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 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 [...]

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.

We’re throwing our summer happy hour at The Dogwood (formerly Mother Egan’s) and we’d like to invite you to come out and join us and the rest of the Austin technology community. There has been a lot of things going on around town, including new funding, acquisitions, and new technology [...]

Linux Against Poverty is hosting their 2nd annual Install Fest tomorrow at Union Park, which will conclude their drive to put computers in the hands of Austin area children who currently don’t have a computer or internet access at home.

Austin’s female business community gathered together yesterday for the inaugural Sharp Skirt’s Offline Meeting at Bess Bistro. Originally founded by Carla Thompson and Stacey Higginbotham as ATX Tech Women, Sharp Skirts Offline will serve to enrich the Sharp Skirts community by connecting women in business, promoting collaboration, and increasing professional success. The evolution of Thompson and Higginbotham’s venture will also appeal to a much broader audience of women, as the focus has expanded to female business leaders, regardless of the industry.

The 28th annual running of UT-Austin’s Global Moot Corp was completed this past weekend and, for the first time for this event, I participated as a judge. In case you didn’t catch the post-event coverage of the event, there were a couple of outcomes worth note.
First, already informally regarded as the “super bowl” of investment [...]

ATX Tech Women are having their second meet-up tonight. Yes, it took a bit of a hiatus, but recovering from SXSW isn’t a small task.

The group will be meeting at Mangia’s Pizza on Guadalupe so everyone can grab a drink and food before entering into deep, tech-inspired talk. Make sure to RSVP quickly so we can save you a spot!