Austin is CTO and co-founder of Cooliris. Austin was a masters degree student in Computer Science at Stanford University specializing in artificial intelligence, and stepped out to lead technology and product development for the Cooliris platform. Austin is fluent in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.
Prior to his involvement with Cooliris, Austin worked at Apple Computer for seven years, contributing to product development efforts in several divisions. In 1995, Austin began testing pre-release software and hardware for the company on a voluntary basis. In 1999, Austin joined Apple as a software intern in the HR division, and subsequently moved to the Mac OS X engineering team in 2001, where he worked with the Human Interface group to develop several user interface prototypes that substantially influenced product design over the years. Austin was an engineer on the team that created iPhoto, Apple's consumer digital photography solution, and later wrote the timeline and clip shelf UI for iMovie, Apple's consumer video editing software. Austin rejoined the operating system team in 2004 to work on Spotlight, the desktop search engine built into Mac OS X 10.4.
Before working at Apple, Austin co-founded a dial-up Internet service provider that grew to span the west coast of Florida. The company, NetLine Communications, was sold in 1996 to Comcast Cable.
As an undergraduate, Austin competed on the rowing team, an endeavor that culminated in racing as part of the boat that won Stanford's first rowing national championship in 2005.