Ever wanted a better way to save your memories? Storing them all on your hard drive is boring and printing them out on traditional photo paper isn’t lasting and doesn’t have impact. Fracture founders Abhi Lokesh and Alex Theodore think they have a better way, and after seeing what they can do, I tend to agree. Abhi and Alex are pioneering and promoting printing your photos directly on glass. It’s way cool and as simple as uploading your photo, selecting your size and format and they print it and ship it to you, ready for your wall or desktop. Prices start at $10 for an 8″ diagonal picture so it’s incredibly affordable.

Abhi and Alex got started after working a consulting project for a non-profit business helping collect socially conscious art and selling it online. Taking the learning from that business they focused on what people wanted in digital imaging and what the opportunity was to bring something unique to market in that area. They’ve been in business for several years and are trying to recreate the idea of exactly what a photo product is. They have combined new technology, manufacturing, online marketing and online retail into a fascinating new business.

The next time you are looking at ways to print a new photo you have to check them out.

I had the great pleasure recently to take a small departure from interviews of the founders of brand new startups and interview a legend in the advertising world, Roy Spence. Roy is the founder and current chairman of GSD&M, an advertising agency with more success than I can quickly enumerate, but whose successes include being the agency behind the wildly successful “Don’t mess with Texas” campaign and Southwest Airlines among many others.

In addition to founding an incredibly successful ad agency, Roy’s new mission in life is his “Dream it Build it” initiative where he intends to create 1,000,000 new startups in America. As Roy rightly points out, the secret sauce of the United States is its ability to create new and amazing businesses. Entrepreneurship is the backbone of the American dream and of lasting success in this country. Roy aims to initiate a program to turn the slowing rate of new business creation around and put the future of the U.S. back in the hands of the dreamers of new businesses. As his program moves forward be sure to look for interviews with new businesses participating in his program here, because I sure don’t want to miss it.

One of the things that really struck me about this interview is how unique Roy’s story of GSD&M is in today’s quick flip startup environment. When Roy and his partners graduated from The University of Texas in the 1970′s they set out to build a lasting business, doing work they love, staying friends and staying together. Almost 40 years later they have accomplished just that and more and are an inspiration to anyone who wants to create a lasting business. Many thanks go out to Roy for taking the time with FounderBuzz to share his story. I wish him all the success with his future endeavors.

You can check out some of Roy’s ongoing successes below:

• GSD&M
• The Purpose Institute
• Royitos Hot Sauce

It was great to have Chuck Gordon back on FounderBuzz again. Chuck is the founder and CEO of SpareFoot and has been interviewed before talking about their growth, and their experience with the Capital Factory. This time Chuck is back and sharing their good news of moving to new offices in downtown Austin.

They have officially moved out of their startup space and have a space all their own, designed to meet their unique storage oriented culture. Chuck says that the new office space is fantastic and that their employees are enjoying their newfound space all their own. Along with the move comes the symbol of success in the form of job growth. Chuck says that they are now hiring several positions that can be found on their jobs page. I congratulate them on their success and wish them more growth and success in the future.

Mike Kalis joined me recently and we talked about his company MarketPlace Homes and how it was benefiting home sellers in a tough financial environment. His company offers sellers a guaranteed 6 year lease on their home when they buy a home from the MarketPlace network. This allows homeowners who are underwater on their current homes to put it on the market and move onto a new home without defaulting on their loan or declaring bankruptcy and in the meantime helps you sell your old home.

MarketPlace homes makes their money off both the buying and selling of homes and has an extensive network of builders they work with to help supply new homes to buyers who want to move on from their old property. Certainly this was an interesting interview for me because of the relevancy of the recent housing crisis and continued problems with home foreclosures. I hope you enjoy it.

I was happy to have Mike Shultz, CEO of Infoglide, join me again to talk about the latest developments at his company. His company recently announced I-BIRDS, a service built to support the financial services industry in their anti-fraud efforts. I-BIRDS aims to create a community where financial service organizations can query a fraud database and get information on known fraudsters while protecting the privacy of their banking customers. In the press release Mike explained:

“Individuals and businesses involved in serious fraud and money laundering often spread the criminal activity across multiple financial institutions during a single campaign. Yet, while a number anti-fraud point solutions focus on detecting and preventing fraud on a department or company level basis, none have succeeded in providing a community-wide view of fraudulent entities. Until our I-BIRDS,” said Infoglide CEO, Mike Shultz. “We created I-BIRDS to help the community work together to find and link suspicious entities without violating privacy compliant policies.”

Fighting fraud while balancing customer privacy isn’t easy. Concerns for privacy is at an all time high as is financial fraud. If Infoglide can successfully balance both needs they may be onto something special.

I had the opportunity to speak with the CEO of rPath, Mike Torto about their announcement offering free technical support for all users of Puppet. rPath offers App Logistics for cloud resources and essentially offers technology and services to large businesses to enable them to move more of their applications to cloud resources and ensure that they are available and reliable. Puppet, the open source configuration management solution from Puppet Labs, is often used by many organizations to manage their applications across the enterprise. Mike explains their reasoning for supporting Puppet installations is to provide a enterprise grade support to companies who had previously managed their own Puppet installations. In the release rPath provided they stated:

“Puppet has built its reputation on the basis of next-gen Web 2.0 startups, not enterprise customers. Enterprise requirements are very different than these types of companies,” said Michael Torto, CEO of rPath. “Technical support is more than just product knowledge – it requires deep domain expertise in process, users and broader enterprise requirements.”

I have previously interviewed Luke Kanies of Puppet Labs here on FounderBuzz and know that they have great technology that is being used by more businesses than ever to provide a comprehensive configuration management solution across their enterprise, both on premise and in the cloud. It is good to hear other companies moving to support this tool and especially this move by rPath to offer free technical support for existing users of Puppet. I wish Mike and his company all the best in the future.

If you love following the fashion trends of the stars, then you would really envy Amit Dharmani, founder of YouCeleb.com. Amit has created a business that tracks and offers authentic celebrity fashion items at a discount to their customers. Amit works with both stars as well as their designers to identify popular items and offer them at a lower price.

To make it even sweeter, a portion of every purchase is donated to the charity of the relevant star’s or famous designer’s choice. For example, today’s deal features a bracelet (shown below) from designer Cubannie Links that has been worn by Rihanna and Alicia Keys. A portion of every purchase goes to the Ronald McDonald House, which is the charity of choice for Cubannie Links.

In addition to talking about his business, Amit shares the important role his startup incubator, Incubate Miami, played in helping him work out the role supporting charity would play in establishing relationships with celebrities. Amit credits his peers and mentors there for helping him work out the value that celebrities would have in allowing him to use their name, image and support to promote his site and special offers. Amit has a very interesting story, and if you like fashion, you should definitely check out his site.

When I interviewed Patrick Chukwura, designer of Goop, one of the things he spoke to me about was the importance of sound effects and original music to his game. Who did he use? Sean Beeson. Today I am excited to share an interview with Sean Beeson who talks about the composition business. Sean has scored over 50 games and has been recognized in his industry multiple times for his work including three nominations for G.A.N.G. awards.

Sean gets his business connections the old fashion way through word of mouth and great references. He is actively using the web and social media to maintain connections with developers and shares his advice on the importance of music and sound effects to a mobile game.

Tara Hunt was nice enough to take the time to do an interview with me about her seed round of funding for $325k and discussed how she changed her business model based on market feedback. Her company Buyosphere aims to help people ask a broader shopping community where to find an ideal product they may be looking for. The basic premise is for people to come online, ask a question to the shopping community, and find the product they were looking for quickly and ideally suited to their tastes.

Buyosphere didn’t start out this way. Their business model adapted from a more user and data analytics intensive model that required the users to fill out a tastes profile and where users would have more things automatically suggested for them to purchase based on data analytics. When both users and venture capitalists pushed back on early versions of the site, Tara listened and now has a rapidly growing site that was able to obtain the seed funding to prove their model with their community.

Business pivots are often talked about when looking back at successful companies. We’ll be following Buyosphere to see if their change equates to future success. I wish Tara and Buyosphere the best of luck.