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.

We have a special present for you! We’ve been working with Rogue Pictures to bring you a free and exclusive pre-screening of the upcoming movie Catfish. This movie was the darling of Sundance, and will be released on a limited basis on 9/17. This is your chance to see it and experience what the buzz is about before everyone else.

The first round of voting for panels for the 2011 SXSW festival ends tomorrow (Friday) at Noon central time. Here’s my panel idea. If you’re Austin-based, please use the comments to tell us about your panel idea.

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 [...]

The 2nd Capital Factory Demo Day is coming on September 8th. We will have 300 investors, press, and technology entrepreneurs in attendance to watch the launch of the 5 companies from our 2010 program. This is an invitation-only event, and we’re keeping the quality of the content and the networking as high as possible.
Five great [...]

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.