.:.Master Feed - Texas Triangle on NewsGator Online

San Antonio phone company connects with Dallas receiver

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:23:53 GMT

Pocket Communications says it is teaming up with Dallas Cowboys tight end Jason Witten for a promotional program that will allow one of the wireless phone company’s customers a chance to dine with the NFL player.

IBC CEO honored as Mr. South Texas

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:45:41 GMT

International Bancshares Corp. Chairman and CEO Dennis Nixon has been named Mr. South Texas 2010 for the 113th year of Washington’s Birthday Celebration. (IBOC)

Analyst calls Southwest's bid for Frontier Airlines a 'great move'

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:10:51 GMT

Southwest Airlines Co.'s planned bid for bankrupt Frontier Airlines is getting good early reviews, even though the two airlines would have to reconcile their fleets of Boeing and Airbus planes. (LUV)

AT&T named Major League Soccer sponsor

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:57:33 GMT

AT&T has been named the official communications services sponsor of Major League Soccer and the U.S. Men’s and Women’s National Teams.

FMC Names VP

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Houston-based FMC Technologies reported earlier this week that it has appointed Jay A. Nutt as a VP, in addition to his current responsibilities as Controller. The firm--which develops technology solutions for the energy industry--said that Nutt has been Controller since August 2008, and has been with the firm since 1987.... (more)

IATA: Passenger and cargo demand drops continue

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:45:05 GMT

Airline passenger and cargo figures declined again in June with no signs of recovery in sight, according to a new report from the international industry group of the world’s air carriers.

KBR appoints hydrocarbons group president

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:14:06 GMT

KBR Inc. has appointed John Rose to the new post of group president, hydrocarbons. (KBR)

Mueller added to Southwestern board

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:30:28 GMT

Steven Mueller, president and chief executive of Southwestern Energy Co. has been elected as a director of the company.

Report: Cruise industry worth $1.1B to Texas in 2008

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:24:19 GMT

The cruise industry contributed $1.1 billion in direct spending and 18,674 jobs to the Texas economy in 2008, according to a new report from the Cruise Lines International Association. (CUK) (RCL)

P3S Corp. CEO nominated for Minority Small Business Person of the Year

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:35:49 GMT

San Antonio businesswoman and entrepreneur Mary Ellen Trevino of P3S Corp. is in contention for the National Minority Small Business Person of the Year award.

Managers, not Engineers is what Houston needs

Marc Nathan — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:43:13 GMT

Aziz Gilani, a local VC writes on his personal blog http://texvc.com/2009/08/02/what-houston-really-needs/about what he thinks Houston needs to compete and the main conclusion he comes up with is that we are suffering from a relative lack of engineering research at our universities. I consider Aziz a personal friend, and I helped plan the party that got this conversation started in the first place. With that said, I think that his post is technically correct, but misses some of the big picture.

As someone who sees entrepreneurs and helps startups every day at the Houston Technology Center, I don’t know if the schools are the issue here. Yes, we could all use more talented researchers and more research commercialization, but that’s not the only place where innovation comes from. Houston is ranked 10 worldwide by number of patents (http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/04/0422_inventive_cities/11.htm) due mostly to the engineering focus of our energy and medical industries.

There are probably thousands of interesting research studies sitting on the shelves of our current universities, but without entrepreneurs commercializing them, they will continue to languish. Making the leap from the lab to the marketplace is extremely difficult under even the best of circumstances. It is nearly impossible without help from people who ‘have been there and done that’.

I believe that the scarcest resource in Houston is not venture money (good money always chases good deals) and it’s certainly not entrepreneurial talent (we’re a city with an entrepreneurial spirit embedded in our DNA) – it’s mentorship. There are simply not enough investors/angels/consultants/incubators to help grow and support the ideas coming out of universities and our large corporations.

The ‘C’- and Director- level talent pool is still too small and it needs to be grown for the next wave of entrepreneurs to pick from to create new businesses. The only way to do this is to create successful large businesses that spin off talented and hungry managers. It’s difficult to name many spinoff companies from Compaq or Lexicon that thrive in Houston today, but just up the road you can name dozens of former Dell and Trilogy execs that have started or joined new startups.

Creating this mid-level group of support personnel that understand the startup life cycle is the single most important (not to mention fastest and cheapest) way to compete in the global market place of ideas. Silicon Valley continues to succeed because of the low barriers to move from company to company, which creates a high velocity of ideas and best practices.

It’s not about technical talent, it’s about business talent in every discipline but engineering.

Marc Nathan
Director of Entrepreneur Development
Houston Technology Center

Texas tops all states in new wind energy

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:55:59 GMT

Texas ranks first in new wind power generating capacity, according to the second quarter market report from the American Wind Energy Association. The state added 454 megawatts in the second quarter 2009, bringing Texas’ capacity to more than 8,000 megawatts.

Charlie Rose - A look at the Microsoft Yahoo search deal

Alan Weinkrantz — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:43:05 GMT

via charlierose.com

For your weekend viewing....

Posted via web from Alan Weinkrantz's Stream of Life

Silicon Valley has lost its way

Graham Randall — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:06:38 GMT

What luck! My anniversary post coincides with a discussion about Houston’s startup culture. — Graham Randall

Seven years ago this week, I declared IT dead and moved from Silicon Valley to Houston. Of course, it didn’t happen that suddenly. I’d come to the conclusion in the months following 9/11 that Silicon Valley wasn’t producing anything worthwhile, anything of any value at all. That was, perhaps, an overly harsh assessment, but looking back at what Silicon Valley has produced in the intervening years, I don’t think I was that far off.

Mind you, what I’m really talking about here is startups and when I talk about value I mean contributing to GDP, increasing productivity, and improving the human condition. The old guard in Silicon Valley are doing plenty to create value. Apple has vastly exceeded my expectations for innovation; it’s products, especially the iPhone, contribute directly to GDP and increased productivity, and, at least for me, the iPhone has improved the human condition.

The Silicon Valley startups, however, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., haven’t done anything of the sort. Sure they’ve attracted millions of users, and billions in investment. Facebook is even making respectable revenues off of advertising. But advertising isn’t a final good or service. It doesn’t increase productivity, and it sure as hell doesn’t improve the human condition*. Of course, not every business needs to meet these three criteria to be worthwhile, but Silicon Valley holds itself out as the idea factory for America. It has a history of fostering enormously valuable companies: Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Fairchild Semiconductor to list a few. Of all places, Silicon Valley should know better.

Instead, one could argue that the social media trend has been nothing but a massive jobs program for Silicon Valley. In the vacuum of ideas created by the bursting of the last bubble, social media was one of the few ideas to gain any traction with consumers. This attracted investment dollars, which, in turn, spurred the creation of more companies. Like an uncontrolled positive feedback loop, everyone in Silicon Valley has a vested interest in seeing these bubbles inflate, and few ask the question, “Does this make business sense?” It’s an astounding example of groupthink on a massive scale, and it’s happening over and over again. The first dotcom bubble was borne out of a similar idea vacuum, and as the old saying goes, “once is a data point, twice is a trend.”

What does this mean for Houston?

We waste a lot of time in Houston worrying about how to become the next Silicon Valley, and I’ll argue that we need to stop focusing on imitating Silicon Valley and start working on creating value. We also need to stop trying to acquire the resources Silicon Valley has, and start taking advantage of the resources we do have. There are plenty of industries with major presences in Houston that aren’t taking full advantage of IT and need solutions that will increase revenues or decrease costs.

Healthcare is a perfect example. Although the government’s involvement in healthcare IT is making for some quirky market dynamics, I get excited about the potential of healthcare IT. Most doctors today using paper records can’t do something as simple as notify their patients when the labeling on their medication changes. And hospitals are only just now getting the capability to determine if one glue used in surgery has a higher failure rate than another. Reducing failure rates can have a huge effect on costs.

You might be surprised to learn that Houston has had some impressive successes with guys who applied IT to solve problems in the oil industry, airline industry, etc. These guys wound up millionaires, but you haven’t heard their stories because they aren’t hanging out at OpenCoffee. We need more collaborations like these between the established industries in town and the startup community. Small companies need mentorship to become big companies, and bureaucratic inertia too often inhibits big companies from innovating. Both constituencies could benefit from better cross-pollination of ideas.

Conclusion

Building an electronic medical record company or a technology that helps make energy production more efficient isn’t as sexy, cool, or fun as building the next Twitter, but sometimes you just have to be a grown up. Silicon Valley didn’t start with Twitter. It started with companies that created value, and only then lost sight of the reasons why those companies were successful. Houston can avoid that same mistake by remembering that value creation is the basis of every sustainable business model.

graham randall, ph.d, mba

* If you compare the quality of relationships you had before and after social media, you will find that today you are closer to people you didn’t care enough about to keep in touch with before Facebook, and, without face-to-face interactions, your relationships with your closest friends aren’t much more intimate than your relationship with every other friend on your buddy list. In the past, we had a range of associations from close friends to acquaintances. Facebook is narrowing that distribution to the least common denominator.

Holly Energy buys facilities for $17.5M

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:05:31 GMT

Holly Energy Partners LP, which transports petroleum products, has acquired rail loading and unloading facilities in Tulsa, Okla., from petroleum refiner Holly Corp. for $17.5 million. (HEP) (HOC)

Magellan Midstream to buy Longhorn Pipeline

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:44:59 GMT

A bankruptcy court has approved Magellan Midstream Partners LP’s purchase of the 700-mile Longhorn Pipeline, which carries gasoline and diesel fuel from Houston to El Paso.

AZZ expands with two acquisitions

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:22:31 GMT

Galvanizing services provider AZZ Inc. said Monday the company has acquired the assets of two companies on the East Coast that provide galvanizing services. The company did not disclose the transactional amount. (AZZ)

Merchants’ Choice changes name

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:45:37 GMT

Merchants’ Choice Card Services has changed its name to Merchants’ Choice Payment Solutions.

Triton moving subsea operation to Houston

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:55:25 GMT

The Triton Group, an Aberdeen-based holding company, is making Houston its subsea equipment production headquarters.

Pier 1 names Catherine David EVP of merchandising

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:49:03 GMT

Decorative home furnishings retailer Pier 1 Imports Inc. has named Catherine David, a former executive for Kirkland’s Inc., as the company’s new executive vice president – merchandising. (PIR)