Published on
July 3, 2009 in
General.
We’re looking for a new venue for the Startup Houston Happy Hour held every first Thursday of the month from 6pm – 8pm.
The venue should be easily accessible to most people – even the Katy-Sugarland-Woodlands-Clear Lake area folks. In the past we’ve held it at Sonoma Wine Bar, the Tasting Room on Alabama and most recently at Saute Bistro.
Ideally, we would like lots of cheap or free parking, drink specials ($2-3 beer, $5-6 wine sounds about right) and plenty of space for 100 or so startup entrepreneurs and the people who love them to chat in an open, comfortable environment. We’re not looking for ’scenesters’ or blaring music of one kind or another, just a place that startup people can talk shop with a little social lubrication.
We have to pick a place before the next one rolls around on August 6th.
Here are a few suggestions – leave any you can think of in the comments and we’ll add them to the poll.
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Published on
July 2, 2009 in
General.
Have a happy 4th of July and a safe weekend!!! We’ll see everyone next month at a new location. More details to come next week.
Published on
June 4, 2009 in
General.
The Caroline Collective, the largest coworking site on the planet and southern book end of the Houston Tech Corridor is celebrating its one year anniversary on Saturday. It’s only been twelve months, but @carolineco has established itself as strong supporter of the Houston Startup and Arts scene and a good friend of freelancers everywhere. Congratulations to the hard work, vision and preserverance of the founders, Matthew Wettergreen and Ned Dodington along with their friends and tenants like Monica Danna and Grace Rodriguez who helped make an abandoned and decrepit warehouse into a hotbed for entrepreneurial activity.
Saturday June 6th
6pm – 10pm
Caroline Collective
4820 Caroline St.
Houston, TX 77004
facebook invite: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=184256345206
Published on
June 3, 2009 in
General.
UPDATE: Here are some videos from the event:
http://www.vimeo.com/5174186
http://www.vimeo.com/5294735
This from Joao Prado Maia of the Houston PHP Users Group:
Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP language, will be in Houston in June and graciously volunteered to do a presentation to our group! Sorry about the last minute modification, but we will need to move our meeting from our usual date/time to Wednesday June 10th at 6:00pm. The presentation details below from Rasmus himself:
————
Architecture, Performance, Optimization and Security.
I take a look at the performance of some popular PHP applications and go
through and show the common mistakes people make and show how much of a difference just a little bit of optimization makes.
Then, if there is still time and interest I’ll explain the current state
of XSS on the Web with some live examples of XSS issues on some local
sites. I usually like to have 2-3 hours, but I can squeeze it into less.
————-
I hope to see you all here for this great opportunity!
– Joao
Techcrunch has just announced the 20 winners of the fbFund, headed by startup rockstar Dave McClure (who you should all be following on twitter). One of our own homegrown startups & Houston Technology Center client, NutshellMail made the final cut and received another $25K to go with the first $1K they got for making the Top 50. The real benefit for the company is that they get to participate in the brand new Facebook Incubator program modeled on ‘Seed Combinator‘ programs like Y Combinator, TechStars and Austin’s own (and one I’m involved with personally) Capital Factory , called REV. NutshellMail founders Mark Schmulen, David Lyman and David Neubauer are heading to Palo Alto in the middle of June to take part in intensive mentoring sessions and network with Silicon Valley’s best and brightest over the summer. Congratulations to these hard-working guys who are making Houston proud.
Published on
May 27, 2009 in
General.
Hey All, Kurt Here. Long time, no write.
Anyway, I was just reading on CNN’s SciTechBlog how Apple might be shopping around for a location for a new $1 billion server farm and thought to myself ‘Why Not in Houston?’ We are already home to the Number 1 dedicated server hosting provider in the world. Why not Apple’s server farm as well? Does anyone know whether the Greater Houston Partnership, the Houston Technology Center’s Emerging Technology Council, or the Mayor’s Office is pursuing this? If not, they should. It is moves like this that help to build solid technology foundations for a city.
Apple plans $1 billion ’server farm’
Apple appears to be planning a major upgrade to its online capabilities. Reports indicate the company is shopping around for a location to build a $1 billion server farm. This cluster of networked computers would power Apple’s future Web operations.
The iTunes and the iPhone app store are certainly growing, but this massive project suggests Apple may have something new up its sleeve — or is the $1 billion price tag expected given the Apple gear that will likely be used?
Data Center Knowledge writes:
The size of the project raises interesting questions about Apple’s ambitions for its online operations. The $1 billion price tag is nearly twice the $500 to $600 million that Microsoft and Google typically invest in the enormous data centers that power their cloud computing platforms.
While the location of the data center is not yet decided, the Associated Press reports North Carolina lawmakers are salivating at the prospect of of bringing a billion dollars to their state. Legislators have proposed tax breaks for Apple that could amount to $46 million in the next decade, assuming the company reaches its $1 billion investment target within nine years:
Though the Apple site is initially expected to employ fewer than 100 full-time workers, legislators said the potential prize was so juicy it justified changing the state’s corporate tax formula to benefit a single company.
Come on Houston! Don’t let North Carolina walk away with this! Let’s bring Apple to Houston!!
On the Texas Startup Blog, Alex Muse writes about the types of angel investors: http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2009/05/05/how-to-find-angel-investors-revisited/
Here are his labels for angels:
- Type 1: Novice angels with financial objectives
- Type 2: Experienced angels with financial objectives
- Type 3: Novice angels with subject matter expertise
- Type 4: Experienced angels with subject matter expertise
- Type 5: Family, friends and colleagues
The classifications are exactly right and Alex says that a new venture seeking angels should shoot for types 3 and 4, which is spot on. But what if you can’t find those types or you’re forced to deal with sub-optimal angels? I personally believe that an entrepreneur’s worst funding nightmare is to take money from someone who is an inexperienced angel investor. Friends and family are difficult emotionally because it changes the dynamic of the relationship forever, and financial expectations must be managed separately from personal issues. On the other hand, ‘professional’ angels are much tougher, especially brand new angels. More often than not, new angels are using your deal to determine if being an investor is right for them. They don’t know what questions to ask and fumble around to determine what ‘feels’ right to them – which may or may not have any basis in the real world. They also don’t have any idea of the emotional toll it will take to see a their investment to a successful outcome. These types can burn up a lot of an entrepreneur’s time with multiple meetings and discussions about meaningless projections and untested assumptions. This is often done so that the angel is comforted and reassured that they are making an informed decision. Pulling the trigger and making the commitment to invest separates talkers from closers. A seasoned investor can make a decision on whether to invest or not in the first one hour meeting – of course it will take considerably longer to actually come to terms and a lot can go wrong in the meantime. A seasoned investor will also have a rolodex of other angels and industry contacts that will help push the startup along at an accelerated pace. An amateur investor requires a lot of hand-holding before (and after) a decision is made and that should be factored in when negotiating with angels.
Published on
May 7, 2009 in
General.
Just a reminder that we’ll be having our monthly Houston Startup Happy Hour tonight, May 7, from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. at Saute Bistro at 2303 Richmond Avenue.
Hope to see y’all there!
Published on
May 6, 2009 in
General.
This neat widget just published in Nano Letters, in a paper published by Ambarish Ghosh and Peer Fischer from Harvard, “Controlled Propulsion of Artificial Magnetic Nanostructured Propellers.”
From "Controlled Propulsion of Artificial Magnetic Nanostructured Propellers," by Ambarish Ghosh and Peer Fischer
It’s a new kind of nano-swimmer, functionally similar to the rotating flagella found on bacteria. This caught my eye because at the Advanced Energy Consortium, we’ve been looking for nano-thingies that can propel themselves to explore oil reservoirs. The authors are more oriented towards biological applications, of course. I think we’re going to see a number of new flavors of self-propelled nanoswimmers appear (at least I hope so). The first one came from Ayusman Sen and Tom Mallouk at Penn State a couple of years ago; the videos on Sen’s website are great. They also just published a great article on their catalytic nanomotors in Scientific American. I think it’s still on the newstand.
Published on
April 1, 2009 in
General.
Check out the full interview here and be sure to make an effort to attend one of the BioWeekend events, BioCamp Houston ‘09 in particular.
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