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Austin’s tech startup community and the budding young entrepreneurs of UT Austin’s student body are two groups of people who often overlap. They blend seamlessly into one another as graduating seniors take positions with emerging companies and as alumni launch their own enterprises in their alma mater’s backyard. For the past three years, Longhorn Startup has aligned those worlds quite perfectly, giving students a leg up on the entrepreneurial experiences that lie ahead for them if they choose a career in the startup realm.
The UT program puts students through entrepreneurial challenges for a semester, giving them firsthand experience in starting a company from the ground up. As the program describes itself, it allows students to “enjoy the resources of a semester-long program of startup acceleration led by well-known faculty who are practitioners of the art and who are augmented by successful guest speakers and team-specific mentors.”
Here, we take a look at three interesting UT Austin startup concepts the spring 2014 Longhorn Startup class worked to develop, as well as a glimpse into what’s on deck for the Fall 2014 class.
Turning movement into energy
Everywhere Energy was the winner of the Longhorn Startup Showcase in March 2014 and is now an Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) company thanks to its innovative approach to sustainable, self-energizing power solutions. Eversole, the company’s first product, is “a shoe insert that harnesses the kinetic energy exerted while walking to charge portable electronic devices.” That’s quite a notable achievement in the cleantech space by students who, upon the brand’s formation, hadn’t yet graduated from college. It’ll be interesting to see what this female-founded brand does next.
Keyboardless Keyboard
The concept behind Airtype.io, now branded as Noki, aims to solve a pain point for mobile technology users -- or in other words, nearly everyone reading this blog post. Now in its early prototype stage, Noki is a hardware- and machine learning-based startup developing, in its own words, “a keyboardless keyboard, because the typing experience on mobile devices is terrible.” The original product description referred to itself as “a wearable peripheral that learns how you type based on finger movements,” promising to let users “type the same way you do at home, anywhere.” And now, a well-executed brand video on the company’s website offers a tease of what the prototype looks like, as well as how it behaves.
Alternative sources of control
Taking the concept of wearable tech a bit further, Freeput seeks to address the needs of people with mobility impairments, reading the electrical activity in a user’s skin and translating it into data read by a computer. In other words -- specifically, those of the company itself -- “it’s a mouse you control with your head. Left wink; left click. Right wink; right click. We’re currently improving the sensors so (they) can detect the orientation of your head. So where you look, the cursor goes.” Freeput’s invention could help the more than 6.5 million people in the United States who, due to temporary or permanent mobility issues, have difficulty using their hands to grasp common household objects and complete simple tasks. The name is a portmanteau of “freedom” and “input,” since the company’s goal is “to empower the disabled community with the freedom of input.”
With a growing stack of innovative concepts now coming to life after class, Longhorn Startup shows no signs of slowing down. Its Fall 2014 portfolio holds its fair share of interesting new companies as well, including a non-invasive blood glucose monitor for individuals with diabetes, a monthly bill payment app, a marketplace connecting choreographers with dancers, and even a “smart mouth guard” that can tell with great speed when an athlete has suffered a concussion while in play.
The program is currently accepting applications for spring semester 2015.
