting their sweat-equity into a new software or services venture.  Meanwhile, speaking of sweat, if your son or daughter is the type who you think would find the sweat-ethic of “better living through agony” appealing, then check out Austin Jiu-Jitsu.

The unique building was built in 1910 by the Slaughter family, which operated a general store on the premises. It was purchased and renovated in 1999 in preparation for the advertising agency. The statistics say that downtown rental rates average $37 per square foot per  year. That would be almost $700,000 per year in rent on a building that the county says is worth $2.5M. Maybe some real estate folks can chime in on how much actual rates become after negotiations, and how much the county underestimates property values.

Congrats to the team at uShip on their continued growth!

Cam.ly will sell you a web-enabled camera for $129. It will do 24 frames/second at 640 x 480 resolution, and has enough local storage to keep 24 hours of video. If you want to add cloud storage, it’s $19.95/month. With that option your live video gets uploaded to the interwebs via your existing home wireless network. You can then view that live video either through a website, any Flash-enabled mobile browser, or the iPhone app. The camera can run off a small battery, or can plugin to the wall.

All that is pretty clever. The company appears to have just launched, so no doubt they have future plans.

It’s a little bit of a novelty at this point really. It would only be a security app if the video were monitored somehow. If you were monitoring your house and someone broke in, you might not even know it. If it was obvious, you could certainly go back and review the video to see if it provided any clues. But there might be more interesting ways to provide monitoring.

What if you hired a security guard to monitor, let’s say, a dozen video feeds for suspicious activity? You could even offshore that task, to attempt to reduce the cost. But people get bored watching the screen, and get familiar with the view the camera has. This complacency might cause a guard to not see a security issue. But what if the video images were randomized and rotated. You had no idea what property you were watching, and every 3 minutes you were watching a different one? It might make it slightly less boring. You could massively distribute this task, similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

I’m just sort of riffing here, but it would be cool to divide up the Neighborhood Watch duties, or check in on grandma who doesn’t really need a full blown nursing home.

The company is currently doubling staff and office space to accommodate the growth. The executive hires include Tom Chmielewski as Vice President of Sales, and David Costilow joining as Vice President of Customer Services.

Financial infusion from partners and customers, as well as signed deals, is a great sign of the market viability of uControl, proof that its Home Security, Monitoring and Automation (SMA) Platform fills a big need today, and tomorrow, in all things digital home. uControl has recently announced new cable company customers such as Comporium, Massillion and NewWave. And partners like Ember and SMC Networks are very aggressive and public about their work with uControl.

The new Vice Presidents will help accelerate this customer and partner adoption even further. “These hires are critical as we move into a new phase of our company,” said uControl President and CEO Jim Johnson. “From product development to market deployment, David Costilow brings a wealth of experience supporting and delivering solutions to broadband service providers while at 2Wire, Motive and AlterPoint. David is tasked with delivering and supporting our SMA solutions with all customers. Tom Chmielewski will be charged with growing uControl’s broadband service provider customer base. We are especially focused on Tom’s International experience as we look to grow the uControl presence globally.”

When: July 22 from 5:30pm – 8:00pm

Where: The Dogwood, 715 W. Sixth Street

Social: Facebook, Plancast

Every entrant will receive two drink tickets, and this will pretty much be the grand opening of The Dogwood. You can pre-register for $7.50 or pay $10 cash at the door. Remember that this event is at a bar, so 21+ please.

Sponsor

With a new Austin software development office and sales headquarters in New York City, BountyJobs is the global recruiting marketplace where employers engage top headhunters to fill any job, anywhere. BountyJobs has become the largest contingent recruitment marketplace in the world by connecting hiring companies, including a third of the Fortune 500, with 10,000 active headhunters in order to service nearly a billion dollars worth of jobs. For additional information, visit http://www.bountyjobs.com/.

This round of funding had participation from a long list of investors including DFJ Mercury, Steamboat Ventures, ff Asset Management, and individuals Paul Bricault (on the board of William Morris), Paige Craig (investor in Plancast), Tom McInerney (advisor at Mochi Media), Josh Resnick (partner at Jericho Capital) and Mark Suster. That is a lot of names for this amount of money, and DFJ Mercury continues its trend to become the most prolific early stage investor in Austin, Texas.

“Gendai Games provides a paradigm shift in casual game development,” said Blair Garrou, managing director, DFJ Mercury. “Our firm is attracted to the simplicity and elegance of the GameSalad toolset, and is impressed by the company’s traction to date.”

The launch of GameSalad — a powerful, accessible, and amazingly fast game creation toolset that publishes to the iPhone and iPad App Store — has quickly established Gendai Games as a unique and leading gaming company. GameSalad has been downloaded more than 70,000 times and in the nine months since the launch of its iPhone publishing service, GameSalad has powered over 800 titles in the iTunes App Store.  GameSalad has been used to consistently deliver top-100 ranked games such as Asplosion! HD and Doodle Cannon to the mobile marketplace. Many of these games have been taken rapidly to market, such as the iTunes-featured game Stunt Squirrels!, which was created and published in two weeks by only one designer at Fire Maple Games.

“Brands are continually looking to extend their customer experience into games and other forms of interactive media,” said Beau Laskey, managing director of Steamboat Ventures. “We believe Gendai Games provides a compelling option for creative professionals and developers to dramatically accelerate and simplify the development of sophisticated casual games, which helps to reduce total costs and turn-around time for development studios.”