The McCombs School of Business’s Texas Venture Labs launched its inaugural Venture Week on Wednesday with a conference at the University of Texas that showcased some of the city’s hottest tech start-ups and showed off some entrepreneurial success stories.
The Texas Venture Labs Expo kicked off four days of entrepreneur-focused activity at the University of Texas’ (UT) AT&T Conference Center in Austin with presentations by 15 early stage technology companies and a keynote speech by Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and now professor of innovation at UT.
Venture Labs director Rob Adams said the week was a consolidated showcase of the university’s entrepreneurial activities from throughout the year. “We’re taking all the entrepreneurial activity happening at the University of Texas at Austin campus and having it all occur in the same week,” Adams said. “So it’s kind of like South By Southwest for entrepreneurial activity on the campus.”
The conference brings together entrepreneurs, Austin’s business community, investors and alumni. As well as Metcalfe’s keynote, Wednesday’s expo featured speeches by the UT-aligned Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) and the university’s Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC). Both focused on local success stories. The ATI’s Isaac Barchas said that in the last three years ATI had generated about $75 million for more than 50 companies, while the OTC’s Richard Miller claimed the office had generated more than $26 million from licensing and royalty payments in the last six months alone. It had also filed more than 1,000 patents in the last five years at UT.
More than 100 people attended the expo, which was open to the public, and heard presentations from such companies as structured data search company Infochimp, cloud data security firm Gazzang, and ‘tweets for TV’ social media company Mass Relevance, which recently provided the tweet-delivery platform for CNN and ABC during the Royal Wedding.
Brandon Knicely, managing partner at Austin Innovation Partners, said he was attending the event to stay plugged into the local innovation scene. “It’s important to have community,” he said. “One of the great things about Austin is that there’s a lot of community and we’re all pretty active. Just like ATI helps Texas Venture Labs, Texas Venture Labs helps ATI – there’s a community of us who are entrepreneurs who have done several start-ups that actually help give back and provide support, provide channels, or distribution, or access, or contacts. We’re pretty engaged in the eco-system around start-ups here in Austin.”
Venture Week kicks off the 2011 Global Venture Labs Investment Competition – the self-proclaimed “Super Bowl of Investment Competitions” – which involves 40 new business competitors from 12 countries. The start-ups are competing for a prize package worth $135,000, which includes an outright grant, access to the McCombs entrepreneurial faculty to aid in fund raising from institutional sources, an ATI launch package, a winner’s announcement advertisement in Inc. Magazine, and the opportunity to open the NASDAQ OMX Stock Market on June 3, 2011.
The conference and competition runs through Saturday.
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