AustinStartup

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

uControl, which launched 5 years ago at DEMO, announced the addition of two new vice presidents and the final $3.9M of a $9M investment round, with none of that money coming from venture or institutional investors. The company exemplifies what startups and entrepreneurship are really all about. They started with a market and an idea, [...]

LiveOffice, the number-one provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) email archiving, email compliance and email continuity solutions and Socialware, the leader in helping companies manage, embrace and leverage public social networks, today announced a partnership. Together the companies will provide LiveOffice users with the ability to pre-review and route social networking activity through their existing compliance [...]

Normally, I use this space to talk about a (hopefully) fresh software venture or other, or a new tech trend that has caught my attention in recent weeks. However, this time I want to share a slightly different subject that starts with a recent catch-up meeting I had with Bijoy Goswami, Bootstrap founder and Austin evangelist, where we were talking about mapping and roots.

Founded in Austin in 1999, Coremetrics is known as one of the high-end providers of web analytics, competing with Omniture and Webtrends. Today it was announced that IBM is acquiring the company for an undisclosed sum. Over the years the company has attracted around $167M in venture funding from such organizations as Highland Capital Partners [...]

On March 12th, Infochimps, a startup data marketplace here in Austin, entered into a revenue sharing agreement with MySpace allowing the social network’s data to be available for sale on the Infochimps site.

A week later, after ReadWriteWeb wrote about the deal, a number of negative comments and ensuing articles were written, most notably a conversation thread on Slashdot.

What happened here, and what can this tell us about the possible futures for data privacy?

During yesterday’s Apple developer preview, the latest addition to Apple’s arsenal was unveiled, iAd. The platform aims to make it easy for developers to monetize their free iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad applications by providing a simple, Apple controlled platform that allows them to provide ads to their users.

While there is nothing revolutionary about ad networks, I believe this specific implementation is. Why?

It’s been said: “Imitation is the sincerest forms of flattery.” But, what if the imitation involves completely copying whole sections or the entire works of others? Or, what if the imitation turns out to be a complete fake, but nonetheless is passed off as the real thing?
On the eve of SXSW, these question about [...]