State0 Blog

This is Tarun. He is a model Austin entrepreneur. He just recently graduated but has already worked on a couple of cool projects and is currently working on SparkPhone. SparkPhone is an app for smartphones that enables international and long distance calling. It is a simple value proposition: it costs less to call people.

Cesar D’Onofrio founded CommonSense in 2006. Charlie is the VP of Marketing at CommonSense and holds down the Austin office. CommonSense does IT consulting and email marketing for many companies in the Austin and San Antonio area. They are starting to get more into iPhone product development and iPhone consulting. They are using the consulting to drive the direction of the product development. This seems to be a common theme for startups right now perhaps because of the lack of seed and early stage money.

David Nguyen is starting a cool green company called Natures Wash. He has a bag of nuts that will make your clothes washing a delight. He is a good communicator and has a very interesting offering. I like the green space. There seems to be money for this kind of thing if you can find the right kind of socially interested investor. Hope you enjoy the interview and go purchase yourself some soap nuts.

Byron was at ProductCamp. This is him talking about his company conferencecalltraining.com. He started his consultancy a while back and has been growing it as technology has changed. Byron has some interesting stuff to say about conference calls. I should probably get his help in controlling my untamed usage of Skype.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of hanging out at ProductCampAustin. It was a great opportunity to learn more about Product Management and get to meet other folks who love strategy. I met a number of other entrepreneurial Austinites there. I purchased a 3GS last week and I love it. All of these interviews were taken on it. It is not the HD quality I was getting before, but it is much more convenient. Hope you enjoy this first interview with Sherry.

Sherry Lowry is a local serial entrepreneur. She has started 7 different businesses in 7 different industries. For the last fourteen years, she has been transfering those experiences to others through coaching and training. She is also currently working on Bridging Futures. Bridging futures is a business built around helping companies with e-commerce and social networking. She is a sharp and wise member of our community. She volunteers and advises in many areas of the Austin Startup and Social Media scene.

Naveed Lalani is a Founder and the CXO of Piryx. Piryx is an Austin startup that offers services for political, non-profit, and government organizations. They have tools for tracking campaign contributions, fundraising, paperwork, and compliance. Piryx started as a contract firm doing work for local political campaigns. I have often read it is not good to start a product company by self funding through contracting because you get pulled into supporting and doing work for your clients too often. However, it seems to have been a perfect fit for Piryx, probably because all of their clients were in their target market.

Naveed is also involved with Texas Ventures, a UT organization that promotes student entrepreneurship. If you visit enough Austin startup events you will eventually run into him. His specialty is experience design. If you have a design problem you are wrestling through maybe you should drop him a line.

Enjoy the interview. The sound is a little low so you may need to up your volume.

David Walsh is a serial entrepreneur in the telecom space. He also happens to be my office neighbor. He has made Austin his home base to start a new company StarView that is focused on delivering VoIP and Data to the enterprise. One of the interesting things we talked about was how telecom innovation is starting to be about software these days. It is no longer about the physical infrastructure. It is interesting that this is happening as we are seeing the same kind of revolution with wireless communication.

The StarView solution is a simple one that I have always thought should be more common. You plug your ethernet jack into their standard looking office phone and it works as your office phone where ever you are. Why is this not more common? I think it is absurd that we have to bring a technician into the office every time we want to move a desk or redirect a phone line.

Most interesting though is that David has set StarView up to donate a 10% of profits directly into a non-prof. It is cool to see responsible entrepreneurship here in Austin. The more that our corporations start to look like non-profits and our non-profits begin to look like our corporations the better we will be as a society. I have been reading Social Velocity recently and Nell seems to be of a similar opinion. You should check her blog out if you are interested in Austin’s social entrepreneurship.

(I had to film this interview on my webcam because my wife stole my car and my camera and ran off to DC. Scandalous.)

(OK, I promise Brad does not actually look like this in normal life. YouTube somehow chose that frame to display and I cannot fix it.)

Brad Powell was nice enough to have lunch with me this week. He is the CEO and a founder of DadLabs. DadLabs produces a great show on the web that includes “Advice for the modern dad by dads and daddys on parenting, parenthood, fatherhood, children, and wives.” It is great to see such avid social entrepreneurship here in Austin. I am not a dad myself but I work with youth and I often see the affects of both good and bad parenting. I love that these guys are putting the time in to back dads up. If you are a dad, you should check them out.

DadLabs is sponsored by BabyBjorn. It is a great match up. I almost enjoy the product placement. There are a number of services that could take from that lead. Seamless product placement is a much better strategy for online video than display ads or abrupt transitions to sponsored content.

Brad and his team have built up experience producing the show and have been in the internet video business as long as almost anyone else here in Austin. I have seen the DadLabs team on a few panels and they are involved in the local social media scene. If you are fighting through some of the branding or sponsorship issues associated with online video, you should consider getting in contact with these guys.

Tom Sheahan just moved to Austin from Australia. He is the founder of Red Oxygen which is an enterprise text messaging company. He is looking to slowly move his headquarters here to Austin. Red Oxygen delivers messages for many major brands already and is hoping to expand its US customer base by setting up shop here. This is a step above the email TXT that many websites take advantage of currently. If you are interested in doing some TXTing to your customers, they have an API that makes things easy.

I met Brooks and took this quick interview at SXSWi but I never got around to posting it. In his free time Brooks built TweetChat. It is a quality site for group chatting on twitter hashes. If you would be interested in embedding something like this into your own site, send him an email.