AustinStartup

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.

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, [...]

Austin-based Gendai Games added $1M in funding from a variety of sources, including DFJ Mercury. The company makes an interesting cross-platform game development tool named Game Salad, and the iTunes app store contains many games built with their tool. Gendai has been around for a while, launching their beta back in March of 2009. In August of that year they were selected to be part of the Austin Technology Incubator. I chose them to be presenters at the Innotech Beta Summit in October of 2009, and they made a great impression on the crowd. This summer, the company is participating in another incubator program in Los Angeles, California.

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 [...]

SailPoint announced today that Tesco Bank, the UK’s most successful supermarket bank, has selected SailPoint IdentityIQ™ as its identity governance solution to support information security and compliance programs within the bank. The selection forms part of Tesco Bank’s migration programme from The Royal Bank of Scotland to its own [...]

I had the opportunity to be a guest on the Austin Tech Scene #7 Podcast with Michael Coté and Brandon Whichard.

During the podcast we talk about the Austin technology scene, Dachis Group, Capital Factory, and a few startups as well.

RGB Networks, the leader in network video processing, has taken three screen delivery to the next level with today’s acquisition of RipCode, Inc., a privately held developer of solutions for mobile IP video. RGB will incorporate RipCode’s technology into its Video Multiprocessing Gateway (VMG) enabling video service providers to [...]

CSIdentity announced that it has added Ro Parra to its Board of Directors. Mr. Parra is a partner and co-founder of Daylight Partners, which is a group of investors who mostly share a background at Dell. Ro retired from Dell in 2007, and previously held roles at Grid and Radio Shack. Bill Morrow, Chairman and [...]

Zynga announced today that they’ve acquired Austin-based social game company Challange Games. Zynga is one of the fastest growing gaming companies in history, and are the creators of the most popular facebook games including Mafia Wars and Farm Town. Challenge Games was founded by serial entrepreneur Andrew Busey, who had previously founded companies such as iChat, Living.com, Question.com, and Pluck.