AustinStartup

Each year Texchange hosts one big blockbuster event with a fantastic speaker that is open to the public (other events are for members only). This year, we’re bringing Gary Vaynerchuk to Austin to speak at the AT&T Conference Center at UT. Gary first came to internet stardom with his video blog Wine Library TV. Gary’s informal and enthusiastic approach to wine tasting and collecting led to numerous appearances on national television. Gary has grown his retail wine website business from $4M to $60M in the past 10 years, largely by using social media marketing.

The list just came out for the 5,000 fastest growing companies in the U.S. as reported by Inc. Magazine. Scanning through the list of the top 1,000 companies reveals a few names that I can recognize. You can see all the companies in the list for the Austin Metro Region. There are other sub-lists to [...]

Personally, I believe that the Semantic Web will become mainstream in the next few years (I actually have a bet on this with some college friends). I know that this is a strong statement, but I am confident that it will happen. Mainstream is defined in Wikipedia as “the common current of thought of the majority”. Furthermore it states that something is mainstream if it “is available to the general public” and it “has ties to corporate or commercial entities”. However, how do you evaluate if something is on the verge of becoming mainstream? I propose the following metric: inclusion at the South by South West (SXSW) Conference!

Austin-based incubator Capital Factory, is hosting an Entrepreneurship for Programmers training day next Thursday, August 26^th.  The training is part of the Lone Star Ruby Conference at the Norris Conference Center, which continues on Friday and Saturday, and features speakers Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub and Blaze Mizerany of Sinatra.

It’s been almost two years since we first saw Smooth-Stone pitch their business at the Rice Alliance venture forum. The company has been making steady progress, culminating in a huge round of financing. The company announced it is raising $48 million from a unique syndicate of investors comprising industry leading venture capital firms and semiconductor [...]

I’ve been tracking the progress of CallVine very closely since meeting company CEO Rudy Prince several months ago. It has always seemed to me that the capacity for my iPhone to manage group communications has always been lacking. When I saw Rudy at the most recent Austin Tech Happy Hour, I was excited to hear that the app had been submitted to the app store for review. Today, the company is officially announcing the general availability (I just downloaded 1.0.1 today), and pricing details.

In the big world of Wordpress blogs there are those big ones on the high end (Techcrunch) where a paid staff can provide all the help you need. On the low end, hosted Wordpress is perfect for many. But what about the middle? In that big middle ground you want to customize Wordpress just enough that they can’t host it for you, but you’re not big enough to afford someone to main your blog and apply the latest updates and plug potential security holes.

Today, Karmaback, the only online engagement and sweepstakes platform that rewards the community’s engagement and evangelism, announced Social Coupons, a new feature targeted at enabling companies to grow their online community while in turn [...]

We first wrote about Caringo two years ago with their first very quiet and secret raise of funds. Today they are putting out a press release announcing their $5M in funding. It’s hard to say if this is in addition to their previous money, or if they’re finally announcing that they’ve raised $5M over the past few years and they’re lumping it all together to call it a Series A.

I think it’s safe to say that early stage funding is going strong in Austin in 2010. It seems that not a week goes by without a notable seed round or A round invested in Austin companies. Back in April we wrote about Workstreamer, a business listening platform, launching their public beta. At the time they had 350 people in their private beta, and hoped to gain momentum and real customer insights from a larger public beta.