Houston tech company launches digital product to take the guesswork out of SEO

Meet INK

INK, a digital writing tool, allows writers to see how their content would perform on search engines in real time. Photo courtesy of INK

A Houston company wants to arm content creators and writers with the tools to perfect search engine optimization, and they want to provide these tools for free.

INK, a downloadable writing tool and web app, was created by the brains behind Edgy Labs, a tech company that has been working on dissecting how Google and search engines operate. Edgy's founders — Alexander De Ridder, Michael Umansky, and Gary Haymann — created the content site as a lab to test out their SEO theories and best practices.

"INK is the byproduct of everything we've learned at Edgy Labs that we productized," says Umansky, who serves as CEO. "We think we are on the cusp of leading what we are calling the content performance optimization revolution."

Umansky says that of the 4 million pieces of content created online daily, 94 percent of content gets little to no traffic on Google. And a big reason for content failing is because the writer doesn't fully understand how SEO works — and search engines are always evolving their algorithms.

Despite this huge SEO problem, there weren't any one-stop-shop tools available already.

"What we came to understand was that there's a ton of SEO and CMS products and analytics products, but what there wasn't was a really good way to help writers — who are really the ground zero for where content is created — bridge the gap to understanding what SEO is all about," Umansky says.

INK edgy labsINK allows writers to see in real time how their content would fare on Google. Photo courtesy of INK

The writing tool allows the user to create content right in the app, and as the writer composes, he or she gets real-time feedback on the content. INK will compare the content to potential competitors' content and analyze and score how it expects the published material to perform. All the while, INK has a customizable interface for users. There are light and dark modes, and even features for writers with dyslexia or color blindness.

Umansky says his team has big plans for growing INK and even introducing more tools and products, and INK's evolution will continue as search engines continue updates and algorithm edits.

"As Google changes, we change with it," Umansky says. "I think last year Google changed something like 3,500 times. It's constant."

He also sees INK being able to provide a headline optimization component, as well as tools for tracking engagement. While perfecting SEO is the first step, Umansky says he also wants to provide products that help optimize writing content for a conversion perspective that would be good for landing pages and digital ads.

INK launched online in early October and was ranked as the product of the week on Product Hunt. For now, the app is completely free to download. Umansky does think the first paid version will be live in the first quarter of 2020.

Ultimately, Umansky says, writers shouldn't also have to be SEO specialists — that's INK's team's job. The product they created will allow for easy content management system integration — it already has an extension in WordPress.

"We envision a world where the content creators can control their own search destiny," Umansky says. "What we want to do is focus on empowering those writers to really take the power of search back into their own hands without having to be SEO experts."

Houston-based Edgy Labs is working on AI technology to constantly stay ahead of search engine technology. Pexels

How this Houston company is staying one step ahead of Google

SEO pros

Where's the best place to hide a dead body? According to Alexander De Ridder and other search optimization experts, it's on the second page of Google where no one ever goes.

Jokes aside, search engine optimization has become a serious business as people have pivoted from making their own decisions based on knowledge acquired or resources available to trusting entities to decide for them, De Ridder explains.

"More and more of our lives are governed by decisions we are outsourcing," De Ridder says. "For example, maybe you jumped in the car this week and you entered a destination. The GPS told you where to turn — you don't question that."

While convenient, the challenge this new normal presents companies is how to make clear to the internet that that their information is worthy of being on the first page of search results. De Ridder co-founded Houston-based Edgy Labs with Michael Umansky and Gary Haymann to figure out for themselves how this "black box" decision making works — and where it's going.

"Our take was let's build a laboratory to understand how that rank or AI works and build our own platform around it and get better insights on how that black box thinks," Umansky, who is CEO of the company, says.

Edgy Labs has two sides to it. At its core, the company is a blog covering trends and research in science and technology that acts as an SEO-testing platform, or lab. Once the team has the developed technology, it's able to provide its best practices and tools to clients.

"We think about innovation in a practical way as something that you need to live out the truth yourself, before you go out and apply it to other people," explains De Ridder, who also serves as CTO of the company.

The SEO business is projected to be an $80 billion industry by 2020, Umansky says, and its evolving from text focused to including voice and video in the search process. When Edgy Labs launched, the focus was on creating content that was primed to be picked up by Google. Through this process, the company grabbed the attention of some large Fortune 100 accounts.

"What we saw was if we applied these same techniques to a large brand, there was a massive uptake in success for the content and the site itself," Umansky says. "What that's led us to want to do is take the power of the technology and put it back in the hands of content creators."

Edgy Labs has found that the key to SEO and marketing online is to be content focused and put the users — and the information they are seeking — first.

"What's been really great is I think we've tried to turn the process upside down and make sure the client is creating content that's data driven insights — not just taking marketing slogans and terms and dropping it in the content, which was the norm," says Haymann, who leads the client-facing business.

Just like any technology, search is constantly evolving. Search engines used to scan the internet to suggest articles to answer your questions. Now, Google is taking information from those articles and regurgitating it for you, rather than sending you to a third-party website. A casualty of that is web traffic for the site that has that information.

This shift is a result of voice searching growth. One in five searches is done via voice search — think: Alexa or Siri — and 40 percent of adults use voice search daily, De Ridder says. With this type of search process, there can only be one response — not pages of results, like web searching. De Ridder says that because of this growth in audio searching, videos will become a more favorable search result.

Another growing digital trend, De Ridder says, is progressive web app pages becoming more useful in search than native apps. These PWAs act and feel like mobile apps, but without requiring the user to download anything. Where this trend metabolized is when the ".app" domains were released. Edgy Labs relaunched its webpage to being a mobile friendly progressive app page and has seen more engagement from its users — longer time on site, lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates.

"As websites want to survive and remain relevant, it will be about providing good information so that they can optimize themselves for voice search, video, and also have amazing experiences of native app-like quality," De Ridder says.

While SEO technology and practices evolve, Edgy Labs hopes to stay at the forefront of the industry.

"It's kind of like we're at the top of the mountain, and the mountain is always getting taller and taller. To stay on the cutting edge, you always have to keep climbing and climbing," De Ridder says. "But, if you're up there, you've got a beautiful view, and that allows you to look into the world and see the opportunity that's associated with that change."


Alexander De Ridder (left), Michael Umansky (center) and Gary Haymann founded Edgy Labs in 2016. Courtesy of Edgy Labs

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Houston hospital names leading cancer scientist as new academic head

new hire

Houston Methodist Academic Institute has named cancer clinician and scientist Dr. Jenny Chang as its new executive vice president, president, CEO, and chief academic officer.

Chang was selected following a national search and will succeed Dr. H. Dirk Sostman, who will retire in February after 20 years of leadership. Chang is the director of the Houston Methodist Dr. Mary and Ron Neal Cancer Center and the Emily Herrmann Presidential Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research. She has been with Houston Methodist for 15 years.

Over the last five years, Chang has served as the institute’s chief clinical science officer and is credited with strengthening cancer clinical trials. Her work has focused on therapy-resistant cancer stem cells and their treatment, particularly relating to breast cancer.

Her work has generated more than $35 million in funding for Houston Methodist from organizations like the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, according to the health care system. In 2021, Dr. Mary Neal and her husband Ron Neal, whom the cancer center is now named after, donated $25 million to support her and her team’s research on advanced cancer therapy.

In her new role, Chang will work to expand clinical and translational research and education across Houston Methodist in digital health, robotics and bioengineered therapeutics.

“Dr. Chang’s dedication to Houston Methodist is unparalleled,” Dr. Marc L. Boom, Houston Methodist president and CEO, said in a news release. “She is committed to our mission and to helping our patients, and her clinical expertise, research innovation and health care leadership make her the ideal choice for leading our academic mission into an exciting new chapter.”

Chang is a member of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Stand Up to Cancer Scientific Advisory Council. She earned her medical degree from Cambridge University in England and completed fellowship training in medical oncology at the Royal Marsden Hospital/Institute for Cancer Research. She earned her research doctorate from the University of London.

She is also a professor at Weill Cornell Medical School, which is affiliated with the Houston Methodist Academic Institute.

Texas A&M awarded $1.3M federal grant to develop clean energy tech from electronic waste

seeing green

Texas A&M University in College Station has received a nearly $1.3 million federal grant for development of clean energy technology.

The university will use the $1,280,553 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a cost-effective, sustainable method for extracting rare earth elements from electronic waste.

Rare earth elements (REEs) are a set of 17 metallic elements.

“REEs are essential components of more than 200 products, especially high-tech consumer products, such as cellular telephones, computer hard drives, electric and hybrid vehicles, and flat-screen monitors and televisions,” according to the Eos news website.

REEs also are found in defense equipment and technology such as electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, and radar and sonar systems, says Eos.

The grant awarded to Texas A&M was among $17 million in DOE grants given to 14 projects that seek to accelerate innovation in the critical materials sector. The federal Energy Act of 2020 defines a critical material — such as aluminum, cobalt, copper, lithium, magnesium, nickel, and platinum — as a substance that faces a high risk of supply chain disruption and “serves an essential function” in the energy sector.

“DOE is helping reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign supply chains through innovative solutions that will tap domestic sources of the critical materials needed for next-generation technologies,” says U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. “These investments — part of our industrial strategy — will keep America’s growing manufacturing industry competitive while delivering economic benefits to communities nationwide.”

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This article originally appeared on EnergyCapital.

Biosciences startup becomes Texas' first decacorn after latest funding

A Dallas-based biosciences startup whose backers include millionaire investors from Austin and Dallas has reached decacorn status — a valuation of at least $10 billion — after hauling in a series C funding round of $200 million, the company announced this month. Colossal Biosciences is reportedly the first Texas startup to rise to the decacorn level.

Colossal, which specializes in genetic engineering technology designed to bring back or protect various species, received the $200 million from TWG Global, an investment conglomerate led by billionaire investors Mark Walter and Thomas Tull. Walter is part owner of Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers, and Tull is part owner of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers.

Among the projects Colossal is tackling is the resurrection of three extinct animals — the dodo bird, Tasmanian tiger and woolly mammoth — through the use of DNA and genomics.

The latest round of funding values Colossal at $10.2 billion. Since launching in 2021, the startup has raised $435 million in venture capital.

In addition to Walter and Tull, Colossal’s investors include prominent video game developer Richard Garriott of Austin and private equity veteran Victor Vescov of Dallas. The two millionaires are known for their exploits as undersea explorers and tourist astronauts.

Aside from Colossal’s ties to Dallas and Austin, the startup has a Houston connection.

The company teamed up with Baylor College of Medicine researcher Paul Ling to develop a vaccine for elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus (EEHV), the deadliest disease among young elephants. In partnership with the Houston Zoo, Ling’s lab at the Baylor College of Medicine has set up a research program that focuses on diagnosing and treating EEHV, and on coming up with a vaccine to protect elephants against the disease. Ling and the BCMe are members of the North American EEHV Advisory Group.

Colossal operates research labs Dallas, Boston and Melbourne, Australia.

“Colossal is the leading company working at the intersection of AI, computational biology, and genetic engineering for both de-extinction and species preservation,” Walter, CEO of TWG Globa, said in a news release. “Colossal has assembled a world-class team that has already driven, in a short period of time, significant technology innovations and impact in advancing conservation, which is a core value of TWG Global.”

Well-known genetics researcher George Church, co-founder of Colossal, calls the startup “a revolutionary genetics company making science fiction into science fact.”

“We are creating the technology to build de-extinction science and scale conservation biology,” he added, “particularly for endangered and at-risk species.”

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