Did somebody pull the plug?

Posted by Eric Stewart Fri, 17 Feb 2006 04:06:00 GMT

Is Alexander Muse right? In Brain Drain for Austin he muses that Austin is losing ground to our neighbor up the road, Dallas.

Another hi-tech company has given up the ghost and decided to leave Austin for the Dallas suburb of Plano. General Bandwidth, …

This loss follows several high profile losses for the city including Tyco’s departure last year.  And one of several big wins for Dallas including Wednesdays announcement of QI System’s move to the city from Canada.  I think we are witnessing a gravitational shift from Austin to Dallas – Austin will still be important, but the resources (human and otherwise) available in Dallas will irresistable for companies seeking a place to live.

Certainly Dallas is a much bigger city, but Austin has always had a strong tech presence including big players like IBM, Motorola (now Freescale), AMD, and National Instruments just to name a few. Not to mention the multitude of smaller players and startups. In fact, Austin just recently won out in a battle over the new future headquarters of Freescale. There is a ton of talent here.

Or is there?

By far, most of the jobs I see listed in the Austin market are for generic J2EE web/enterprise shops. I know there are companies with other software/hardware products out there. Has Austin’s talent pool become too heavy in one area? Are there just not enough tech workers? Or is it just the usual tax incentives game?

Maybe Alexander is jumping the gun. I hope not. If so, what can be done to attract more companies?

I’m not really sure either, but can someone check the plug just to be safe?

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DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 over

Posted by Eric Stewart Sun, 09 Oct 2005 18:44:00 GMT

The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge is finishing up this morning. Already 5 teams have completed this year and more are coming in. Team ENSCO might still have a chance.

Unfortunately some of the teams I was routing for didn’t make it.
  • Team Banzai – A Tourag driven by Max OSX based computer that almost made it. They completed 2 out of 3 runs in a qualifying event
  • Austin Robot Technology – A local Austin group that doesn’t seem to have made the finalists list and I haven’t seen yet why
  • MonsterMoto – A local Cedar Park based group that was a finalist but apparantly not a finisher this time around
  • Team Mojavaton – A Colorado group who wisely chose to use a Nissan XTerra named the Xboxx (Of course these finished!)
  • Team Mojavaton – A Colorado group who wisely chose to use a Nissan XTerra named the Xboxx

Looks like there are are many entries still on their way in as I type this, but here are the top finishers so far…

  • Gray Team – Bad choice using an Escape but at least it was a hybrid. And who am I kidding, they finished just thirteen minutes behind Standford’s second entry (Red Team Two)
  • Red Team – Those Carnegia Mellon people seem to know something about robotics.. they managed to enter two vehicles and had them both finish.
  • Stanford Racing Team – The Stanford team won it all with a modded Touraeg, though it looks like they only beat Red Team by about 4 minutes. Ouch!

Now if I can just manage to find out how to get myself on one of these teams in coming years….

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