Make sure to pick up a copy of the Austin American-Statesman. There’s a great article in the Business section by Lori Hawkins about Piryx and Tech Ranch:

New Austin incubator seeks to help young businesses grow

For-profit TechRanch wants to help early-stage companies connect with investors.

A new Austin technology incubator wants to provide office space and mentoring to early-stage Austin startups as they get off the ground.

Tech Ranch , which was started earlier this year by entrepreneurs Jonas Lamis and Kevin Koym, says it will help young companies navigate through the process of launching their products and raising money.

Lamis said startups seeking their first round of investment are facing more challenges as angel investors — wealthy individuals who invest their own money in hopes of financial reward — pull back amid the economic downturn.

“The best way to get the angel money going is for them to feel more confident about the ideas and the work that’s going on at Austin’s seed-stage startups,” said Lamis, who held executive positions at Austin software startups Ventix , Question.com and Troux Technologies and is founder and chief executive of SciVestor , which researches new technologies. “We want to connect the two.”

For entrepreneurs, Tech Ranch will serve as an adviser, offering guidance from day-to-day decision-making to longer-term planning including product and marketing strategies.

Unlike the 19-year-old Austin Technology Incubator , which is operated as a nonprofit as a division of the University of Texas, Tech Ranch aims to make money, mainly through consulting fees and by taking an equity stake in companies it assists.

For-profit incubators have had a low survival rate in Austin. Past failures include SeedStage.com , which was founded by a group of veteran entrepreneurs during the Internet boom in 1999 and closed two years later when early-stage funding became nearly impossible to come by.

Tech Ranch is self-funded by Lamis and Koym, a co-founder of Bootstrap Austin , a network of 600 self-funded businesses, and founder and CEO of Enterprise Teaming , which assembles virtual teams to build technology for clients. It is operating out of 2,500 square-foot offices on Spicewood Springs Road and working with eight startups, including Piryx , which sells an online software that helps political campaigns manage fundraising, volunteers and other services; MomSquawk , which operates a Web site for new and expecting mothers; and Auction Hawk , which runs an eBay listing service.

Piryx CEO Tom Serres said Tech Ranch has been a sounding board as he seeks to raise a $3 million round of venture capital. Piryx, which has five employees and has received seed money from a private investor, has its own offices but meets a couple times a week with Lamis, Serres said.

“This is my first startup, and because I’ve never done this before, it really helps to work with someone who has been over the hurdles,” Serres said. “That’s what Tech Ranch offers me: that ‘Hey, I’ve been there and done that, and don’t make this mistake.’

“They’re helping me with hiring new people and managing my operation better and just getting through growing pains,” Serres said.

The December 2nd runoff election in Georgia for a U.S. Senate seat gives us a textbook look at grass roots politics. If you aren’t excited by this race then perhaps you don’t realize how rare and historic these campaigns can be. They are a great microcosm of campaigning with each party brining in money, staffers, volunteers, and celebrities to turn out the vote. While the presidential election was fun, it was spread across the nation. A senate run-off by law can only take place in Georgia and only under the rarest of conditions as Georgia is the only state that requires candidates to earn over 50% of the vote to win a general election. What fun!

This run-off harkens back to the 1992 U.S. Senate race in Georgia. In that year a little known Republican from the Midwest named Paul Coverdell went through four exceedingly close contests to ultimately become one of our better senators. Tragically, Sen. Coverdell died in 2000 of a brain aneurysm, but his legacy is still well respected by people in Georgia and there is now a statue built in his honor in Atlanta. In 1992 though Coverdell was the longest of long shots. The incumbent senator, Democrat Wyche Fowler, had been a U.S. Congressman from Atlanta before winning a tough senate race in 1986 when he narrowly edged out incumbent Sen. Mack Mattingly. Few thought Coverdell would have a chance against him. Before Coverdell could even win his party’s nomination however, he faced off in a multi-candidate primary that resulted in a run-off with a former U.S. Attorney named Bob Barr (yes, the same one that was the Libertarian’s presidential candidate this year) that resulted in a 51% to 49% Coverdell triumph.

In 1992 Georgia was still a Democratic state. The governor was a Democrat, as were both U.S. Senators, and the congressional delegation was nine Democrats to one Republican (Newt Gingrich.) Clinton had even become the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state that year. It was thus quite a surprise when the final totals showed that while Sen. Fowler had won over 35,000 more votes than the upstart Coverdell, his 49.2% of the vote was below the 50% threshold that was established by a 1966 state law. In fact, few realized that Georgia even had such a requirement. At that point mayhem, as it is wont to do, ensued. The Republicans saw a new chance to gain a senate seat and take some of the luster off of Clinton’s election before he had even taken office. Soon First Lady Barbara Bush, Sen. Bob Dole, and others were stumping across the Peach State for Coverdell while President-elect Clinton used his political capital to come to the aide of Fowler. The run-off election was held on Tuesday, November 24, 1992, or exactly three weeks after the general election. Coverdell, who had since been endorsed by the Libertarian that took the 3% to cause a run-off, proved better at turning out his base when turnout fell by 44% from the general election. He won 50.6% of the vote to Fowler’s 49.4%.

The Democrats were irate. How could this have happened? Clinton had been embarrassed before he had even taken office and the Fowler loss proved to be a precursor of huge Democratic losses to come throughout 1993 and 1994. Attempts were even made to prevent Coverdell from taking office after the victory by claiming the run-off election was unconstitutional. Those complaints quickly withered and died though as the Democrats played the part of sore losers. The Democratic controlled legislature however would quickly abolish the run-off law and it would serve its purpose in 1996, as their candidate, Max Cleland, would defeat the Republican, Guy Millner, by a tally of 49% to 48% without having to face a troublesome run-off. When the GOP took control of the legislature a few years ago they put the old run-off law back in place.

Today 16 years later the situation in Georgia is just as exciting. On election night Sen. Saxby Chambliss took 49.8% of the vote, but failed to eke over the 50% mark after all absentee and provisional ballots were counted. Now he and Democrat Jim Martin, who earned 46.8%, square off in a December 2nd runoff. Much has changed in Georgia in 16 years though as the state is now solidly Republican with a Republican governor, two Republican senators, a Republican congressional delegation, a Republican state house and senate, and McCain easily carried the state. With the Democrats still hoping to get 60 votes in the Senate to stop a filibuster, they are bringing in all their firepower to Georgia and the Republicans are responding in kind. Bill Clinton and Al Gore will soon be stumping for Martin while McCain, Romney, and Huckabee are hitting the hustings for Chambliss. It should be a fun show.

Each campaign is aggressively targeting base voters. There is no attempt to appeal to moderates or undecideds. The runoff is all about getting your people out to the polls. Martin, hoping again for the large black turnout that was strongly for Obama, is invoking Obama’s name at a rapid-fire rate. It seems to be his only hope of overcoming Chambliss, who for his part is hitting up conservative talk radio and holding rallies with popular radio show hosts like Neil Boortz and warning that he is the last line of defense against complete Democratic domination of D.C. The Obama campaign has said they will send some of their staffers to aide Martin, but thus far there is no sign that Obama will come to Georgia to campaign despite Martin’s incessant pleading that he do so. The question now becomes if Martin is defeated, does he become the canary in the coal mine that Fowler was in 1992? We’ll see.

This site is burning up the internet today. I think I’ve already gotten several emails on it. I’m sure you could do this with voters for any candidate, but it does make a point that in a democracy we share in the common ignorance. This is one reason why I personally oppose the mindless “get out and vote campaigns” because they can lead to a highly uninformed electorate. Why don’t we try “Become informed and then vote”? I served as an election judge three times this year (primary, municipal, and general elections) and witnessed first hand how scary some of our voters are. It reminds me of this Onion parody.

Note: To start everything off, I want to apologize for once again putting long hiatuses between articles. Frankly, midterms overwhelmed me and that had to take priority. Then I got sick, twice, in a three-week period. Things have not exactly worked greatly lately. I probably will not commit to subjects or dates for putting out articles, it just isn’t realistic. However, at the moment my workload has decreased significantly, and I think it should be possible to at least put out an article week. I am also looking at starting a blog on foreign policy and national security, but I won’t let that get in the way of this blog. Now that all of that is out of the way, let’s get to the actually interesting stuff (I hope).

So, election 2008 has finally ended, and the roar of battle is (temporarily) quieted, I am going to take a look at the aftermath of what I consider to be the first truly 21^st century campaign. Technology, and specifically the Internet, played a huge role in President-elect Barack Obama’s victories in both the Democratic primaries and the general election.

There is no doubt that many outside factors played a role as well. The President (43) was already massively unpopular, seeing the worst financial meltdown since the great depression didn’t help.  The inept response by House Republicans made the situation for Republicans, including Senator McCain, much worse. John McCain also made a number of risky choices that he felt were necessary to have a shot at winning. His selection of running mate Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, and his decision to suspend his campaign to work on a bailout bill, in retrospect (and for me personally, clear as they happened) didn’t work well at all. Frankly, no one expected the race to be close, and McCain did as well as one could in the circumstances he faced. One can speculate endlessly as to whether the McCain that we saw in 2000 and 2004 would have made the race turn out any different, but the fact is that he was simply caught in a tidal wave of significant proportion.

However, even in such a scenario, it takes real effort to turn public anger into turnout in the polling booth. Obama, beyond his obvious skills, had an Internet operation that redefined the use of the net in politics globally. If you don’t believe me, look at articles about the website for Israeli prime ministerial candidate Benjamin Netanyahu, it’ll make it pretty clear, pretty fast. He had what was essentially his own Facebook, and a website that looked and functioned a lot better than a lot of movie official websites, which have a much greater range of resources.  

Hell, he even had an iPhone app that allowed you to solicit for fundraising and read his latest activities and policies directly from your phone (well, at least my phone, which is indeed an iPhone).

It wasn’t just propaganda that was distributed over the web, but also voter turnout operations. For the week leading up to the election, I got multiple e-mails from the campaign to remember to turn out and to assist in turning out other people. 

Much has been written about how the Republicans that swept into office in 1994 eventually became corrupted by the very system of power in D.C. that they once despised and promised to change. Instead, idealistic young lawmakers began to fulfill the famed quote of Lord Acton when he said that, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The first true sign of the selling-out came when more and more members that had pledge to fight for term-limits decided that they would break their promise. Member after member would tell their constituents that they were young and naïve when they made that solemn pledge and that with seniority came wisdom and experience. Sadly, many of these pledge breakers were reelected as the taxpayer pork they brought home outweighed the breaking of their word. Is it any wonder however that Congress today has the lowest approval rating of all time? Sadly, the problem cannot fix itself as most voters highly dislike congress, but approve of their own personal representative and senators.

Recently the disgraced former congressman Mark Foley gave an interview to the AP. The most revealing quote was not about his lurid emails to underage pages, his homosexuality, or his alleged alcoholism. No, the most revealing quote was this gem buried towards the end of the story – “In public life, you dream of the day they’ll name a hospital after you, or a bridge or a post office,” Foley said.” There you have it, a living, breathing example of political egotism run amok. Does anyone doubt that far too many of our “public servants” harbor the same dreams as Foley? It’s ironic that Foley first came to congress in 1994 on the wave of the Gingrich revolution and resigned just before the GOP was bounced out of the majority for the first time in twelve years.

There can be no doubt at this point that term-limits must be implemented if we ever expect true reform. This spans both parties and all regions of the nation. To deny it is to make excuses for a failed system. When a convicted senator is nearly reelected in Alaska, when an indicted congressman from New Orleans has literally been caught with secret cash bribes in his freezer, and when the public no longer bats an eye at political corruption, then it is time for drastic change. How can anyone excuse members serving in the House and Senate for over 40 and 50 years while using their seniority to spend taxpayer dollars on pork projects that buy off the voters? Does anyone truly think it is good for our nation to continually reelected members that feed off the federal carcass at the expense of the nation?

The classic case for term limits is our United States military. In all branches members never serve in one unit or assignment for more than four years. Even the Commandant of the Marine Corps serves for only one four-year tour and then retires. This prevents cronyism and serves to ensure that no one from the highest general to the most junior private becomes lax or complacent in his or her post. Can the same be said of Congress today? Does anyone believe that Sen. Robert Byrd has not grown out of touch and entitled since serving in the Senate since 1958? Is it a good idea that Rep. John Dingell has been in the same congressional seat since 1954? Do we really want people in office like Sen. Ted Stevens that have an airport named after them and view the budget as their personal playground? Did we like having Sen. Strom Thurmond stay in the senate until he turned 100 and was barely able to function? The military’s use of term-limits has helped to provide us with the finest fighting force known to history. Can we say our Congress is the finest legislative body ever? Did our Founding Fathers visualize a Congress full of members that spend literally over half of their lives in office? No wonder we have elected officials like Mark Foley that dream of having their names on post offices and bridges. It should be no surprise that former members such as Rep. Duke Cunningham and Rep. Bob Ney are serving time in prison for taking bribes. It’s a culture of corruption in dire need of a cure.

The harsh reality is that 97% of all members of congress are reelected each year. The advantages of incumbency protect them from virtually all challengers. In an age of increased technology politicians have also taken the gerrymandering of districts to a new low. It is now possible to use the latest demographic and voting data to split homes and streets from once district to another, thereby allowing the politicians to chose their voters rather than the other way around. We saw an example of this last week in western Pennsylvania where “Pork King” John Murtha was reelected with 58% of the vote despite slandering our Marines and calling his voters racists and rednecks. His district as drawn in 2001 went out of its way to pack in as many friendly Murtha voters as possible. Murtha then topped that off for good measure by continuing to bring home the government bacon in the form of highly questionable earmarks out of the federal budget.

In the 1980s Murtha was caught up in the FBI sting operation known as Abscam when undercover agents posed as sheiks seeking favors from the government. One senator and five congressmen later resigned from office because of it, but somehow Murtha hung on. His words from the covert video recording linger on as well however. He boldly told the “sheiks”, “I want to deal with you guys awhile before I make any transactions at all, period…. After we’ve done some business, well, then I might change my mind..I’m going to tell you this. If anybody can do it — I’m not B.S.-ing you fellows — I can get it done my way.” he boasted. “There’s no question about it.”

Yes, we need term limits now – no question about it.

I heard someone touting Newt Gingrich today as the “reformer” of the Republican party. Then I heard someone else mention Fred Thompson. I thought to myself…are these guys serious?? Didn’t Republicans learn anything on election day? Then I stumbled onto an interesting interview with Governor Bobby Jindal from Louisiana.

If the GOP really wants to become the G “New” P, how about something out of the ordinary? Something fresh. Something that’s just…well…wickedly different. I know, how about someone who isn’t a relic of the past…someone maybe…like…Bobby Jindal.

Now that’s a refreshing step in the right direction. Better yet, how about they start listening to the issues people actually care about. Here’s a Hint: Google and twitter trends…that might be a good start.

Found this great article written by Mark McKinnon about twitter. Figured I’d pass it along.

The greatest impact the Internet has had on politics is democratization. And nowhere is this trend more evident than in the current use of microblogs like Twitter.

The political conversation in the 2008 presidential election is driven largely by blogs and microblogs. Online democratization has blown to bits and bytes the command-and-control approach that campaigns used to take to communication. Mainstream media reporters now blog throughout the day in an effort to compete with the constant, virtual news cycle.

Despite the information clutter, blogs are bringing new life into the political process. Bloggers are looking for new ideas, fed through their personal lens, to produce the original thought that will impress their network of supporters. This is forcing people to think deeply about politics in order to formulate their own opinions and share their thoughts with others. They are talking about politics; they are getting involved. Across the country, records are being set everywhere for participation in the electoral process.

Twitter is filling an important gap in the digital democracy — a gap that most did not even know was there. If blogs are the inner monologues that occur after we have had a chance to sit down and think, then Twitter is the internal (albeit sometimes random) thoughts that most of us have all day long. Twitter allows us to tap into the collective brain; there is something very fascinating but strangely voyeuristic about this.

People are listening to and analyzing every single word that John McCain and Barack Obama say, so the campaigns don’t necessarily need another channel for communicating to the public. But people are also paying attention to which campaigns and politicians are actually listening to the people as well, and it may be that the true value of Twitter for political campaigns is in listening more than talking. Twitter is more than just a large, unorganized focus group; it is a link to real-time constituent consciousness.

As someone who consults on the power of concise and well thought-out messages, I have a deep appreciation for the 140-character limit of Twitter. If you give a candidate two minutes to say something, he will take three. Limits force message discipline. At the same time, polished messages sound fake on Twitter. This is a delicate balancing act the campaigns must figure out, something they have not done — yet.

Twitter may eventually have a bigger effect on the political landscape than blogging. The possibilities are limitless, and the creative applications are just starting to be realized. The second presidential debate may have been a town-hall format, but the real town hall was on Twitter’s Election 2008 page. (See video of the page in action.)

For anybody who had his or her computer open to this page while watching the debate, it would have been hard not to notice the stark contrast between the stoic live audience and the very lively online audience. It was not as dramatic a shift as the first televised debates almost 50 years ago between Kennedy and Nixon, but more subtly suggested the game has changed.

It’s hard to tell where this is all headed and just what the ultimate consequences may be to the Internet’s role in politics. Like democracy, it can be pretty messy and unpredictable. But we embrace the Internet’s role just as we do democracy, because, in the end, our country was built on the notion of ultimately trusting the power, the will, and the good intention of the people.

— Mark McKinnon has worked for both Democratic and Republican political campaigns, including Texas Governors Mark White, Ann Richards, and George Bush, Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, and, in 2006, Senator John McCain’s candidacy for President. He is a co-chairman of Arts+Labs and serves on the board of the Lance Armstrong Foundation

Actual Article Here

Much Love Mark, You Rock. @tomserres

Great article by Abigail Shaha about Piryx founder and CEO Tom Serres in month’s issue of Politics Magazine. If any of you can get your hands on the November issue, let us know!

Long Tail Politics: Sell Less of More

It took being a young idealist for Tom Serres to decide to run a friend’s judicial campaign. After all, the odds were 10-1 against winning—and, sure enough, his candidate didn’t pull off an upset. But Serres helped his friend run a close race, despite struggling to get voter data and make the most of a limited budget.

“I experienced personally all the problems [candidates and staffers] go through when all they want to do is make change,” Serres says. Frustrated with the barriers facing regular people who want to run, Serres launched an online company to help small campaigns get the assistance he couldn’t find. “We started moving up the political ranks—helping with local, county and state elections,” Serres says. Soon his services were in high demand, but as prices rose, “smaller campaigns couldn’t afford us anymore.”

This dilemma isn’t unique to the political world. In 2004, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson described it in a seminal article, “Why Selling Less of More is the Future of Business.” According to Anderson, companies traditionally make money by offering goods that sell in high quantity. BestBuy, for example, sells millions of mainstream, big name CDs that everyone knows and buys.

But what if you want a lesser-known artist who isn’t profitable for BestBuy to shelf? Then you’ll visit iTunes, which sells the same mainstream as BestBuy, plus songs and names that aren’t profitable for large firms to keep in stock. They cater to what Anderson called the “Long Tail”—a scattered group of consumers with more specific needs. And political firms are increasingly finding that they, too, can build a successful business model serving the Long Tail.

While Serres was selling big software packages to lots of state and congressional races, his original judicial candidate could no longer afford his product. Serres had to find a way to make his customized solutions affordable to enough people that he could still make a profit.

His audience was out there, just spread across the Long Tail, and it represented a huge market opportunity for anyone who could make a profi t supplying such a wideranging set of needs. So after a year and a half at the drawing board, Serres envisioned the same Long Tail bridge that the private sector had already started using.

“Technology is becoming more and more of a commodity,” he says. “So if you created a technological system that would allow anyone, anywhere, to run for public office, you could really serve a lot of campaigns.”

Shortly thereafter, Piryx was born. The company sells an online software system that uses the Internet to bundle volunteer management, online fund raising, Web presence and other services. Some of Piryx’s clients are candidates in big races, but many are running local campaigns for precinct chair or school board: the political Long Tailers.

While the Internet has done the most to bring Long Tail marketing to politics, new printers are playing a big role, too. Digital printers can produce mailing pieces that used to require multiple print jobs to let the ink dry.

“Ten years ago, people were charging $700 just for creating and designing,” says Jody Murphy, a partner in Barnett & Murphy Inc, a communications consulting firm. “Then there was the printing and postage and that’s where it got expensive. Here it’s all free because we built it once and it can be used over and over.”

The combination of these factors lets Murphy print at about the same price as with the old printers, but target specialized products to a far wider audience and bring higher profits. The political phone industry is also starting to dip into this market.

“The whole point of our service is to make it appealing in the most simple of ways,” says Les Morales, sales director at Voice Shot, which also takes a Long Tail approach to business. His firm offers call services for everything from robocalls to text messages and polling. “It brings the power of campaigning to the smallest of politicians. People running for president of the local school council can use Voice Shot to garner support just as much as people running for president.”

That’s the same rationale Ravi Singh used in creating ElectionMall, which he bills as a one-stop-shop for smaller races with specialized needs. He says the political Long Tail represents a remarkable business opportunity.

“When you look at the entire market,” says Singh, who is ElectionMall’s CEO, “you’re looking at 1.2 million candidates running this year in over 500,000 elections. The majority of those are state and local races, but the highest expenditure usually comes from the federal races. So if you think about it, you have an untapped market in the majority of the races.”

More advanced campaigning methods can make even small races more competitive, increasing the business opportunity for potential clientele. “If you can provide this kind of environment,” Serres says, “you’re creating a competitive opportunity for everyone to effectuate change on the national or local level.” Put another way, it’s a win-win-win for businesses, campaigns and American democracy.