The Landing Pad Program supports early stage technology companies by leveraging ATI’s network and community insight to accelerate that company’s acculturation into the Austin business ecosystem. ihiji founders, Stuart Rench, President; Michael Maniscalco, Vice President of Technology; and, David Rench, Vice President of Finance, started a residential design-build home automation company with the idea that home electronic systems could be simplified using better engineering and application of technology. In 2010, after building a successful integration firm in West Palm Beach, Florida, they sold their company to focus solely on ihiji invision, a cutting-edge network management solution, and moved to Austin to be part of ATI. In 2011, the company hired Seth Rubenstein as Director of Sales and Business Development. In 2012, ihiji completed development of a more scalable, flexible and secure architecture and decided to apply the platform into other bigger markets, such as IT markets focused on IT Value Added Resellers (VAR) and corporate IT departments who manage a large number of branch locations. Ready to go on the fundraising circuit, ihiji decided the timing was right to move into full membership at ATI to take advantage of its additional benefits, such as deeper engagement with ATI directors and further access to ATI’s established network of peers, mentors, businesses, and investors.

“Not only is Texas a great state for businesses, but Austin is on the rise, has a wonderful tech community and is also very livable. The structure of ATI was a good fit for our company and the Landing Pad Program helped us easily relocate from out of state and not miss a beat,” said Stuart Rench, President of ihiji; adding that “ATI staff has been great. They’re there when you need them for ideas, thoughts, reviews and introductions. We’re also able to take advantage of multiple directors depending on our challenge, which is nice because they each have their own perspectives and areas of expertise.”

ihiji’s new NMaaS platform is based on the same cloud-based architecture as its award-winning remote monitoring and support solution, ihiji invision, and lowers its clients’ capital and operating expenditures, increases productivity, and improves profit margins by minimizing equipment and network outages.

“ihiji is a classic example of a services business successfully morphing into a scalable product company providing enterprise software solutions. ihiji fits perfectly into the sweet spot of Austin’s tech ecosystem and ATI’s IT portfolio. In working with the ihiji team as they transitioned from the Landing Pad Program to a full member company, the team continually impresses with their vision and discipline as they have shifted gears and moved into the next phase of their growth strategy,” said Kyle Cox, ATI IT/Wireless Director.

ihiji’s NMaaS platform is in private beta, and the company is seeking participants from the Small to Medium Businesses (SMB) and/or IT Value Added Resellers (VAR) channels. To learn visit http://itbeta.ihiji.com/, email itbeta@ihiji.com, or call 512.538.0520 ext. 2003.

Contact:

Laura Beck for ATI

laurabeckcahoon@gmail.com

512-786-1098

W2O Group is acquiring Ravel’s big data analytics technology and pending patents, as well its founding team. Steve Blackmon, Ravel co-founder and VP Engineering, will be appointed as the new Director of Data Sciences at W2O Group. Zach Richardson, Ravel co-founder and VP Product, joins The Daily Dot, the hometown newspaper of the World Wide Web, as its first CTO. The entire Ravel development team will join W2O Group as full-time employees.

Blackmon and Richardson, with support from W2O Group and The Daily Dot, will continue to develop Ravel’s GoldenOrb, as directors of a not-for-profit to which all GoldenOrb intellectual property will be donated. GoldenOrb is a cloud-based open source project for massive-scale graph analysis, built upon best-of-breed software from the Apache Hadoop project modeled after Google’s Pregel architecture.

Ravel co-founder Bart Bohn was ATI’s information technology and wireless director from 2007 to 2011. He was also a founding mentor and board member of 3 Day Startup, MobileMondayAustin and Semantic Web Austin.

Ravel is the latest ATI software company to be acquired by a large competitor, joining other successful ATI alumni exits, such as IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi Software and BMC’s acquisition of Phurnace.

Read the full release at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/4/prweb9419258.htm.

Omni Water Solutions and Austin Technology Incubator Collaborate for Success

Austin-Based Water Treatment Company Sees Tremendous Value in Technology Incubator Model

On March 1, 2012, NuMat Technologies, Inc. (NuMat), a clean technology Northwestern University spin-out, was awarded the $100,000 top student prize at the Clean Energy Trust (CET) and the Department of Energy’s National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition (NCEBPC). In partnership with the Department of Energy, CET supports the commercialization of innovative cleantech companies. NuMat was also awarded $10,000 as the top team for the state of Illinois and will be representing the Midwest region for the National Grand Prize competition to be held in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2012. http://numat-tech.com/

Tab Ebrahim pictured above.

4) Investor Perspective:

a. The ATI startup teams always have great technologists. One benefit that ATI provides is an avenue to investors, which not only are a source of capital but even more important, they are available to provide advice, critique, and introductions.

b. While at ATI, I had a unique opportunity to interact with angel investors and VCs, and this interaction helped me to understand the investor perspective. I learned the main questions investors ask, such as what the differences are in angels and VCs, and how corporate VC groups work with startups—these lessons learned have impacted how I and our NuMat team thinks as entrepreneurs and how we prepare for business plan competitions.

5) Entrepreneurial Ecosystem / Targeted Networking:

a. While at ATI, I learned that you need Professional Service Providers to help grow your startup. That is, having good relationships with law firms, accounting firms, marketing/PR firms, etc. help advance one’s startup.

b. ATI provides access to Professional Service Providers that have worked with startups—past ATI entrepreneurs know which are the best professional service providers to work with—and this rich network of trusted provides is a great resource for startups.

6) Process & Challenges in going from Lab-to-Market:

a. While at ATI, I learned more about intellectual property—specifically patents. More so than the nuances of patents, I learned how a startup should develop and advance its patent position. I learned how a tech startup team should attain freedom-to-operate, respond to design-around patent strategies by competitors, and evaluate patent licensing value.

b. My ATI experience helped to understand the challenges and issues involved in technology transfer—working with research faculty, understanding academic tech transfer budgets, and recognizing how industry can work with a university in harvesting technologies from university labs. I have utilized these lab-to-market lessons at NuMat, which is a cleantech university spin-out based on breakthrough materials science and computational research at Northwestern.

7) Twists & Turns of the Startup Journey:

a. While at ATI, I learned that the startup path is not linear and is not predictable. While people only hear about the major successes of the big winner startups, ATI helped me to understand how a startup goes through ups and downs.

b. While at ATI, I better understood how issues related to people, cash flow management, and customer interactions create twists and turns for startups—how a startup management team responds is critical.

8 Targeted Networking:

a. As a technical person, I came to ATI without really understanding the power of a network. While at ATI, I learned that targeted networking can be really helpful to a startup. ATI has an amazing network built on years of incubating startups, and this network continues to give back to ATI startups and the ATI family.

b. While at ATI, I learned that targeted networking can produce unexpected beneficial results for a startup. I have learned this lesson while at NuMat, where I have consciously taken part in targeted networking, and our team has benefited greatly from access to unexpected potential customers and unexpected potential investors. The ATI experience helped me to understand such targeted network—what types of events to attend, what types of people to reach out to, and the process in general. I also learned that targeted networking only works when one also gives back—it’s sort of like karma.

9) Pattern Recognition:

a. When I first heard the phrase “pattern recognition” at ATI, I had thought it referred to image processing theory from one my electrical engineering classes. Later I learned that “pattern recognition” was a business concept that referred to the skill of identifying certain qualities of successful startups.

b. Through learning about “pattern recognition” while at ATI, I have a better sense of what an investor might be looking for in a startup and its business plan.

10) Austin Tech Environment:

a. ATI embodies the spirit of Austin—which is grounded in a progressive, forward-thinking, and risk-taking attitude.

b. ATI is the core of innovation in Austin, which itself is one of the most innovative cities in the world.

c. While at ATI, I learned that for a city like Austin to continue to be innovative, it needs an innovation engine like ATI that brings together multiple stakeholders—academia, local and state government, industry, investors, startups, etc. This “consortium approach” is the hallmark of Austin innovation, and it is clear ATI is a major driving force.

On March 1, 2012, NuMat Technologies, Inc. (NuMat), a clean technology Northwestern University spin-out, was awarded the $100,000 top student prize at the Clean Energy Trust (CET) and the Department of Energy’s National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition (NCEBPC). In partnership with the Department of Energy, CET supports the commercialization of innovative cleantech companies. NuMat was also awarded $10,000 as the top team for the state of Illinois and will be representing the Midwest region for the National Grand Prize competition to be held in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2012.

NuMat Technologies is a cleantech university spin-out that computationally designs and synthesizes high performing nano-scale materials for gas storage and separation applications. NuMat focuses on the design and synthesis of Metal Organic Frameworks, or MOFs, a revolutionary new class of materials that can be custom designed at the atomic level to capture and store specific molecules. NuMat has also radically shortened the development cycle for MOF research. For example, using its proprietary computational tool, NuMat was able to identify over 140,000 new MOF structures, including one that has the highest natural gas storage capacity of any know material, in under 72 hours. Then, using NuMat’s complimentary low-cost synthesis method, this MOF was synthesized and validated. To put this in context, in the prior 15 years, there have only been ~10,000 MOFs which have been made and reported. NuMat’s technology has the potential to significantly increase natural gas storage capacity in natural gas vehicles, and to fundamentally change the economics in other gas storage and separation applications. http://numat-tech.com/

Photo from left to right: Ben Hernandez, Dr. Omar Farha, Christopher Wilmer, Tabrez Ebrahim

Tab’s Lessons Learned at ATI: First Installment

1) Cleantech Experience:

a. ATI provided a great opportunity to learn about the cleantech sector. ATI’s cleantech-focused forums, networking events, and the Clean Energy Venture Summit (CEVS) helped me to understand emerging technologies and markets in cleantech.

b. ATI also has a broad informal and formal network of cleantech investors across the country. These investors know about ATI’s results—over 200 ATI startups have raised over $1 billion in investor capital—and ATI provides direct access to these investors for its startups.

c. While at ATI, I had the opportunity to attend a few cleantech conferences, which enabled me to learn even more about cleantech efforts across the country and make contacts with potential investors for ATI startups. For NuMat, I have consciously taken up any such opportunities to connect with other members of the cleantech community because I know that such efforts can lead to unexpected positive results for a startup.

d. While at ATI, I learned that cleantech is very unique compared to other tech sectors, since cleantech has a multiple moving parts—academia, government, industry, investors, national labs, strategic corporates, and utilities. Our NuMat efforts have included collaboration with all of those stakeholders.

2) Team, Technology, Timing:

a. Before I started at ATI, I had originally thought that just having a great technology idea would equal startup success. Through my ATI experiences, I learned that while technology is a critical foundational piece, there are several other important factors to success, such as the nature of the leadership team and market timing.

b. While working with startups at ATI, I observed that successful team chemistry was a key to growth. I learned that having complementary skill sets and different personalities on the management team are necessary for success.  We have considered this aspect in the composition of our startup, NuMat Technologies, whose interdisciplinary team hails from several institutions, including the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern School of Law, McCormick School of Engineering, and the Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences. The executive team includes Dr. Omar Farha, Christopher Wilmer, Tabrez Ebrahim, and Benjamin Hernandez.

c. At ATI, I came across many amazing startups that had a great team and a great technology solution, but sometimes, even those were not enough initially. What ATI helped startups with was with understanding the market. ATI helps startups to segment the market, develop their go-to-market strategy, sync up product development and launch with market timing. I am leveraging those market lessons learned at ATI now at NuMat as we advance our product development and build relationships with potential customers.

3) Importance of Advisors & Mentors:

a. While at ATI, I learned that the startup management teams greatly benefit from mentorship. Even the successful serial entrepreneurs know that they don’t know everything—it’s important to learn from someone who has done it before. ATI provides amazing access to such mentors and those mentors want to give back to the new ATI startups.

b. There are a number of successful “graduates” of former ATI startups that continually come back and advise current ATI startups. This is one of the best qualities of ATI—so many of those entrepreneurs that ATI benefits end up giving back to the new startups at ATI. It is like an exponential growth mentorship model! Hopefully when NuMat has more success, I would like to share my lessons learned from my current startup experience.

c. The “ATI family” has been and continues to be incredibly awesome in their support! 

Make sure to read the second installment.

Here is the list of the ones to watch, a little background information and their connections to ATI:

Calxeda, a.k.a. Smooth-Stone, a successful ATI alumni company, offers a processor platform for hyperscale servers that will allow data centers to slash IT costs and energy consumption by as much as a factor of 10.  Calxeda, with its industry-disrupting ultra-low power processors powering servers and data centers, closed an impressive $48 million funding August 2010, and launch its first product with global impact via a partnership with Hewlett Packard November 2011.

GameSalad, a.k.a. Gendai Games, and successful alum of ATI, is an online community that empowers everyone to express and share their ideas through games. GameSalad provides a platform used by creators to rapidly design, publish and distribute original games that have been played by millions of people worldwide. It is currently the number one platform for iOS development and boasts 300,000 developers. 30,000 games have been built with the GameSalad Creator since its 2007 founding. Now at 60 employees and growing, all this was accomplished with just a little over $7 million funding since inception.

Ordoro participated in the SEAL program as UT Austin business students before joining ATI in 2010. Ordoro is a Web-based order and inventory manager. With just a login and a password, online retailers can use Ordoro to process orders, print shipping labels, drop-ship orders and track their real-time inventory at all times. Ordoro helps small and medium online retailers grow their business by spending less time processing orders, tracking inventory and dealing with confusing IT systems.

Ravel, an ATI member company, provides the tools to rapidly discover and integrate knowledge from disconnected data. Ravel’s KnowledgeStream and GoldenOrb products are used by company consultants and clients to acquire, transform, integrate, and utilize large data sets from enterprise databases and web sources.

Wheel InnovationZ, founded by serial entrepreneur Srini Gurrapu, CEO, and a new member of the Austin Technology Incubator, Wheel InnovationZ is privately funded, and still in stealth mode, with its 1.0 product in the hands of early adopter customers by summer 2012.  Wheel is building a Unified Application Store that helps enterprise manage the demands – and needs – of users accessing a variety of applications on a variety of devices.  Wheel will truly enable the ‘any app on any device’ vision with both local and cloud based access with a Unified Application Store enterprise management platform that reduces TCO, and improves security and productivity.

Hurricane Party, free mobile app that helps friends find, share, and create spontaneous parties; moving online experiences offline to make social networking more social, participated in ATI’s 3 Day Startup in 2010.

Macheen is a leading enabler of “Internet Included,” connected devices. Its multi-tenant cloud-based platform makes it easy to sell and market pre-connected devices that sustain profitable relationships with the consumers who buy them. Macheen enables new business models for device makers, retailers and network operators alike. Macheen CEO, Richard Schwartz, is on the Wireless Advisory Board formed in 2011, and was a featured speaker at ATI’s 2011 Texas Wireless Summit (TWS).

ATX Innovation, the company behind the TabbedOut app, participated in the ATI’s 2009 Wireless Seed Stage Forum (WSSF). The TabbedOut app is a secure and easy-to-use mobile payment solution that allows patrons to open, view and pay their tab with a smart phone, eliminating time waiting in line to close your tab and the need to even take your credit card out of your wallet, let alone give it to a stranger. TabbedOut is securely integrated directly into the merchant’s point of sale (POS) system.

The 27 companies, along with Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the Cockrell School of Engineering, and Kyle Cox, director of the Austin Technology Incubator’s University Incubator, will discuss business visions and the startup environment overall.

Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com Corp., will give an overview at 6 p.m. of the startup camp and the new vision for startups at the university.

“The paramount goal of Longhorn Startup Camp is to establish a space in which students with startups can congregate, creating a critical mass of startup activity, a breeding ground for ideas, learning, exchanges of best practices, team formation and general celebration of startup progress,” Metcalfe said.

The 30,000-square-foot space, located at 1616 Guadalupe St., is a new initiative of The University of Texas at Austin. Executive Vice President and Provost Steven Leslie has agreed to loan the camp the space until the end of the spring semester. Its goal is to encourage student entrepreneurship and collaboration among startups at the university.

The vision for Longhorn Startup Camp came from Metcalfe and Cox, along with John Butler, director of the university’s IC² Institute, and Austin entrepreneur Joshua Baer, who is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and managing director of Capital Factory.

The camp is currently at 85 percent occupancy, and primary residents have been companies from 1 Semester Startup (1SS) and ATI, which is directed by Isaac Barchas. Within the first days of alerting the 1SS and ATI, 27 companies and four student organizations had committed to space.

Other student companies have also taken up space at the camp, including companies from ATI, 3 Day Startup, the graduate level Idea-to-Product courses, McComb’s Master in Science and Technology and Texas Venture Labs programs, the Dell Social Innovation Challenge and more.

“I believe Longhorn Startup Camp represents the future of student entrepreneurship at UT Austin,” Barchas said. “There needs to be a place where student innovators can congregate and benefit from Austin’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and from each other.”

Student organizations, including the Technology Entrepreneurship Society, the Student Entrepreneurship Organization and the College of Natural Science’s newly formed Entrepreneurship Society, have also used the space.

Current Longhorn Startup Camp residents:

For more information, contact: Marjorie Smith, Cockrell School of Engineering, 512 471 7541; Kyle Cox, Austin Technology Incubator, 512-522-4768; and follow Longhorn Startup Camp on Twitter at @LonghornStartup, using hashtag #UTEWeek during the startup crawl.

Aunt Bertha, which joined ATI last month, launched first in Austin in June 2011, and has been researching and inputting data for cross-Texas since, going live with a Texas-state-wide resource today.  Plans are to expand to Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas next, with intentions to cover the entire continental United States before the end of 2012.

Aunt Bertha is designed to be an easy-to-use website for those in need, or for family and friends trying to help those in need.  All assistance program information is in one place, but Aunt Bertha also sorts through and helps guide toward the programs a person qualifies for, how to apply and what help they might receive.  Imagine the barriers of intense “seek and find” missions, and then working through complex filings of dozens of applications.  Those in need do not need to have to work so hard just to get help.

“At ATI, over the course of our two dozen years helping incubate and grow a variety of technology companies, we’ve helped a lot of people make a lot of money,” said Robert Reeves, Director, ATI IT Portfolio.  “I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to be part of helping Aunt Bertha help those in our country most in need. This one has a special place in our hearts.”

“What we do is pretty obvious and should have been solved long ago,” said Aunt Bertha founder Erine Gray.  “But we found this is actually a big undertaking – finding all the right information, coordinating with over-stretched agencies and putting all the information together in a user friendly experience that actually lets people get the help they need.  We are really proud we’ve figured this out for the Austin area, and now for all of Texas, and can’t wait to bring the value of Aunt Bertha to the rest of the US.”

 Aunt Bertha picks up where Uncle Sam leaves off by making it easy to find food, health, housing and education programs.  There are literally thousands of assistance agencies in the US, all typically working with their own challenges of small budgets, limited resources, and volunteer staff.  The economic climate has resulted in more need, putting additional strain on already taxed organizations.  There is no standard for agencies, and websites are often complex and unintuitive.  And reviewing and approving (or not) applications is a time intensive and expensive process.  Aunt Bertha helps the agencies do their work: find, engage with and help those in need, and even help processing applications.

 For people in need, the process of even finding the right agency to help, let alone working through an application process, is very intimidating.  Aunt Bertha delivers free, understandable information to those in need – including websites, contact information and locations, guidance on how to apply for programs.  Users can search anonymously and can get reliable estimates of benefits based on factors such as number of family members, location/zip code, etc.

Aunt Bertha was started by Erine Gray who brings the rare combination of technology and web skills with government experience, having been a City of Austin project manager, as well as working on software projects for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. Now, there are 3,000 Texas-state-wide education, housing, employment and health programs, and food pantries on Aunt Bertha.  Aunt Bertha is a Certified B Corporation, a for-profit business that meets higher standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.

Contact:

Laura Beck for ATI

laurabeckcahoon@gmail.com

512-786-1098

“We believe users no longer have to be bogged down by bloated, complex, insecure and costly operating systems, nor should they even care about the operating system like we did not so long ago,” said Srini Gurrapu, founder & CEO, Wheel InnovationZ, Inc. “Rather, with the advent of new devices, it is all about accessing and using the right apps and right data on the user’s preferred devices. Our vision at Wheel InnovationZ is to simplify – and unify – this new device-plus-application-stores world.”

Wheel InnovationZ was built to address two growing trends in IT: cloud computing and consumerization, as related to end user computing. The company is working to deliver a secure and unified experience for “Apps + Data on Any Device.” This Unified Application Store – for Android, iOS, SaaS, legacy Windows, etc. – will help enterprises and service providers reduce TCO and improve both security and productivity. Wheel InnovationZ will break down the siloed Application Stores rapidly being built right now, as well as for legacy apps where there is no store experience, to deliver a common store, and a common management platform to help enterprises manage whichever “flavor of the day” app their employees want, or what the business needs.

Gurrapu’s focus of the past eight years has been evolving end user computing, especially virtualization and cloud computing, reflected in several previous companies successfully built in the Bay Area. He was previously at Neoteris, acquired by Juniper, working on the industry’s #1 SSL VPN appliance that allowed end users to access any enterprise application securely using a web browser – “Anytime, Anywhere Access.” After that, Gurrapu delivered a cloud-based PC, SuperPC.com, to remove desktop challenges like back up, security and access. After which he partnered with virtualization leaders to pioneer news ways to deliver a managed and secure Windows PC such as Mokafive, RingCube and Virtual Bridges. Srini also led several industry-leading solutions at BlueCoat, Microsoft and Bell Labs. Wheel InnovationZ is the next frontier, and ATI – and all of Austin – benefits from Gurrapu building this company here.

“ATI is a great resource for new entrepreneurs, but also for us more experienced entrepreneurs, especially when new to Austin,” added Gurrapu. “ATI gives me access to a wide network of investment resources, successful entrepreneurs and industry professional, as well as all the immense value of the University of Texas. It is an honor to be an IT portfolio company of ATI, especially when looking at its history, and the successes of those companies who graduated from it.”

Full press release here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9233460.htm

Contact:
Laura Beck for ATI
laurabeckcahoon@gmail.com
512-786-1098

3 Day Startup (3DS) is currently accepting applications for its spring event, Friday, March 30 at 2pm until Sunday, April 1 at 10pm.

Application deadline: March 1st. Rolling Admissions

Info sessions will be held on February 6 & 16th at 5:00pm in JGB 2.216. If you have any questions contact Rishi Shah at rishi09@gmail.com.

There will be sponsors, mentors, press coverage, and of course, the invited participants don’t pay for anything. The culmination of the event is when students pitch their start-ups to a wide array of Austin entrepreneurs. Past mentors include:

• Bob Metcalfe, Professor of Innovation, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at the University of Texas at Austin;
• Gary Forni, Central Texas Angel Network (CTAN);
• Josh Baer, Capital Factory & OtherInbox;
• Zaz Floreani, Austin Ventures

Companies that have emerged from previous 3 Day Start Up events include: Famigo (famigogames.com), Hurricane Party (hurricaneparty.com), and HootMe (hoot.me). 3 Day Start Up was started by students and is run by students.

When asked about the influence of 3 Day Start up on their academic and professional careers, previous participants have said the following:

“3DS takes all kinds of people from their respective little boxes and encourages them to bring their talents together to make something great.” – Jeff Zhao, BBA Finance, 3DS Spring ’11

“3DS has been by far the best experience I’ve had thus far as a graduate student. The weekend is intense and sometimes grueling but it’s also just a lot of fun. “- Rene Pinnell, MS Design, 3DS Fall ’09

“At 3 Day Startup, we learned by doing. Instead of sitting in an auditorium, I worked with forty like-minded people to go through the process of launching something great. The next time I go to a seminar on entrepreneurship, I’m going to sit in the middle of the front row, watch the PowerPoint presentation, and think to myself, ‘I’ve done that.’” – Rishi Shah, Plan II Honors, 3DS Fall ’10

If you’re interested, apply at http://austin.3daystartup.org/apply/. Check out our website at http://austin.3daystartup.org or our Facebook Page or Twitter. Questions? Email austin@3daystartup.org.