Archive for the 'Austin' Category

Porter Novelli Austin, rocks

Published
by
John Erik
on June 24, 2008
in Austin
. 2 Comments

Laura Beck and her team at Porter Novelli Austin have been helping launch some of the coolest startups on the plant for years; and they’re right here in Austin. Who knew! I didn’t until I met Brittany, Lauren, and Josh at the DEMOparty last month.

OneSpot, Radar Networks/Twine, PeoplePad, Friendfeed, those are some of their clients I can think off the top of my head. I know there are several in town.

After talking with Josh Dilworth a bit about the Startup District and Conjunctured he invited me to come chat with the whole office. It was great, they had ordered a ton of tacos that morning, everyone was giving me hi-fives and hugs and talking about startups, I was like what is this place!?! … the meeting went great, they are very very supportive - Josh especially has been helping me out a ton and I’m very grateful (thanks for sure dood).

Later that day I ran into two people who were talking about Porter Novelli and that’s when I decided, “geez, I’m gonna do a quick post on them.” :)

Update PN is hiring, here’s the skinny:

* 2-4 years work experience – marketing or PR
* Agency experience, at least 1 year
* Tech preferred, but could be consumer tech/Internet tech
* Web 2.0/social media awareness critical, experience a huge plus (blogger, etc.)
* Strong writing
* Strong press relations/ability to pitch
* Multi tasker, well organized
* Highly responsible
* Team player
* Quick to adjust, ramp up, learn, and very flexible in an always changing environment
* MUST be live in Austin, already here, or willing to get her FAST
* Need to start ASAP.

I can tell you, because they let me sit in on their Thursday Staff Meeting an hear the nuts and bolts, this is a talented, fun, excited, and clever team. I actually found myself thinking “wow, it would be fun to work here” and I never ever think that. Let me know if you fit the above and I’ll intro ya. cheers!

Startup cities/Austin chat with @garyvee and @kevinrose

Published
by
John Erik
on June 1, 2008
in Austin and Videos
. 6 Comments

Some of the hippest peeps on the net have been playing with Seesmic recently. Yesterday Gary Vaynerchuck tweeted that him and kevinrose where on there chatting it up. So, I hopped over and asked a couple questions.

Here’s the deal:

(Juan Sequeda asked the city ranking question to PG at StartupSchool and was telling me about it over bagels last week.)

(oh yeah. facial hair. … like I said in my first video up there - boulder, techstars, gwen bell, andrew hyde… kickin some ass. I’ve been to Boulder once (in CO I always go to Telluride with fam) but I’m wanna come see yall soon. …totally agree on the valley talk. …I also know! Austin is a kick ass city and I’m trying to develop this sucker - that’s why we got Startup District rollin. Since southby I gave myself 1 year to see what we could turn this place into, and it’s coming along nicely.)

(sorry ’bout the sound on this one)

Gary In Austin! Tuesday, June 3rd - Austin, TX

  • 1:00 PM–Book Signing at Grape Vine Market, 7938 Great Northern Boulevard, Austin, TX 78757

These guys are a blast. Here’s a garyvee with a Radar sticker. heh

Gray is a mofo that knows how to love his fans and customers. I love how it just flows outta the guy — every time he’s talking it’s just like “Thank you sooo much for your question”, “Awesome t shirt”, “I love your burp”, whatever.. he makes ya feel good. Everyone can take a lesson. Kevin was kick ass at this too. Just more to the point - “what your question? BAM I’m gonna tell you the answer; and it’s a good one.”

Meeting with great people in Austin

Published
by
John Erik
on May 29, 2008
in Austin, General and startup district
. 5 Comments

Almost everyone I met with today was somehow interested in the Semantic Web. What’s the deal? Is Austin really that much of a hot bed for this?

My first meeting was with Juan Sequeda. Juan is a Semantic Web Evangelist, Entrepreneur and Web Developer - he’s also working on his Ph.D at UT. He gave me the run down on how Parquesoft operates in Columbia. In Juan’s words here’s a run down of what they do, you’ll see how it’s applicable to Conjunctured/Startup District (I hope you don’t mind me posting this :):

The creator of parquesoft was a millionare software developer who decided to buy a huge warehouse and convert it into tons of small offices. Any student/ developer who had an idea, could apply for a space, and if the idea was unique enough, you would get a space, free internet and everything for just 25 dolars a month. The company was on its own, but if they needed help because of a huge contract and they needed lawyers or something, Parquesoft would help them [for a percentage of the take]. The deal is that this place has extended to several other cities in Colombia and is doing the same. Any entrepreneur who has an idea, can get a space and work. The idea of Parquesoft is also to do a social impact (Colombia is a developing country).

It just so happened that Cesar was meeting with Clay Spinuzzi in the same coffee shop - I love when that happens.

Next, thanks to Melissa’s introduction, I met Timothy Maxwell. Tim is a Developer/Consultant at Optaros. He was especially interested in the kind of business model ideas we talked about originally for Conjunctured (ie the “Co-company” model) and what kind of software could be developed to facilitate such a structure. I’m going to connect Tim with John De Oliveira and ActionItem.com.

After this I had a great lunch at Chez Nous with Jonas Lamis (the food was good, but the conversation was better - I need to revisit Chez Nous and think about what I’m eating, not just talk). Jonas is into stuff I think is so cool. He’s the founder of SciVestor, a “research and advisory firm focused on coming waves of disruptive technologies. [They do] Research and events for business and investment communities covering Life Extension, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Nanotechnology marketplaces.”

It was great getting to know Jonas (it always weird writing about someone when you know they will probably read it soon). I’m looking forward to continuing our conversations. I want to ask more about AI, Singularity, etc. But I think there are a couple videos and blog posts I need to watch/read beforehand. We talked mostly about the Startup District and after lunch went and drove around the East Side to scope out warehouses.

Finally went to the Long Center and volunteered with the American Cancer Society - @daveiam, Tom, and I were there talking to people about SharingHope.tv - it’s a great social site for cancer survivors and others to share their stories. ACS and the HBMG Foundation are sponsoring the showing of The Love Sonatas there.

At the Long Center I ran into David Smith, CEO of HBMG and formally of Technology Futures Inc, and Lyn Graft who Founded the Club E Network - both guys I enjoy talking to.

Back at home I jogged to Marcus Ceniceros‘ place and had a long conversation about the University of Texas and it’s place in the State of Texas, how Austin politics work (i learned a ton), the Startup District, how to effectively rally people, and about managing relationships for the long term. Marcus will be teaching in Houston for 2years via Teach for America. Soon we will all be voting this guy into office. And even sooner he’ll be improving our educational policy.

More fun in Austin

Published
by
John Erik
on May 28, 2008
in Austin and General
. 0 Comments

Recap of a great Memorial Day weekend

  • Went on a 2 hour bike ride with Jon and Will - rode our bikes from the UT campus to the greenbelt at 360
  • Danced up a storm, jumped in Barton Springs at 4am-ish with @cesart, @jon100, @rockgirl, @gloriakt, @imdane SEE DANE’S FLICKR
  • Startup Drinks at Cork and Co was great - excellent conversation all around, most notably with @jdhouse4, Rajat, and @damon
  • Rode down 2222 from Mount Bonnell on bikes+flaming torches with Will Roman (the photos below i stole from Will’s flickr stream - thanks man)
  • Went cliff diving with a ton of Twitters SEE KRISTINE’S POST
  • Cliff Jumping, Austin from Kristine Gloria on Vimeo.

What if Austin had a Startup _District_? the story thus far

Published
by
John Erik
on May 21, 2008
in Austin and startup district
. 9 Comments

I’ve been trying to write different things to explain what this startup district idea is… Sooo im gonna tell the story of how this came about and let you decide what to make of it.

Startup Disrict is just an idea that started in a conversation between Dane Hurtubise and myself several weeks ago. We were basically saying how much we love austin and talking about startups / entrepreneurs here. The topic came to the fact we didn’t think all the startups really knew each other. From there Dane said it would be awesome if Austin just had a startup district. …I don’t know about you, but when I heard that idea I was like “holy shit. you’re right on…” As pure concept I’m sure you can agree its a really cool idea. Basically it’s: have a bunch of startups and entrepreneurs in one place… Just calling it a district sounds cool - I mean, we have the Warehouse District. What’s that good for? I don’t know but calling it a District makes it an attraction.

After talking to Dane about this forever, I went home and told cesar about it via chat and he immediately pinged the domain name. By some off chance or act of god, the domain was available and he grabbed it faster than you can say wiimote.

That week I talked about it with the other guys at Conjunctured and we quickly saw that this idea really fell in line with what we want for Conjunctured. And that is, a place where entrepreneurs / one-two man startups / indepentends can work together - you know, coworking. The other side to conjunctured is having a brand and bringing in work as that brand - the reason to do this is to provide well paying hourly work to people who are working on their own startup or project but still need to be making some cash (like JobStrap). The idea there is that Conj would handle client serivces, and makes sure there is work avaliable (need to blog more on this).

So yeah, we felt like getting Conjunctured Coworking set up was 1.0 of the startup district idea - ultimately all Startup District really means is bringing people closer together in the hopes that everyone involved (including those looking to get involved) will benefit. Whether it’s Conjunctured or not, it seems like there would need to be some sort of central hub or commons at the center of all this - a place for people to start.

Soon after this we all met Thomas Marriott from GameWager. He had just moved their company from Houston to Austin and was looking for something exactly like this. At Startup Drinks (btw there is one this Sun. 4/24) I told Thomas about the idea of having a Startup District flag and all the startups involved also flying flags into the streets… Thomas being a competitive gamer and an all around boisterous kinda guy loved the idea. He came up with some pretty fun plans to incorporate the flags concept, assuming all this works out.

A couple days later I was riding my bike home from Whole Foods and Mayor Will Wynn was walking home also… so I had a walk and talk conversation with him about the idea. Basically he said talk to Lee Leffingwell or someone with the Emereging Technology Fund and to the east side neighborhood planning committee.

The next step was putting something up on the domain. I found out about the DEMOcocktail party dayof. So before Colin Anawaty and I rolled out to the party, I put up a barebones black text site and fed in a startupdistrict twitter feed. Im glad I had something up because there ended up being a ton of people great people who were willing to listen to me talk about this Startup District idea im all jazzed up about. People I talked to there were Chris Shipley (thanks Carla), Co-Founder of Guidewire Group, the people who put on DEMO (she tweeted about it), John Hime (thanks Christine)(he said he really likes the idea), Andrew Busey (it was really brief, but I told him :), Gerald Zhou formerly of Austin Ventures now at Rackspace (should be talking more with Gerald soonish), Daniel Hope of TrackSuitCEO (he blogged about it here), Jonas Lamis of Scivestor, Aruni of BabbleSoft, Josh Dillworth of Porter Novelii (he blogged about it), and some others.

After the party Colin, who just moved back to town from LA and is the Creative Director for GaimTheory, said he would help out creating a real site for startupdistrict.com and built a sweet little one on drupal.

Colin had the good idea that all the people who really want this to happen should start meeting twice a month. So without much planning we sent an email to all the guys mentioned thus far. Cesart, Dane, Thomas, Dave, and I all ended up making it - Colin hosted, and even provided beer and cheese and fruit trays. The meetup was awesome and I hope Dane feels like a king every time someone says “Startup District,” because he’s the one who said it in the first place. w00t!

…and that’s all I got so far. I need to write another post that talks more about the website and talking to different audiences. .. off to wordpress fest..

Walkandtalk meeting with Austin Mayor Will Wynn

Published
by
John Erik
on April 23, 2008
in Austin and Goals
. 6 Comments

Today I ran into Mayor Will Wynn on 5th street. I asked if I could walk and talk with him. Per my tweets afterwards, here’s what happened:

  • Me w/ 1 minute version of our plans for a Startup District: startups in close proximity = innovation, attraction for Austin, reclaim our diminishing spot as the number 2 location for startups, proposed east side location because of price, light rail.
  • Mayor: the city has been talking about something like that for 10 years now. No one has taken the lead.
  • Mayor: you better get to know the neighborhood planning committee (for the east side)
  • Maor: what kind of startups are you talking about.
  • Me: internet, digital media, gaming, etc. - not silicon, not enterprise software
  • Mayor: talk to the emerging technology fund at their next open meeting and propose the idea. It’s in line with what they want. and there are funds there (Kristine Gloria thanks for finding the link).
  • Me: staring at Will Wynn as he walks off  ::Our mayor is a sharp dresser. I gotta remember to take pictures with people::

Austin Startup Community Vision - true alpha

Published
by
John Erik
on April 21, 2008
in Austin and Coworking
. 6 Comments

google image

…for Austin

  • Austin has a Startup District. Blocks of startups flying their flags to the world - I want this to be an attraction when people come to Austin. Highest props to Dane Hurtubise for originally coming up with this one.
  • The startup community in Austin knows each other. (Yeah.)
  • When tech people come to Austin we twitter ‘em up and we welcome them as family. When they get they know wher to go and where they can stay. We love our community.
  • AustinStartup.com has stuff to talk about non stop. Like the valley, people who run blogs about austin startups can live off just blogging. There is that much traffic; because people really care. right?! …this is how the community stays up-to-date with the people around them - people report on it.
  • One of us hits a home run. I’m talkin Google. :)
  • We have several kick ass coworking spaces - including one that is straight up free.
  • (1 Year) We have a micro fund - 10-15 teams per year - 25K max. similar to ycom / techstars <— <3
  • Oh, and we have people running the fund who know what they are doing — who are these people in Austin? Answer me that. …I know one I want on the team: Jared Slosberg. Sosa bothers would be nice. I could go on.
  • there is a bar downtown that you can walk into at anytime and see some great startup people.

…for The University of Texas

  • Coworking space for students, near campus -call it an incubator, call it a hatchery, i’ll call it coworking
  • Official concentration in entrepreneurship available to all majors - similar to “business foundations”
  • Grads and Undergrads know where to go if they have an idea or are interested in entrepreneurship -single place that embraces them, fosters them, understands them. COMEON!

conjunctured guys, john sibley butler, marc nathen, whurley, andrew hyde, Thomas Marriott … just so you know, i thought of all of you while writing this.

//

Forms and verbiage, feel free to pass it on:
Conjunctured is opening a Coworking space in Austin. We’re following the lead of some of our friends in other cities: [http://www.indyhall.org/] [http://nwcny.com/]

We’re looking to plant this space in the heart of a “Startup District.” A place where all the startups in Austin live. Where we proudly fly our flags to world. The district is an attraction in Austin. If you think you might be interested in playing with us, let us know by filling out this fancy form, here:
http://tinyurl.com/68f89z

If you don’t need / want a space. But you’re interested in sponsoring this endeavor (great for social capital, exposure to potential recruits, and PR), you can let us know that, here:

http://tinyurl.com/5usods

The number one reason why I love the Austin Startup Community

Published
by
John Erik
on April 15, 2008
in Austin
. 2 Comments

I’m not sure if y’all know this, ohh my 50 visitors, but the Startup Community in Austin has a hawt group of g33k girls!! (just look at that sweet, blue VC Wear tee, “Your Mom is not a test market.“)

These are the twitter’n, text messagin, geek loven, iPwn sportin, black boxy glasses wearin, nerd babes of Waggener Edstrom.

As you can see here they’re always busy in meetings and twittering things like “Beauty bar rules..plus I just got hit on in the women’s bathroom ..hot!” from @gloriakt (the scenester looking one in black) and “I am wearing my iPhoneDevCamp shirt tomorrow, you wear your BarCamp shirt and we’ll see who gets the most dudes… ;-)” from @keelyanne (stripes, cardigan and dual tone hair) and finally “I’m in!! @gloriakt you better come tonight since you missed all the spooner action last night” from @kmclarty (PINK - w/ cunning elf ear showing in second and third pics).

Above, in pow-wow fashion, likely twitting about @whurley’s upcoming escapades or the next Austin Startup Drinks.

…So, here you have it. Bring it on girls!

Operation bolster Austin startup/tech community via video+conversations

Published
by
John Erik
on April 14, 2008
in Austin
. 10 Comments

(these awesome g33k girls say “read this post!“)

Here’s what I wanna do. I want to talk to every tech/startup person in austin. and I want to take a video camera. I want to know what they are doing, what they want (from the community/city). And, if they don’t know about beautiful things like door64, Jelly, refresh & geek austin, coworking movements 1 and 2, txventures, etc. I want to share that with them.

I’m so pumped on Austin from Startup Drinks and the Barhunt, this would be like my dream right now. But, if I’m going to be spending a considerable amount of time doing this I would need to have either a trust fund (OH HAI!) or some kind of other little income. I think meeting all these people, videoing it, sharing teh good news, if you will, could be valuable to some people. I mean, I’ll post all the videos to a blog, I’ll wear a company’s t-shirt, you know, sponsorship. hmmm…. Sounds like I could put a little startup in this idea (looking to VC Wear’s pitch document for clever inspiration).

Vision: Talk to every tech/startup person or person who cares about tech/startups in Austin (or until diminishing return).

Problem: SILOS!! No one knows what anyone else is doing/up to and thus overall innovation in Austin is, well, not as high as it could be.

Solution: CONVERSATION!!! Talk to all these people, document it, share it with y’all, share what I know/learn with the people I’m talking to. Swirl everything up on a blog like it was a fruit cocktail. Y’all could even tell me what to ask.

Market Size: it could be bigger than Hutto.

Team: Yours truly! (maybe a flipcam.)

Monetization: Hope so. All I need is enough to live. So about 20k a month will do (wah!). How am I gonna make it? that’s the next line.

Funding: Cool organizations/people/groups are going to sponsor me, because they like initiative, because they want me to tell everyone just how cool they are, because what I’m doing will benefit them indirectly.

Contact/paypal address: jmetcalf27(at)gmail.com

Potential Partners:

Look at that! every place I just listed has AUSTIN in their name. ha. I guess tomorrow I have to contact all these places. yikes.

if you copy my idea i’ll be sad.

Austin Startup/Geek Bar - FIND IT!

Published
by
John Erik
on April 12, 2008
in Austin
. 5 Comments

I was out tonight with Cesar, Jon and Kristine - we had a good time hopping from Key Bar, the Belmont, SIX, Cuba, One2One… (none of us drank btw).

In keyBar we were talking about meeting people. We (or maybe it was just me) decided that ‘if they were on Twitter‘ was a good determinant for, would they be fun to talk to. Of course we met nobody who was on Twitter. So, with that in mind, I did a Twitter search for Austin just now and got ~2000 results. I made it through page 45 (of like 130) looking at people’s links and following them if they seemed interesting to me. By doing this I totally ruined my nice ratio of followers to followees, but who cares - I’m really looking to meet more interesting, creative, entrepreneural, techy, people in Austin, and I’m hoping this will be a good way to do it - I’ll let you know. Hiii if I just followed you!

Something else I think would be amazing is having a single place where startup/tech people usually hang out - we need to pick a place. THE place for techies, startup junckies, social media geeks, designers to hang out. It doesn’t have to be the same year after year - think of it like the clubs in LA. The cool clubs are are where all the celebs are. ohhh. Now replace celebs with geeks! w00t! I think it would be awesome to walk into a bar or club or whatev and see all the great startup types we have around here. WHERE ARE MY PEOPLE AT!

I tweeted this out about the bar spot and got some response: cuatros, firehouse, speakeasy, one2one, & sapphire. I’m going to check all these out tomorrow night. Let the hunt begin! …If by some luck you read this and want to come along, well that would be SUPER! just tweet me up!

People to meet in Austin / set meetings with

Published
by
John Erik
on April 10, 2008
in Austin
. 2 Comments

Last edit - July 1

Some of these folks I’ve met and some I have not… now to have meetings with them regarding the development of Austin’s startup community, the Conjunctured coworking space, the plan for a Startup District, etc.

Entrepreneurs/invest

Gov types

  • Dawanna dukes - starte rep for the district that covers east austin
  • Sheral cole - councel. east side revitalization process
  • Lee Leffingwell, Council Member Place 1
  • Mayor Will Wynn - Done
  • Rosalinda Jalifi - economic growth and redevelopment services, small business development program
  • Brewster McCracken - http://www.brewstermccracken.org/
  • Eve Richter - Economic Development

Edu/othr

more to come! i’m past my bed time to get 6hrs… more politicos, angels, law, realestate … need to look at old business cards

Leadership Austin - AH! Baby Boomers

Published
by
John Erik
on April 8, 2008
in Austin
. 7 Comments

“insert pic of persons age 44-62″ :)

Last weekend Thom Singer invited me to be apart of a panel. The topic was Boomers and how they will be affecting the Austin area. Here are some things I took away:

  • There needs to be an app that shows everyone (people my age especially) a time line of their life. down to saying, “this is when your parents will die and this is when you will die…” This sounds kinda drag but it’s important stuff to know and think about. We need to be thinking about what were going to do to take care of out parents and/or close friends. Unless we think about these things now, we’re bound to be unprepared. I think this can be done with a web or facebook app. - I lots of ideas about this that I’ll spare you.
  • When asked where they want to retire, the majority of the Boomers in the room said in a community of others like them… it was the “we’ll be old ladies together” line. “Grow old on the porch swing,” kinda thing. There needs to be a way to connect these people boomers. My take was they need to be better educated in technology so they can use social media to find each other, see who their neighbors are. The joke here was “Geriatricbook.” Also, if something like this was to exist it cannot be termed a social network. That phrase is ingrained in everyone’s minds as a kids toy. grrr
  • The conversation was purposefully broad. There absolutely needs to be more talk about this and it needs to be done with statistics, demographics, all the breaks downs on the board. People were talking from their own bubbles, their own experiences - the percentages need to be put on the board and it needs to be determined how one side can help the other.

Thanks again for the invite Thom. And thanks Jon.

Austin Entrepreneur Townhall

Published
by
John Erik
on March 5, 2008
in Austin, Texas Related and Texas Ventures
. 1 Comment

449776021_d6b5d5faf7.jpg

The night started with some casual networking. Kevin Koym our conversational host for the night told everyone this was not a sit-down event. That we needed to get off our butt and stop talking to the people we came in with. We were all there to meet people. I thought it was a great thing to say - really set the mood. Kevin knows what he’s doing, he’s held these kind of townhalls all over the place (Chile, Mexico… Kevin, correct me?). We also watched a clip from A Beautiful Mind, this one where John Nash (Russell Crowe) declares The “best result comes from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself. Incomplete. Incomplete. Because the best result will come when everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself and the group.”

After a quick intro to the agenda of the night’s events we broke into groups of 3. Each person answered 3 questions: Why did you come here? What challenges are you facing in your business? Who are you? In my group was Jon Lebkowsky (more on Jon in wikipedia) and a nice guy named David? who was not yet an entrepreneur, is working on finding his passion in life, and doesn’t let his kids on the internet.

Then the discussion started. We were in a half-circle auditorium, the one at IC2 if you are familiar. Kevin seeded the discussion. He wanted to know, what can we do together? Where can we take Austin?

The conversation for some reason stayed on social media for quite some time - we can we all use it to efficiently make more meaningful connections. There was a lot of talk regarding the Digital Convergence Initiative, who’s goal is “To create an economic super cluster through the growth of the Digital Convergence business and research base of the Central Texas corridor from Waco through Austin to San Antonio and the surrounding and included communities.”

To further develop Austin as a hub for innovation I posed a couple things: There must be free flow of information (who’s working on what, etc), we must eliminate good ol’ boy networks, and use the internet to do this efficiently. This is what DCI is doing for businesses and this is what our co-company, Conjunctured is working on for the individual entrepreneur.

Of course the comparison came up between our Silicon Hills and Silicon Valley. Jonathan McCoy, one of Austin’s youngest serial entrepreneurs was called out because he’s leaving for San Francisco soon. Granted he has a good reason - he’s working on semantic web applications and the only place in the world for that is a little district in The Valley some are calling Sema.

hmm… If we believe that innovation comes from collaboration and collaboration can only happen when people know what the other individuals/companies are up to - I think the bay area benefits from such an extensive blog network - thus resulting in everyone knowing everyone else’s business AND everyone benefiting for a peer review, scrutiny. We need to work on a way to facilitate communication in Austin - these townhalls are a great way to do that, same with Rise Austin.

There is so much to say on the conversations that were had, I’m going to cut this off know because I’m way over my 20min time limit. Pretty soon we’ll have a video of the night that I will post here. Until then, here is a purposefully lame video by Saatchi and Saatchi (thanks Dave for this).

Join the Entrepreneur Townhall Google Group if you’d like to attend the next one - sometime after south-by.

Where to post jobs in Austin / active communities

Published
by
John Erik
on February 15, 2008
in Austin
. 0 Comments

Let me know if I’m missing any important ones under these topics, this is the list I sent to the City of Austin guys…

Communities with active job boards

Other Active Groups

Happy Hours/Events

Know any good UI designers in Austin?

Published
by
John Erik
on February 15, 2008
in Austin
. 0 Comments

To follow up on my last post, we had drinks with the AustinGo guys. They’re working hard on the site - I told them a list of places to post for jobs. They need Plone developers.

On that note, I’m always surprised with how little people know about what is going on in the city.

I was watching DEMO the other day and discovered a new Austin startup: Voyant Inc., purveyors of Voyant @Home. It’s a downloadable java app that allows you to create a financial time line for yourself and/or family. meh.

It’s not like mint.com (a service that connects to all your financial accounts and creates pretty graphs to tell you when you’ve spent to much eating out, etc.)- you have to enter everything manually. I love time lines, but they have to be pretty. That makes them fun to use. My friend Michael had me watch a TED video of JJ Abrams, in it he says how he loves Apple computers because they are so beautiful. It’s like they look at you and say “what are you going to write worthy of me.” Needless to say, Voyant @Home is not really fun to use this time around.

Austin. Go!

Published
by
John Erik
on January 31, 2008
in Austin and Texas Related
. 1 Comment

austingo.png

Myself, Cesar and Dusty went to the first of six Townhall Meetings regarding the redesign of the City of Austin’s website. At one time our site was voted the one of the best in the nation, unfortunately it hasn’t changed since then.

Pete Collins, CIO, did most of the talking and was very receptive to the audience’s thoughts and opinions - and even gave out his personal email address and phone number. We talked with Matt Esquibel who’s heading up the project. He seemed to really know his stuff and was a designer in his past life so I’m looking forward to a beautiful exterior for the site. Something that was interesting to me, they’ve deiced to build the site in Plone . They are looking to hire asap - I believe they have three full time positions open.

I was telling Paul Hopingardner how I believe the city needs a private media network to talk about/publicize what the city is up to. I’m subscribed to all these blog from The Valley, but really what I want to read about is what’s happening here in Austin. …We’re having drinks on this topic soon, I’ll report back.

On another note, it was my first time inside our City Hall, it’s very sleek, but quirky at the same time - fits Austin.