Brenda P. Salinas

This Ain’t Greyhound: The Luxury Bus That’s a Texas Alternative to Rail

Posted on March 13, 2015March 13, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, texas

Get the full story on the Texas Standard

More than 200,000 super-commuters make the trek between Houston, Austin and Dallas every week. Doing that by air or behind the wheel can be a major hassle. Marjorie Kimmel knows first-hand. She travels around Texas once a month to teach real estate courses.

“I tried a little bit of everything, most of the time I was a road warrior, gripping the steering wheel on 1-35 the whole time,” Kimmel says. “I also tried flying once which was a real pain because I have a lot of books and equipment when I teach, and so trying to get that shipped ahead of me to then fly took a lot of logistical planning.”

Limos can be expensive. Executives like Marjorie Kimmel don’t always see the bus as a possibility. “That’s not probably something I would have done, just because I would have felt pretty cramped and you know, I don’t know, it’s never even occurred to me,” says Kimmel.

But Kimmel is exactly the type of business traveler that Alex Danza had in mind when he started his luxury bus service, Vonlane.

“The idea for this was give people an alternative to that hassle experience of flying and the alternative of driving themselves wasn’t much better,” Danza says, “so what we’re trying to do is to give people a real first-class travel experience where they can arrive 5 minutes before departure, they get on board, they can start to work right away, they can relax, they have an attendant taking care of them, they have great amenities from complimentary wi-fi to satellite TV, satellite radio, food and beverages.”

Danza isn’t trying to compete against Grayhound or Megabus – Because he says Vonlane isn’t a bus, it’s a motor coach for executives. “Our rate is 100 dollars one way and we’re priced very competitively with flying Southwest airlines or driving your own vehicle,” Danza says.

Danza says a lot of his customers are lawyers – because riding his bus provides them 3 uninterrupted billable hours. So far, business is pretty good. Danza says the only real competition he sees is far into the future.

“I do think there’s a demand for rail, people ask me if that concerns me, I think it’s a long ways away if it can happen, but we’re definitely seeing people looking for an alternative to self-drive or the airlines,” Danza says.

A company named Texas Central Railway plans to use private investment and Japanese technology to run a bullet train between Dallas and Houston. Travis Kelly says the demand for rail is much greater than just the number of passengers on executive motor coaches.

It’s a lot of people who are making the trip now, but it’s also people who choose not to make the trip at all because to travel by air or by car is too onerous, too difficult, too unpredictable,” Kelly says.

Commuter Marjorie Kimmel says she’s ready for rail. “If they had a high speed rail system like they do in Europe from Austin to Dallas, heck yeah, I’d be the first to sign up!”

But the reality of rail is still a couple of years way.

“We hope to proceed to construction as early at the first quarter of 2017 and that would allow trains to start running in 2021 or 2022,” Kelly says.

High speed rail would cut the road commute time in half – just 90 minutes to travel from Houston to Dallas. Even in the fanciest motorcoach, it’s going take you 3 and half hours to get there.

In the meantime Danza says, at least in a bus, you’re not behind the wheel.“We get comments that say ‘I’ll never drive myself to Dallas again’, ‘I’ll never fly to Austin again’, and we’re seeing that repeatedly so it’s been very interesting to see that there is a marketplace for this,” Danza says.

The more miserable you are at security checkpoints or stuck behind an 18 wheeler on 1-35, the better for Danza’s business model – at least until you can board a bullet train.

Harnessing The Power Of The Most Entrepreneurial Generation

Posted on March 12, 2015March 13, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Economics, millennials

Get the full story on the Texas Standard

The Bentley College study showed 67 percent of millennials want to start their own business.

Fred Truffle, the director of Bentley’s entrepreneurial studies program, says part of that is having lived through the Great Recession.

“They’ve seen their parents get fired or laid off during the downturn, that affected many of their lives, they don’t want to be part of that, Truffle says.

“If I’m going to take a risk, why not start my own company?” Truffle says, “It’s a better alternative.”

Josh Bauer describes himself as a millennial who helps other millennials quit their jobs.

Bauer’s with Capital Factory – an Austin incubator for start-ups. He says starting a company is cheaper than it’s ever been, especially when it comes to a tech company.

“Number one factor to start is that the cost has dropped, democratized it, opened it up to a lot more people,” Bauer says.

Bauer says that makes it seem like it’s possible to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerburg. Twenty-nine year-old Melanie Weinberger certainly sees herself that way.

“I always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” Weinberger says.

Her startup is a consulting company called Fitsteady. She chose to headquarter in Texas for a reason.

“I moved to Austin sight unseen because of its low cost of living, that’s important when you’re an entrepreneur and high quality of life, I don’t know how often those two are correlated,” Weinberger says.

“It’s super liberal, it’s weird, you can try out wacko things, it’s not a major metro, you won’t get your ass kicked as quickly, you won’t get trampled on as quickly.”

But 90 percent of startups never make it past the seed stage, even though Texas has one of the highest millennial population growth rates in the country and a business friendly climate, entrepreneurs in Texas face unique challenges. Cam Hauser directs 3-Day Startup, an entrepreneurial workshop for college students.

“Silicon valley, the investors in that community are much more likely to invest in a really cool idea that shows no promise of making money,” Hauser says.

“The investors here in the Texas community are a very business-model driven, they’re interested in business models that are proven to make money.”

In Texas, 13.5 percent of the millennial generation is unemployed or underemployed. A report by the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation projects that millennials will make up 75 percent of the American workforce by 2025.

As state legislators consider how to keep the Texas job machine turning, Bauer says there’s one thing they can do attract young entrepreneurs from out-of-state.

“There’s not a lot that they can do,” says Bauer. “They need to stay out of the way, they need to not do things that make it an unattractive place.”

“Incentives that make people want to live here, nothing specific about startups, keep making this a place where people want to be,” Bauer says.

Bauer says he believes Texas should keep taxes low and do something about increasing housing prices in Houston and Austin – all things to keep Texas an affordable place to start a business.

Job Growth Spurs Temporary Housing Market In Houston

Posted on March 9, 2015March 13, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Economics, Houston, texas

Get the full story on the Texas Standard

Imagine waking up in your luxury apartment. There’s a knock at the door – in wheels some scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, a gourmet breakfast delivered. Every morning.

And your company’s paying for all of it.

That could be the reality for some Houston transplants — as early as June. If David Redfern has his way. He’s the president of Waterwalk.

“Waterwalk specifically is one part apartment, one part corporate housing and one part upscale extended stay hotel,” Redfern says.

While anyone who can afford the base rent of $2,ooo a month is welcome, Redfern has one specific customer in mind.

“Our customer is the people that are traveling for those types of business trips and so that tends to be companies that have relocations, trainings and projects,” Redfern says.

Houston added more than 100,000 jobs in the last 12 months and hosted more than 4 million business travelers. Forty-one percent of those jobs were in the energy and healthcare fields.

Relocation specialist and writer Michelle Sandlin says all those business travelers need a place to stay.

“Houston has a lot of temporary housing providers offering various products and there’s always been, for the last few years, an inventory shortage in that regard,” Sandlin says.

“So, I would imagine anybody coming into that market offering this type of product and service would certainly be welcome in the community.”

More than 5,000 energy-related firms in Houston compete for some of the best talent in the country. And when you’re trying to woo someone to your team, every little luxury counts.

“We deliver breakfast to each room, each apartment, we provide obviously housekeeping, we have a car service that will take people wherever they need to go,” Redfern says.

“It’s kind of a level of pampering you don’t get these days.”

Once the Houston property is up and running, Waterwalk plans on expanding to Austin, San Antonio and Dallas/Fort Worth.

“Well, Houston has had and Texas has had a steady influx of people moving here for several years, we’ve got population growth that continues to surge,” Sandlin says.

The state demographer says the Texan population will double by 2050. Part of that is projected birth rates, and part is people from all over the world moving here to work. Companies who can ease that transition for new Texas residents look at the statistics and see dollar signs.

Texas Is A Leader In The Video Game Industry

Posted on March 9, 2015March 13, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, Economics, texas

Get the full story on the Texas Standard

The Texas video game industry directly employs about 5,000 people. It also creates hundreds more jobs that depend on transporting and selling the technology.

Dallas, San Antonio and Austin are the hubs of innovation. Big games like “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft” came from Texas game studios: Aspyr and Blizzard.

But gaming isn’t just about gaming anymore.

Jennifer Bullard directs the two year-old Captivate Conference for professionals in the gaming industry. “The game industry is pretty wide and diversified – there’s console developers, there’s mobile developers, there’s education game development here, there’s people who work in what we call real-world games, training simulations,” she says.

Bullard has been designing games like “Heroes of Might & Magic” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” for 17 years. She says the country’s second biggest gaming industry is always hunting for new recruits.

“There’s more education institutions for game development,” Bullard says. “When I first got started people didn’t even have bachelor’s degrees and frankly didn’t care about it. Now, of course, if you want to get into the game industry you need a bachelor’s degree.”

Texas universities are stepping up to keep the industry supplied. Campuses from Abilene to Victoria have established gaming departments. At UT-Dallas there’s the Center for Modeling and Simulation. Marge Zielke is the director.

Director Marge Zielke says the program “emphasizes 21^st century media as an extension of its degree plan.” The curriculum is based on critical thinking, research projects, and learning how to appeal to a wide audience.

“One of the things that we try to teach students in all of our classes is that it’s one thing to be able to use the technology that we have available to us today,” Zielke says, “but students of media really have to think about how to conceptualize and develop media that doesn’t exist yet.”

Some of that conceptualizing is likely to take place at next month’s SXSW. Developers, manufacturers and fans from all over the country will show off their stuff at the SXSW Gaming expo next week. No matter what happens, you can be sure the next big thing in gaming will be revealed in Texas.

Tortillas: The Hot Food Trend 500 Years in the Making

Posted on March 5, 2015March 13, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Latinos, texas

Get the full story on the Texas Standard

When Chef Jorge Rojo learned that Food And Wine Magazine had named homemade tortillas a trend to watch in 2015, he scoffed.

“Tortilla? A Trend? Really? Well in Mexico the Trend has been for hundred for years, and it hasn’t been a trend,” Rojo says.

Aztec women were already making tortillas in 1515 – before Cortez even arrived.

Turns out – in 2015 — store-bought tortillas are more popular than ever. The Tortilla Industry Council reported 12 billion dollars in sales in 2012. And the flour versions edged out corn by about 120 million.

Alma Ramirez understands why tortillas are so popular in stores. I caught her on her shift at the Del Rio Tortilla factory in south San Antonio. She says that even though she spends all day making tortillas, when she cooks at home, she uses store-bought.

“You get home late from work and you’re tired, you go get your kids and you stop by the store to get your tortillitas,” Ramirez says.

You see-even though they look simple, tortillas are really hard to make.

Chef Jorge Rojo’s restaurant is attached to the Sanitary Tortilla Company in San Antonio. The corn grinding and the masa-making start way before sundown every day. By noon most days, they’re all sold out.

“It’s a long process that you have to make every day, so we grind our own mixtamal, which is the cooked corn,” Rojo says, “so they make them in several ways, we make corn chips, tostadas, taco shells, tortillas, all you can do with corn.”

But Rojo says there’s a big difference between the hand made tortilla versus the machine made version at the supermarket.

“When you do those by hand it’s considerably different, it’s more fluffy, they cook at the same time, it’s more convenient to reheat them, because they’re more soft, and it has a longer shelf life,” Rojo says.

So maybe it’s not that homemade tortillas are a “trend,” it’s that the American consumer is becoming more discerning.

Natalie Boites says if a restaurant “didn’t have homemade flour of corn tortillas I wouldn’t go back.”

Alma Ramirez agrees. She says store-bought tortillas are fine when you’re making yourself a late-night quesadilla. But if you’re going to buy your meal, even if it’s from a side-of-the-road taco cart, you want those tortillas to be fresh.

A note here to Food and Wine editors: calling something a trend, implies it’s a fad. Here today, gone tomorrow. In Texas, tortillas aren’t a trend, they’re a tradition.

Texas Institutions Take A Bite Out Of Student Debt

Posted on February 27, 2015March 13, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, texas

Get the full story on the Texas Standard

In 2003, The Texas Legislature voted to allow public universities to set their own tuition. Since then, tuition has more than doubled and student debt in Texas has skyrocketed.

State Senator Charles Schwertner filed a bill to cap tuition and fees at the state’s public colleges and universities at their current levels. Under the bill they would only be allowed to grow at the rate of inflation. But this bill hasn’t yet come to a vote, and there’s no indication of whether that will happen.

Lauren Asher with the Project on Student Debt says that Texas is doing relatively well compared to the rest of the nation.

“Texas had lower than average than debt compared to the national, it had the 32^nd highest and was 28^th for the share of students with loans,” Asher says.

But one of the reasons why student debt is relatively low is because Texas has a higher share of students who graduate from community colleges, which tend to be much cheaper. Among students who go to 4 year colleges, debt is still a big problem. Texas is among the top states with the highest default rate on federal student loans.

Right now a lot of students rely on Federal Pell Grants, which are about $5 thousand dollars a year. But when you add in not just tuition but housing, food and books, that just makes a dent in what it costs to go to college.

Which is why two Texas institutions are tackling student debt in their own ways. Memorial Herman, one of the biggest hospital systems in Texas, made an announcement saying that on July 1^st they’ll start paying off their employee’s student loans. Ann Hollingsworth is an HR executive there.

”We’ve long had a tuition reimbursement program for people who are currently going to school but we didn’t have anything for people who had gone through school and finished who were struggling with debt,” Hollingsworth says. “We thought, well what can we do to help the people that have just graduated who won’t be going to school anymore, but who are still paying for their education.”

The healthcare field is so competitive in Houston that it just might catch on. But there’s another novel idea in the works. Michael Sorrell is the president of Paul Quinn College, an HBCU south of Dallas. The small liberal arts college is now becoming a work college to make school more affordable for students.

“Being a work college means that every student that lives on campus is required to have a job, probably the simplest way to explain is work study on steroids,” Sorrell says.

Students can perform any job on campus, from administrative positions to groundskeeping. Sorrell says that by basically having students run the school they’ll dramatically cut costs. Between Pell Grants and scholarships, he’s vowing that no student will graduate with more than $10,000 in debt. That’s less than half the state average.

How to Get a Full Turkish Immersion In Texas

Posted on February 25, 2015March 2, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in ARts, Austin, culture

Get the full story on the Texas Standard.

At six o’clock every evening, the Raindrop Turkish House in North Austin begins to light up. Dozens of students from all backgrounds come together to learn Turkish language, art, cooking and even calligraphy.

René Flores is a graphic designer who wanted a break from his software package for a change.

“I’ve always been interested in calligraphy and I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to do it when I was in school studying graphic design,” Flores says. “So when I heard about this, you know, it sounded really interesting to me.”

He heard about it in the Austin Community College catalogue. This is the first year that Raindop Turkish House classes are accredited by ACC. Director Ibrahim Server says that came after a six year campaign.

“After that we saw some ACC classes offered, like Foreign Language, and we went to ACC and we talked to them, Server says. “We actually complete the requirements and they also accept our Turkish classes and we start working together after that time.”

ACC doesn’t pay the nonprofit. All of its teachers are volunteers. So what does the Turkish house get out of the deal?

“ACC [helps] us find a lot of students also with a catalog with continuing courses they publish some flyers they publish this class on their websites and they help us a lot finding students,” Server says.

Raindrop House’s first function is to welcome Turkish immigrants to Texas. It’s second is to introduce Texas students to Turkish language and culture – students like Courtney Debower, who takes Turkish conversation classes.

“I went to Turkey when I was in college and I always thought it would be a fun language to learn someday,” Debower says. “So when I moved to Austin I looked at the ACC Adult Ed. Catalog and they happen to have a Turkish Class so I felt like that was a sign that I should sign up.”

Debower will get an official certificate from Austin Community College when she finishes her course.

“It’s been a lot of fun they really incorporate the cooking and the tea and the art classes and all of the culture side that goes with the language,” Debower says.

There are 17 Raindrop Turkish houses across Texas – Houston has the largest one. But Austin is the only city where the art and language classes are accredited by a local community college.

It’s a model that the group wants to export to the rest of the state.

Why Millennials Are Being Left Behind

Posted on February 24, 2015February 24, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Economics

Get the full story on the Texas Standard

If you ask millennials to name some of workplace skills they should have learned in colleges, these are the answers that you’ll get:

“Email organization or running a calendar, things like that,” William Stamps says.

“Writing office memos, sending out appropriate emails,” Sophia Mackris says.

“Team management. Getting to work and understanding how to manage other people.
Mike Curry says.

“How to properly allocate your salary based on savings and long term goals,” Danny Cruz says.

Testing giant ETS is the company behind the new report. Researcher Anita Sands says millennials are behind left behind because colleges aren’t giving students the skills they need. She analyzed literacy and arithmetic skills of workers ages 16 through 65.

“Nearly two thirds of the millennials in numeracy score below what is regarded as a minimum standard,” Sands says. “And that’s a large percentage of the population to lack the skills necessary to participate in the 21^st century in both the workplace and the family and the society overall.”

She’s not talking Outlook calendars – she’s worried about millennials’ information processing skills. Like being able to read something quickly and summarize it, or making a decision on their feet.

Michael Harris says the challenge for this generation is an education system that favors workplace readiness over a robust education. He is the director of the Center of Teaching Excellence at Southern Methodist University.

“Every test we have of CEOs will tell us that they want someone who is a critical thinker, someone that can write effectively, someone that can speak coherently and these are the most valuable skills,” Harris says.

Harris says the role of college isn’t to teach you how to write office memos – you’re supposed to learn that stuff on the job.

“You can learn how to work the fax machine, you can learn how to use the fancy new technology, but that will be out of date about as fast as you learn it,” Harris says. “However, if you know how to process information, how to critically analyze new information, that’s what’s going to prepare you in the long term.”

What you’re supposed to learn to college, is how to learn, he says.

But that doesn’t help frustrated law student Sophia Mackris.

“There’s just things I don’t think we’re being taught in an academic setting, just real world life skills that we’re not being taught,” Mackris says.

It seems like everybody disagrees on how to prepare young people for careers. Educators like Michael Harris think it’s the focus on career readiness and testing that does students a disservice, while the young people in this story think it’s that lack of entry-level skills.

One thing everyone agrees on – the research. This cohort of millennials is more unprepared to enter the workforce than any other in history.

¿Quien Soy?

Posted on February 24, 2015May 22, 2020 by Brenda P. Salinas in Uncategorized

I’m Brenda Patricia Salinas Baker. I’m a trilingual public radio producer living in New York. I was awarded the highly competitive Kroc Fellowship at NPR in 2012. Since then I have reported pieces for NPR’s flagship programs, Marketplace and PRI’s The World as well as a number of podcasts including Life of the Law. I have a B.A. in Economics from Columbia University and I’m pursing my MFA in Creative Writing from The Writer’s Foundry. I was one of the founding producers of the Texas Standard, a daily news magazine show that broadcasts state-wide from KUT in Austin. I helped re-launch NPR’s Latino USA as a full-hour show and have reported original stories for the show as a freelancer. I was a founding producer of the personalized radio start-up 60dB where I reported original stories and helped publishers bring their print-pieces to audio life. I’m now working at Google where my team is re-imagining the future of radio.

I’m committed to building a media landscape where every woman of color has the power to tell her story. I am proud to be an NPR Next Generation mentor, a board member on the Association of Independents in Radio, an Advisory Council member of the PRX/PRI Podcast Creators’ Program and a coach to young woman breaking into the world of public radio. The world needs our stories.

Want to know more? Follow me on Twitter or shoot me a note. Can’t wait to hear from you!

Skoop: A Social Network That Will Only Live For 12 Days

Posted on February 20, 2015February 24, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Social MEdia

Facebook has more than one billion users you can friend. Twitter has 800 million accounts you can follow. But if you want to find information relevant to a small community on those networks, you have to search for it.

Neil Patwardhan says that’s a problem. He founded a new social network called Skoop.

“The growth of macro social networks has gotten so vast that its created a perfect problem and the problem is relevancy,” Patwardhan says, “I mean theres only so many cat videos I can take in my news feed.”

Skoop is centered around specific colleges. For example, if you have a Texas Tech email account, you can login in and find events, free food, buy used books and chat with the people nearby.

Now Patwardhan is taking Skoop to SXSW – But it will only be good for Southby’s 12 days of conferences.

We’re out to prove that a micro network actually makes a ton of sense around a event so no ones ever done a social network around a event before,” Patwardhan says.

If history is any indicator, one conference is a good place to debut a new social media platform. Twitter first launched at South by Southwest Interactive in 2007. Foursquare did it in 2009.

Josh Constine says there’s a lot buzz around social networks that are small by design. He writes for Tech Crunch.

“I think there’s a lot of value and people are excited about micro networks because it means that there’s a more an intimate back and forth conversation rather than a one-way broadcasting,” says Constine.

The problem now is money, as in “how do you make any”?

If you’re a brand trying to advertise on Facebook or Tumblr, the main draw is the sheer number of eyeballs. A small network just can’t compete. Which is why Patwardhan is banking on South By Southwest.

“What you will end up finding out is after South by, having proven our model, we can actually go to event organizers and say listen you need this for your attendees, says Patwardhan,” and we would build that for you we would write label that for you for a fee.”

Right now Skoop doesn’t make any money. It’s in good company, though – Twitter waited 4 years before it turned a profit.

But Twitter didn’t pay a team of people to populate the app with content. Skoop is paying to plug 900 events to plug into its South by Southwest model.

Patwardhan wants to sell users and potential sponsors on the idea that engagement is more valuable than a wide user base.

Tech Crunch’s Josh Constine says that’s consistent with the way people use social media in 2015.

“A lot of people would say that they would rather share to a small group of people but get real feedback, say friends who really read what they wrote, and wrote something back tot hem rather than just broadcasting it out to a ton of people who only shallowly consume it and there won’t be any feedback or conversation or discussion,” Constine says.

But whether that’s a point of view that will generate any revenue, well, that remains to be seen.