Our strange, icy winter has finally given way to spring here in Texas, a perfect opportunity to reflect back on Xconomy Texas’ most notable stories of the last three months.
Many of these stories attracted your attention as well, as measured by readership. These entrepreneurs and their innovations span the range of the Texas economy itself. We have biotech and medtech companies developing therapies to cure disease or instruments to help doctors give patients better care.
There are also innovations in software for use by attorneys in discovery as well as for global energy companies seeking to secure critical infrastructure hundreds of miles offshore. The funding environment in the Lone Star State grew to include new venture capital and seed funding for startups in Austin and San Antonio, and a Houston entrepreneur partnered with Kiva to boost entrepreneurship among people who might otherwise be left out of the innovation economy.
And, of course, Austin played host to about 30,000 people for the annual South By Southwest festival.
1. Longtime Austin-based tech investors team up to form LiveOak Ventures, a sign of a maturing VC climate in Texas.
2. Houston’s CS Disco digitizes the legal world with e-discovery software.
3. Prasad Menon, a Houston entrepreneur, sets up a social entrepreneurship fund to help pay it forward to help the next generation of companies.
4. Houston’s the home of Big Energy, but it’s also home for an influential group of algae advocates, including a son of the man who inventing fracking.
5. The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas is back in business. Now what?
6. The University of Texas introduced Clay Johnston as the school’s first dean for its new Dell Medical School.
7. Bob Metcalfe—inventor of Ethernet, University of Texas innovation professor and Xconomist—storms the Valley with some of Austin’s best student entrepreneurs. And they want money.
8. In Austin, Lumos Pharma tackles creatine disorder while Aeglea looks to starve certain cancers to death.
9. Houston has a problem? These hackers might have your solutions.
10. By way of Norway, Houston’s SecureNok aims to defuse crisis-causing malware at oil and gas operations worldwide.
11. SXSW attracted technophiles from around the world and Austin’s own Capital Factory illustrated hometown innovation at a demo day. (The festival in pictures.)
12. San Antonio’s Geekdom Fund targets early stage startups in the Alamo City.
13. Houston medtech firms give the heart a little love—and help.
14. Can a “death carrot” play a role in treating cancer?
