The Austin Chamber of Commerce and the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization (CenTex RCIC) announce that the state of Texas has chosen Smooth-Stone, Inc., a portfolio member company of the Austin Technology Incubator, a key program of the IC2 Institute at The University of Texas at Austin, as a recipient of a Commercialization Award through the Texas Emerging Technology Fund (ETF).

“We’re pleased to announce another State of Texas Emerging Technology Fund investment to create jobs right here in Central Texas,” said Jack McDonald, Chairman and CEO of Perficient, Inc. and Chairman of the CenTex RCIC. “Smooth-Stone’s innovative architecture has the potential to change the server market and keep Texas on the cutting edge of technology.”

Smooth-Stone, the leader in ultra-low-power server technology, will receive an initial $250,000 pre-seed investment, with potential for $1,000,000 in total investment, for the commercialization of its breakthrough technology.

“The server market is realizing what the mobile phone market has known for nearly 20 years – power consumption matters. Moore’s law delivers amazing gains in server compute performance, but power and cooling challenges are now front and center. Smooth-Stone is bringing low-power mobile phone technology to servers,” said Barry Evans, CEO of Smooth-Stone. “We are proud to partner with the Austin Chamber of Commerce, the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization, the state of Texas and the Austin Technology Incubator to lead the push for truly green datacenters.”

The emergence of Web 2.0 services such as Software-as-a-Service, social networking, and consumer media delivery drive continued growth in web and cloud-based computing. To support these services web infrastructure compute density and power consumption are growing rapidly. However, corporations and governments are becoming alarmed at the accelerating rate of energy consumption by datacenters. In fact, supply of electricity is the constraining factor today in data centers’ ability to supply the needed power to keep businesses productive and satisfy consumer demand.

“Smooth-Stone shares our vision of true, energy efficient computing. ARM low power products are proven in billions of high performance, battery-powered devices. With Smooth-Stone’s innovative technology, we foresee bringing that same truly low power, high performance value to data centers,” said Ian Ferguson, Director of Segment Marketing, ARM. “There is a tremendous amount of improvement potential in reducing data center power consumption. This is a huge problem and we are pleased to be working with Smooth-Stone on a solution.”

Smooth-Stone was selected by the CenTex RCIC after an extensive due diligence process based on multiple criteria including a stringent analyses of the market and financial opportunity, technology potential, management team and economic impact to Texas.

The CenTex RCIC is a virtual center that operates out of the Austin Chamber of Commerce and serves as a catalyst for emerging technology research, development, commercialization and start-up incubation. In an effort to keep Texas globally competitive, the CenTex RCIC focuses on integrating technology development and commercialization in a 15-county region.

About Smooth-Stone
Founded in January 2008, Smooth-Stone brings ultra-low power mobile phone technology to the datacenter. Smooth-Stone products and technologies enable datacenter managers to increase the density of their compute resources while significantly reducing energy consumption. Smooth-Stone has brought together leading engineers with experience in mainframes, server CPUs, network processors, telecom infrastructure, blade server platforms, and high performance cellular application processors and cell phone system-on-chips. Smooth-Stone technology combined with the industry-standard ARM architecture and tools enable truly green datacenters. For media inquiries, please contact Christina Felton at 512.370.5510 or cfelton@saxumpr.com. Smooth-Stone. Data center performance. Cell phone power.