Austin Startup

We've Moved

Please come visit us at the new site!

You can find AustinStartup at http://www.AustinStartup.com as we're no longer here on TypePad.

Feed Readers: The new feed is at http://feeds.austinstartup.com/feed. This will never change again. Promise.

Email Subscriptions: Get your daily dose at http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=1531262&loc=en_US. Sorry we can't automatically move you.

[Note: On our first day on the new WordPress site, GoDaddy made some fancy technical changes that took the site down for half the day. What a great first day!]

Get The New Feed Today!

There hasn't been a single post to the old blog all year (it's all over on the new Wordpress site at http://www.austinstartup.com) yet we still have hundreds of people on the old feed. Get on the new feed! It won't change again ever, promise.

http://feeds.austinstartup.com/feed

We've Moved!

You can find the blog at www.AustinStartup.com. As soon as the DNS is finished propogating, that domain name will no longer forward here to the TypePad site, it will take you directly to the new site.

If you've saved http://austinstartup.typepad.com in your favorites, please update your favorites to go to directly to www.AustinStartup.com.

Feed Readers: We're trying to convert your FeedBurner feed for you. If that doesn't work, please pick up the new feed over on the new blog site.

We have lots of new and interesting things coming as a result of the move!

Jim Cash Joins BSG Board

In it's first year of formation, BSG secured $20M in funding, acquired The Concours Group, acquired Industrial Sciences, and acquired New Paradigm. To cap off the year, they've announced that Dr. James Cash has joined the board.

Jim Cash serves on the board of some of the largest corporations in the world, including GE, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Chubb. He retired in 2003 as the James E. Robison Professor and Senior Associate Dean of the Harvard Business School. He joins Steve Papermaster, Warren Weiss of Foundation Capital, and Mitch Kertzman of Hummer Winblad who already sit on the board.

vcfo Acquires Startup Staffing

Accountants to the startup stars, vcfo (Virtual CFO) announced that they are acquiring staffing company Startup Staffing. vcfo's focus on providing flexible financial and accounting services to startup and high growth companies combined with staffing services focused on startups should prove to be a powerful combination. Startup Staffing founder Greg Garrison will run the new entity which will be known as The Startup Staffing Group, a vcfo Company.

vcfo has more than 80 financial professionals to service their clients in Austin, Dallas, Denver, and Seattle. The headcount for Startup Staffing was undisclosed, as were terms of the deal.

Element Labs Raises $12.75M Series B

Element Labs, which provides low-energy LED lighting systems to the entertainment industry, raised $12.75M in a Series B funding. Back in June the company announced a new flexible LED video screen that has been a big hit at events like the MTV Video Music Awards, and the X Games. If you take a look at Britney Spears controversial performance at the awards, you can see some of the 125 half-meter Versa TUBEs which were aligned upright and placed side by side. Line up these Versa TUBEs and they act like a video display, only with much more created control about how you display it. Take a look at some images from the Reunion Tour of The Police to get an idea of how it looks. You can arrange the tubes in any combination and multiple sizes and they act kind of like a flexible video display. Pretty cool stuff. We don't dare ask the price.

Heliovolt Picks Austin to Build Plant

Heliovolt Corp., Austin's very only CIGS company which has now raised over $109 million in venture funding,  has announced that it will be building a 20-megawatt factory here in Austin.  Considering that the Austin City Council recently approved an incentive package worth $600,000 to get Heliovolt to build here, we were surprised that the announcement took this long.   However, it appears that not everyone was excited about the prospects of a new factory which will employ 150 people.  Apparently, the Travis County commissioners recently rejected county tax abatements for HelioVolt, citing that the proposed plant did not create enough jobs to warrant such subsidies.  Fortunately, the company elected to choose Austin nonetheless.  The plant will be built at the Expo Business Park, a new development in Southeast Austin near Austin-Bergstom International Airport, and should have have panels in production by 2008.

iTaggit Sees 200% Growth

iTaggit is wrapping up it's first year of operations, and announcing that the number of users on the system has grown over 200 percent since July 2007. "The success of iTaggit can be contributed to the overwhelming need for an easy-to-use service that helps individuals organize and manage their things," said iTaggit CEO David Altounian. "The passion of our members is what keeps iTaggit growing and constantly improving to better meet the needs of our community."

Recent cool features include the iTaggit Wishlist (which came just in time for the holidays), a Facebook app, and the ability to list any of the items in your collection on eBay from without the iTaggit site. We think iTaggit's Parting Price feature is conceptually a big hit.