So to say things are brewing in Austin would be an understatement. With the arrival of Rackspace and Facebook in the past months/years and Samsung’s announcements for new hires, combined with the great barcamp and startup scene (and by startup I am throwing you boot strappers in there!) I would venture to say Austin is moving again.
And it should be mentioned that this movement isn’t just in part to the traditional large business savior situation, but the great attitude and creative space that Austin geeks and social media nerds have fostered over the years. It is truly amazing!
With such a great network setup it has been amazing to see how small businesses, consultants and corporations alike have begun networking in such a way as to create opportunity at all levels of participation.
So if you are new to Austin, take a look at our links page and our calendar, there are things going on almost everyday. This is a renaissance time for the web 2.0 and a time to look and see what the next.
Over the next couple of months we will be having guest contributors offer their ideas of what is “next” both technologically and socially for Austin and the central Texas region. So stay tuned and enjoy the ride!
You might be wondering who the hell I am. I’m Cecy Correa, and I’ve known Joey and the ACTLab peeps for a couple of years now. Joey asked me to do some write-ups for Austin three-oh (it’s not Austin thirty), so here I am!
I attend Refresh Austin pretty regularly. Refresh Austin is a monthly meet-up of developers and designers in the Austin area. We meet at Buffalo Billiards the second Tuesday of every month (you can check out the Refresh Austin site here.)
This past Tuesday Michelle Greer kindly organized an excellent panel on start-ups and how to get funded our acquired. The panel included Jason Cohen (SmartBear software), Pat Condon (Rackspace Hosting), Jim Curry (Rackspace Hosting), and Josh Baer (OtherInbox).
The panel was excellent! We’re about one month away from SXSW, but the quality was on par with SXSW. Video of the panel should be posted soon, so here are a few interesting bullet points I took from the meeting:
Bootstrap: Most start-ups thrive due to bootstrapping. It’s not greed! Bootstrapping builds a good sense of what’s really important in your business, and allows you to focus on what matters. Once you make it as a successful business, what you have learned from bootstrapping will keep you on the right track.
Don’t get VC unless you need it: Sure, Venture Capital is great. Someone gives you money and you get to work on your business. However, you should not rely on VC. If you can get started on your business, get started! Don’t let the wait for capital freeze you and keep you from even starting your business. Acquire a couple (or a few) clients to get you enough of a cash flow to stay afloat. Having a small number of clients will help you focus your business, while proving to a potential Venture Capitalist that your business is worth it and can make money.
The business plan: Most panelists agreed that a business plan is not important: You can’t predict where your business will be in 5 years or 10 years. Moreover, you can’t predict how your business will change in 5 to 10 years. That said, I think a business plan is important because it allows you to sit down and write down your ideas concisely. Writing a business plan will allow you to articulate your idea for your business, which in turn should enable you to give a good business pitch when the opportunity arises. Ultimately, panelists seemed to agree that a business plan should not be longer than 2 pages.
NDAs: Should I sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and what are the rules for disclosing information in a business meeting? No! First of all, a Venture Capitalist is not going to sign an NDA, so why should you? Just keep it simple and refrain from disclosing secret information about your business. You can discuss your business at length without revealing anything that you feel would compromise your business. Do keep in mind, however, that if you think your idea is too good to be revealed, it probably isn’t. Think about it: if your idea is that easy to steal, you probably need to move on to another idea, or fine tune your current one.
That’s it! That’s what I took from it. The next Refresh Austin for March 2010 will be a lightning speed round for those lucky souls presenting at SXSW who want to practice before the big event.
So I bet a lot of you all thought Austin 3.0 was down and out for the count? Well nothing could be further from the truth. We are still going full force, however our blogging efforts have been less then stellar and for that we apologize.
Kristine and Dustin just began their first semester in the Media Studies master’s program at the University of Texas at Austin where they have been tearing it up talking about new media and geek centric issues.
I am hoping Dustin will soon write an article about his adventures with the Drupal development movement taking place here in Austin, as he has been one of the behind the scenes players hosting barcamps and monthly development meetings. His work with Lauren Roth and other great geek Drupal leaders like Lynn Bender and Four Kitchens has been invaluable.
Kristine has been working in the ACTLab where she has been tearing it up learning quickly how to “Make Stuff” and has been taking her new media skills to a new level. Maybe she post about her experiences taking an ACTLab course for the first time.
Me (Joey), well I have been up to no good. While I have been less then good about going to all the tech happy hours, I have met some really cool people when I have made the events. In the summer I attended John Erik’s going away party and met some very delightful geeks and new media moguls.
Oh and a shout out to Conjunctured who recently celebrated their 1 year anniversary, I remember going to Jelly and watching Dusty, John, Caesar and the rest of the crew put together that great business, it was awesome to watch. You all rock!
I have also had some great conversations with the Austin Entrepreneur Network folks here in Austin, they have been tearing it up as well, hosting low cost seminars about all the new media technologies.
And of course GeekAustin has been the backbone to our great scene here in Austin, Lynn’s work is always amazing to watch.
And Whurley, don’t think we are not watching you kick ass as well! Oh the list could go on forever.
Enough Shout Outs.
If you are all are wondering why I have broken out into such a different writing style from my previous academic style posts, it probably has something to do with the fact that I have been working for the past 6 months in the automotive industry doing new media development for various Austin Automotive companies such as Boost Logic, American Racing Technologies, UpRev and other companies.
As well as making my way around the automotive industry, this fall I am helping TA 3 courses in the ACTLab. In addition to the ACTLab courses, I was invited by the University of Incarnate Word in San Antonio to be an adjunct in Audio Production. I have since had a great time down in San Antonio once a week working with a great set of students who are truly amazing and inspiring. This last week I took the students to a music recording studio (Studio M), yes they still exist! We had the pleasure of meeting with Michael Morales who gave us a great tour and really brought to light the new vs. old mentalities of copyright and new media production. We had a great discussion. And one question I came away with was “will we be able to sustain high-end high level purpose built recording studio’s when everyone is making their music at the coffee shop on their laptop?”
So while this post brings you all some what up to date, I hope it leaves you wanting more. Trust me, there are some great articles in the making and I look forward to seeing what Dustin and Kristine have to write about their new found geeky experiences in Academia.
CloudCamp Austin is happening this coming weekend, make sure you stop by. It will be hosted at the ACTLab, from what I hear there will be all types of folks there. Stay tuned!
IT Administrators will soon become the new blue collar workforce. Like licensed plumbers of today, IT workers of the near future will primarily be called on to fix problems after they have occurred, the cubicle will become the new white van and the on call pager will finally be rewarded with time and a half instead of the salaried pat on the back. This is not an attempt to belabor the tired “series of tubes” metaphor that former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens choked up during a Senate committee hearing; I am instead interested in the shifting perception of the personal computer as a piece of specialized work equipment to an information appliance. Read the rest of this entry »
So Dustin and I made the voyage over to Bryan, Tx, as well as Texas A&M (which we came to learn are two totally different places). I had a contact at A&M, a Professor in media studies, Patrick Burkart, who set us up with a slew of talks and meetings to go to in order to orient ourselves with the campus. Our first meeting was a talk about metadata systems and modeling, which at times proved very interesting, especially when the idea of doing qualitative/quantitative analysis of twittering came up. But I digress…. (into academia boredom!)
Emerging from our meetings, Dustin and I came away with a new respect for academia in A&M, while also wondering why the engineering buildings seemed to be 10-100X nicer then all the other buildings
We then met with Patrick where we talked about his upcoming book about hacktivism, cyberliberties and evidently the ACTLab (at least a little, here’s hoping!). We then headed over to The Creative Space in Bryan, Tx where we met with Cody and Bill. Here is a short interview I did with Bill about the vibe of The Creative Space.
After showing us around, the Creative Space people took us to dinner. A couple days before our trip Cody informed me he was organizing the first DorkBot BCS meet and invited Dustin and I to present a project or two. Never ones to turn down a good Dorkbot, Dustin and I showed up with some cool ACTLab hardware projects based around homebrew amplifiers and hard drive speakers. To say the least the crowd was impressed and we were impressed by the crowd. There was some great energy that night.
So yeah, BCS was a good time and if you are ever in their neck of the woods make sure you drop by and say hi to Patrick at A&M and Cody and the gang at The Creative Space.
So it is time again for StartUpCamp Austin 2009. Brandon Wiley and myself (Joey), along with the help of many others will be putting it on in the ACTLab. We hope to have a great turn out like last time. So be sure to sign up. Unlike many other barcamps, this one is a half day event, that is right you get to sleep in
So for those of you who have been living under a rock, there’s a Twitter + Good Deed + Charity + Party mash-up on the horizon.
Here are the deets for your consumption:
To attend the event you need to get a ticket here: http://www.amiando.com/twestivalaustin.html. For those who can’t attend there are still a bunch of other ways to support the cause listed below.
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One in six people on the planet doesn’t have clean drinking water. This kills more people than all wars combined. The Austin community has decided to get together to do something about it, and you are invited. Austin Twestival features bands, sumo suit wrestling, and a lot of cool people joining together a great cause. 100% of all ticket sales go to charity:water and if we sell out we will have earned enough to build two wells in Africa.
Twestival is taking place in over 100 cities all over the globe on February 12, 2009. It was organized by people using the microblogging service Twitter and took off in places like Bangkok, Sao Paolo, Berlin and Rome in less than one week. Each city is seeking to make history by ensuring everyone on Earth has safe water to drink.
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Twestival sounds awesome, right? Join us at Ace’s Lounge in downtown Austin on Feb. 12th. Here’s the schedule of events:
8:00 Meet and mingle
8:50 A word from sponsors
9:00 Twestival Sumo Smackdown (see video below)
10:00 Presentation by Glimmer of Hope, a non-profit that drills wells in Africa
10:45 Performance by T-Bird and the Breaks, one of Austin’s most highly regarded up-and-coming bands. This 11 piece band won accolades from both ACL’s “Sound and the Jury” Awards as well as the Austin Music Awards. They’ve sold out their past two shows and just released a new album. See video below.
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A donation of just $10 can provide someone in Africa clean drinking water for 12 years. Collectively, we can initiate substantial change for developing nations. Here are are a variety of ways you can make this happen:
Innovation and entrepreneurship seem to be the words of the day. Everyone wants to be an innovator, everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. The problem with being an entrepreneur is the fact that you are on your own. There is no boss to give you assignments, no water cooler to commiserate around, no paycheck waiting to be cashed at the end of the week.
While many techies have thrived in garages and coffeeshops in the past, the current generation has grown up expecting a certain amount of social interaction to permeate their day to day lives and a new social construct has arisen in the past year that aims to spur newer and more advanced innovation in the near future: co-working.
Whether your idea of co-working is hooking up at a coffee shop for a Friday Jelly or finding collaborative office space to share with like minded folks at Conjunctured or The Creative Space, the basic idea is the same: camaraderie and fluid collaboration leading to enhanced productivity.
My name is Dustin, the new guy around here, and co-working is my current fascination. I look forward to exploring the topic here with y’all at the blog.
So the time is near and we are gearing up for SXSW, as well as other geeky events that will be taking place this spring. In order to keep up, we are proud to introduce two new senior correspondents, Dustin Younse and Becca Camp. Both of them will offer a great “fresh” perspective of the Tech/Geek scene we have been covering.
Dustin is currently an IT administrator at UT Austin, he has a deep rooted involvement with the geek scene at large, attending the 2600 / H.O.P.E. conferences in NYC and numerous other hacking events. His involvement with geek events around town are numerous and he is very well know about the ACTLab/Dorkbot/BarCamp scene. You can catch his Twitters @milsyobtaf.
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Becca has the freshest view of the Austin tech scene, with her induction only a month or two ago. A quick learner and incredibly curious, Becca’s sense of humor and go-with-the-flow attitude makes her a perfect candidate for geekdom. She recently graduated from UT with a non-tech degree *shocking!
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So keep an eye out for personal introductions by our new writers and their coverage of SXSW and other events.
Dustin is currently an IT administrator at UT Austin, he has a deep rooted involvement with the geek scene at large, attending the 2600 / H.O.P.E. conferences in NYC and numerous other hacking events. His involvement with geek events around town are numerous and he is very well know about the ACTLab/Dorkbot/BarCamp scene. You can catch his Twitters 
Becca has the freshest view of the Austin tech scene, with her induction only a month or two ago. A quick learner and incredibly curious, Becca’s sense of humor and go-with-the-flow attitude makes her a perfect candidate for geekdom. She recently graduated from UT with a non-tech degree *shocking!