Sweb In the News

Step inside the Sweb Development headquarters and see what companies in Silicon Valley are trying to be. Despite efforts to diversify, companies like Facebook, Apple and Google remain predominantly white and male. “In terms of gender diversity, we’re almost 50-50 in the company overall, which is really exciting,” said Sweb Development CEO Magaly Chocano.

Chocano’s 14-person staff is 72 percent Hispanic, 14 percent Asian, 7 percent white and 7 percent Native American. She said diversity is a benefit to her staff and clients.

“The more diverse you are, the better you are in general. It’s a male-dominated world, still is, of course, and I think that it will be for a long time. I think women in technology are hard to find, and when you do, it’s a gem,” she said. “What I have seen is a change in clients actually wanting to work with us and a much more diverse team understanding that having this diversity is incredibly beneficial to them.”

The San Antonio Business Journal announces the winners in the small company category of the 2015 Best Places to Work awards.

A total of 58 companies will be recognized this year, with 33 in the small company category. The winners in the medium, large and very large company categories will be announced Tuesday. The order of the winners will be revealed during the awards presentation.

San Antonio is the nation’s seventh largest city, yet it doesn’t have a lot of tech startups run by women and backed by venture capital.

But San Antonio’s booming life sciences industry holds a lot of promise for women-led ventures. Two women, both biotech industry veterans, lead two of the startups on this list.

San Antonio also has had some very successful technology companies run by women. In 2008, Nancy Kudla sold dNovus, a company she co-founded with her husband Frank, to Kforce for $38 million.

Sweb Development – Magaly Chocano founded her startup in 2008. She saw the market developing for iPhone apps. She launched the first do it yourself platform online for creating iPhone apps. She also landed some major clients and developed native apps for them. Her firm also does social media marketing…

Seven Texas high school students have teamed up to organize the School’s Out Hackathon, an overnight computer programming workshop that already has attracted hundreds of sign-ups from middle and high school students.

Set for June 13-14 at Rackspace Hosting Inc. headquarters in Windcrest, it will offer coding workshops, meals and energy drinks and a chance for teams of students to independently develop their own software.

Hackathons are marathon coding sessions whose participants collaborate on projects, often over several days. At School’s Out, students will work in teams of three or four to develop their finished products.

Co-organizer Canzhi Ye, a senior at Reagan High School, said 513 students had registered by Friday. It’s expected to be one of the largest high school hackathons in the United States, said Joshua Singer, a junior at the International School of the Americas and another organizer.

When Apple began using mobile devices in their stores, people in retail started paying attention. According to a recent study from research firm IHL Group, 28 percent of North American retailers plan to adopt Mobile POS in some form by the end of 2013. The Mobile POS market will surpass $2 Billion in hardware/software sales in North America this year.

Clarification: This data is not consumer point of sales transaction value, but sales of POS equipment hardware and software.

Overall, mobile in retail is now a $5.7 Billion business worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. It is the single fastest moving trend in retail since Internet was added to the stores, according to IHL Group.

The report summary also stated that more retailers, however, are not planning to install Mobile POS at all within the next 3 years (33 percent). Naturally, the adoption of a mobile POS solution is dependent on the type of retailer and volume of transactions, but I am drawing a blank for a retail environment that could not benefit from some mobility. See link in resources below for the report blog post, which is all I read — the report is not free. But you can download a free preview.

But you do not have to be Apple to turn an iPad into a cash register in your business. The iPad on its own, with free or premium apps, can serve as a full-blown POS (point of sale) system for small and large businesses. If you have not been to a farmer’s market recently, take a look at all the merchants who can now take more than cash. Add a Square credit card reader or one from Intuit INTU +0.22%, and you are a mobile retail machine.

“The San Antonio Express-News and the University of Texas at San Antonio will hold a town hall on comprehensive immigration reform at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Buena Vista Building at UTSA’s Downtown Campus.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro will participate from Washington, while Mayor Julián Castro will deliver a video message. Richard Perez, president of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, TrinityUniversity president Dennis Ahlburg, Rackspace director Nick Longo, San Antonio Councilman Diego Bernal and Ramiro Cavazos, president of the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce will participate in the live-streaming event. So will Peter French of FreeFlow Research, Jason Seats of Techstars Cloud, Inigo Arzec of GlobalSCAPE, Magaly Chocano of Sweb Development, Walter Teele of Parlevel Systems, Alan Weinkrantz of Tech PR, Laura Lorek of Silicon Hills News and Juan Fernandez of Empresarios Mexicanos.”