In groups of twos and threes, the constituents lined up to take potshots at the assembled city officials.

“Just about any fifth-grader could do it better,” said Yan Digilov, speaking of the city’s request for proposals process. “We just hope to retire a lot of fax machines.”

In the audience, Houston Mayor Annise Parker gamely sat through the zingers, smiling and taking notes. Digilov and his colleagues were offering solutions along with their barbed commentary as part of Houston’s first citywide Hackathon on Saturday. Nearly 300 professional and amateur software developers gathered over the weekend to help city officials make their online services more efficient, or to create new apps and websites that would better serve residents.

For Houston leaders, the assembled techie brainpower—ready to work for free—is a boon for the city. Like many large American cities, Houston is strapped for resources. Bruce Haupt, the city’s deputy assistant director at the finance department, says his team often devises plans to help make city functions more efficient. But implementing such plans is difficult: “The bottleneck is always at IT,” he said.

Over the weekend, the 26 teams tackled projects that would help commuters know which routes were congested due to construction, provide a comprehensive list of the city’s bike trails, and give residents a better way to seek out and pay for permits for parades.

One group created an online database for up-to-date restaurant inspections named after Marvin Zindler, the famed Houston broadcaster who became known for his on-camera inspections and his signature phrase: “Slime in the ice machine!”

The hackers spent Saturday huddled in conference rooms at the Houston Technology Center. They ranged from those with streaks of gray in their hair to a trio of Taylor High School students joining a hackathon for the first time.“We thought it would be pretty cool to solve a problem, to make things happen,” said Jonathan Zong, a junior, who along with his classmates was trying to create an open-source platform for residents’ feedback. “We would really enjoy seeing an idea come to life.”

Ultimately, the top prize went to a program that simplified the search process related to obtaining required permits for construction, parades, and other activities. That project—as well as an open-source map and data search to find potential and existing green spaces in the city, and a location-aware mobile map to view bike lanes and trails around the city—will be presented to Parker and other city officials in about a month.

Many of the hackers—though, we’re assuming, not the underage students—had begun work the night before following a beer-fueled happy hour. “There are a lot of people who love Houston and want to make it an even better place to live,” said Jeff Reichman, a consultant who runs technology consultancy January Advisors and was one of the hackathon’s organizers. “And it’s really exciting that the city has a new way to engage the community.”

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I’m on the phone with Andy Miller, and I don’t know where to begin.

Ask him about working with Steve Jobs at Apple? About how Leap Motion may or may not be the next Apple? Or what about how that $348 million deal to buy the Sacramento Kings went down?

Miller is driving in his car. It’s Friday, and the mayor of Sacramento, CA, is about to announce that the contentious deal to sell the Kings to a group of California tech investors—including Miller—has been signed. The sale, which the NBA is expected to approve officially this week, means the Kings aren’t moving to Seattle, where a competing bid was made by a group led by hedge fund manager Chris Hansen and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The battle has played out publicly since January.

Miller is known in the Boston area as the guy who co-founded and led Quattro Wireless, a mobile-ad startup bought by Apple for $275 million in early 2010. (He’s also a member of the “m-Qube mafia,” though that list needs updating.) Miller worked on Apple’s mobile advertising business for a couple years, reporting directly to Steve Jobs. Then he went off and joined Highland Capital Partners, a Quattro investor, before taking a job with San Francisco-based Leap Motion (another Highland company) as president and COO last year.

So how did he get involved in one of the biggest sports deals of the year?

“It’s been a long saga, and it’s pretty amazing,” Miller says.

Here’s the back-story. Miller loves sports and grew up wanting to play baseball. When he realized that wasn’t going to be his career, he says, “I set a goal that I wanted to buy a team and run a team.”

When Apple acquired Quattro, Miller moved from Boston to the San Francisco Bay Area and got involved with a professional sports team. He bought into the Modesto Nuts, a Class A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies baseball team, as a co-owner. He says he learned a lot about the business of sports teams and “wanted to get involved with a major league club.”

Meanwhile, like a lot of Boston sports fans who move West, Miller says he “wasn’t sure what team to root for.” The NBA’s Golden State Warriors were trendy, but he says, “I love the underdog.” That would be the Kings, who haven’t been good since their heyday of the early-to-mid 2000s. Plus their fandom was “kind of like Boston,” he says. “It’s gritty, it’s not front-running, it’s so passionate.”

When the Kings ownership situation broke early this year, Miller says he “started talking to people.” He went to Sacramento and talked to the mayor, Kevin Johnson—yes, that Kevin Johnson, the former NBA all-star point guard who played in Phoenix and Cleveland. Miller also talked to Mark Mastrov, the founder of 24 Hour Fitness, who was also interested in buying the Kings and keeping them in Sacramento.

Mastrov was close to Vivek Ranadivé, the founder and CEO of Tibco Software, who leads the new Kings ownership group. (You can read Q&As with Ranadivé by my colleague Wade Roush on pattern recognition and basketball, and real-time information and prediction.) “We were on standby as a little group,” Miller says. Once the Seattle bid went through, Mayor Johnson gave them a call to action.

“One thing led to another,” Miller says, and Ranadivé brought in the Jacobs brothers of Qualcomm fame, and others. All told, the new Kings ownership group includes about eight general partners (counting the Jacobs brothers as one) and more than 20 limited partners, including former Kings star Mitch Richmond.

Their deal is for a 65 percent controlling stake in the Kings, acquired from the Maloof family, with the team valued at $535 million (not counting a proposed new stadium downtown).

“It’s a huge deal for Sacramento,” Miller says. “It’s a one-team town. It’s part of their identity. We want to invest a lot of money in downtown, build out restaurants and hotels, and really rebuild downtown Sacramento.”

With owners from Tibco, Apple, Qualcomm, and Facebook, “we are a tech owner group,” Miller says. “Technology will be forefront in how we interact with fans.” That means everything from using cutting-edge Web and mobile platforms to enhance the fan experience (at home and in the stadium), to extending the Kings and NBA brands to the rest of the world—in particular, India, where Ranadivé originally hails from. (He’s speaking at Xconomy’s Napa Summit on June 3-4, on “Solving World Problems While Going to the Hoop.”)

For his part, Miller will serve as chair of the technology committee for the Kings. And he says, “I definitely want to get my hand in the basketball operation.” So, how much of his time will the Kings take? He laughs, saying his wife has the same question. “I have no idea,” he admits.

But his day job is keeping him plenty busy. Leap Motion is developing a new kind of motion-and-gesture-tracking interface that Miller says could be a “touchscreen killer.” Imagine controlling your desktop or mobile … Next Page »

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We’ve all been there, standing in a superstore, shopping list in hand. We stare at the dozens and dozens of rows of consumer products before us and don’t have a clue where to find anything.

But if you’re in China, Appconomy has something that might help. The company, which is based in both Austin, TX, and Shanghai, unveiled its “Smart Shopping App” in a soft launch in Shanghai earlier this month. Shoppers can now check in through the app on their phones and upload shopping lists that the app would match to maps of the store in order to plot out the most efficient route, among other services.

So far, the app has been rolled out in 26 stores of one of the world’s largest hypermarkets. (Appconomy isn’t making the name public since the official unveiling is still to come in China.)

At stake is a piece of China’s $2.3 trillion retail market, which is already nearly half of the American retail market and is expected to surpass the U.S. by 2020.

How did an Austin startup come to serve shoppers in the most populated city in the world’s largest marketplace?

Appconomy’s founders were each longtime members of Austin’s entrepreneurial community, having previous experience at startups such as Moxie Software, iMark.com, and Powershift Ventures. But executive chairman and co-CEO Steve Papermaster got to know China when he was appointed by former President George W. Bush as a member of what is now known as the China-U.S. Strategic Economic Dialogue, among other organizations dedicated to growing Sino-American trade ties. During his time there, he got to know Jiren Liu, the chairman, founder, and CEO of Neusoft.

The publicly traded Chinese software giant was looking to expand into the mobile market and saw an opportunity in a partnership with Appconomy. The American executives had intended to start its operations in the U.S. when it was founded two years ago, but realized that if they were to join up with Neusoft, the Chinese market would dominate the company’s business.

“We did a total pivot to shift all focus to China,” says Joe Canterbury, Appconomy’s COO and senior vice president of marketing and business development. “It wouldn’t be feasible to build markets in parallel.”

Since then, three of Appconomy’s senior executives moved with their families to China, and six months ago the company launched its first mobile app aimed at retail, called Jinjin Marketplace (see screenshot). The app enables customers to manage mobile-based loyalty programs and receive store coupons and special officers. Customers can also participate in digital gifting programs through SMS. Retailers get a direct, real-time channel to their customers and can harvest data about how people shop and what they buy.

“Merchants are getting to leapfrog from paper punch cards to a much more dynamic loyalty program that allows them to capture so much more data about members,” says Canterbury, who joined Appconomy last year after more than a decade involved with Starbucks’ international operations.

The Jinjin app targets food and beverage outlets and smaller-box retail such as health and beauty stores. Since its launch in December, about 50,000 consumers in Beijing and Shanghai have used Jinjin.

Canterbury says the linchpin for Appconomy’s efforts in China is its relationship with Neusoft.

“Anything that’s Internet-related in China is very regulated,” he says. “To operate any kind of business that is tied to Internet, you have to have a special license, an ICP [Internet Content Provider], and can be hard to get for foreign companies.”

Appconomy was able to piggyback on top of Neusoft’s existing licenses. Without the partnership, Chinese companies like Neusoft would find it difficult to expand globally, Canterbury says.

Neusoft became Appconomy’s largest investor in 2011 and last November, Shanghai-based Qiming Ventures led a $10 million Series A round of equity and debt funding. Appconomy’s other investors include Western Technology Investment and True Ventures. Qiming Ventures Managing Director Gary Rieschel also joined Appconomy’s board of directors.

A majority of Appconomy’s 100 employees are currently based in China, including Neusoft engineers who are dedicated to the startup. The company has plans to expand into tier-one metro markets in China by year’s end and is looking at other Asian countries as well.

“We are extremely focused on being successful [in China], first, because the opportunity is extraordinary to reinvent the physical-digital retail experience,” Canterbury says. “Our most likely path will be hand-in-hand with some of the global brands and partners with whom we are currently doing business or in discussions with in China, first.”

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Just a little over a month to go before our fifth annual flagship conference, XSITE 2013 (Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, & Entrepreneurship) at Babson College. The date is June 19, the theme is “Boston’s Tech Revival,” and the agenda is here.

You can still register for the event (be sure to note our student and startup rates, if they apply).

I’m pleased to tell you about a few more high-profile speakers who will be joining us.

—Jeremy Hitchcock, the CEO and co-founder of Dyn, is speaking on the “Founders’ Stories” breakout panel that also features Diane Hessan of Communispace and Mike Baker of DataXu. I’m sure Jeremy has some pretty good stories about bootstrapping Dyn to profitability with the rise of the Internet.

—Jason Jacobs, the CEO and co-founder of FitnessKeeper (RunKeeper), will also join the “Founders’ Stories” panel. Jason brings a consumer/mobile and healthtech perspective to the discussion. This session is always popular, as it features founders of top companies being brutally honest about the challenges they’ve faced in building their businesses.

—Meredith Flynn-Ripley, the CEO of HeyWire, will speak on a plenary panel moderated by Olin College President Rick Miller. Called “Serial Entrepreneurs Club,” the discussion will touch on the need to innovate across sectors such as mobile tech, big data, social marketing, and sustainability. The other panelists are Ash Ashutosh from Actifio, Roy Rodenstein from TrueLens, and David Berry from Flagship Ventures.

—Bob Frankston, a member of CommonAngels and co-creator of VisiCalc, will talk about the interplay between opportunity and innovation. Let’s just say Bob has some provocative views on existing models of tech and business innovation, and how things can be done very differently for the betterment of society.

—Sarah Hodges, co-founder and managing director of Intelligent.ly, will talk about the state of talent and training in the Boston-area innovation community. Sarah has her finger on the pulse of education for students, young entrepreneurs, and transitioning executives, and she has some important suggestions for how New England companies can develop their talent base.

—Naomi Fried, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, will join the healthtech breakout entitled “Clinics, Corporations, and the Cloud.” The rest of the health IT panel includes Jeremy Delinsky from Athenahealth, Chris Boyce from Virgin HealthMiles, and John Walsh from CareCloud. Naomi will bring a much-needed perspective from the hospital side to the discussion of emerging technologies and business models aimed at improving healthcare.

—Our “startup Xpo” will feature about 10 seed-stage (or earlier) companies that we are hand-picking for their diversity of approaches and sectors. Emceeing the session will be Meredith McPherron, director of the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. Meredith helped change the face of the HBS business plan competition this year, and she brings a fresh perspective to startup strategy in the Boston area (and beyond).

The full agenda is still evolving, and we’ll have more speakers to add, but I wanted our readers to see what’s in store for XSITE on June 19. It should be a fantastic rallying point for people who want to shape the future of Boston-area technology and business. We’re looking forward to seeing you all there.

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A prominent leader in the tech-startup community is moving on.

Walt Doyle, the longtime CEO of Where, which was acquired by PayPal in April 2011, has left the company as of today. Doyle served as general manager of PayPal Media Network after the acquisition. It has been two years since the deal, so Doyle’s departure is not surprising.

I’ve reached out to Doyle and the local PayPal office for comments and an update on the company’s local progress and strategy.

There are two real stories here, and this isn’t one of them—they have yet to be written.

One is what Doyle (pictured below) will do next. He has been very active in the entrepreneurial community, serving on the boards of Celtra, EverTrue, and other companies, and serving as an advisor to other firms like Leaf and Auction Holdings. He is one of the Boston area’s leading experts in mobile technologies and payments, but more broadly he has strong business instincts in areas such as consumer products, media, and publishing.

The other story is about the future of PayPal in Boston. From what I’ve heard, a lot of PayPal’s mobile strategy is being driven locally. With Doyle’s departure, the local office is led by David Chang, the chief operating officer of PayPal Media Network. Chang originally joined Where as vice president of product back in 2009. Like Doyle, he is steeped in Boston’s entrepreneurial ecosystem (his previous experience includes TripAdvisor, m-Qube, and Mobicious) and is involved with a bunch of startups.

Another Where alum, Mok Oh (who served as PayPal’s chief scientist after the acquisition), left PayPal in October and is now working on a consumer-focused photo organizer startup called Moju Labs.

Where (originally called uLocate) was started in 2003 and relaunched in 2007 as a location-based mobile services platform. The company built its software business around local search and discovery, deals, and an advertising network, and became nicely profitable. The price tag for PayPal’s acquisition was about $135 million.

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The search for potential investments has led the team at ff Venture Capital in New York into strange waters.

John Frankel, a partner with the firm, says he decided to back UniKey Technologies after hearing about its founder’s appearance last year on the television show “Shark Tank.” In spite of early misgivings about approaching an entrepreneur who was grilled on the air by the likes of Mark Cuban, Frankel saw an opportunity in UniKey’s smartphone technology for door locks.

One of ff Venture Capital’s limited-partner investors had asked him to take a look at UniKey. However, the company’s TV exploits drew an incredulous response from Frankel: “I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

After closer scrutiny and a seed round, the relationship seems to be working for ff Venture Capital and UniKey. Late last week, UniKey announced that its Kevo electronic lock is coming to market thanks to a partnership with major door lock distributor Kwikset.

Frankel compared the smartphone-accessible Kevo lock to intelligent thermostats from Nest Labs in Palo Alto, CA, which are targeted at the growing smart home market. Though he discovered the company through atypical means, he says UniKey fits his firm’s interests. Many venture capitalists, he says, use location and industry to define the way they invest. “We believe those two parameters are suboptimal for generating returns,” Frankel says.

Instead, his firm looks at a broad mix of ideas and sectors and is not afraid to leave the city to meet startups it may want to back. “Though about 40 percent of our portfolio is in New York, that’s just happenstance,” he says.

That portfolio includes social influence metrics company Klout and crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, both based in San Francisco; photo community 500px in Toronto; and New York’s Moveline, whose platform helps people find moving companies. The flexibility at ff Venture apparently now includes hearing out an entrepreneur who endured a reality television show. “We like to invest in companies like UniKey that can build size and heft and come to dominate,” Frankel says.

UniKey—based in Winter Park, FL—developed the Kevo platform, whose software and hardware lets people use their smartphones or a key fob to control doors equipped with the electronic lock. Rather than a classic metal door key or keycard to gain access, a smartphone or fob puts out a signal that grants access when in close proximity.

Kevo is an opportunity, Frankel says, to put a digital answer to work on an analog problem. Controlling locks through software and near field communication (NFC) can be complex, though. The system has to be smart enough to react only when ordered to and not just whenever a fob or smartphone with the app are near. “You don’t want the door unlocking if you go to check when a stranger is at the door,” he says.

The platform can also be used to record who opens these locks, or to remotely ensure that the doors are locked. Use cases can include knowing what time kids return home from a night out, or giving a friend access to a vacation home. The digital keys can be tailored to grant individuals access only during specified times. That way visiting friends might have keys that only work for one week, Frankel says.

Kwikset will distribute Kevo locks.

Kevo looks like an ordinary lock until someone with a fob or smartphone with the digital key approaches—that is when an LED ring around the lock lights up. The initial version had a more pronounced appearance; Frankel says an effort was made to make it more discreet and consumer-friendly.

That kind of control is, at a smaller scale, comparable to elaborate security systems found in some corporate offices. Kevo is not the same as installing a complex monitoring station, but it does have the potential to add a new way to access secure doors.

Helping an entrepreneur bring such a potentially disruptive product to the consumer market meant dealing with a plethora of “what ifs,” Frankel says. For instance, what if wireless phone signals are weak in that area, or the user does not have a smartphone? Frankel says UniKey CEO and founder Phil Dumas had unique intellectual property to respond to such questions.

While UniKey is not the norm in terms of where ff Venture Capital finds its prospects, Frankel says the company fit the profile of what his firm wants to see. He watches … Next Page »

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There’s some more fuel for the online database arms race today: Boston-based Cloudant has secured a new $12 million investment round.

The money will bankroll Cloudant’s general growth, which includes a new office in San Francisco, complementing Cloudant’s previous footprint in Boston, Seattle, and Bristol, England.

New investors in the new Series B round are Devonshire Investors, Rackspace Hosting, and Toba Capital. Previous investors Avalon Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and Samsung’s venture arm also re-upped for the new round.

Cloudant’s three founders were MIT particle physicists, and have been working on “big data” since way before it was cool—think Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider. The company was part of the summer 2008 group at Y Combinator, when the startup accelerator still had an outpost in Boston.

Cloudant’s service helps Web and mobile developers handle big, complex, ever-changing sets of data without having to constantly manage the software behind it all. That frees up developers to work on their actual applications, rather than tinkering with the guts that keep them running.

Like most things cloud-related, the competition in this field is spread out from big to small. Amazon Web Services has its own database products, and big computing companies are getting into the game, alongside a crop of startups hoping to rise to prominence.

With this latest bet of confidence from investors, it looks like Cloudant will be one of the upstarts continuing to the next round.

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Orbotix got a little boost last week in its quest to make the Sphero robotic ball one of the must-have gadgets of 2013.

CEO Paul Berberian said the $4 million equity financing Orbotix raised last week will be used to ramp up production for the holiday season. After all, there are only 224 shopping days ’til Christmas, and smartphone-controlled self-propelled robotic balls don’t just roll themselves under all those trees.

In all seriousness, the 2013 holiday season looms large in Sphero’s plans. Last fall, Target became a retail carrier, and Orbotix ramped up media outreach efforts. Sphero has garnered a lot of love from gadget-crazed technophiles—and President Barack Obama, whose impromptu test drive while at a campaign stop in Boulder was a guerrilla marketing coup for the company.

But Berberian said last fall the company’s eyes were on breaking through into the mainstream in 2013. That’s what it hopes to achieve with this latest shot of investment cash.

“We’re growing rapidly and are excited about the future and building awesome products that consumers love,” Berberian said in an e-mail.

Orbotix is based in Boulder and is a TechStars Boulder Class of 2010 graduate. The company now has raised about $15 million in total.

According to documents filed with the SEC, Sphero intended to raise $10 million in this round. It closed the round early so it could put the investment dollars to use on production to get ready for the upcoming holiday season, Berberian said.

The Foundry Group led the round. The Boulder venture capital firm is a major investor in Orbotix, and Brad Feld is a director. Orbotix did not disclose other investors in the round, but a total of three investors joined the financing, according to the regulatory filing.

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It’s time to catch up with Dyn. You know, the once-bootstrapped tech dynamo from Manchester, NH, which raised a big venture round last fall and has been making some acquisitions as of late.

Today the Web infrastructure company said it has acquired fellow New Hampshire firm Trendslide, a business-analytics startup focused on mobile apps. No terms were given, but this is Dyn’s fourth acquisition since September.

Dyn says Trendslide co-founder Benjamin Petrin has joined the company as a lead developer in mobile tools. (Trendslide’s other co-founder, Jeffrey Vocell, spoke at last year’s XSITE conference; apparently he is not joining Dyn.)

It sounds like Trendslide’s mobile dashboard technology will be repurposed from a sales and marketing tool to an IT/development tool for Dyn’s core customers. But the common theme is mobility: data and analytics being pushed to business and enterprise users’ smartphones and tablets to help them keep tabs on their companies’ performance.

Dyn’s chief technology officer, Cory von Wallenstein, was an early investor in Trendslide. As is often the case, timing-wise, Dyn chose to buy the startup as it was about to raise more money.

Dyn was started in 2001 and became a leader in managed DNS (Domain Name System) and e-mail delivery services for big customers like Salesforce.com, Twitter, and Zappos. Back in October, the company announced its first venture funding round, $38 million from North Bridge Venture Partners.

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The San Francisco-based NewME Accelerator, a tech startup incubator focused on businesses led by minorities underrepresented in the tech world, is planning a Detroit pop-up accelerator May 29 to May 31. The three-day event is being held in partnership with Google for Entrepreneurs, TechTown, Bizdom, the Mobile Technology Association of Michigan, and Wayne State University.

Angela Benton, founder and CEO of NewME, says the group selected Detroit as the location for its third national pop-up accelerator because of the enthusiasm for entrepreneurship in the city. “There’s a lot of activity going on in Detroit,” Benton notes. “It was definitely on our radar.”

NewME is short for New Media Entrepreneurship, and it launched in Silicon Valley in 2011. During its inaugural season, CNN cameras were on hand to document NewME as part of it’s award-winning “InAmerica” series. Hajj Flemings, a Detroit entrepreneur and founder of Gokit and Brand Camp University, was featured on the show. Rippld, a Detroit startup that Xconomy profiled last year, is also a NewME portfolio company.

NewME’s mission is to mentor startups, connect founders to early-stage capital, and expose young talents to the larger scene in the Valley. Now, through this partnership with Google for Entrepreneurs, NewME is taking that experience on the road and bringing a slice of Silicon Valley to cities like Detroit. Benton says the NewME network will be coming to town to offer coaching and participate in the demo day event that culminates the three-day pop-up. “Our real purpose is to make sure connections are being made,” she adds. “Investment may follow, but we’re just excited to come to Detroit and see what people are working on.”

The NewME Detroit pop-up accelerator is $99 per participant. Interested entrepreneurs can register here.

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The Pleasant Ridge, MI-based digital marketing and engagement company ePrize announced this week that it has acquired Promotions.com. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the company did say it will retain 13 Promotions.com employees and fold them into its New York and Chicago offices.

Promotions.com offered similar services as ePrize: digital promotions across a number of social media platforms. Jen Grey, ePrize’s vice president of marketing, says ePrize often bumped up against Promotions.com in the marketplace. “They do similar work in the contest space,” she explains. “We consider them a competitor, but they also have a great wealth of knowledge, a great team, and great clients.”

This marks the company’s fifth acquisition in two years and the third one in 2013 alone. Grey says that although ePrize is always looking at companies to see if they might fit as potential acquisitions, there are currently no additional acquisitions planned for this year. She says the company is aggressively snapping up competitors like Promotions.com as ePrize strives to offer “holistic engagement” with a special focus on mobile. The other two companies acquired by ePrize this year were Mozes and Bulbstorm, both of which were primarily innovating in the mobile sector.

ePrize was founded 14 years ago by Josh Linkner (an Xconomist). What started as an online sweepstakes startup has grown into the largest interactive promotions agency in the world, providing digital marketing services for 74 of the top 100 brands with more than 400 employees in Pleasant Ridge, New York, Chicago, Nashville, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Seattle. ePrize itself was acquired last summer by Catterton Partners. The terms of that deal were also undisclosed, though at the time, ePrize CEO Matt Wise told Xconomy that the company’s local backers, including Quicken Loans‘ Dan Gilbert, scored a healthy return on their investments.

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A big Taiwanese tech company you probably haven’t heard of is starting to make noise in the U.S. Based out of several hubs around the country, it is positioning itself to gain a foothold in the local market for chips used in smartphones, tablets, and wireless networks.

In recent years, Hsinchu, Taiwan-based MediaTek has opened offices in Woburn, MA; Austin, TX; San Jose, CA; and Irvine, CA. Its U.S. presence is still pretty small—just under 250 employees nationwide—but it’s growing fast. And the firm’s global resources and strategy make it one to watch if you want to know the future of mobile hardware.

MediaTek (TSE: 2454.TW) was spun out of United Microelectronics Corporation back in 1997. It originally specialized in home and consumer tech—designing computer chips for things like DVD players, TV systems, and optical storage drives. The company went public on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 2001 and got into the mobile-handset business in the mid-2000s. Now wireless chips make up 60 to 70 percent of its overall business.

The multibillion-dollar firm is Asia’s largest chip designer, and much of its growth is from China’s booming smartphone market. Earlier this week, MediaTek said its 2013 first-quarter profit ($125 million) was up 51 percent over the same period last year. The 7,000-person company is expected to grow to about 10,000 strong with its $3.8 billion acquisition of MStar Semiconductor (also based in Hsinchu, Taiwan), which is supposed to close this summer.

Most of MediaTek’s mobile business to date has been in feature phones and low-end smartphones. But that could change quickly as more consumers (both in the U.S. and worldwide) buy higher-end phones, and as the price of devices continues to come down. Indeed, recent developments could put MediaTek on a collision course with Qualcomm and other chip giants like Intel, Broadcom, and Nvidia, in the increasingly competitive mobile market.

That’s not happening right away, at least not in North America. But if you know much about Clay Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” model—start at the low end, move up-market, and eventually take share from the big guys—this has all the hallmarks. What’s interesting is it’s a big company pulling the strings, not a startup.

But MediaTek’s U.S. offices are startup-like in scale. Its Boston-area branch has 80-plus people; many of them came over from MediaTek’s $350 million acquisition of Analog Devices’ cellular chip business in 2007. The Texas office is just north of 40 people, working on radio-frequency transceivers and CPU core optimization (more on that below). Silicon Valley has the biggest presence, with over 100 employees. And the Orange County branch is small, with about 10 people.

I recently met with Boston-area executives Finbarr Moynihan and Hong Fan (pictured above), who head up MediaTek’s international sales and marketing and global product marketing, respectively. They were pretty open about their company’s ambitions in the U.S.—and how much it needs to do to get there.

Moynihan and Fan were previously with Analog Devices, doing product marketing. Fan is a native of China, and Moynihan lived in Taiwan for two years as part of the MediaTek-Analog integration process.

As Moynihan explains, MediaTek is “historically very strong in China and emerging markets… But where we need to be, what we need to grow into, is an international global player, shipping into North America with higher-tier customers.”

That means becoming a leading supplier of … Next Page »

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What do you get when you add Silicon Valley mojo to Korean soju (rice liquor)?

You get Moju Labs, the latest startup from Boston-bred entrepreneur Mok Oh. The former chief scientist of PayPal and current entrepreneur-in-residence at North Bridge Venture Partners has been working on a “consumer big data” startup on the West Coast for a few months now, and he’s finally ready to name it.

Oh, who has an office at North Bridge’s facility in Palo Alto, CA, just told me a little more about Moju Labs—but not a lot. The basic idea is to create a kind of smart photo album. Oh calls it “smart ways to explore and rediscover your precious memories.”

If you’re like a lot of people these days, you take plenty of pictures with your smartphone or digital camera. You share some of them, using Facebook, Instagram, or e-mail, but most of them just sit there doing nothing, Oh says. What if you could regularly access and share the ones that are most important to you and your inner circle, in a simple and smart way?

No, he says, this isn’t yet another photo-sharing app. For starters, Oh (pictured) is going after a fairly mature demographic—families with kids, say, and adults who want to connect with long-lost relatives. “It’s not, ‘I just checked in here, I’m having a beer, come join me,’” he says. “It’s something to last forever. We’re focusing on stories where the value will increase over time.”

He’s trying to make the system proactive, too: “How do we relevantly and smartly push these stories to you?” Oh asks. You might imagine that photos of a picnic you had with another couple and their kids might pop up on your iPad a few days later when you’re e-mailing them—and they should be easy to share in that case. Or there might be a channel on grandparents’ Internet-connected TV that shows recent pictures of their grandkids.

One key is the kinds of data and algorithms that would be used. When you take a picture with your smartphone, it knows the time, location, and a fair bit of context around the picture. Combine that with facial-recognition software—tuned to a small set of close friends and family—and you can start to imagine building a pretty smart system. (This does sound a bit like ThisLife, a photo organizing and sharing startup that was acquired by Shutterfly in January. And also Flock, an app from Bump Technologies. But I’m sure there are some differences.)

Privacy is a big issue, of course. Oh says his company is taking a consumer-centric view of that. Any photo sharing will be done with explicit permission, for example. And philosophically, he says, the “sharing is not about connecting people to people, but depending on the stories, it’s connecting who the relevant characters are—who might also want to consume them.”

He adds, “Earning trust is important. This isn’t something that gets blasted everywhere. It’s not going into some timeline or feed somewhere.” So it sounds much closer to a private network than Facebook.

Speaking of which, couldn’t the social-networking giant do something like this itself, and target users’ private data as a business? “It’s a big ship,” Oh says. “It’ll have trouble turning. You need a smaller ship to navigate these waters well.”

As for other companies to take lessons from in big data and user interfaces, Oh mentions Dropbox (for data capture and syncing), Evernote (extracting value from private data), and Instagram (consumer virality).

Moju Labs currently has three people, plus advisor Frédo Durand, a computer science professor at MIT (who has worked a lot with Oh before). Collectively, they have experience in machine learning, data mining, image processing, user interfaces, and data science/analytics.

The company is building early prototype products and getting feedback. For now, Oh says, he’s busy getting ready to raise a venture round (presumably North Bridge will be involved in that if it wants to). And he’s trying to build a team that has the right culture and tech DNA.

“I think we have a much better chance of success here than anyone else in the world,” he says.

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[Updated with comments from CEO Ofer Shapiro. See below] Imagine being a doctor with patients scattered across the rural reaches of Alaska. Booking face-to-face visits might not be that easy—unless you also happen to be a bush pilot—but having access to videoconferencing technology can be away to conduct visual exams regardless of the distance.

Vidyo, in Hackensack, NJ, says it is now supplying technology for real-time video communication and consultations between health care providers and patients across Alaska. The company is providing its platform under a new partnership with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) and the Alaska Federal Health Care Access Network (AFHCAN).

Ashish Gupta, chief marketing officer with Vidyo, says previously the Alaska network did not have real-time, video communications between patients and care providers. The technology now gives practitioners access to information about the patients, and lets them use electronic stethoscopes and other devices remotely during the sessions. “It allows you to see what is going on with the patient right then and there,” he says.

ANTHC is managed by Alaska’s native tribal government and regional organizations, Gupta says, and is adding some 500 more caregivers annually. Vidyo—whose backers include Rho Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Sevin Rosen Funds—also has offices in Redwood Shores, CA; Andover, MA; and abroad.

With Vidyo’s technology, physicians, specialists, nurses, and other practitioners can host visual consultation sessions with patients who visit video conferencing stations or connect through laptops, tablets, and other mobile devices equipped with cameras. “They needed technology that would be able to scale up and down for real-time, visual collaboration dependent on the devices and the network being used,” Gupta says.

[The next 5 paragraphs were added after initial publication---Eds.]

Vidyo CEO and co-founder Ofer Shapiro says this is just the latest partnership his company has landed in the healthcare market. Vidyo also provides its services to the enterprise sector, he says, and competes with rivals such as Polycom and Sysco. Shapiro says the partnership with ANTHC shows how his technology can break into new territory. “If you can do it in the outskirts of Alaska, you can do it in Iowa, Texas, Norway, Germany, Poland, and so on,” he says.

Vidyo’s platform has also been used by Arizona State University, Shapiro says, to connect with researchers in Panama. The CERN nuclear research facility in Switzerland also uses Vidyo to host video conferences for large audiences, he says.

Videoconferencing, Shapiro says, can be used by medical practitioners who are trying to provide more service, including increasing follow-up calls with patients, even if their resources are limited. “You can reduce the rate of rehospitalization,” he says.

Part of his strategy is to offer his services at lower rates than rivals, making Vidyo’s platform accessible to customers on tight budgets. “It has to be available for about the same price as voice communication, which is something we’ve accomplished,” he says.

The competition, Shapiro says, is focused on making money by selling expensive telepresence equipment to be installed in videoconferencing rooms. “The reality is when you get to a certain price point, a lot of those solutions do not scale,” he says. Vidyo’s platform, he says, offers a lower-cost option.

Some 2,500 health care providers across Alaska try to serve municipalities and villages spread across more than 660,000 square miles of terrain, Gupta says. “They live in a very diverse geographical environment,” he says. In some cases, the vast landscape separates practitioners from patients by 75 to 100 miles. “Often times the medical professional has to take a snowmobile and drive out to take care of the patient or sometimes airlift that patient,” he says.

These virtual visits with medical professionals, he says, can save patients the wear and tear of riding across the frontier to be seen. Through Vidyo’s technology, Gupta says, practitioners can even use remote cameras to check for ear infections. “They can do this from their home or a facility that might connect with specialists in a different part of the state or the world,” he says.

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We’re in the middle of a frenzied period in major American sports: the NBA playoffs, the NHL playoffs, and regular-season Major League Baseball all competing for attention, along with the draft and offseason reshuffling in the NFL.

All in all, not a bad time to reload with more investment cash if you’re a fantasy-sports startup.

That’s the case today for Boston-based DraftKings, a two-year-old startup that provides daily fantasy sports contests for rabid fans, both online and through mobile apps. The $7 million Series A investment comes from Atlas Venture, the Boston-area venture capital firm that bankrolled DraftKings’ previous $1.4 million seed round (and just raised a new $265 million fund).

DraftKings has a somewhat different take on the classic form of fantasy sports, in which fans assemble a mythical roster of individual players and rack up points based on those individual competitors’ statistics, which translate into “scores” in head-to-head competitions with their friends.

The DraftKings spin on things makes for a faster game—its contests are daily, as opposed to long-term commitments that can stretch over a whole season. And in the Web version, there’s actual money at stake: DraftKings says it will award more than $20 million just during the current fantasy baseball season.

Sounds like betting, right? Yep, but it’s actually legal under federal law to win money on fantasy sports contests, because choosing which players to pick is considered a skill rather than a game of chance, like playing against the house in a sports book. DraftKings does, however, have to block players in certain states that have more restrictive gambling laws.

For mobile apps, DraftKings has users play for virtual currency—which they can buy more of with real money, like in many freemium mobile games.

DraftKings says it now has about 1 million users between its Web and mobile platforms—not enormous numbers, but it’s just a year into the game. In a press release, CEO Jason Robins says the startup is seeing hopeful signs in users who stay with DraftKings for more than one sport season.

“We were amazed to see how popular fantasy basketball became with our fantasy football customers, and we are now seeing similar conversion from fantasy basketball to fantasy baseball,” Robins says.

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Consumer Reports, the nation’s most respected source of product reviews and buying advice, does not mince words about extended warranties. It calls them a bad idea and money down the drain. The website Consumerist agrees, calling extended warranties useless and usually a bad deal.

So why on earth would you consider shelling out an extra $50 to $150 for a couple of extra years of warranty coverage on your new appliance, computer, or mobile gadget?

Well, dear reader, try to suspend your cynicism for a moment while I tell you about a 200-employee company in San Francisco called SquareTrade, which works with bricks-and-mortar chains like Costco and TigerDirect and e-retailers like Amazon, eBay, and Buy.com to offer protection plans for laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other electronics.

Steve Abernethy, the company’s energetic CEO, says he’s well aware of the extended-warranty industry’s dreadful reputation. But he thinks SquareTrade has a shot at salvaging it, mainly by offering broader coverage and better service at lower prices.

He also has some interesting thoughts about the physical and financial risks we’re taking as we become ever more inseparable from our smartphones and tablets. Sure, the chances that your new Frigidaire will conk out within the warranty period may be tiny. But what about that $700 chunk of glass and integrated circuits that you’re carrying in your pocket? How sure are you that you can go three years without accidentally sitting on it or dropping it in the toilet? (It happens more often than you might think.)

I’m not saying SquareTrade has won me over, and I haven’t bought extended warranties for any of my own devices. But I’ll say this: I went into a recent interview with Abernethy as a hardened warranty skeptic. I came out thinking that the industry might be changing, and that buying an extended warranty might be a good idea for some people.

Steve Abernethy, co-founder and CEO of SquareTrade

To start, Abernethy knows why people are suspicious about extended-warranty offers. He acknowledges that it’s been “a business done poorly, with a fundamentally flawed business model.”

You can file most of the historic problems with extended warranties under lack-of-transparency. To start, it’s hard to make an informed decision about buying a warranty, since they’re usually pitched at the point of sale, when customers tend to be hurried, and it’s difficult to inspect the fine print or research alternatives. It’s also hard to predict whether your new $200 microwave oven will go kaput in the next two years, and therefore, whether a $50 two-year extended warranty pencils out.

On top of that, it’s often tricky to figure out who’s actually behind a warranty offer. Companies like Apple and Dell have their own protection plans. But the warranties that many big-box stores sell under their own brand names actually come from third-party providers; the stores essentially buy the plans wholesale and mark up the price.

This outside provider is the company you’ll have to talk to if you ever need to get an item repaired or replaced. In the gadget sector, the largest warranty provider is Nashville, TN-based Asurion, which might just be the biggest company nobody has ever heard of. It works with Walmart, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, among others. In 2010, it reported $3.8 billion in revenue.

Then there’s the claims experience. If your laptop, TV, or tablet shorts out, it’s often difficult to get definitive word about whether or when it will get fixed or replaced. That’s assuming you were even able to dig up your receipt and your warranty papers before you called in your claim. (Abernethy says other warranty providers count on a certain level of “breakage,” i.e., customers who are entitled to file claims but forget they even bought a warranty, or don’t have the documents to prove it.)

These kinds of flaws and frustrations are exactly what attracted SquareTrade to the warranty business in the first place, says Abernethy. He co-founded the company in 1999 with fellow Harvard Business School alum Ahmed Khaishgi.

Up to 2006, the company was in a completely different field: mediation and dispute resolution for buyers and sellers on eBay. When it turned out that there wasn’t much demand for that service outside the auction site, Abernethy and his team started looking for other sectors where … Next Page »

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Do mobile-device owners really want to share photos, videos, and other media with their friends in real time? Would you have more fun browsing your photo album or watching the latest viral video on YouTube if you knew your friends were looking at the same stuff on their phones at the same time?

Every so often, a company comes along arguing that the answer to these questions is yes. Their premise is that our existing ways of connecting—phone calls, FaceTime and Skype calls, text-messaging, e-mail, Facebook, and all the rest—lack a certain richness, and that given the right software, smartphone owners would jump at the chance to consume media together.

The thing is, the idea has never caught on, even though researchers have been playing with the concept for the better part of a decade. One company I’ve followed, called Thrutu, came out with a pretty cool app for Android, iOS, and BlackBerry phones that lets people share photos during a phone call back in 2011. It never really took off. Samsung has put a function called Group Play into its Galaxy phones that lets users share music, photos, and games if they’re within Wi-Fi range of each other, but as CNET has observed, few consumers even know the feature exists.

Balaji Krishnan thinks there’s an easy explanation for the lack of interest so far: it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. “The reason we haven’t seen people wanting this product is because they haven’t seen products like this,” he says. “Once they start experiencing it, they will understand how easy it is to consume media together.”

Krishnan is the creator of DabKick, an app for iPhones that’s got voice-over-Internet technology under the hood but skips the phone call and goes straight to the media sharing. If you’ve got DabKick on your phone, you can invite any other smartphone owner to join a communication session in real time and see photos you’ve selected from your camera roll or watch the same YouTube video you’re watching.

Selecting songs to share on DabKick's new music home screen.

They can also chat with you via text messages or walkie-talkie-style voice messages. In an update released today, Krishnan added yet another feature: music sharing, which lets friends listen simultaneously to free music from YouTube or the playlists on their phones. If the invited party doesn’t have the DabKick app, that’s okay—the whole thing works via a mobile Web browser as well.

Krishnan says the original idea behind DabKick was to help friends and family members recreate in-person social experiences such as flipping through a photo album or watching TV together.

“When you meet with a friend in person, you walk into their living room and you watch TV together and talk together,” says Krishnan. “When you are away from each other, you might try to to get a similar experience by sending a YouTube link via chat, and your friend might send back an LOL. You’re trying to have the same experience you had in person, but via multiple protocols—which is a broken experience, in our mind.”

In DabKick, the experience is more unified. Users can initiate a session, share photos and video, and talk smack through text and voice messages, all without leaving the app.

Krishnan says that makes the experience more casual than firing up three or four separate applications to do the same things—and more temporary, since all of the shared photos and other media disappear from the recipient’s phone when the session ends.

“There’s a new category evolving with things like Snapchat—temporary sharing, where you share something and then it’s gone,” Krishnan says. That’s a better fit with the way people interact in person, he says. And it also lends itself to virtual dating—one of the use cases Krishnan sees for DabKick as well. (The main users of the app so far are the under-25 crowd, he says.)

Krishnan is a veteran Silicon Valley software engineer who’s done database and operating-system development work at Sun, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard. His previous startup, Snapstick, offered screen-sharing software that let mobile device owners “snap” videos and other media from their phones to their big-screen TVs. DabKick is a two-man startup based in Redwood City, CA, with development help from engineers in India; it’s been operating so far on a seed investment from Gree, the Japan-based mobile social network and mobile game maker.

The app is free for now, but if it catches on, Krishnan believes the startup will have the opportunity to charge for virtual goods such as stickers that users can exchange during chats, or to create a “freemium” price structure where users need to pay a subscription fee after sharing a set number of free videos.

Down the line, Krishnan hopes to open up Dabkick’s technology to other companies. “Imagine if Shutterfly put DabKick inside their app, so that users could now share Shutterfly photos inside their app and decide what to print,” he says. “Then it would be a Twilio model, where we could charge by usage.” (Twilio is a San Francisco startup that provides voice infrastructure services to other Internet companies.)

It’s clear that people love to share media; that’s why so much of the traffic on social media services like Twitter and Facebook consists of links to videos and photos. The big question is whether they really want to do it synchronously. DabKick is betting that once people see its app in action, they’ll understand what they’ve been missing all these years. Says Krishnan: “People have seen bits and pieces of this in other products, but when you bring them together it creates a whole different experience.”

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Trumpeting the upcoming debut of the Optimus G Pro phablet, last night LG Electronics brought the press, analysts, and other guests to the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York to check out the device. With dusky lighting and indie rock band Atlas Genius taking the stage part way through the night, the company tried put some dazzle on its latest device and strip some of the gloss off of competitor Samsung.

The AT&T-exclusive G Pro, to be released in about a week, is the big brother to the Optimus G smartphone, which was released last November, with a larger display, an amped up processer, and some software upgrades. LG Electronics, which has its U.S. headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, is not-so-subtly pitting the G Pro against Samsung’s Galaxy Note II, which went on the market last fall.

When holding these rival Android devices at the same time, their physical differences are rather nuanced: the G Pro feels slimmer than the slightly meatier (by 0.2 ounces) Note II. The G Pro is smaller by a few fractions of an inch yet packs in a 5.5-inch screen, about the same size as the Note II’s display. The G Pro, however, has a 1920×1080 resolution display compared with the Note II’s 1280×720 resolution screen. Unfortunately the Note II at LG’s event was not powered up last night to compare their visual aesthetics side-by-side. (Hmmm.)

Inside the G Pro is a 1.7 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon Quad-Core 600 Processor, 2Gb of RAM, 32 GB of internal memory, and a memory slot for up to 64GB of extra storage. It runs the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, called Jelly Bean (4.1.2). More of the device’s specs can be found here. For those interested in comparing stats, the Note II’s details are here. The short take is that the G Pro’s processor has more cylinders under the hood. But it will require a real shakedown of both devices to tell which performs various tasks more smoothly.

In terms of apps for productivity, the G Pro comes equipped with Polaris Office 4 for writing and editing spreadsheets, documents, and presentations. That gives it some out-of-the-box potential use for the business world. The QSlide 2.0 multitasking function lets users run multiple apps, from a set list, simultaneously on the home screen. You can resize and change the transparency of each app, letting these windows overlay while they are in use. There is also feature called VuTalk that lets users take and share notes during voice calls—so long as they use compatible devices.

The G Pro includes some features that Samsung—which has its North American headquarters in Ridgefield Park, NJ—has already ballyhooed, such as sharing info between devices through near field communication. G Pro users can also shoot video from the front-facing 2.1-megapixel and the 13–megapixel rear cameras simultaneously, letting them record their own reactions to what they are watching. Sharing media over Wi-Fi with televisions is rather standard with the latest generation of mobile gadgets; the G Pro also has a remote tuner that lets the phablet manipulate multiple nearby devices from a plethora of manufacturers (and apparently can be used to hijack control of TVs in sports bars—but this is not advised).

Preorders for the G Pro, priced at $199 with a two-year contract, start this Friday with the scheduled release set for May 10. That said, it is hard to ignore the fact that Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone arrived recently with much fanfare on the market. From phablets to classic smartphones, competition to be the mobile device in consumers’ hands continues to intensify in all shapes and sizes.

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You’re hungry, and you’re in a hurry. Don’t you wish you could skip the long line ahead of you? Wouldn’t it be great if the restaurant knew what you wanted and had it waiting for you?

Splick-it, a company that develops mobile and online ordering and payment systems for restaurant chains, thinks that it can work with restaurants to grant those wishes.

On Tuesday, Splick-it announced it will develop the online and mobile ordering system for Jersey Mike’s, a fast-casual restaurant chain selling subs and sandwiches in more than 750 locations that are now open or are soon to open. The online ordering site already is live for most locations, and the Jersey Mike’s apps will be available soon through the App Store and Google Play.

Splick-it has developed apps for about 25 chains, which each get a standalone app that features its branding. The apps allow customers to look at menus and place orders from their phones. They also take care of paying the restaurant, which means users bypass the line at the register and go straight to pick-up. The order is ready in about 15 to 20 minutes, so Splick-it apps work best if used before reaching the restaurant.

The contract with Jersey Mike’s is the latest recruitment success for Splick-It, which is based in Boulder, CO. Splick-it’s clients have about 1,300 locations, but Splick-it co-founder and chairman Rob Taylor expects that number will reach 2,000 or more this year as it adds clients.

“The demand for this type of ordering is only getting higher. We’ve seen it grow exponentially over the past 18 months,” Taylor said.

Taylor and Splick-it marketing manager Linds Panther pointed to industry analysis that estimates 84 percent of the 600,000 or so restaurants in the U.S. do not offer mobile orders. Analysts expect a large percentage of those companies will settle on a strategy and launch online ordering in the next six to 18 months.

“We all see this market as being very much in its infancy. There are a significant number of restaurants that have yet to make a decision about their online and mobile strategy,” Panther said. “It’s really timed well for companies in our space that offer turnkey solutions.”

Customers want easy-to-use apps that cut their wait times considerably, and Taylor believes that speed of service is the most important factor that drives repeat business. That’s why Splick-it focuses on user design and making sure orders get processed quickly.

“Once a customer finds out how easy it is to order from their phones, when they’re in a hurry, they’ll go back to that,” Taylor said.

Restaurants want to get customers in and out quickly, but it isn’t their only need. They want those customers coming back, they want them to pay more, and they want to know what they’re ordering. Splick-it believes it delivers all that.

Splick-it’s internal data show its apps have been able to increase the numbers of repeat customers. App users also have been placing larger orders, paying about 30 percent more than walk-up customers.

“Those two components, if you’re a restaurant brand, you’re pretty keen on,” Taylor said.

Splick-it also offers data about customer behavior and the potential to run loyalty and rewards campaigns. So far, Splick-it’s client base is made up primarily of independent regional chains. The most prominent clients are Pita Pit and Moe’s Southwest Grill.

Taylor said chains with between 25 and 1,000 locations seem to be the ideal size for Splick-it. Still, Splick-it wouldn’t turn down a major national chain and have talked with or worked on pilot projects for a few, although Taylor expects many will develop their own apps.

Splick-it is not the only company trying to cash in on impatient customers by offering online or mobile ordering. Competitors include GrubHub, Snapfinger, ChowNow, and Crunchbutton, which Xconomy recently covered.

In Taylor’s view, those companies are not direct competitors. They place more emphasis on being a portal that provides options to many different restaurants, or they emphasize website ordering over mobile.

Taylor believes Splick-it’s strategy of developing freestanding apps for each brand is the winning strategy. While Splick-it does have an app that’s a “one-stop-shop” app, it’s not its emphasis.

Since its founding in 2008, Splick-it has been bootstrapped or relied on angel investors. That’s about to change, as the company is reviewing term sheets with institutional investors. It expects to raise about $3 million, which will carry it through the critical next 18 months, Taylor said. It also has a handshake agreement with a new CEO.

Splick-it is bringing in revenue and could reach the breakeven point next year, although accelerating its growth strategy could mean the company remains in the red, Taylor said.

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Texas has always had a larger-than-life reputation.

Big business, big politics—even big hair—the state’s outsized persona often takes center stage in our national story. No matter where I’ve traveled, be it in a village in Nepal or the glitzy hotels of Hong Kong, when I say “Texas,” I receive a smile and a flash of recognition. Texas is everywhere.

But our story goes beyond the stereotypes. Texas is home to three of the biggest cities in America, and it continues to attract migrants from around the world and around the nation. (This started back with Davy Crockett: “You all may go to hell. And I will go to Texas.”)

Why? Texas is a good place to work, live, and dream. A robust entrepreneurial community works alongside some of the world’s top corporations, medical facilities, and research firms. What happens here today gives us as Americans a glimpse into our nation’s future. That’s not to say there aren’t real challenges in healthcare, education, and using technology to improve standards of living. But those challenges are opportunities that create the perfect crucible for innovation. With the launch of Xconomy Texas, we will present to you a portrait of the Lone Star State not often reflected in the press.

Texas is home to innovators like H. Ross Perot and Jack Kilby, Michael Dell and Mark Cuban. You’ll find the next generation of these men (and there are women, too) in places like the Texas Medical Center and energy startups in Houston, at IT companies scattered across the Dallas suburbs, and at software and media organizations in loft offices in downtown Austin.

On a personal note, Xconomy Texas brings me back to my hometown of Houston. When I left more than 20 years ago, Houston was mired in a deep downturn, plagued by an oil bust and a real estate crash. In the years since, I’ve studied and worked in both Austin—as Silicon Valley transplants transformed a hippie college town during the ’90s tech boom—and Dallas, as it evolved beyond being J.R. Ewing’s hometown and a place where that football team plays.

From late 2008 until last month, I lived and worked in the United Arab Emirates, where regular visits by Texas executives and entrepreneurs reminded me constantly of the state’s position as a major node of the global economy.

So, welcome to Xconomy Texas. And please join the conversation. Whether you’re an old Texas hand or someone new, let us know what we should be writing about. As Lyle Lovett says, “You’re not from Texas. But Texas wants you anyway.”

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