Christian Reed of EastWest Alternative Assets Talks about his view of Austin Alternative Energy Policy and His Investing Interests

Are you a native of Austin?

I am from San Diego. In December I will be here three years.

What brought you here?

Austin was voted a top “Green” city and the overall thinking is very progressive. When we decided to establish a US presence for our carbon trading and alternative energy companies we settled on Austin for this reason and the fact that it is the capital of a state that is leading the way in alternative energies, is progressive in the adoption of alternative energy and provides a great investment climate.

So you are interested in Angel investing?

We have done some start up investing. Right now we’re interested in alternative energy such as next generation batteries, solar start-ups, bio-fuel plays and any other progressive technologies that will help reduce our dependence of foreign sources for energy. While Austin offers rebates for solar panels I think the city is missing an opportunity for real financial benefit within the current rebate program. While aggressive compared to many other cities, it could be more progressive. Currently the city pays the rebate amount in cash, up-front, calculated from the “plate rating” of the system that is being installed. Many factors cause this to be inaccurate and not fair for the city of Austin, conversion inefficiency, shading, orientation to the sun to name a few, all these will impact the actual production of electricity from a solar array. Right now because The city should be paying for electricity generated and placed back on the grid, not just equipment installed.

I have proposed that a ‘FIT’ or Feed-In-Tariff program be explored as an option to more accurately track and fund solar installations, not only would the cash up-front be significantly reduced but the amount payable would be accurate and calculated off of actual energy produced by a system.

I’m working on building my case for this. Whatever the plates on your solar system say, then that’s what you are going to get back as a rebate. Well, if your panels are shaded then you are not going to generate anywhere near that amount of energy. In some brief discussions with Austin Energy we have a few things to tackle before we could move forward, first to satisfy the “de-regulation question” and there are also some system ownership issues. As a financier of Solar Installations for large commercial projects East West Alternative Assets has an interest in owning the system and selling the power. If we become the seller of power within Austin Energy’s area the argument is that by default they are “deregulated.”

What else do you invest in?

I believe water conservation is also important. When you see that some of our major rivers are not reaching the ocean I think one must realize the machine is broken. If the rivers and oceans are not able to do the job then the earth is not going to operate how it is supposed to, water is the vital part of all life and it should be an issue that everyone takes seriously. Not long ago, the Colorado River failed to reach the ocean. That means the cycle of water returning to the ocean is broken. The system cannot cleanse itself.

Perhaps angel investment can help with that.

I think there will be great opportunity for good companies with ideas on how to conserve water and we would welcome the opportunity to help them along.

What other areas do you invest in?

We are involved in oil & gas exploration, carbon reduction/green house gas reduction projects, carbon credit trading, real estate, technology, and various other areas including solar finance and project management.

What are your investment requirements?

What we look for mainly is the ability to add value to our investments personally. We don’t take a shot-gun approach and hope one in ten investments work out. We take a personal role in nurturing investments along with our input and contacts and other investments all working synergistically to help one another.

Best regards,
Hall T.

Tim Keyes of Keyes Capital Talks about His Startup Experience in Austin and His New Endeavor

What do you do?

I work for two different family offices. The first is Lubar & Co. which has its primary office in Milwaukee and the second is Keyes Capital which is based here in Austin. Both groups are focused on buying existing, profitable operating companies and also investing in real estate.

What is a family office?

Family offices invest money on behalf of the families they represent. They are similar to a private equity firm or real estate fund but do not typically take on outside or institutional money. This provides them with great latitude in what they can invest in and allows them to exit investments only when appropriate and not a predetermined time frame.

How did you come to Austin?

I worked in Austin in the late 90’s for a start-up company I helped found. When things dried up here in the early 2000s I went back to Wisconsin where I was born and raised. The best part of my first go around in Texas was meeting my wife who I had to drag up North. After too many cold winters we decided to moved back to Texas and start Keyes Capital and expand the footprint of Lubar & Co. Although based in Milwaukee, Lubar has been a significant investor in the energy space and has numerous holdings in Texas.

What kind of investments are you guys looking to make?

We make primarily invest in established operating companies and secondarily real estate. Lubar looks at companies that have between 5 and 20 million EBITDA and for Keyes our target range is 1 to 4 million of EBITDA. Since both our family offices, however, we have the flexibility to go smaller or larger for some deals. Lubar has been operating for over 30 years. We made about 5 investments so far on the Keyes side.

How do you decide which deals to pursue?

We pursue deals in which we can add value from our network of contacts and our experience in working with small private companies. On the Keyes side that means primarily leveraging the relationships my father has as the ex-Chairman and CEO of Johnson Controls and currently on the Board of Fidelity, Navistar and Pitney Bowes. Both groups prefer to partner with existing management teams or owners who are looking to gain some liquidity and continue to grow their companies.

You were in Austin the 1990s. Who did you work with?

I was co-founder of a software company called AIM Technologies. We developed software that ran loyalty programs for sports teams and entertainment venues while simultaneously allowing advertisers to target ads, market research questions and coupons to our members based on their demographic profile. At our peak we had over 1 million members signed up in the programs from more than 100 different venues.

What did you learn from that experience?

Like many companies in the late 90’s we grew too quickly and did not do a good job matching revenue and expenses. Despite having some operational success, when the funding dried up in the venture community we were not able to raise the adequate funds to get to profitability.

What would you do differently if you had those days to live again?

We would have not tried to grow so quickly. Given the acceptance of our program by teams and members we probably could have survived by not taking on so many venues at once. Each venue was a large capital outlay which generated profits in the outer years of our contracts. We took on so many with the belief that funding would always be there and when it was not we were stuck.

What do you find most enjoyable about Austin?

We have two children age 8 and 5 so they keep my wife and I very busy. Unlike Wisconsin we can enjoy the outdoors year round and try to take advantage of that with them. I also have lots of friends from my AIM days here in town so it has been great to get back together with some of them and see the success they have had in other companies.

Best regards,
Hall T.

Non-Starters in Angel Investing

When the Conversation is Over Before it Begins

I have an espresso each morning at the Priom360 coffee shop in the Arboretum. It’s part of my daily routine. I often meet entrepreneurs and angels during that time to hear their story. In this blog you read about the up and coming companies and the story behind the people making it happen. What you don’t hear about are the non-starter discussions or as I call them, the conversation was over before it began. Here are some examples:

“We’re raising money to build a software system to . . . “

The angels look for the entrepreneur to spend their own money to get the initial software up and running. It’s okay to raise money to develop it further but angels aren’t going to invest money to build the software in the first place.

“We only need $8M to . . . “

The raise limit for the angel group is $2M. If it’s close to that then it’s a possibility but beyond $3M too far beyond that and it goes out of range.

“Our premoney valuation of $20Mis justified by . . . “

There’s almost no investment return in deals that start with a $20M valuation. I won’t say those deals will never get funded but it’s not far from there.

“The market is $10B and we only need to get 3% of it to . . . “

Revenue projections based on achieving market share have little connection to reality. A bottom-up list of accounts in the sales pipeline is much more convincing.

“We have an electronic medical records solution that . . . “

There are some applications that are so difficult to execute that it’s a non-starter. The electronic medical records space is filled with large competitors, an ever changing regulatory landscape, and a challenging customer base.

“Our product requires doctors to make only a minor change in their procedure . . . “

Getting doctors and/or patients to change their behavior is a major challenge. Doctors only change their procedures under great pressure or incentive.

“We only need $2M to run the clinical trials on our therapeutic drug . . . “

The cost of bringing a drug to market is typically beyond the angel raise and only covers a portion of the costs that go into creating the drug.

“We just hired our 14th employee and hope to complete our first customer sale later this . . . “

Startups with large headcounts bring the business plan into question.

“We are raising money to buy condos so we can flip them . . .”

Straight up real-estate deals are just that, real-estate deals. They are not angel investments.

The ultimate conversation stopper is “We just ran out of money and . . . “

If you didn’t manage the last round of funding what does that say about the next round.


Best regards,
Hall T.

Call For Contestants -- Fastpitch Competition at the Open4Business Conference – November 11

One of the most important skills an entrepreneur needs for success in a startup is the ability to deliver the ‘elevator pitch’. That’s the 60 second version of your business idea. The goal of the elevator pitch is the ability to generate further interest in your deal with a potential investor. I once heard an entrepreneur tell me that he couldn’t explain his business in less than 35 minutes. I asked him why would he spend 35 minutes telling someone about his idea or business without knowing if the investor is interested or not? The elevator pitch gives you the ability to screen potential investors. After gauging their interest, you can choose to spend more time discussing.

At the Open4Business Conference on November 11, 2008, the Central Texas Angel Network will hold a Fastpitch competition. Entrepreneurs are invited to submit a one-page summary of their business to the Director of the Central Texas Angel Network at (director @centexangels.org). The deadline for submissions is October 20, 2008. Contestants will be chosen from the submitted plans. Each contestant will get 60 seconds to pitch their business to a panel of angel investors. The winner will receive a one-hour coaching session with the angels after the event.

Best regards,
Hall T.

Craig Berlin of Texas Motion Picture Alliance Talks about the Austin Film Industry

Craig Berlin of Texas Motion Picture Alliance Talks about the Austin Film Industry

I understand Texas is falling behind in the film industry. What’s your view?

Yes, other states started offering incentives for people to shoot there. As a result of that, Louisiana went from $20 million a year from 2002 to $640 million in 2006 and that’s just features and episodic TV. They are literally lined up to make movies there and they have no infrastructure but now they are building it. They have lured enough business there to do it. Same story with New Mexico. Michigan is now offering 42% rebate on in- state spending which is insane. 3 years ago Bob Hudgins, Texas Film Commissioner kind of pushed the panic button and helped put together a nonprofit trade association which we named the Texas Motion Picture Alliance and whose purpose was to establish a board, raise money and help pass incentives.

What is your background?

I was an actor in high school and college, became a producer in college and worked as one for several years but now I basically sell the stuff that other people use to make films. Apple has the majority in market share in video editing and audio editing so we sell Apple as well as professional video and sound recording equipment and supplies.

So you said Michigan had a 42% rebate. What are other states doing?

Louisiana is at about 25%. Now their system is very convoluted with an income tax rebate. Since most people coming in don’t pay Louisiana income tax, they have brokers so you end up at about 20% after the brokers get their cut. New Mexico is up there in the 20-25% range. The additional thing that Michigan has is some Canadian- like features such as credits for on the job training and some other peripheral benefits that are very attractive. Now this is not sustainable but the flood gates are open with Drew Barrymore and even Robert Rodriguez headed there for starters.

What does Texas offer?

Other than our 5% incentive, dead last on the list of states with an incentive program, we have a sales tax exemption on production supplies, which has been around for a while. There is a hotel sales tax exemption after a 30-day stay and free use of state facilities in some cases.

How does that add up?

If I am producing something then I buy tape or supplies directly related to running the camera then its sales tax exempt, as would be a rental and certain equipment purchases. So you can say 6% of that amounts to about 3% of your net spend on average. Unfortunately, most people tend to look at the front number and everything else is sort of ancillary.

What is the Texas MPA doing?

Our first year of the TxMPA’s existence we were successful in hiring one of the best known lobbyists in the state. We all have the bad taste for lobbyists but the reality is in Texas, the Legislature meets every two years, they literally get 5000 bills put in front of them, and very few of them get past. You want your legislation passed so you hire lobbyists. We are coming up on Round II this session and there will be more opposition and we’ll have to have a strong grass-roots effort along with our paid lobbying efforts to make something happen.

Why did you join?

I got involved because it’s about the whole state economy, particularly at Austin and to a great degree in Dallas and Houston. By the time you look at the amount of money that we have lost it’s into the billions. We were successful in passing a very underachieving 5% incentive which puts us on the incentive list but at the very bottom of all the states. It’s basically maintenance and ineffective.

What are you shooting for?

I want to get at least 15% incentive with a $40 million allocation. Consider the 15% with our sales tax incentive and the other things that we have to offer, the amount accrued and talent that we have. That puts us kind of in the 20% range so people will be able to consider coming here. So it will make us an viable choice again, because now if you are a money guy in Hollywood, Texas is not even on your list of options. Robert Rodriguez lives here, is a major TxMPA sponsor and yet is producing his next project in Michigan. Getting a higher incentive will be tougher because at that level, we cannot rely on a “revenue neutral” fund from the Comptroller; rather we have to be partially on the budget as well.

So what is the name of the group that you are with?

It’s called the Texas Motion Picture Alliance, which is a 501(c)(6). They are technically considered a trade association as we do lobby. It is my belief that all we are trying to do is bring more business to our state and that then benefits everyone in our state. It grows the tax base and brings jobs here. When these guys are in town they rent apartments, they rent cars, they eat at restaurants, and they buy clothing. They live here while they are here and they spend money. Good for the economy.

Best regards,
Hall T.

Don Williams of Common Credential Systems talks about allowing Building Access for First Responders During Emergencies

Don Williams of Common Credential Systems talks about allowing building access for First Responders during emergencies.

What is your background?

We’re IT professionals. I was one of the initial founders of Lares Security Systems (now NovusEdge) about 12 years ago. Lares was one of the first companies to converge security systems with IT networking. Before Lares, access control systems were program logic controllers or PCs connected via direct building wiring. Lares was the first to build network-capable door appliances for access control security. Over the last three years, we’ve been working on our new company, Common Credential Systems.

What problem does Common Credential Systems solve?

We created the company to solve the Homeland Security emergency response problem. Consider one of our current projects, Duval County Florida, there are more than 100,000 first responders county-wide. That’s a big number. Most access control systems can’t handle that many IDs. And even if they could, the community’s diverse access control systems don’t know the responders. How do you prepare the County’s critical infrastructure doors to accept these responders when an emergency occurs – and only when an emergency occurs?

How do they do it today?

If the door is locked, they wait. They must have someone meet them at the facility. That not only heightens the danger - it’s also costly.

How do you propose solving it?

We’ve developed a common internet database so the whole community can prepare for emergencies beforehand. That database is then stored in our network appliance at any door in the community – even doors connected to diverse existing access control systems. When an emergency occurs, rules in our appliance allow responder access.

That was our first problem solved. Once we began to sign up integrator partners, though, we found corporations and military bases have the same problem - different access control systems from different vendors scattered across the corporation or across the military base. Our solution (CommonPass™) establishes a common set of rules and people across these diverse systems. The existing systems can still operate autonomously, but when an event occurs, CommonPass™ allows corporate personnel to access their branch locations or military safety and security officers to access their contractor operated facilities – utilizing their existing badge.

What’s the status of your system?

It’s ready to go. We completed our beta sides in 2007. We’re now conducting three high profile market trials – Duval County Florida and Palm Beach County Florida for Homeland Security responder access and the Federal Reserve System for corporation-wide business access.

How do you charge for this?

We charge by the door. We charge for the network access appliance and for the software system - by the door. We have 170,000 doors in our current forecast pipeline.

Have you sold any systems yet?

Yes we have. Our beta sites have paid for their systems and we are moving our market trial sites toward purchase orders.

In San Antonio?

In San Antonio and in New Braunfels and, as I mentioned earlier, in Duval County, Palm Beach County and Federal Reserve System Banks in Atlanta and Jacksonville.

Best regards,
Hall T.
***

Karen Bantuveris of VolunteerSpot.Com Talks about the Need for Volunteer Management through the Web

So how did you decide to develop VolunteerSpot?

I’m a business process expert and working entrepreneur and when my daughter entered kindergarten -- I wanted to find a way to be involved in her school. I quickly learned that the way volunteers are coordinated is an antiquated mess. The level of inbox clutter with reply-all emails and bad klunky signup tools just to staff classroom helpers -- I got overwhelmed. I thought this has got to stop!

So I got on the PTO board, and took over the volunteer coordination role as a way to get more working parents involved. I thought for sure I could fix the system -- but I found a lot of moms couldn’t use Excel, and were frustrated with Yahoo!Groups and other tools like Evite. They could RSVP to Evite, but setting one up for volunteering didn’t work.

Talking to friends that work in tech in CA, I said “you know, I think I stumbled across a need” and they said, “surely someone’s doing this.” – but after looking for a long time to find someone making volunteer coordination, signups and reminders a snap – I discovered no one was – so I decided to build the tool myself.

Cool. So you are using it now for volunteer coordination at Eanes Elementary?

We’re using it now with some pre-screened beta groups from Eanes and some other community groups. We’ve already posted a public demo of the system that uses the real tool and then we’ll be opening the doors to all in our public beta launch in October.

Where do you get the development done?

We’re using a diverse team of local and Seattle programmers. This was my big learning curve – pick the right developers! I had a false start in 2006 with the wrong vendor.

What did they get wrong?

I’ve never developed software before so I thought they could build it because they said they could -- the guys that I hired were more web designers than web developers and they subcontracted out the backend to somebody who was a programmer but not an architect. Whew – that was a learning curve. But now we’ve got a fantastic dev team – the back end is architected here and our UI team is in Seattle. All our developers are invested in the product and are getting equity.

So how do you plan to make money out of volunteer work?

We have a beautiful story -- most volunteers are women from 35 to 49 and they’re involved in their kids’ activities and advertisers can’t find us on line because we’re not sitting in Facebook and we’re not sitting online chatting and blogging all day because we’ve got other stuff to do. We give volunteers simple tools that they use in their real lives, we give nonprofits and community groups higher volunteer retention rates, and we give advertisers access to power purchasers and a forum to demonstrate their social responsibility. Win – win – win in a great demographic.

So, is it an advertising model?

Yes, it’s an advertising model initially and the companies we’ve spoken to are super excited about getting their message out to this demographic – all the while supporting volunteering. Downstream we’ll also be offering premium subscription services, private branding and other services. We’re also pursuing some really high level advertisers and partners who want a white label.

And you’ve approached them already?

We’ve had meetings with Florida Orange Juice, Salvation Army, HEB and Michael Angelo’s.

How many users do you need for those groups to get interested?
We don’t need a lot, actually, we only need 10,000 – 20,000 highly-targeted users.

What nonprofits are you targeting?

Groups with volunteer-intensive missions like Habitat, United Way, Red Cross, PTA and Scouts. These groups have their own proprietary software for their employees – but committee members and community volunteer captains are left on their own to organize ground-level activities. We plan to create custom widgets for these groups to push out to their membership.


So how did you get this in front of those organizations?

My board is highly networked, Dr. Sarah Jane Rhenborg is a national expert in volunteering from the LBJ school. She’s one phone call away from many of these groups including the PTA. We’re mentioned in an article coming out in PTA magazine this Fall. Our board is also networked in faith-based volunteering and other nonprofit membership organizations.

But the other thing is that volunteers and volunteer leaders are highly networked. So if you’re involved at school, or if you’re involved with your kid’s soccer team, or church, you would likely be involved in four or five other group activities.

So you target schools and churches?

Schools, churches and non profits. We’re pursuing nonprofits to build our channel because we’ll be able to push our service quickly - such as creating a widget for a blood bank that they can push out to get people to sign up with a local drive at work or school. Our users are highly networked and if you get invited as a volunteer, you taste the tool. If you like the tool you find other places to use it.

Do you have events now or anything this fall?

We’re using the tool at Eanes Elementary school for cafeteria and recess volunteers. We’re seeking demonstration sites with nonprofits and events where we can prove our product (and cross-promote it with the cause).

Eventually we have plans to provide volunteer hours tracking because that’s important to be able to log hours for United Way and other recognition. But right now it’s a feature for the future. We don’t have a lot of money and need to refine development on our core feature set. Eventually we’ll do text message reminders and mobile signup as well.

Best regards,
Hall T.

George Giannukos of GameWager Talks about Enabling Gamers to Earn Prizes by Playing PC Games

What does GameWager do?

Simply put, we’re creating the “Dave & Buster’s” for online PC Games. Gamers earn tokens for kills and other in-game achievements (capturing the flag, rescuing hostages, etc.). These tokens can be turned in for the opportunity to win really cool prizes. In addition, we are adding a number of social community features and have many other innovative ideas in the pipeline.

What kind of prizes?

Seriously really cool ones! We’ll have daily, weekly, monthly and yearly drawings. Based on the drawing, we’ll award gamers anything from t-shirts and hats to video cards or a new laptop. We will be offering one lucky gamer a 2008 Ferrari!

How does GameWager work?

It’s ridiculously simple. Our sign-up process takes 10 seconds for a gamer to register on our site. Once they’re registered, they simply click on our “Play” tab and find game servers we’ve GameWager-enabled. We have approximately 20 game servers that are enabled which allows us to collect each gamers’ performance/statistics. Gamers can view their accuracy rate, favorite weapon, and other relevant in-game statistics.

What games are you working with so far?

It’s only PC-based games right now. We’re currently supporting Counter-Strike Source and Counter-Strike 1.6. They are First Person Shooter (FPS) games.

Is the system up and running?

Yes it is. We probably launched a little early, but we’re working very hard to add more features and flesh out the site. We wanted to get it out there and begin receiving feedback from the gaming community. Our philosophy is to release early and release often.

I see you are from Houston. How did you come to Austin?

We believe the first five or so people you hire in the company are the most important. We looked at Dallas, Houston, and Austin, and felt like the technical talent here made this the best spot.

Best regards,
Hall T.

Jessica Hanover of ATI Bioscience Talks about Moving to Austin

Where are you from?

I moved here from San Francisco. I had been working at a medical device company in Redwood City in California so when we moved here I thought I would do the same. There are several medical device companies in particular orthopedic companies here. After talking with Isaac Barchas, I decided to take up the position in the ATI.

What medical device company was that?

It was called FoxHollow and we developed and marketed an atherectomy catheter that essentially shaves plaque out the arteries in the leg and physically removes the plaque from the body. It was acquired by another company.

Where did you go to school?

I did my undergraduate work at Harvard and my graduate work at University of California at San Francisco. I met my husband while doing my PhD work in neurobiology. We lived in Chicago for awhile.

What did you think of that?

It was cold. We left because it was too cold. After three years we moved back to California. That was one of our criteria for moving. It couldn’t be cold. So tell me about CTAN.

We have 50+ members. It‘s a member-led group. We have 6 rounds of deal flow this year which includes a screening meeting and a presentation meeting. Every member writes their own check for how much they want to. We do have a Life Science subgroup which includes about 8 people with experience in the life science field. They preview the deals and make recommendations on which ones to recommend to the screening meeting.

What kind of deals does CTAN see?

We get a wide variety including medical devices, therapeutics, healthcare IT and more. We have a funding raise limit of $2M or less so that cuts out a number of therapeutics because they’re way beyond that level. Also, we see a number of electronic medical record deals but that’s pretty much a non-starter with the group because it’s a competitive space with large players in a changing regulatory environment. We do see a number of life science deals from San Antonio and Houston as syndicated deals.

So how many life science deals do you see?

We collected ten over the summer to preview. We get 5 more a quarter from San Antonio and Houston. Where do you think the life science growth opportunity is here in Austin?

The medical device sector is strong here. The diagnostics and tool companies are a key opportunity – such as LabNow. I think UT is a rich resource that we should explore more. I’ve talked with the CEO’s of many companies. They wish there was a bigger ecosystem here for life science companies. I bet in five years we’ll see many more companies here in the life science area.

What about bioinformatics?

I haven’t thought about it as much. What do you see?
Applied Biosystems bought Ambion and then moved their bioinformatics arm to Austin because of the rich software resources here in town. Just a thought.

Best regards,
Hall T.

Brian Ferry of JawDrop Development Talks about Split-shore Software Development

What is JawDrop Development about?

We provide offshore software development with an on-shore presence. We have done a good job about putting project management into place to manage each project. We’re now going to a direct business model. In the current climate where many businesses are cutting back but still need development, we offer them an alternative. The client doesn’t have to take on the overhead.

We have a pretty good run of customers and are getting significant value from our services. We offer 12 month contracts our experience shows that clients prefer to have dedicated resources and the comfort of our longer term partnership

How do you price it out?

We charge a monthly fixed cost, that ends up being less than half of the cost of a local developer. We provide statements of work to set expectations, deliverables and timeline, along with a local project manager, weekly reports and access to code. It’s based on a typical 40 hour work week.

How many people work there?

We have a seasoned team of developers with a range of skills sets on staff full-time in Lahore, Pakistan and here in headquarters in Austin,. We want to provide the local communication needs so the customer doesn’t have to deal with the time difference. Currently we have approximately 70 employees and we are in process of building our US based project management team.

Is it mostly web work?

Yes, we have expertise is custom applications, software mash up, and mobile platform work. Also, some firmware.

What software languages do you work with?

It’s a wide range but lately more Ruby on Rails work. It’s grown legs and there are more inquiries. Our development team is strong in JAVA, NET and Web 2.0 technologies with most current languages.

What’s driving the interest in RoR?

I think it’s the current flavor of the month. From what I know there’s no great advantage over Ajax or the others.

What do you code on the mobile platform?

Windows Mobile and now we’re doing more on the iPhone.

Do you take equity for work?

Sometimes. We can be creative.

What’s it like for a company to work with an outsourced programming team?

From the business perspective it makes sense. But people have had flawed experiences in the past. That’s the biggest challenge. We’ve doing this for several years in stealth mode, with a few companies, so we have the support team built up. We provide career paths for our development teams and most are UK / US-educated. Many of them attend UT for education and then when they go back they take their English-speaking skills with them.

What do you do that’s different?

We develop a partnership so we can provide agile development programming techniques rather than working on a project by project basis. Also, we dedicate a programmer to the same project rather than moving it around to different people. Our experience shows that the developer is much more effective working on one project, than boucning around trying to understand other applications.

What kind of collaboration tools do you use?

We use Montras which is a codetracker and debugger tool. Weekly conference call and written reports are part of the package too.

What are some success stories?

We’ve worked with Clearcube for four years. ReachForce is ramping up a bit with. Edioma is a longer term one. We have done projects in the financial and travel sectors too.

What is the next step for JawDrop?

We’re opening an office in Dubai.

Why Dubai?

That’s where the action is.

Best regards,
Hall T.