austinpreneur

Startup Digest week of 1/29/12

This week's update is written by Joshua Baer.

The events not to miss this week are the Campus2Careers Intern Fair (if you're looking) and of course the always engaging Open Coffee. I hope to see you there!

I've been doing lots of office hours with entrepreneurs interested in Capital Factory and students interested in taking my class at UT. I also meet with any entrepreneur who is new to Austin and looking to get plugged in, or is considering a move to Austin. Every week I meet amazing people and try to help in some small way by making an introduction or giving an outside perspective on their startup. Any entrepreneur can reserve a spot on my calendar. 

The past two Saturdays I've been huddled under hot camera lighting with Toyin Akinmusuru, Ruben Cantu, Rene Lego, and Austen Trimble interviewing some of the top movers and shakers in the Austin tech community who also happen to be many of my idols. It's been an incredible experience and we've captured unique and moving content. We will be unveiling the site soon, but for now you can follow us on Twitter @weareaustintech and Like us on Facebook.

I'm probably most excited about the SXSW Startup Crawl coming up on Thursday March 8. Last year we had more than 2,000 participants at 20 startups downtown and this year promises to be bigger and better! The idea is to show all of the great talent that comes to Austin for SXSW a sampling of all the great places they might want to work! If you're interested in attending, please follow @atxstartupcrawl and join the Facebook event so that you get a link to the map. If you want to be a host company, email me.

Did you know that Austin has more than 2,500 entrepreneurs on the list? The bigger it gets, the more people we can draw into the startup community. Please help spread the word by sending out a tweet about the Austin StartupDigest today!

What's Going on in the Austin Startup Community 

InternInAustin Spring Fair
http://www.interninaustin.org
Tuesday from 5:30-8:00pm
AT&T Conference Center

Campus2Careers is putting on another intern fair. I went to this last time and met 4 really interesting candidates that we followed up with. And for $25, even a startup can afford to go. 

Austin NoSQL
Wednesday at 7pm
uShip, 205 Brazos Street
http://www.meetup.com/austin-nosql/events/48370242/

Ben Beecher, an engineer from 10gen, will be talking about GridFS, the mechanism used to store large files in MongoDB.

Open Coffee
Thursday 8:30-10:30am
Caffe Medici on Congress

Coffee. Entrepreneurs. Conversation.

What's Coming Up

 Mongo Day Austin
2/15/2012
http://www.10gen.com/events/mongo-austin

SXSW Startup Crawl
3/8/2012
http://atxstartupcrawl.com

SXSW Interactive
3/10/2012
http://sxsw.com/interactive

Austin Startup Bus
3/14/2012
http://startupbus.com/unlock/25

Austin Startup Weekend 
3/30/2012
http://austin.startupweekend.org/

 

Austin Startup Digest - January 23, 2012

This week's update is written by Damon Clinkscales.

This week, I'll be at Apple iOS 5 Tech Talk on Monday, which is going to be a full overview of iOS 5 directly from Apple engineers at the Austin Convention Center.  Stoked about it! It's awesome to see that Austin is the kind of place that Apple wants to hit on their geek road show.

On Tuesday evening, I'll be at Buffalo Billiards for Austin on Rails. If you're interested in learning more about Rails or meeting the community, you are welcome to come out. Speaking of the Austin Rails community...we have recently achieved a major accomplishment! Ruby Central has selected Austin to be the site of RailsConf 2012!  RailsConf is the primary national gathering where the best Rails developers in the world get together to hack, build community, and share knowledge. Over 1300 attendees are expected.  

The event will take place downtown at the Hilton on April 23-25.  We are organizing several community efforts around the conference, such as Ignite RailsConf, Kids Ruby Day, Talk-To-A-Local, Stay-With-A-Local, and BohConf (an annual unconference timed to coincide with RailsConf).  Austin's selection is an acknowledgment of the incredible Rails community we've built here over the past 6 years and we couldn't be more proud and excited about the event.

A few quick notes about SXSW Interactive, which is coming up fast (March 9-13)...This is the first year that the organizers are hosting a dedicated space (Startup Village) for startup folks to find each other while they are in town for the conference. On Friday, March 9, Startup Austin (part of the national Startup America partnership) is officially launching at SXSW Interactive. Finally, Eric Ries and 500 Startups are back again this year, delivering a day-long Lean Startup Track on Saturday!  You don't want to miss this.

You also won't want to miss the ATX Startup Crawl on Thursday, March 8. After arriving in Austin and picking up their badges, SXSW Interactive attendees can hop on a shuttle tour of a dozen simultaneous parties happening at startups downtown. Last year we had 20 startups and 2,000 attendees. This year promises to be bigger and better.

By the way, if you are interested in digging deeper into actionable startup metrics (so you know you are tracking the right things), Ash Maurya is offering Early Bird pricing ($99) for his workshop if you sign up today.

Did you know that Austin has more than 2,500 entrepreneurs on this list? Please help spread the word by forwarding this email to a friend or sending out a tweet about the Austin StartupDigest!

What's Going on in the Austin Startup Community

Austin on Rails (AoR)

Tuesday, 1/24 from 7:00-9:00pm (doors open at 6:30pm)

Buffalo Billiards – 201 East 6th Street – Upstairs

Talks this month about background processing and how to efficiently store high fidelity event histories. Great community.

Austin Web Python User Group (AWPUG)

Thursday, 1/26 from 7:00-9:00pm

Texas Tribune – 823 Congress Ave

Craig and Kenneth from Heroku are visiting Austin, talking PaaS and horizontal scaling. Sounds awesome!

Twilio Training Workshop

Friday, 1/27 from 1:00-5:00pm

HubAustin  – 4930 S. Congress Ave

Learn how to build SMS & Voice Apps with Twilio! For free!

Top Upcoming Startup Events

February 3 - Actionable Metrics Masterclass (Ash Maurya)

February 15 - Mongo Day Austin

February 18 - API Hackday

March 8 - ATX Startup Crawl

March 10 - The Lean Startup Track at SXSW (Eric Ries & 500 Startups) 

March 14 - Austin Startup Bus

March 30 - Austin Startup Weekend

 

 

Austin Startup Digest January 16, 2012

 

This is a copy of the Austin Startup Digest. Subscribe to get this in your Inbox every Monday morning. If you have news or events that the Austin startup community would want to hear about, please submit it here.

I was excited to announce this week that my startup OtherInbox has been acquired by a company from New York called Return Path. This is a great thing for my team, my investors, and for me. I hope it's a great thing for Austin too. I'm staying on as CEO of OIB and we are planning to double the size of our Austin office in 2012. 

This week I also met some incredible entrepreneurs at office hours. Tom Giesberg came in and showed me a tablet to help people communicate who are in a hospital bed and can't talk. Stacy Zoern of Community Cars told me about her inexpensive electric cars designed for use by someone in a wheel chair. Last week Stephen Straus showed me these magnets that had magical properties that I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't seen them with my own eyes.

This week is the first class of 1 Semester Startup at the University of Texas. We're looking for experienced entrepreneurs, engineers, marketers, lawyers, and other skills to be mentors for the students. If you're interested in volunteering 1 hour per week please reply to this email.

SXSW ramp up is in full swing. I'm planning on doing another Austin Startup Crawl, attending Startup America, lots of mentoring sessions, a co-founder meetup, organizing a panel about elevator pitches, and hanging with Startup Bus. I hope to see you there!

One of the most common requests I get is for help finding a co-founder. Don't miss the Co-founders Meetup this week. This is one of your best opportunities to meet other entrepreneurs to work with.

Did you attend the Web Developer Lunch or the PHP Meetup last week? If so, reply to this email and let me know how it went.

Did you know that Austin has more than 2,500 entrepreneurs on the list? Please help spread the word by sending out a tweet about the Austin StartupDigest today!

What's going on this week?

Javascript Meetup

When: Tuesday, 1/17 from 7:30-9:00pm

Where: Frog design – 101 West 6th Street – 2nd Floor

This month we have a special guest flying in from New York City – the CTO and co-founder of Nodejitsu, Paolo Fragemeni.  Paolo, a solid computer programmer and veteran hacker has written loads of node.js code including the a significant portion dedicated to the node.js framework, Flatiron. Node.js.  What is it?!!  How does it work?!! 

Twilio Training

When: Tuesday 1/17 1pm

Where: HubAustin 4930 S. Congress Ave  Ste 307 

The focus for this free workshop will be to get an overview of the basic features and functionality of the Twilio platform; send, receive, and respond SMS messages; place, receive, and respond to phone calls; and use Twilio Client to use your browser to place and receive phone calls. 

Drupal User Group

When: Wednesday, 1/18 at 7:00 PM

Where: Cospace, 911 W Anderson Lane #203

This month we'll be hearing from Michael Trevino, who will discuss the recent relaunch of the UT System websites (in Drupal of course).

Austin.rb

When: Tuesday 1/17 from 7:30-9:30

Where: Cospace, 911 W Anderson Lane #203

Matthew Swain give us an introduction to keeping our environment dependencies managed using Ruby with Chef. After the presentation we'll be pairing off to work through a brand newcode kata. Be sure to bring your laptop!

Co-Founders Wanted

When: Thursday 1/19 at 6:30pm

This meetup is back with its regular format: 10 speaking slots available (3 minutes each) for startups looking for co-founders or looking to hire developers/designers. Find a startup to join here!

CodeWorks Austin

When: Thursday 1/19 at 9am

Where: Norris Conference Center 2525 West Anderson Lane 

CodeWorks ’11 is a one day, single-track conference created specifically for PHP developers. Join local developers for a full day of learning and networking as php|architect continues the tradition of bringing the conference experience to you. No airport security lines, no bad hotel food and you get to sleep in your own bed.

Top Upcoming Events

1/23/2012 Apple Tech Talk

2/15/2012 Mongo Day Austin

3/10/2012 SXSW Interactive

3/14/2012 Austin Startup Bus

3/30/2012 Austin Startup Weekend