An easier way to book appointments is finally here. Book whatever you need, when you want, where you want.

MyTime has built a place for you to come whenever you want to find open appointments for services you need. You can check off everything on your to-do list, from Haircuts to Oil Changes, all in one place. We also give you access to third-party ratings and reviews right on our site, and offer exclusive discounts on selected appointment times. Now booking an appointment and getting services you need is as easy spinning up a virtual server on the Rackspace Cloud !

Every business on MyTime is a high quality establishment that has been vetted by their team. They stand behind every purchase you make on MyTime. If you’re not happy, they’ll comp it.

Let us be your one-stop destination to purchase and book the things you need done in your life. Why call when you can click? Start doing things on Your Time.

MyTime is now available in the Los Angeles market and will be launching in other cities soon.

http://www.MyTime.com

Searching for software that automates the planning, management and deployment of complex releases and test environments across the enterprise in a simple and transparent manner? Sydney, Australia-based Plutora enables companies to manage their enterprise IT pipeline, enterprise IT releases and IT environments with an Enterprise Release Management and Planning, Test Environment Management and Deployment Plan application. It’s a robust on-demand Enterprise IT Release Management software built from the ground up to help organizations deliver effective and efficient releases while driving real value back to your business through improved efficiency via roadmap features.

“Plutora was conceived from real world experience while dealing with the non-existent Enterprise IT Release Management software problem,” explains Sean Hamawi, director and co-founder of Plutora. “Our experiences as executives delivering complex systems within large financial services institutions over the last five years and with no other direct product offerings meant this market was ripe for disruption.”

Hamawi and his colleagues saw a need for a simple and transparent way to manage the flow of features from business stakeholders through various IT environments, ultimately culminating in a release to customers. The IT landscape was also becoming more complex through multi-sourcing arrangements, multiple vendor involvement, globally distributed teams and a move to cloud-based services. Passionate about building a better solution, the executive-assembled team at Plutora left their corporate roles to build the startup. Plutora, which is a member of the Rackspace Startup Program, is a privately-held company since 2012.

“We started out doing this via various spreadsheets, intranets and extranets, which were updated manually,” says Hamawi. “Maintaining these disparate sources just wasn’t working and was eventually abandoned. This often resulted in costly delays and failed releases. Every other tool we explored didn’t do what we needed or was bloated with features we didn’t need. So, we built the Plutora software and application platform from the ground up on Rackspace. We came to the conclusion that Rackspace was the leader in cloud hosting solutions. We felt that the flexibility, scalability and level of control that Rackspace offers was the best cloud solution for Plutora and our customers”

Looking ahead, Hamawi says, Plutora will focus on growth.

“At Plutora we are building software using deep subject matter knowledge of the problems we are solving. We are passionate about these problems and our solution as we have lived through the pain of bad process and lost efficiencies,” concludes Hamawi. “User feedback has validated our passion through stellar product feedback, and when your users are telling you that you’re onto a ‘winner’ you know all that hard work will pay off. This is going to be a busy year for the team at Plutora. Our core focus will be on customer acquisition, product marketing, product development and hiring talented people.”

The Rackspace Startup Program continues to provide more and more startups with a world class open cloud computing platform upon which to build their businesses. Contact the Space Cowboys to find out how you can get the rocket fuel to launch your startup.

Forged in the fires of Noisebridge and TechShop, a team of dedicated hackers set out on an epic journey to bring better desktop 3D printers within everyone’s reach.
Based out of San Francisco, Type A Machines was founded in 2012 by Andrew Rutter. In the many years since, Type A Machines has focused on designing and building the easiest to use and most reliable desktop 3D printers.

Check them out at Maker Faire this weekend. Their booth is number 204 and is located in the Expo Hall, featuring multiple printers humming away, and some cool concept prototype machines to give you a glimpse of the future of 3D printing.

http://news.typeamachines.com/

Gild Source provides recruiters with comprehensive profiles of developers and an assessment of their coding ability, years of coding experience, and influence in the developer community.

Tech recruiting has been begging for innovation. That’s why Gild is here. Gild brings meritocracy to hiring. Gild provides tech recruiting solutions that harness the power of data to liberate hiring teams from the challenges of finding developers. Using patent-pending technology, Gild evaluates the work of millions of developers so companies using Gild’s talent acquisition tools know who’s good and can target the right candidates.

http://www.gild.com/

RentHouseMap (previously known as Cravify) is a property search engine that aggregates rental and shared properties from the largest real estate portals in the United Kingdom and displays them on a single, interactive map that allows users to easily browse only the properties they want. The company collects information about rental and shared properties from the most popular portals in the UK, including Zoopla, Rightmove, SpareRoom, Gumtree, Adzuna, EasyRoommate, Vivastreet and Nethouseprices.

“When I relocated from Oxford to London for my job, I found it is expensive to buy new furniture to furnish my apartment,” explains Trung Huynh, founder and man of many hats at RentHouseMap. “Looking on Gumtree or eBay for secondhand furniture, the price is usually increased by the cost of delivery. I was wondering whether anybody in my neighborhood was selling stuff that I needed and soon realized that there was no existing platform that enabled sellers and buyers to trade stuff easily in their local areas.”

RentHouseMap, a member of the Rackspace Startup Program, was then born as a location-based trading platform for sellers to trade with buyers in their local areas in the UK. Initially RentHouseMap has five categories including Properties for Rent, Properties for Share, Furniture for Sale, Electronics for Sale and an employment section. Soon Huynh, RentHouseMap’s CEO, CTO and COO, recognized all those categories were too broad to focus on and decided to thin the herd, and focus purely on rental and shared properties.

“RentHouseMap is passionately aimed to solve existing problems in the property search market,” says Huynh. “At RentHouseMap, we think browsing page by page is not the right way to search for properties. Our customers care about property location. Thus we believe the customers will have a much better user experience if properties are displayed on maps, the central focus at RentHouseMap. The second problem that we want to solve is the dispersion of property listings from an overwhelming number of portals. And the third problem is spam, validity and availability detection. We hope to solve this by crowd-sourcing.”

So, if you’re searching for a rental or shared property in the United Kingdom, the RentHouseMap search engine can save you some time by bringing them all together and allowing you to view wanted properties on maps in the neighborhoods you’re are interested in living in.

And in 2013, RentHouseMap will focus on growth and raising awareness, Huynh says.

“I am trying to market RentHouseMap to more people, adding more data and property filters,” he says. “We are working on ways to monetize the site in 2013 and make many more people aware of RentHouseMap. Regarding product development, RentHouseMap will soon have full data coverage over Great Britain and many more property filters.”

The Rackspace Startup Program is here to help entrepreneurs in the early stages of startup. If you are involved in the startup movement, the Space Cowboys would like to hear from you. Drop us a note and let us know what ideas you are building in the open cloud.

Check (formerly Pageonce) is an award-winning app that stays on top of your bills & money for you, so you never miss a bill or get hit with overdraft & late fees again. Just set it up once and the app goes work — proactively staying on top of your bills and monitoring your bank accounts and credit cards, all in one place. When bills are due or funds are low, the app will let you know so you’re never caught off guard.

Check pays your bills on time so you never stress about missing a bill again — we’ll remember so you don’t have to. Get reminders when bills are due, then pay them on the spot or schedule the payment for later. No stamps, no phone calls, no hassle.

Check also keeps it all together in once central place. With multiple credit cards, bank accounts, and numerous bills to keep track of, it’s too easy to overdraft, miss a payment or exceed credit limits. With our app, you never have to worry because you’ll always know exactly where you stand.

http://check.me
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pageonce

Looking to save some money on cab fares? Do you want to do your part for the green movement and reduce the carbon footprint by cutting down on the overall number of taxi journeys? Or, do you just enjoy some company when traveling from point A to point B in a cab?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, Taxi for two, a United Kingdom-based startup and member of the Rackspace Startup Program, is building a solution for sharing taxi cabs in London. It’s a mobile phone-based service that enables people who are going in the same direction to easily and safely get in touch, with no mobile phone numbers shared between parties, and arrange to share a taxi. It works on any mobile phone with an Internet connection.

Taxi for two is the brainchild of founder and Managing Director Garry Prior a UK-based Rackspace employee. He has been involved in the mobile and Internet industry for 15 years and previously held the position of Head of Apps for O2. His experience in this role, and his deep understanding of the power of mobile location-based services, led him to cook up the original idea of a taxi-sharing service. Nick Bishop, co-founder and experienced web developer, came on board shortly after, impressed by the initial concept development work.

“I approached Nick and asked him to help me build Taxi for two,” explains Prior. “After several months we had a version ready to launch, to start testing out market demand. We went live during the Mobile World Congress in February 2012, where Taxi for two was featured as the official event smartphone app.”

The launch was supported by mCrumbs, an augmented reality specialist that was responsible for Taxi for two being the featured app at the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Since launch, the co-founders have showcased the service at several events in London. Taxi for two has been well-received by the collaborative consumption movement, which praises its ability to encourage people to live more sustainably.

“We genuinely believe there’s a big market opportunity here, a chance to change the way people travel via taxi,” says Prior. “There are lots of taxi-booking apps such as Hailo, the Black Cab App, already in the market, but we believe we’re the only people looking to make taxi sharing more effective. Longer term the same principles and technology could be applied to car sharing, although there are already a number of companies operating in this space.”

Taxi for two has also received a number of positive reviews in the online and offline media. Rachel Botsman, a high profile social innovator who writes, consults and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through network technologies, has encouraged her Twitter followers to use the service. Taxi for two has been mentioned in London’s Daily Telegraph, Look Magazine and Metro News; online at Mobile Entertainment and Watch My Wallet; and on the American online news site, The Huffington Post.

What’s going on right now at Taxi for two you ask? Prior tells us, “We are testing a number of marketing approaches right now. Clearly as a start-up we have virtually zero marketing budget, so every penny has to count. The challenge we face is building sufficient demand within targeted geographic areas so that taxi sharing starts to work. There’s no point of one person logging on to share a taxi if there’s no one else looking to make a similar journey at a similar time. We are also continuing to develop the product itself, and looking at how we can utilize Facebook and Twitter integration to drive the social word of mouth effect.”

Prior says he is looking at the year ahead as a prosperous one for Taxi for two.

“As already mentioned, it’s important we start to gain a foothold within key geographic areas. London is an obvious market for us, so I’d like to see us have some kind of presence at the major train stations and airports,” Prior concludes. We’re also looking at ways to address the business-travel market, which could be through partnerships with companies directly or potentially with people running local businesses. By the end of 2013 I’d like to see Taxi for two well established and starting to generate revenue through charging a small fee every time someone arranges a taxi share through the service.”

Are you an entrepreneur involved in an accelerator, university program or backed by a venture capital firm? If so, the Rackspace Startup Program can assist you in launching your business by providing a world class open cloud computing platform powered by Rackspace and backed by Fanatical Support™. Just talk with the Space Cowboys!

Great things happen over drinks – big ideas are hatched and celebrations are had. But it’s not always easy to get everyone together to say “cheers.”

Cheersable is out to make it easy to clink glasses with friends, despite location. Cheersable, a member of the Rackspace Startup Program, has created a new app that enables friends to send and share drinks nationwide. Its database boasts 4,000 partners restaurant locations, which guarantees there’s always a convenient place for the recipient to pick up a beer, a glass of wine or a cocktail, wherever they live. Whether you’re celebrating a birthday, a new job or just catching up, Cheersable helps celebrate those cheers moments and share them with friends, even if you can’t be there in person.

Marco Aponte, founder and CEO, says Cheersable came to fruition from him wanting to celebrate over drinks with friends scattered across the country.

“I was born in Austin, went to school in Georgia, and am currently living in San Francisco. I have friends across the country and wanted to be able to celebrate moments with them. I was sitting at a bar in San Francisco and saw that it was my best friend’s birthday in Austin. I did the obligatory Facebook post, but wished I could do more. I looked down at my beer and Cheersable was born. You already connect with friends over drinks, so we give you the ability to do this with friends anywhere.”

Sometimes it’s tough to stay in touch with your friends across the country. Cheersable takes the online gifting process and makes it hassle-free for both you and your friends. Cheersable allows you to send a drink, and your friend can decide where to redeem it. Cheersable provides the best of both worlds; you get to say cheers to friends and they can enjoy their drink at any partner restaurant.

Some of the inspiration for Cheersable came from Aponte’s restaurant business background and his interest in the social dynamic around people gathering for drinks.

“I and my two business partners, Sachin Gangupantula and Chris Barnett, started working on this business about eight months ago,” explains Aponte. “I have a background in the restaurant space so it was always fascinating for me to see how people come together around drinks. Three guys, one fun idea and the determination to do what most thought was impossible. Isn’t that how most great companies start? We believe that friendship, like beer, is a terrible thing to waste. So don’t waste any more time, and reach out to your friends across the nation and celebrate ’Cheersable‘ moments! Our entire team is passionate about helping people creating meaningful social experiences.”

The social aspect of meeting up for drinks is the perfect excuse to get back in touch with friends you haven’t seen in a while or surprise someone who lives in a different area. Life gets so busy sometimes, so the Cheersable mission is to help people slow down, make time for friends who are important to them, and enjoy spending some time over their favorite beverage. This allows people to stay in-touch with friends anywhere.

Aponte goes on to say that the Rackspace Startup Program has helped Cheersable on several fronts.

“In addition to the great visibility from Rackspace, the main thing we’ve been amazed by is their willingness to help. They offer great mentorship to start-ups through advice and perspective as a company who has been there. Starting a business is hard, but getting support from their Fanatical Support team has been invaluable. Chris, our CTO, has worked closely with their team to move our entire infrastructure over to Rackspace and their tech staff is the best of the best. We have a small team at the moment, so being able to defer the task of helping with migrations and scaling saves us valuable time. Finally, we’ve had some great networking opportunities at several events so they’ve also help us grow our network in the startup community.”

And, now, Cheersable’s mobile app is ready to rock and roll and spread good cheer nationwide, Aponte adds.

“Our app just launched on Android, and we are working on our iPhone app, which will be out in less than two weeks,” concludes Aponte. “We’ve gotten great feedback from our early beta users so we’re working on additional social features to make Cheersable even more useful. From the business side, we’re aggressively growing our restaurant and bar network, which will provide more options for people to stay connected. This year, we are focused on building the best experience for our users and making sure they celebrate friendship with Cheersable.”

Cheers from the Rackspace Startup Program! We can assist you in launching your business by providing a world class open cloud computing platform powered by Rackspace and backed by Fanatical Support™. Just talk with the Space Cowboys!

In 2012, TechStars, the global startup accelerator group founded by David Cohen and Brad Feld in Boulder, Colo., came to San Antonio with its first themed accelerator program: Cloud. It was hosted at Geekdom, the collaborative workspace for the tech savvy. TechStars Cloud came out of the gate with a dynamic group of startups including Cloudability, Conductrics, Distil, Emergent One, TempoDB and Vidmaker. This inaugural group of cloud-based startups was a hard act to follow for the 2013 class at TechStars Cloud…but that didn’t stop them from stepping out of the shadow of such stiff competition and into their own cloud spotlights.

Veteran startup guru Jason Seats, Managing Director of TechStars Cloud, was back for his second season and was extremely excited to showcase his group of 12 entrepreneurial companies that presented their ideas to a packed house at the Charline McCombs Empire Theater. As Seats has told us before, the secret sauce to the TechStars program is, “Mentorship – that’s what this program is all about.” And in his TechStars Cloud Demo Day 2013 introduction at the Empire Theater, Seats exclaimed, “We take our mentor relationships pretty seriously. It’s not unusual for there to be lifelong relationships between mentors and teams.”

And here is the TechStars Cloud Class of 2013:

Cloud Options – allows you to pre-book future cloud usage, securing lower prices on payment terms that suit you. Cloud customers can now accurately budget for planned usage.

conspire – analyzes email data to understand the strength of your connections, allowing you to find the strongest path in your extended network to reach anyone you need to talk to.

DataRobot – an app for building the most accurate predictive models. It’s a “model search engine” that finds the best possible modeling algorithm for a given modeling problem.

drifty – makes cloud-based HTML5 development tools that let anyone easily create cross-platform mobile apps and websites with products Codiqa and Jetstrap.

Good.co – helps people who aspire for greater meaning in their careers. Users can discover their unique personality mix, see how they fit with peers and teams and thrive in their current job or find a better fit.

parlevel – provides intelligent solutions for the vending industry, with devices and powerful web-based management systems that give vending machine operators full control of their business to maximize profits.

Postmaster – a SaaS API for shipping that makes integration with UPS, FedEx and USPS easy for ecommerce businesses. They can integrate a robust logistical pipeline that saves them time and money on shipping.

Skit! – with this app, anyone can use their latest photos, Facebook friends or quick drawings to share an impressive animated story.

threat stack – a security platform that provides a simple and affordable way for businesses to monitor their computers and networks for threats and respond to incidents.

TrueAbility – a technical assessment tool that allows IT professionals to demonstrate their skills in a simulated environment.

ZeroVM – is a cloud hypervisor that advances virtualization with three game-changing concepts: process level virtualization, converged cloud storage plus compute and hyper-elasticity.

ziptask – designed from the ground up as a virtual project manager for reliable outsourced work.

Are you an entrepreneur with the next big idea in cloud computing? If so, the Rackspace Startup Program can help you in launch your business and provide a world class open cloud computing platform powered by Rackspace and backed by with Fanatical Support™. Just talk with the Space Cowboys!