Austin Startup Week: Startup Crawl Highlights

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This past week, Austin hosted an interesting event to promote the growing collection of technical startups in the city; Austin Startup Week. The final night of the event was a Startup Crawl giving the 50+ companies a chance to present their solutions/ideas and meet with the broader technology community in Austin. I attended the crawl to see what the latest trends in startups are and if I could find any solutions to try for myself or bring into Dell via a partnership for our cloud platforms.

Thoughts:

  • I am an old-timer now, the average age was easily 22 and it was great to see such an enthusiastic group of young people creating new companies
  • I did not see very much open source at all; this was a disappointment for me and something that the open source community needs to put some efforts toward to keep the movement going in next generation startups
  • Social Media Scoring –  I saw MANY companies creating proprietary solutions allowing companies to better evaluate their social media influence via significant data analysis;  interesting that none of these are public like Klout where I can just enter my social media account and get results.All of these are behind the scenes solutions for companies to purchase
  • Email – people are working on interesting solutions for email and mobility for GMAIL. It would be nice to see these solutions for cross-email systems including Outlook, etc but at least people are working on creative ideas for email

To help promote awareness of some of the companies I spoke with, here are a few that I liked:

  • Taskbox “Your Inbox is now a Taskbox”
  • Whit.li “Explore Minds Like Yours”
  • Ziften “Breathe New Life Into PCs”
  • Umbel “Audience is Everything”
  • RideScout “Urban Transportation Made Simple”
  • WPEngine “Hassle Free WordPress Hosting”

Of course, there were lots of other companies that I didn’t have time to visit or were not interesting to me, which doesn’t mean that are not doing great things. Feel free to checkout the Austin Startup Week site to see the complete list of companies, etc.

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