Following Aussie Startups and Tech Trends

Vishal Sharma Monday, June 30, 2008 Australia , Business , Interview , Online , Podcasting , Ventures , Web 0 comments

Today we showcase an exciting and a successful technology business co founded by Cameron Reilly , from Australia,The Podcast Network - World's First Podcasting Business.

In a recent email based interview with Cameron, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say:

Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
I'm 37, stunningly handsome, brilliant, and like long walks on the beach.

What is the name of your venture/company?
I'm the founder of The Podcast Network, MODM, Geeks Who Care, Twittories and The Church of LOTU.

Please tell us about your venture/company?
Where to start?The Podcast Network - the world's first podcasting business. We currently produce over 80 podcasts with a monthly audience of about 500,000 people from around the world.
MODM - a monthly networking event for the digital media industryGeeks Who Care - a charity based on getting geeks together to use their geekful powers for good in their local communities.
Twittories - an experiment to get 140 people to collaborate on writing a short story using Twitter
The Church of LOTU - a church for atheists and critical thinkers.

Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Let's focus on TPN. My co-founder was a guy called Mick Stanic but he left the business about a year after we started it in Feb 2005. TPN was formed off the back of the podcast Mick and I started doing in Nov2004 called "G'Day World", which was the first Australian podcast (which now makes it the longest running Australian podcast).

How long it took before it was up and running?
It took us about two months from the day we came up with the idea to start something to launching the site.

What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
To build a 21st century global media company that can change the world.

What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Audio and video podcasts mainly, but we recently published our first book (in both paperback and e-book formats).

What type of customers you are targeting?
Intelligent people who want to change the world.

How many people are using your services?
about 500,000.

What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Just word of blog.

How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools in place to monitor the progress?
We look at the stats.

What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
We're selling advertising. Not much of it yet, but that's the plan.

Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
The entire radio industry, the entire television industry, and everyone with a podcast.

What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
The interwebs. And a microphone.

What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology
Wordpress rocks.

Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Yes it's 100% open source.

What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
Linux and MySQL.

What's your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
I love being an entrepreneur. Australia has advantages and disadvantages, the same as anywhere else.

What's your thought on the start-ups culture and innovation coming out of Australia especially in media and telecom?
There aren't enough of them.

How do you see the opportunity in mobile space? Do you think iPhone (closed) and Google's Android based (open) platform will be the two major players going forward?
I think mobile is huge and yes, Apple and Google will be the key players moving forwards.

The conventional computing model is shifting to Cloud computing which is comprised of SAAS, PAAS and IAAS (infrastructure). This has resulted in changes to conventional monetising model? How do you see the future of business in terms of technology and revenue model?I'm just a media guy. Software business models don't interest me much outside of what I have to pay for it. I think Microsoft are screwed though.

What do you think the government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation and the telecom industry?
Get out of the way, mostly. And perhaps create some incentives for start-ups (like a tax break or two).

If you are given an opportunity to change the nation, what 3 things you will do?
I am changing the nation (and the world) every day.
Here's my plan:
1. Run a large media company.
2. Start a new political party.
3. Use the media company to start a new political party.

You are a prolific and a well-established blogger and podcaster. How do you manage this with work?
It is my work.

How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up? Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
I started MODM about a year ago in Melbourne for that very reason. It was a monthly catch-up at various bars in Melbourne. This year I'm launching it nationally.

Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?Do it. Stop making bullshit excuses and stop listening to your spouse. Just pull your socks up and do it.

Thanks Cameron for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Wednesday, June 25, 2008 Australia , Games , New , Startup , Technology , Ventures 0 comments

Today we showcase an exciting and a pioneering technology startup from Australia, Emotiv Systems - Control Gameplay With Your Thoughts, Expressions & Emotions. It is co-founded by Nam Do, Professor Allan Snyder, Dr. Neil Weste and Tan Le, president of Emotiv Systems.

I recently did an email based interview with the president Tan Le on the progress of their venture. This is what she has to say:

- Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
Before joining Emotiv, I, along with Emotiv Systems CEO, Nam Do, co-founded and ran SASme, a pioneer in providing SMPP platforms and one of the companies responsible for the creation of Australia's SMS application market. I’ve also worked with one of Australia's leading law firms, Freehills.

In 1998, I was named Young Australian of the Year and voted one of Australia's 30 Most Successful Women Under 30. I graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Laws (with Honors) from Monash University.

I also was a Goodwill Ambassador for Australia in Asia, and a Patron of the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development Program. I’ve been an Ambassador for the Status of Women since 2001, and I’ve also been appointed to a number of Boards, including Plan International Australia, Australian Citizenship Council, National Committee for Human Rights Education in Australia, and RMIT Business in Entrepreneurship.

- Please tell us about your venture/company?
Founded in 2003, Emotiv Systems is a pioneer in brain computer interface (BCI) technology. Its mission is to create the ultimate interface for the next-generation of man-machine interaction. It does this by evolving the interaction between human beings and electronic devices beyond the limits of conscious interface. Emotiv creates technologies that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs directly from the brain. These technologies include a hardware and software platform that is being licensed to application developers and other third parties worldwide. We recently announced the world’s first consumer neuroheadset, the Emotiv EPOC™ as part of a complete product offering for consumers. Emotiv is headquartered in San Francisco and has R&D facilities in Sydney, Australia.

- What is your key-product?
Our key-product is the Emotiv EPOC, a neuroheadset that allows players to control gameplay with their thoughts, expressions and emotions. The notion of brain-controlled gaming has long been a dream and a goal of the gaming industry. The Emotiv EPOC is a high-fidelity neurosystem and is the first affordable, wearable, neuroheadset specifically designed for the video gaming industry. Engaging, immersive, and nuanced, Emotiv-inspired game-play will change the face of electronic gameplay by making it possible for games to be controlled and influenced by the player's mind. The Emotiv EPOC will include the neuroheadset, game content published by Emotiv that showcases the unique features of the headset and access to the Emortal, a next generation online portal that unleashes the full potential of the headset. Consumers can also experience any of their favorite PC games through the neuroheadset, by using the Emotiv EmoKey, which allows the user to link any detection to any action in the game.

- Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Emotiv was founded by four people: Nam Do, Professor Allan Snyder, Dr. Neil Weste and myself. Nam is our CEO and his background is strategic planning and management and he’s also an expert in IT and multimedia. Prior to forming Emotiv, Nam co-founded and ran SASme together with me. At the age of nine, Nam was selected to join a special program in mathematics and physics at the National School for Gifted Students in Vietnam. In 1995, Nam won one of Vietnam's most prestigious scholarships for study abroad. In 1996, Nam came to Australia's RMIT University under a scholarship program for students with exceptional academic ability and leadership potential. Nam was honoured in SmartCompany’s list of Australia’s Top 10 digital entrepreneurs in 2007.

Prof. Allan Snyder is an internationally known and recognized neuroscientist. He has been concentrating his energies on this field for the past 20 years. In 2003, he made a major scientific contribution by demonstrating that it is possible to access the non-conscious mind by turning off the conscious mind using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. He was also the first to describe the way light travels along optical fibres, thereby paving the way for today's worldwide telecommunications network. This historically significant contribution earned him the 2001 Marconi International Prize, the "foremost prize in communication and information technology." He also received prizes such as the 1997 International Australia Prize, the 1996 Massey Prize and medal of the British Institute of Physics and the Thomas Rankin Lyle medal of the Australian Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Neil Weste is one of the most successful engineers/entrepreneurs that Australia has ever produced. In 1977 he started his career at Bell Labs, where he worked on early VLSI design tools (i.e., the MULGA suite), and he went on to become the head of the entire Bell Labs VLSI Department. Neil is a pioneer in chip design. His book, The Principle of CMOS and VLSI Design, was the first book on CMOS design and is now considered the bible for all chip designers around the world.

It all started when Nam, Allan and I sat together at a dinner talking about Allan’s research he was doing with autistic people. He talked about the conscious and the non-conscious part of the human brain. We talked about the way how humans interact with computers and thought it would be incredible if the next generation of human beings would not only be able to communicate with machines on a conscious, but also on a non-conscious level. This would create a far more natural, intuitive and rich experience for the user. And this became our mission: To create the ultimate interface for the next-generation of man-machine interaction.

- How long it took before it was up and running?
Our company was found in 2003 and we announced the final form factor of the Emotiv EPOC in February 2008.

- What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
The Emotiv EPOC uses a set of 16 sensors to tune into electric signals naturally produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expressions. Emotiv uses proprietary, patented algorithms to formulate detections of activities from the reading of EEG signals. These detections can determine a user’s expressions, feelings and thoughts and are broken down into three categories:

The Affectiv™ Suite monitors players’ emotional states in real-time, providing an extra dimension in game interaction by allowing the game to respond to players' emotions. It can be used to monitor players’ state of mind and allow developers to tailor difficulty to suit each situation.

Second, the Cognitiv™ Suite reads and interprets players’ conscious thoughts and intent and can differentiate between multiple conscious thought commands. The Cognitiv suite reads the player’s thoughts and intent, such as lifting an object, and sends commands through the API to levitate the object in the virtual world.

Third, the Expressiv™ Suite uses signals measured by the neuroheadset to interpret players’ facial expressions in real-time. It provides a natural enhancement to game interaction by enabling game characters to mirror the reactions and expression of the player in real time, including complex non-verbal expressions.

- What type of customers are you targeting?
Emotiv is currently focusing on developing solutions specifically for the electronic games industry, its solutions will enable games to respond to the players’ emotions and expressions, and allow players to manipulate objects in the game using the power of their thoughts. This entirely new interface will dramatically change the gaming experience by making it more immersive, intuitive and personal.

- How many people are using your services?
The Emotiv EPOC will be launched in the US by the end of the year 2008. So far, we’ve already received several thousand pre-orders for the headset.

Since the announcement of the Emotiv development platform as an open standard, we have received more than 1,500 downloads of the Emotiv SDKLite™ - a free, downloadable tool that provides developers with a complete development environment to take advantage of, and integrate seamlessly with, all the functionalities and features of the Emotiv EPOC.

- What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Emotiv has developed a very well rounded marketing strategy and plan, utilizing a variety of tools online and offline to reach our targets. For example, through the Emotivate page and the EPOC fan page on Facebook, we have over 500 friends. Additionally, we’ve built a very content rich website for consumers and developers to understand what the company is doing. We are engaging the developer community directly through a media-rich e-newsletter and have a multi-faceted PR campaign incorporating several different markets.

- What government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact?
The Australian Federal Government's Commercial Ready Grant contributed to the funding of breakthrough research activities in Australia.

- Have you sought any funding?
We have raised $13.4 million to date.

- Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
There are no other companies in the market that created a BCI with a similar performance as the Emotiv EPOC.

Thanks Tan for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Monday, June 23, 2008 Australia , Business , Jobs , Linkedin , Social Networking , Ventures , Web 0 comments

Today we showcase an exciting and interesting startup from Melbourne, Australia, 2Vouch - a social recruiting site that helps employers and recruiters find hard to reach people. It is founded by Riges Younan.

I further explored about 2Vouch and how Riges is progressing with his venture in a candid interview with him. This is what he has to say:

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
I am currently founder and CEO of 2Vouch a Social Recruiting site. I have over 12 years of professional executive search and recruiting experience gained in Sydney, Melbourne, London and New York. I have been responsible for the successful launch of five start-up recruiting offices for various firms as well as the development and deployment of sophisticated sourcing techniques & processes that lead to superior results for clients. I bring deep industry knowledge and extensive sales, marketing and management experience to 2Vouch.

• What is the name of your venture/company?
2Vouch – vouching is what we are asking our members to do when they recommend someone they know and trust for a job.

• Please tell us about your venture/company?
2Vouch is a social recruiting site that helps employers and recruiters find hard to reach people. It uses social networks to provide referrals to people who would consider a better opportunity if it is presented by someone they know and trust. Customers pay 2Vouch for successful placements, and 2Vouch rewards the referrer with cash incentives.

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Over a decade of executive recruiting experience has clearly shown that referrals are the best source of talent. Many firms having informal internal employee referral programs and every professional has received calls saying “Hey, I’m trying to find an xyz person, do you know anyone?”. The process, technology and tracking of those referrals, however, were ad hoc and inefficient. So we decided to help solve the problem of sourcing people in talent-short industries (like IT, engineering, etc) by building a web based system that uses referrals, social networks and rewards to bring employers & recruiters together with “passive candidates” automatically, quickly and cost effectively and 2Vouch was born!

About a year ago I met Jeremy Samuel via a ‘referral’ and after an hour lunch we decided to work together, Jeremy has made a extraordinary contribution to building 2Vouch and we make a great partnership.

Jeremy brings over 11 years experience in marketing, sales, product and project management and consulting in the information technology and telecommunications sector. He has launched three start-up businesses, delivering large scale projects, business strategies and has been responsible for selling complex technology solutions to leading corporate clients. Jeremy has a Master of Science in Cognitive Science and an MBA.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
2Vouch was incorporated in September of 2006 and is due to launch in July 2008.
What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Our Vision: 2Vouch will provide high quality & relevant referrals for every professional job vacancy in the world

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
2Vouch offers employers and recruiters the ability to reach passive candidates who come with personal recommendations. We deliver wide distribution of their job listings through blogs and social networks and provide tools to review and manage referrals. Best of all, client’s pay nothing until they hire or place someone.

For professionals, the offer is cash rewards (and enhanced social capital and network standing) for referring people they know and recommend to job opportunities. We allow members to automatically track their referrals and payments, manage their contacts, show interest in positions and apply directly if they wish. The system allows referrers to donate some or all of their referral reward to a charity of their choice.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Companies wanting to hire skilled and professional talent, and recruiters looking for the same talent for their clients. Our focus initially will be the ICT community.
Professionals – People who like to help friends/colleagues (and be rewarded both financially & reputationally for it)

• How many people are using your services?
N/A launch in July 2008

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
2Vouch will be promoted primarily on line via email, pay-per-click advertising and content distribution to a wide range of publications and blogs. The online promotions will be supported by a tiered publicity campaign that will focus on reaching key influencers directly, providing targeted relevant stories to industry specific publications and general publicity to the business press. We have also built partnerships with key associations, charities and business schools.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
We are introducing an innovative Pay Per Hire Model. If free to use and advertisers only pay when hire or place someone. We also provide a money back guarantee

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
We have competitors in the UK and US

What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
Our platform is written in Python under the Django framework. We use a range of open-source development tools and databases along with some key commercial tools.
What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology? n/a – it’s all custom development

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
We have a mix. Some of the platform runs on Linux and some tools use Windows. Our main database is on PostGRE.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
My view is that there is a major gap between the 3F / Angel round and the VC round when seeking funding in Australia. This is a very challenging growth stage and access to sufficient capital to get to scale and compete with global offerings is challenging.

• What’s your thought on the start-ups culture and innovation coming out of Australia especially in media and telecom?
I attended the Aussie top 100 Web 2.0 apps launch in Sydney recently, and I came away with a very reassuring sense of community with the Web 2 space. There are some very interesting businesses being built in Australia that are world class. There seems to be a great willingness among web2-preneurs at various stages to share ideas, lessons and information to help the community as a whole develop. Let’s hope that the investment community backs theses ventures.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Talk to customers first, understand their problems, find out how much they would pay to solve that problem and then try and solve it. Fail fast, cheap and iterate.

• How many business partners you have?
None

• Any women business partners?
No

• Any external funding – from VC, Govt, Self funded
Received a COMET grant. Then self funded.

• Which City you are based in?
Melbourne.

• Do you have any business advisor/mentor?
Yes and we are about to announce some high profile people joining our team very soon.

Thanks Riges for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Monday, June 23, 2008 0 comments

We have been getting some feedback on and off from some friends/readers that our interview questionnaire is too long and in some cases not well researched. Today we received another feedback on similar lines. So we decided to ask our readers via a poll to tell us bit more about how the interview should be constructed and how many questions ideally should be there, so the people who are replying to these questions don’t feel like giving an exam. The poll is on the Right Hand Side of this portal, which closes on July 7, 2008.
Please provide us your thoughts and feedback. Thanks

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Vishal Sharma Friday, June 20, 2008 Australia , Building , Software Development , Startup , Technology , Ventures 0 comments

In our ongoing coverage of startups coming out of Australia and interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, today we showcase an exciting venture and story of an entrepreneur from building industry, Malcom Lambert founder of Intresto - Software for Intelligent Rearrangement of Stones

I did an email based interview with Malcom to explore his thoughts on the progress of his venture and new emerging trends. This is what he has to say:

• What is the name of your venture/company?
Intresto Pty Ltd. The name is derived from “intelligent rearrangement of stone”, something people have been doing for thousands of years but only now do we have the computing power and computer science techniques to allow software to take over the difficult part of the procedure which is the 3d geometric shape fitting of irregular objects.

• Please tell us about your venture/company?
A self-funded tech start-up company developing software for use in the construction industry.

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
I am the sole owner and director. I worked for some years as an atmospheric physicist with the Australian Antartcic Division where I gained experience with the measurement and analysis of geophysical properties. I then built a house in Tasmania, party out of irregular pieces of stone, and realised there's a problem builders have had for thousands of years and only now do we have the tools to solve that problem. So I set about to develop software which could mimic the way a stone mason builds a drystone wall.

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
Studied physics at UNSW then worked in Narrabri, Antarctica, Tasmania and Germany as an atmospheric physicist before changing careers to inventor/entrepreneur.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
Company incorporated in January 2007 and the project is still in the R&D phase.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
The main objective is to use computational power rather than industrial power to help build durable structures from locally sourced raw material. To do this Intresto is developing software which will automatically fit together a collection of irregular polyhedra into a regular shape according to general rules of structural stability. The software, interfaced with appropriate scanning hardware, will increase the viability of unprocessed stone as a building material. Unprocessed stone has been extracted from a quarry after blasting but hasn't be subject to any sort of cutting, grinding or heat treatment. It is a very low embodied energy material meaning very low levels of energy are required to produce it. Used as a building material its production results in about 1/10 the greenhouse gas emissions compared to processed and manufactured products such as dimension stone, concrete and brick. The production of just one product, concrete, accounts for 5% of the world\'s greenhouse gas emissions. If unprocessed stone can be used instead of concrete in the construction of sea walls, river levees, landscaping, houses, etc. then it will play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
The aim is to provide designers and architects with a tool which will make it easier for them to specify a very low embodied energy building material. The software will allow builders to use a cheap, in-situ building material in a wide range of projects. The software will also allow engineers to design and analyse large civil engineering structures constructed from unprocessed blocks of stone each weighing many tonnes.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Civil engineers, architects, building and landscape designers, builders, coastal protection authorities and the back-yard landscape artist.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
The manufacturers of building products such as concrete blocks and bricks. These are often very large companies which have the difficulty of differentiating their products due to the low-tech nature of their industry.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
Proprierty software developed by Intresto and a purpose-built 3D scanner using opto-electronics componentry.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
“Blender” open source 3D graphics and animation package. Takes a while to learn how to drive it but it's free and great for producing animated clips to demonstrate potential uses of emerging technologies.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Yes, in particular the Java development tools. Also open source applications like the Gimp and Open Office which are good to keep costs down when starting up.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
Java based application is being developed to enable the software to be used across platforms.

• How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up? Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
About once per month in the Sydney CBD I meet with other tech start-up entrepreneurs at the informal Open Coffee meetup group.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
It's easy to start but if I wasn't self-funded for a while I would find it very tough to keep going. Might have to ask me in a couple of years how tough it is to be successful.

• What government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact?

Have you sought any funding? I often use the government subsidised seminars and workshops at the local Business Enterprise Centres which are very good for people new to the world of business. I have made one unsuccessful R&D grant application but will apply again.

• What do you think the government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation and the telecom industry?
Definitely reintroduce a broad-based R&D grants scheme to replace Commercial Ready which was scrapped in the recent budget.

• How many business partners you have?
None

• Any women business partners?
No

• Any external funding – from VC, Govt, Self funded?
Self funded.

• Do you have any business advisor/mentor?
Yes.

Thanks Malcom for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Wednesday, June 18, 2008 Australia , Ecommerce , Innovation , Online , Technology , Web 0 comments

Today we showcase an exciting and interesting startup from Sydney, Australia, Sticky Tickets - an online ticketing and event registration web portal. It is co founded by Matt Freedman, Jay Gaibisso and Dany Gruosso.
I further explored about Sticky Tickets and how Matt is progressing in a candid interview with him. This is what he has to say:

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Wednesday, June 18, 2008 Australia , Blogger , Entrepreneur , Interview , Media , Search Engine , Ventures , Web 0 comments

In our ongoing coverage of startups coming out of Australia and interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, today we showcase a successful venture and an exciting entrepreneur Ben Barren, co founder of Gnoos - Australia's Largest Blog Search Engine for Consumers and Enterprises.

I recently met Ben through our common friend Duncan Riley. I was highly impressed by his breadth of knowledge and enthusiasm. I followed up with him to do an email based interview with me to explore his thoughts on the progress of his various ventures and new emerging trends. This is what he has to say:

• What is the name of your company, the people involved, and can you provide some background on the venture?
Red Lion Ventures Pty Ltd owns Feedcorp Pty Ltd and Gnoos Pty Ltd. Red Lion Ventures was co-founded by Michael Leone and Ben Barren. The business has doubled revenue in the last 3 quarters so we’re hitting a real growth spurt.

In early 2005 Michael and I believed there was a great opportunity around enterprise RSS; This is when companies such as Feedburner, Newsgator and Technorati were flourishing and sites using RSS like MyYahoo, Flickr, and Delicious started to thrive. We wanted to localise this opportunity.

Feedcorp deals with our enterprise customers in the community arena. Gnoos relates to our Aussie blog search engine in the consumer space, whose business model is a mirrored deployment of the index running intelligence and syndication offerings for our clients who want to track when their brands and topics of interest are mentioned on Aussie blogs and twitter feeds.

In November 2007 the business also brought in Peter Burley as Shareholder + CEO of Feedcorp as an experienced media, online and management professional. Pete has previously worked setting up Fairfax Digital, ninemsn, and Vividas.

Our fulltime headcount has grown from 4 employees to 9 with the majority of those (6 FTE) being in engineering, as well as hiring an experienced CEO Peter Burley.

• Please tell us about your venture/company?
Gnoos has the largest index of Australian blogs and media RSS feeds – currently indexing 150k feeds : Which it then uses the power the Gnoos blog search engine to provide Australian blog only results; The unique business model is that blue chip Australian companies pay to access the blog and social network intelligence from the data, which includes when their company and product names were mentioned.

Gnoos also powers extensive content syndication for large media companies wishing to publish popular Australian blogosphere content. Clients log into a custom branded web based secure extranet with their own branding and set of topics and keywords. This is a unique offer in the intelligence and content syndication space. By indexing 150k media and blog sources, gnoos indexes far more content sources than competitor offerings.

We aim to grow this to 1m feeds within 6 months, at which time we aim to have a new consumer version of gnoos (finally) available, as well as a developer API so they can mashup the Aussie blogosphere and widgetise the content. Blog search in itself is not a business, as technorati proved. Blog search didn’t solve a real problem, and didn’t package up a digestable RSS product in the way FriendFeed or Dave Sifry’s new Offbeat Guides seem to.

• Please define metrics for success for your business?
We look at traditional business metrics : Proposals out to market; Percentage likely to close and Forecast Revenue and Cashflows, with tracking of expenditure against this. It was important our business was already due diligence ready with audited financials, and appointed accountants and lawyers. You need to be always ready.

We are on track for over $1m in revenue for CY 2008, with more than half of that revenue locked in. Since Facebook hit mainstream adoption, brands realise they need to have a social networking and web 2 product in their portfolio. We are looking to go to the next level of the business through launching a new version of gnoos, an API for the Australian blogosphere, and extended enterprise offerings in the user generated content syndication and intelligence space.

Acquired companies such as Pluck.com bought by Demand Media for $75M and Sphere.com bought by AOL for $25M-$35M - who have similar offerings - show there is a market for the enterprise intelligence, syndication and community offerings we currently offer and want to develop further.

• Any external funding – from VC, Govt, Self funded
The business was self-funded by Family and Founders for the first 2 years through the use of a $200K debt facility. Feedcorp did a Series A Angel round of around the same amount in May 2007 incl co-founder of Hitwise Adrian Giles, plus high net worth individuals and is currently raising $800K for its Series B round, of which one quarter is subscribed and is in advanced discussions to close the remaining amounts. So it’s taken us about $500K to get us to where we are, over 3.5 years; Which is a lot cheaper than what it cost to run a digital business in the dot-com period. But it’s not peanuts and good engineers, designers and project managers are all $80-$120 per hour cost lines, even with the benefit of equity and working on cool cutting edge projects. Unfortunately the banks in Melbourne pay engineers a lot of money to keep their online banking online, and a 9-5 job can be quite attractive to some people. Which is unfortunate because a lot of technical people’s skills are only getting semi-up to date by the programming they do on their own projects at night.

• What services do you provide for customers?
After 3 years of operations in the web 2.0 space, through trial and error, we have learnt what products customers will pay for, that we can deliver and scale, with good economics : That being powering online community and user generated content for media companies. As well as providing syndicated user generated content from the Australian blogosphere. Further, financial institutions and other blue chip brands are paying for our social networking intelligence offer, which provides them with a hosted secure extranet webpage where they can track if their name is mentioned on Aussie blogs, twitter and social networks.

Demand for these 3 products (community, content syndication, social network intelligence) has grown rapidly with revenue for the last 3 quarters doubling quarterly; $54K (Sep 07 quarter) to $96K (Dec 07 quarter) to $209K (till March 08 quarter) - The intelligence and syndication products are driven by the investment we made in the gnoos.com.au blog search engine. The benefit of Series B investment will be ability to upgrade the back end RSS infrastructure, as well as expand the sales pipeline, which at the moment is well over $3m.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Customers we’ve worked with include large publishers such as business units within News Ltd, PBL Media, large media companies, digital agencies and online startups in high value verticals. We’re currently seeing the most demand in media, travel, automotive, financials, classifieds, and sporting clubs.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Personal and company brand building using blogs, twitter, talking at conferences and interviews like this ! The most important marketing however is to traditional decision makers who read BRW + AFR, but are high unlikely to use Twitter or Facebook J For these people, our CEO Pete Burley and myself have done over 60 meetings with a qualified sales pipeline of over $3m. In these meetings a lot of time is spent educating clients about social media, and what types of tools they can use to participate in the conversation. You can’t beat hitting the pavement, day in, day out. We try and use well presented documentation that clients can understand. We also spend a lot of time with investors, where we do similar explanation of our business, with more of a focus on the business model, expenditure requirements and competitive scenario.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model?
Gnoos draws its revenue from setup and licensing revenue from its (hosted) intelligence and syndication offers. It also through Feedcorp offers a complementary community offering so a clients end user can create conversations around the syndicated content. Setup fees average $25K for intelligence and syndication; Up to $150k for community projects. Ongoing licensing fees are $2500 to $10k per month depending on the offering.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
Gnoos is the only blog search player with a dedicated index of Australian and global blogs and feeds. Neither google or technorati index Australian blogs solely. And other Australian offers don’t index globally. Indexing RSS is very hard though and we aim to major upgrades to the number of blogs we index (from 150k to 1m), the way in which the content is categorised (our enterprise clients want to slice n dice the data by location as well as product/brand name mentions) So we’ve got lots of work to do and to date our team of 6 engineers has been focused on the paying projects. So it’s a balancing act between back end investments and front end client work.

While we are just based in Australia presently, the same “localisation” issue applies to every other country such as UK, Germany, India, US, Singapore, Japan etc – So these are attractive markets for us, the same applies in the online community tools provision (+ blog syndication) where large publishers such as UK newspapers want to syndicate local content and embed tools in their sites. But we’ve definitely learnt we don’t want to be a Web 2.0 web developer, nor are we trying to be ning.com or google alerts.

Overall the blog search space is being subsumed in parts by google.com’s universal search. As a result, while blog search is important to Feedcorp, the next version of the site will be focused on having the most popular browseable blog (and mainstream media content) and the ability to filter it by location and topic, as well as personalise it.

So rather than compete directly in the search space, we want to be positioned more in the “hyperlocal personalisable news” space. A bit like http://www.outside.in (in effect similar to the tool that our publishers utilise) In this way gnoos.com.au will become much more like a hyperlocal theage.com.au or news.com.au – However it will include all the latest breaking blog news (and each of the categories to read thru such as travel, finance, auto, sex, politics, tech)

Unlike newspaper websites the next version of gnoos will have the ability to subscribe and personalise, as well as search. The original vision of gnoos was heavily focussed around the ability to use RSS to subscribe to feeds, topics, peoples and locations you are interested in, then when you login next time receive updates on what you have expressed interest in. It just happened that Search was the first feature we bit off. If you use google reader, the experience will be similar to this, however your feed reading will be setup and you just add and delete feeds, topics and locations you are interested in. Further, the ability to “share” and “clip” content you find interesting on gnoos, onto your blog/facebook/twitter/tumblr page is important as alot of blog search users want to blog about a topic once they find a relevant weblink. Again, we need to make this easy for gnoos users.

As you can see we want to build out the service away from the pure blog search space, and much of the functionality and algorithms we’ve developed in the enterprise space we want to apply to the consumer. (and vice versa)

Further, with funding, the aim is to create a developer API For gnoos.com.au so for non-commercial use developers can create mashups of Australian blog content eg if someone wanted to create an Aussie Politics Blog Website or Latest entertainment gossip (or overlay a google maps interface with Aussie blog content) This API should also stimulate media publishers who are interested in using Aussie blog content and want a quick way to get to experiment with content before going to market.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
We’ve been an open source orientated company from inception : Using Wordpress Multi-User and MySql for our community projects with structured blogging and mh-reviews microformats for user generated reviews. On the search side we’ve used Lucene and Postgres running Java. For the mirrored enterprise deployment which runs separately (and doesn’t have the same speed and indexing freshness of gnoos.com.au which we should have fixed shortly) we’re very happy with the Django framework and Amazon web services.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
Feedcorp. is our company website which details the latest projects we are working on. My blog also captures my end of day thoughts in running a business a 24 hour flight from the optimal place to be doing it – California. There is an absolute lack of early stage specialist Web 2.0 and online investors like Mobius, Union Square, and Y-Combinator in the US. The benefit of Australia though is lack of competition. But the biggest challenge in running a worldclass online business is lack of skilled engineering resources downunder. I want to grow my RSS index from 150k feeds to 1m in the next 6 months, and run machine learning queries on top of the index to power my intelligence and syndication services to Corporate Australia for example : But I need RSS and search engineers to help me achieve this. Please contact me thru my blog if you are an engineer up to this challenge. If you do, it will make doing this interview worthwhile :-)

Thanks Ben for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Australia , Business , Local Online Search and Directory , Startup , Ventures , Web 0 comments

Today we showcase a showcase an exciting and interesting startup, in online business directory search market segment, from Sydney Australia, FreeConnect - Online business directory search with multichannel capability, including VOIP. It is started by John Kennedy and was lunched on May 28, 2008.

In my view FreeConnect is definitely a unique service in Australian business directories market segment as compared to other players. It has the huge potential to change market forces. It offers consumers a free way to connect with the business of their choice via (multichannel) telephone, email, sms and VOIP. It is also Australia’s first ever VOIP online directory service.

It allows businesses to post a wide array of information - everything from their address and contact details to product and service information, photographs, payment options, business history and more – all at no cost. The only payment businesses make is for the actual lead when it connects them with a customer looking for their service.

Let us explore what John has to say about his venture FreeConnect and his thoughts for future. This is what he has to say:


• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
John Kennedy

• What is your background?
Advertising Executive in Europe

• How long it took before it was up and running?
3 years

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Accurate pay per lead enquiries for the business and FreeConnects for the public

• How does FreeConnect Work?
For businesses wanting to purchase leads, FreeConnect operates the same way as a pre-paid mobile phone account, with a $99 advance payment giving the business up to $175 credit which reduces as leads are delivered. Leads range from 40c for an SMS up to $3.00 for a phone connection, with businesses able to specify how and when they are contacted, with options including telephone, email, SMS and more.

Consumers either search FreeConnect’s national online database for a business meeting their criteria or type in keywords specifying their location and the nature of the service they need. The service shifts the cost of the connection to the business, with FreeConnect either ringing the consumer back to link them with the business, or sending their details to the company for them to make contact. The service doesn’t cost the customer a cent – they get the right details from the FreeConect website, they don’t have to keep trying different numbers, they just click the FreeConnect button and they are connected to the business free.

With FreeConnect, businesses don’t pay to list or promote their products and services. They only pay for the leads that bring new business in the door, which is a results-driven approach that hasn’t been available before now.

“For Australian businesses not familiar with the internet and its innovations and those of you very familiar with generating business from the internet can now get calls instead of clicks. FreeConnect is the next logical step. Unlike major search engines that charge per click, businesses can’t lose – they can have a totally accurate and detailed listing, they can decide how many leads they want, when and how they want them, and how much they want to pay each month. They have total control.

The ability to specify the number of leads and available times to receive them allows businesses to grow at a rate they can sustain and ensures they don’t receive calls after hours or during holidays. The flexibility of the system enables business owners to suspend customer contact if they’re fully booked, or on vacation simply by changing their preferences online.

We know this approach works. We ran a two month beta test of the new service in Newcastle last October and saw our usage levels grow by a massive 126 per cent each day. If a consumer asks for a plumber in Balmain, it’s a reasonable assumption that there’s a job involved. Every connection represents a customer who is pre-qualified as wanting that particular product or service in that area.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
SME businesses

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Viral right now and TV soon

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
Pay per call/SMS/Fax/Post/email

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
Any one in local commercial search, yellowpages, whitepages, google, dlook etc....

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
Oracle, PHP 5 & IPPBX

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
YES

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
Linux and Oracle

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
Almost impossible, great employee's are hard to find

• What government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact? Have you sought any funding?
Comet grant

• Which City you are based in?
Sydney

• Do you have any business advisor/mentor?
Yes

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Think about it longer, ask lots of questions to your mentor and then ask some more!!!!!!!

Thanks John for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Australia , Business , Ecommerce , Online , Startup , Ventures , Web 1 comments

In our ongoing coverage of startups coming out of Australia and interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, today we showcase a startup in eCommerce segment from Manly, Tjoos.com - Compare Prices For Better Choice While Shopping. It is co-founded by Kim Chen and Bart Jellema.

Let us explore what Bart, co founder of Tjoos.com, is progressing with his venture. This is what he has to say:

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Back in July 2007 my partner and I were looking to purchase contact lenses online. Having done comparison shopping a few times I expected it to be easy to find the lowest price using one of the price comparison sites. We spend all day looking at every comparison site we could find and got some upsetting results. Shopping comparison engines rarely list the lowest price, and if they do it's merely a coincidence. Shopping comparison sites only list stores that pay them, making most sites nothing more than PPC product search sites. Basically the current function of comparison shopping engines is to give consumers the 'perception' of finding the lowest price and thereby facilitating the buying process. We believed there was a market for a quality online shopping portal and started plans for Tjoos.com (pronounced choose).

• How long it took before it was up and running?
In October 2007 we launched the site with the world's first real price comparison engine. The only category we listed was contact lenses, and to calculate the 'store to door' price we took into account volume discounts, shipping costs, hidden handling costs, taxes and available discount coupons. After successfully launching the contact lens price comparison feature we experimented for a few months and created an online store directory listing over 90,000 online stores, a clothing recommendation engine, some widgets and an extensive coupon code listing.

• What is the main mission behind your venture?
We have narrowed our focus to online coupon codes. Coupon codes are the online equivalent of grocery coupons. Many online stores such as Old Navy, Dell and Amazon issue coupon codes that give you instant discounts during checkout. This is a huge market with over 25 millions users looking for coupon codes each month, however there is no dominant player. This is
because the quality of coupon sites is so low that none of these sites can give consumers the confidence that they list all available coupons and that their coupons work. At Tjoos.com we are setting up a team of people that work 24/7 around the globe to collect, enter, organize and test coupon codes to provide the most comprehensive and highest quality coupon site on the
web. It's free to use and we don't display advertising.

• How many people are using your services?
More than a million people have already used our site and visitor numbers keep growing.

• What is the revenue model?
A number of the stores we list on our site provide us compensation for referrals. This means that if we refer a user to one of these stores and the user makes a purchase, we receive a percentage of the sale. Currently the sales we make through our partners are over US$100.000 per month. In line with our mission we naturally also list many stores that do not provide any
compensation for the referrals.

• How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up?
Over the last few months we've met many like-minded people and we try to go to at least one event every week. To help others find out what's happening around Australia I setup an open wiki where everyone can share their knowledge on starting up in Australia.

• What are your thoughts on being an entrepreneur?
We absolutely love it! We live and work in Manly, close to the beach and though we work long hours, we work when we feel like it. For me it is like doing what I would do as a hobby anyway, but now I get to do it full-time. When running your own business, there is none of the big company rubbish, no red tape, no politics. We get to decide what to do and just do it. It's also very exciting to create a successful company out of nothing. Less than a year ago we just had an idea and some crayon drawings. Now we have website with thousands of visitors every day.

• Any external funding?
We are a self funded company.

• Which City are you based in?
We are in the heart of Silicon Beach: Manly, NSW

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Start! Just get it out there as soon as you can. Don't be afraid someone will steal your idea and stuff like that. As long as you're small nobody will notice, when you're big you're already ahead of the pack. On top of that people tend to not believe in what you do until it works, so just get out there and do it, talk about, get feedback, go to social events such as OpenCoffee, BarCamp, friday night drinks, and many of the other regular meetups happening around Australia.


Thanks Bart for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Tuesday, June 10, 2008 Australia , List , Startup 6 comments

Today I'm publishing the list of Australian Startups which have surfaced on the global map in last 3-5 years and got coverage on our Startups Portal. This is an ongoing endeavor to learn more more about new technology based startups in IT (Enterprise, Product, Open source, SAAS, eCommerce,Web 2.0/3.0), Telecom (Mobile, OSS/BSS), Media (News, Social Networking), Marketing/Branding, Green Tech (Sustainability, Carbon trading), R&D.

The following list will be updated regularly as we learn more about startups and cover it here. If you know any new venture or startup which we should know then please feel free to contact us. Let us look at the list now:

1. Adimade
2. Agents of Change
3. Ankoder
4. ApartmentReviews
   
5. AppleBox
6. Australiaforum
7. BeamMe.Info
8. Booktagger
9. Boozle
   
10. Brownbook
    
11. Buzka
12. Cinergix
    
13. Clickfind
14. Clivir
    
15. Coastal Watch
    
16. Community Enabler
17. Confer
18. Debenu
    
19. Docoloco
20. Etradesman
    
21. Flogd
22. FreeConnect
23. Front Foot
    
24. Emotiv
    
25. Evaluator
26. GlobalSurfari
27. Glynx
    
28. Gnoos
    
29. GoodBarry
30. GoPC
    
31. Greenairfaires
32. HatchThat
33. HomePriceHistory
34. Infome
    
35. InvoicePlace
36. Intresto
    
37. ITQSM
38. Local.com.au
39. JustRosters
    
40. Locatrix
41. Linky
    
42. KahunaBay
43. MComms TV
    
44. Me2mobile
45. Millstream
46. Mogeneration
    
47. Momentum Technologies Group
    
48. MomentVille
49. Moodle
50. Morfik
51. Mostyle
52. My Perfect
    
53. NavSports
54. NetDefence
    
55. Obits
    
56. OurPatch
57. OurWishingWell
58. OZWeather
    
59. plasq
    
60. Plutext
61. Plugger
62. Podmo
63. PTY Auctions
    
64. Rave About It
65. RAYV
66. Rentoid
67. RetailmeNot.com
    
68. Scouta
69. Shadow Gap
    
70. Smartpath
71. SMS Poll
    
72. Stripe
    
73. Sticky Tickets
74. StreetAdvisor
    
75. Suburb View
76. SwapAce
77. TechCollective
    
78. Tiinker
79. The Fame Experiment
80. Tjoos
    
81. Trickytix
82. The Podcast Network
83. ThreatMETRIX
    
84. Uvouch
85. Vquence
86. WasabiTV
    
87. Webdirections
    
88. Whatyah
89. Windlab Systems
    
90. Womow
91. ZaaBiz
92. 2Vouch
    
93. 3eep
94. 88Mile
95. 99designs

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Vishal Sharma Tuesday, June 10, 2008 Australia , Business , Ecommerce , Startup , Ventures , Web 0 comments

In our ongoing coverage of startups coming out of Australia and interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, today we showcase a startup from Melbourne, Australia, to be lunched in October, 2008, Trickytix - an online event registration company.

Trickytix allows a customer to create an account, setup and style their event page and then begin selling tickets without any manual intervention from us. This is all achieved through a self-service interface. Typical events include lunches, meetings, fun runs, cycling or triathlon events, dinners, conferences, etc etc.
It will be running under closed beta trial with number of companies from July 2008.

Let us explore what Scott, co founder of Trickytix, has to say about his venture and innovation coming out of Australia. This is what he has to say:

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
My name is Scott Handsaker, and I am the Managing Director and co-founder of Trickytix, an online event registration startup from Melbourne, Australia. My previous experience was in managing IT call centres in Singapore and Malaysia, but I have been working on the web exclusively since 2004 in my role as MD of Hugeobject.

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Andrew Edwards and myself founded a web consulting company in 2004, and commenced Trickytix as part of that in mid 2007.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
Hah! Trickytix is the end result of a thousand and one ideas for a web application, some of which we actually started coding before dumping them in favour of Trickytix.

We commenced it in April 2007 with the aim of launching a beta within 8 weeks. The need to keep money coming in through consulting work put paid to that launch date, but the build continued throughout 2007 with a successful launch in Feb 2008.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Trickytix allows anyone to accept registrations and sell tickets for their event online, without the need to know computer code. It is a self service model aimed at small business, community groups, sporting organisations and not-for-profits in Australia.

Trickytix has a number of modules built in which make it easy for event organisers to accept registrations online quickly and easily, as well as make more money from each entrant. These include merchandise, donation and sponsorship modules.

Fundamentally we are aiming for Trickytix to do two things for our customers:

• Make accepting online event registrations easy and hassle free
• Extract more money per online registrant for them than any other previous method used

We have achieved both these objectives for our first two customers, and look forward to rolling out our solution to the rest of the country.

• How many people are using your services?
We launched to two larger customers in Feb 2008, with both the Mothers Day Classic and the Million Paws Walk (RSPCA) using our solution to run their online event registrations. Each event is the largest single fundraiser for their respective organisations.

Since then we have added another two smaller customers, with another five lined up to commence our closed beta testing program in July 2008. Trickytix has not yet fully launched as a product, but will do so in October 2008.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Since we commenced the build we have been blogging for Australian Anthill magazine, and have been featured a number of times in their pages over the last 12 months.

Each ticket/registration done through Trickytix is branded with our logo and URL, so many people have found out about us through both the Mothers Day Classic and the Million Paws Walk.

Once our full marketing plan kicks into gear we will be utilizing a combination of direct mail, pay-per-click, organic search, media releases, content provision and word of mouth.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
We take a small percentage of all financial transactions put through the system. This service fee can either be absorbed by the event organiser, or passed onto the ticket buyer as a booking fee.

Once we launch in October 2008, free events will be able to use our system at no charge.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
MySQL, Flex, Flash, PHP.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
We use Basecamp extensively, as well as Trac

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
Doing a start-up is not for everyone, although it is no more difficult in most respects in Australian than anywhere else. Where it gets harder when compared to places like the US is in access to capital, as well as the depth of recruitment resources available.

• What Government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact? Have you sought any funding?
Our experience in seeking Government funding has been poor. The processes are difficult to navigate, while the amount of early stage funding available is quite small. The serious money (6 figures) only kicks in once you have an established, growing business with a few years of operating revenues behind you.

We are currently seeking private equity/VC money to fund the expansion of our business, and have teamed up with BSI to facilitate this. I have pitched in Sydney and Melbourne at investment breakfasts, one of which went quite well and one of which I would like to do over again!

Fund raising is a lengthy process with no promise of a return at the end of it. We are lucky in that we have a consulting business which can continue to fund us whether we receive funding or not, but yeah funding makes life easier.

• Do you have any advise for people who want to start their venture?
There are a lot of people more qualified than me to provide advice on doing a start up, so my best advice is to do what I do – read them extensively!

Blog suggestions are:

• Marc Andreessen
• Guy Kawasaki
• 37 Signals
• Dick Costolo
• Paul Graham
• OnStartups
• Ask the VC

And one book suggestion, which I highly recommend: The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Steven Blank

Thanks Scott for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Tuesday, June 10, 2008 Australia , Business , Ecommerce , Retail , Startup , Ventures 0 comments

Today we showcase a story of another successful startup and entrepreneur, Phillip Kingston, Co Founder & CEO, Flogd

Flogd is an Australian based company which allows anyone to create a shop to sell stuff anywhere you can paste code. Sell from blogs, websites, social networking sites like MySpace. It provides its users with a shopping cart system which handles postage, taxes and processing of the sale. It also partners with other company’s to offer Flogd services natively in other applications.

Let us explore what Philip has to say about his venture Flogd and his thoughts on entrepreneurship and innovation coming out of Australia. This is what he has to say:

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
I am a 22 year old student at the University of Melbourne studying a Bachelor of Science/Bachelor of Commerce. I am interested in human behaviour, social and environmental sustainability, and, I suppose, technology. I am a programmer by trade but much prefer strategy and business problem solving - so I do more of it.

I am the CEO of Flogd and I am also the Vice-Chairman of the Centre for Sustainability Leadership

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Flogd was co-foundered by Edward Thomson and myself. It all started on a phone call between Ed and myself. Ed said to me “I have an idea..”

• How long it took before it was up and running?
6 months. We both took a semester off uni so we could pursue it full time. The main reason for this is because we kept changing (read: improving) our product and our service offering.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
To ultimately allow people to monetize their web traffic (blogs, websites, etc) with product sales and commissions.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Flogd is an integrated and full-feature portable shopping cart system. Flogd handles taxes and shipping costs and has a user-friendly control panel for product, tax and shipping management.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Anyone who has web traffic can find products to sell with our partner sites and sell. Customers can also sell their own products either in isolation or with products from our partners. We are targeting people of average technical proficiency, it’s important they don’t need ay specialised computer skills.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
We’ve tried a lot of different avenues, but the best is word of mouth, particularly through forums. We’ve used Google AdWords and fairly aggressive press strategies. Nothing competes with a recommendation from a faithful Flogd user to a forum.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools in place to monitor the progress?
We have a few metrics for this including: the number of users, the number of page views, press, and good-will.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
There are no Australian competitors. Our main competition comes from silicon valley. It’s challenging keeping up with Silicon Valley all the way out here - but it allows us to constantly improve our product and service for our consumers.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
We use all the standard web-development programming languages and software. PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, Flash (ActionScript) and CSS. Everything is custom built - we don’t use any platforms.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Everything except Flash is open source.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using? Linux derivative operating system, Apache software, MySQL database

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
Web start-ups are not too tough. You need to know the technology in-house. If you have to pay upfront for the initial technology development then it’s going to be expensive and the product will never be exactly as you want it. If you are not tech savvy, find someone who is and partner with them.

• What government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact? Have you sought any funding?
We never thought of Government resources or funding.

• What do you think the government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation and the telecom industry?
Yes, although its easy to bash the government. Rudd seems to value innovation and entrepreneurship and seems to be trying to develop the Australia scene. Brumby is trying to establish Geelong as a new tech centre. We will have to wait and see on that one.

• How many business partners you have?
I have one business partner, Edward Thomson, and he is amazing. He is very intelligent and a good character, the two most important attributes. He keeps it fun when it gets tough. He is also a very creative fellow and works out hard things like design and usability.

• Any external funding – from VC, Govt, Self funded
Self-funded by my business partner coupled with a lot of free man hours

• Which City you are based in?
Melbourne

• Do you have any business advisor/mentor?
Initially, I made sure that I had a lot of people around that I could ask for guidance and advice. The real value of a mentor is knowing when you’ve actually made a mistake - most of the time mistakes are very hard to identify and attribute to yourself. Mentor’s can slingshot you up the learning curve.

• Do you have any advise for people who want to start their venture?
If you know what you are doing in the web technology scene, go for it. If you don’t, find someone who does. In any case, I’d also advice that people don’t do it alone.

Thanks Phillip for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.


For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Sunday, June 08, 2008 Australia , Business , Online , Service , Sports , Startup , Web 1 comments

Today we showcase a story of another successful startup and entrepreneur, Stewart Whicker, Founder & CEO, NavSports Ltd

NavSports is an Australian based company focused on providing next generation tools to grass root sports clubs to promote to and communicate with existing and potential participants.

Let us explore what Stewart has to say about his venture NavSports and his thoughts on Sports as a industry and Innovation coming out of Australia. This is what he has to say:

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
My name is Stewart Whicker and my background is in Sports Facility Management and Elite Sports Coaching. My interests include sports promotion and playing tennis when I get the chance.

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Dean Viglione is Navsports Chairman and a former Australian Junior Judo Champion.
Marcelo Moraes is our Chief Information Officer lead software developer .
Navsports also has a small team of graphic designers and software engineers.
Navsports was started by Stewart Whicker (CEO/Founder) about three years ago.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
About 12 months

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Provide the most cutting edge applications to the world`s sports clubs and provide the largest sports social network in the world.


• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Club benefits

• Map location/Address.
• Customised logos and pictures.
• Contact phone numbers.
• Contact emails.
• Personal Profiles can display club`s logo.
• Additional website linking.
• List and edit coach profiles.
• Competitions, Tournaments, squads.
• Sports camps, coaching programs.
• Socials and Lots more.
• Latest competitions and tournaments are display right on you home page.
• Closest sports players / athletes are displayed right on your home page.
• Live event video streaming.
• Communications portal with associated members. (Navmail)
• Volunteer incentives.
• Much more.

Personal member benefits

• Upload photo of yourself.
• Personal blog about your interests.
• Shows a list of your local sporting clubs.
• Add your friends to your profile.
• Search for other people based on age and skill level.
• Search thousands of Australian sports clubs.
• Associate yourself with your favourite club by having their logo on your profile.
• Upload your own sports videos and have the public vote for you to be our video star.
• When you associate with a club, your profile will be on their club template under club members.
• Select your own skill level.
• Make your profile available in other sports.
• Create sporting groups.
• Much more.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Sports minded people of all ages.

• How many people are using your services?
Last month we had over three hundred thousand unique searches on sports directory NavSports

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
We are working closely with National sporting bodies through our getting started program. You can view this program here

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools in place to monitor the progress?
Yes we measure the growth of our site through member registrations, club registrations, visitors to our site and through advertising revenue, premium membership registrations and online statistical gathering.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
Premium memberships, advertising models we are developing a new model but its under wraps for know.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
There are many players in this field. There are many national and international companies all vying for this market. You have players like (Nationally) Doubledrummer, 3eep, Sporting Central and the like and then you have (International) players like FanNation, Takkle and quite a few more.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
We are a leading proponent of web2.0 technologies. Ajax, php, java, flash and a few newly developed technologies that are under wraps for the moment.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
Gee we customise are own applications, we have partners for highly refine technologies but mainly believe in developing in house applications.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
No we like to customise and develop our own apps

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
Window server, and we are running MSQL database configurations

• How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up?
Absolutely, it’s very important to communicate with industry leaders we catch up online. Sportsmarketing20 is a great resource for budding entrepreneurs’

• Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
There are communities within Australia, but within Australia we mainly work with National sports bodies and local sporting clubs.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
If it was easy then everyone would be doing it, so I very much appreciate the difficulties and complexities of the industry. My background in elite sports coaching has given me insight to believe in yourself and your team.

• What government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact?
I looked into Government resources. I must admit that for the time and effort in chasing Government funding as a resource you would be better off networking with industry peers.

• Have you sought any funding?
We have had fruitful meeting with venture capital firms, but at the moment continue to rely on our private backers. We see venture capital as imperative when we start to develop our hardware infrastructure further.

• What do you think the government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation and the telecom industry?
Stop wasting money by outsourcing funding pools to consultancy firms. They are out of touch and lack interest in innovation.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Research, research and study. Know your industry. And don’t let people take your belief away (because they will try).

Thanks Stewart for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

Image Credit PhotoWorx

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Vishal Sharma Saturday, June 07, 2008 Australia , Interview , Software Development , Startup , Web2.0 0 comments

In our ongoing coverage of startups coming out of Australia and interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, to gauge the innovation and startups landscape in Australia, today we showcase our interview with, the co founder of Webdirections - Conferences for web professionals held in Australia and North America, John Allsopp .

I did this interview with John to know more about Webdirections, its offerings, its progress and future plans and how his second venture Westciv is progressing. Let us explore what John has to say about the progress of Webdirections and Westciv Australia. This is what he has to say:

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
I'm a software engineer, with a computer science and maths degree, coupled with quite a few arts subjects at university, and most of a law degree.
Born and raised in Sydney, I lived for a time in the UK, and Italy in the early 1990s, before starting my first company in 1994

I live just outside Sydney, in the national park, with my wife and two young daughters, and try to take advantage of the location I live in by doing lots of outdoors stuff, to counter the hours a day in front of computers.

I've been a volunteer surf lifesaver for a decade, at Bondi Beach, I plat football (soccer) with a local team, and do quite a bit of mountain biking.

• Please tell us about your venture/company/ start-up?
We have two - a well established small software company called westciv, which developers web development tools for Mac OS X and Windows, as well as a range of online tools and resources, training and so on for web developers - novice and experienced.

Our more recent venture is Web Directions, conferences for web professionals held in Australia and North America, and soon hopefully elsewhere as well.

Our big event is Web Directions South, in Sydney at the end of September each year (now in our 5th year) - at the Convention Centre - last year saw just under 650 people attend. The conference also includes an Expo of products and services relevant to web professionals

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Both these companies are run by myself, and Maxine Sherrin.
Westciv was founded in 1994, to develop and publish a hypertext knowledge management application called Palimpsest. Marketing and distributing it online in the mid 1990s lead us to see the potential of the web as a medium for publishing and software distribution.

Web Directions was founded with two others in 2004 as Web Essentials, a grass roots style conference for web developers interested in standards and accessibility. After two years, Maxine and I continued on our own, and have turned an expensive hobby into a successful conference series that has been attended by ver 2000 people from all over the world.

• How long it took before it was up and running?

• Westciv took about 18 months from being founded to releasing our first application.
• Web Directions launched it's first conference weeks after being formed, and held it's first conference within 5 months.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?

• Westciv - to build the best web development tools and resources available
• Web Directions - to put on the best possible conferences, mixing content, inspiration and networking for web professionals anywhwere in the world.

• What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
Both our ventures target web professionals. Westciv is more focussed - on designers and developers, people who code web sites. Web Directions broadens the focus to anyone whose day to day job is building and managing web sites, applications, services and communities. That includes IA experts, UX experts, front-end back end programers, designers, developers, project and product managers, all the way to senior management.

• How many people are using your services?
Westciv - the site and its resources are used by millions of people each year.
Our software is used by hundreds of thousands, and we have n the order of tens of thousands of paying customers.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Almost entirely word of mouth and online.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
Food on table. But seriously, our metrics are quite informal - attendance growth at conferences, inbound linking to sites, buzz on networks like twitter, number of photos on Flickr, software sales .

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
Pretty straightforward model for each - folks buy our software or premium content, or pay to attend our conferences. Sponsorship and the Expo at the conference account for a reasonable amount of our revenue, but our aim there is to work with sponsors to put on a better conference - better wifi network, better social experience, and so on.

In fact, this model for Web Directions is probably a bit less obvious than it appears. Many conferences see Expos and sponsorship as a primary revenue source, and so their number one customers are sponsors. In our case, the event has always been put on by us as members of the professional community, and so our attendees come first.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
Software- there are a number of smaller software companies building tools that directly or indirectly compete with ours on the Mac and Windows - none that target both platforms. The applications like Dreamweaver from large software companies are no so much competitors, as our software compliments their functionality rather than going head to head with it.

In the conference space, around the world there are a number of conferences focussing on a similar niche - but these tend to have a slightly different focus, or a slightly narrower focus.
In Australia, there really is nothing like Web Directions in the web professional space.

• How do you see Webdirections in future and what can we learn from it?
Conferences are resource intensive, and require a reasonable amount of startup capital, though this can be returned quite quickly with a successful event.
Conferences tend to be put together by conference companies, which service a perceived need in an industry. Our motivation was and remains quite different. We felt the lack of an event in the professional community we were members of. It's primarily driven by our passion and desire to see the Australian web industry grow and prosper, and take on the world, and while we carefully mange it as a business, we definitely spend money and effort where others would see that as a waste.

We hope Web Directions will move from being just a conference to a real hub for the community of web professionals here and world wide - through events, publications, and other activities.
What did we learn that we'd pass on to others. Temper passion with realism. Have a long term plan (our conferences effectively lost money for several years before becoming financially really viable if you look at the opportunity cost). But passion and commitment to things you care about go a long way, even when up against multinational companies, and large established players.

• What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
For web directions, we've used a lot of open source, web based software as a platform for building our own solutions incrementally. Our sites are run on top of Wordpress - which enables us to quickly roll out new events once they are planned.
We've also built a fantastic registrations management system using ruby on rails that means we can get new events up and running online in hours or less. It manages payments via just about any gateway, affiliate programs, promotional offers, and all the registration management stuff we've found we need to run the conference. We can even print our badges more or less directly out of it.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
Not a lot of out of the box stuff - though we have been thinking of turning our registration system into an out of the box service for other events - big and small.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Yes - All LAMP stacks or Rails on top of open source OS's on commodity hardware.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
Server side it's apache and MySQL - on top of either BSD or Linux. Client side we are mostly Mac, but windows to an extent too - but most of our management etc is browser based, so clients are less of an issue.

• How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up? Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
Rarely. We tend to meet up with a few folks holding events like ours either at our own events here and Canada, or when speaking at events elsewhere. In terms of software, there's little client app development happening in Australia - we know about 4 in the Mac space we'd say are similar to us ()there's probably quite a few more out there, but we have nothing like the networks you find in the US.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
Very. Above all because we don't have the kinds of networks and culture you can find in San Francsico and the valley, Austin, Seattle, New York, and a number of other cities in the US, or London in the UK. There's a lack of the kind of role model and success story you can find by the dozen elsewhere, and few if any mentors in the garage startup space doing in on the super cheap, using little if any credit.

• Which city in Australia is more vibrant and can be regarded as Silicon Valley of Australia?
None. Some stuff happens in Sydney and Melbourne. We've been looking to try and make some more explicitly startup focussed stuff happen, but the response from all kinds of stakeholder - VCs, Angels, tech press, and the startup folks or those who should at least be thinking about startups, has been, well, underwhelming. We actually shelved plans for a one day "bootcamp" style event last year after launching it as there was so little enthusiasm for attending or participating.

We have a long long long way to go.

• What do you think of new ventures and innovation coming out of Australia?
Some people are doing some excellent stuff. Too often though these side projects languish while folks put food on the table. Sydney and Melbourne are expensive cities, and if you are young, it's hard to turn your back on the lifestyle everyone seems to be living - $8 beers, $75 meals in restaurants, to do the hard years and make the sacrifices it takes to go from good ideas to decent execution.

• Do you think we can create a new Google in Australia?
No. While we do have great success stories, like google maps, which we always try to get the word out about via web directions, the key to Google and the valley generally is Stanford - really well educated folks coming out into that community, where networks of alumni can employ, mentor and fund, and there is a critical mass of ventures, VCs, tech press, and so on.
I think trying to create an environment that creates the next google is not the right way to go forward. We need to create a vibrant community of IT success (I'd focus on the web, or one other tightly focussed area - we just don't have the resources to target say "IT". The web also has the advantage of letting ventures fail fast, for little great expense).

A big problem here is that those coming out of post secondary IT and comp sci courses simply don't have much exposure to the kinds of technologies web ventures need. No idea how long it will take to have that addressed.

• What Government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact?
We have used Export Development Grants for some aspect of our promotion of westciv. These pay back about 50c in the dollar you use for promoting exports, after a threshold. They are also time consuming or costly for smaller companies to take advantage of, and the threshold means that large companies can much more readily benefit from them than smaller ones. So much so in fact that we felt that it simply wasn't worth the time and effort to go through the hoops for the money we would receive, having done it the first time.

• Have you sought any funding?
No. We've managed to grow organically to date. Whether we'd seek funding in future depends on particular hurdles we face, and goals we might have at the time. The main reason westciv in particular is still around and doing well is probably because we never had funding, and so could follow the path that made most sense over time - which is how we ended up in the web development space.

• Why do you think that we have not created many world class companies in technology based business (except, medical science based) as compared to other OECD countries?
I think there are several factors

• A lack of startup culture - it's just not what folks in the IT industry, IME, see as a big goal of theirs.
• A risk averse culture - in Australia, failure is bad, and a lifelong stigma in business.
• It's expensive to live here, and startups require lifestyle sacrifice
• I often find in Australia business culture what I call "professional cynicism" - Australian business folks often respond to ideas with "why it will fail" as the very first response. No one ever got sacked I guess for not investing in Google. They got sacked for investing in the failed ventures that part of the ecosystem around successful ones.
• The number of folks who pooh poohed using the web as the distribution medium for software when we started in 1994/5, and predicted no one would come to our conferences far outweighed those who were positive.

My experience of the US (which is reasonably extensive now) is the opposite is true - people give you a hearing, and look at the whole picture far more than just try to pick holes. I always came back from the US much more enthusiastic than when I left.

• Do you have any thoughts on our TAFE/Universities and their curriculum in terms of promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation?
In terms of the web, we have a huge bottleneck when it comes to the skills folks need to hit the ground running when it comes to the web. Even things as simple as HTML, CSS and Javascript, let along back end development skills, and so on. I can't say when it comes to the innovation/business side - but my experience is that the innovation, particularly in the web space, has almost entirely come from technical, not traditional business/management/marketing folks. Here, IT folks seem to largely be isolated in the operations side of things. That really has to change, and a lack of technical literacy among decision makers should be seen as in essence a lack of basic literacy.

• What do you think the government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation and the telecom industry?
I've already written war and peace :-) That would be the Lord of the rings, and the Bible rolled into one.

But, start by having government and political decision makers with technical literacy. That includes a basic understanding of how core technologies work, and what hey are capable of, and frankly, an understanding of emerging technologies, and the impact they'll have on the policy context of their decisions. A simple example. The previous federal govenment a few years ago gave away a huge chunk of valuable spectrum to incumbent TV broadcasters, with the mandate that it had to be used for Digital TV. Digital TV is just bits, like all other digital information. That was simply backward looking.

• At the 2020 conference, PM Kevin Rudd is meeting with top 1000 people from different background to discuss and collaborate on the issues facing the nation. What issues would you like to raise if you are given a opportunity to attend?
The web emerged bottom up as the lose coupling of people, and technology on top of a simple stack of open, interoperable standard technologies. That's how all lasting change occurs. So, the 20/20 summit really was no doubt a well intentioned, but ultimately pointless anachronistic exercise. Is there a single minister in the Rudd government whose ever used a wiki?

• Any thoughts on the launch of iPhone in Australia?
The key thing is - will it drive realistic, affordable, transparent mobile data plans? Right now they are stupendously overpriced (along with public wifi access) - and frankly, in a digital age, this is as crippling as lack of public sanitation was to the growing urban centres in the 1850s/

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
If you are driven by passion, and committed, willing to sacrifice time, money, and other opportunities, it can definitely be done. And I'd hope it were easier than when we started.
Thanks John for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Thursday, June 05, 2008 Australia , Business , Local Online Search and Directory , Online , Regional , Rural , Startup , Ventures 1 comments

In our ongoing coverage of startups coming out of Australia and interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, to gauge the innovation and startups landscape in Australia, today we showcase our interview with, the co founder of OurPatch - Regional And Rural Business Directory, Simon Wyk .

I did this interview to know more about OurPatch, its offerings, its progress and what does it mean to regional and rural business of Australia. Let us explore what Simon has to say about the progress of OurPatch and state of affairs in this domain in Australia. This is what he has to say:

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
I was born in South Africa, came to Australia in my mid twenties. I started my career in marketing. Initially for a chemicals company and subsequently for a home improvements company.

I then found myself in Interactive Communications and built the first commercial CD-ROM is Australia. We migrated from commercial CD-ROM to CD-ROM titles and I co-founded Brilliant Interactive Ideas which later became Brilliant Digital Entertainment. I left BII to found Hothouse a web development company. Our first client was Microsoft. We also worked for Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Telstra, Lexus. NineMSN, I7.

I co-founded Stuff Auctions. We outlasted GoFish, Sold but finally could not get past eBay.

I’m interested in my family, horse riding, Burning Man, kayaking and the Internet.

• Please tell us about your venture/company?
The industry buzzword fanatics would say it’s a local search play. We think it’s a little more than that. We’re focused entirely on rural and regional Australia. We’re a directory of local business, we have community groups and events and we’re creating community with our blogs and forums. We think we’ve made a start on the local paper for 2008 and beyond

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Patrick Cusack and I had been tinkering with ideas for sometime. We both had a passion for rural and regional Australia. We found a model in the Southern Highlands run by Steve von Kohorn and started with that

• How long it took before it was up and running?
We started work in April 2007 but we were still working full time and it took until November before we had a working model. We launched officially on Australia Day 2008.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
We’re trying to connect business and customers in rural and regional Australia

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
We provide listings for business and community groups. We have a fully functioning jobs board, we have a comprehensive events calendar and we have community tools, forums, blogs and groups. We’re adding dating. All of this functionality is available down to the postcode.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Rural and regional Australian businesses and community groups.

• How many people are using your services?
We launched the site on Australia day with thee Patches. Orange, Bathurst, Blayney and the Southern Highlands. We now have 38 Patches and the traffic grows every week. We’re pleased we’ll catch up with some of the established players by the end of July.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
We are using search and PR. We’ve done over 100 interviews on regional radio.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools in place to monitor the progress?
We have 4 measures of success. We have three separate systems delivering these numbers. It’s not perfect but it works. It’s simple and pragmatic and we know where we are going.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
We are monetizing our site with advertising and premium listings. We’re also implementing a range of new services all with a fee for service model, Jobs, dating, coupons and other services all have well established business models.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
Yellow Pages are the key competition here.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
We have built the platform using Ruby-on_Rails

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
We use many of the 37 Signals products. We have people scattered across the country and we needed an easy way to keep them all across the progress and issues. It had to be easy to use. These products all fit the bill, I’d swop a few enterprise products for their products anyday.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Yes the entire platform is open source.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
Linux and My SQL

• How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up? Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
Yes I know quite a few people in the same space trying to do similar things. We all share war stories. It’s motivating and helpful

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
It depends what you want. If you want the status and security of a big job with a big company it’s extremely difficult. If you’re prepared to give it a go and put up with the uncertainty that goes with a start-up, the lack of status and structure it’s not that hard. I’ve managed to raise money for a few of these now.

• What do you think of the digital revolution that is breaking the conventional business model for media houses & music companies?
It’s an exciting time. Those of us who work in this industry are extremely lucky. This type of change does not happen very often and we won’t see it again for a long time. We’ve lived through a revolution and it’s not finished yet. Simple things like email have been transformed over the past year. You could now run an enterprise on email services that are outsourced and cost nearly nothing. A year ago every enterprise needed Exchange or Notes and a huge cost for the infrastructure. You can get started with a collaboration space for $40 per month two years ago you had to buy Sharepoint or Vignette. And on it goes. It’s amazing to be part of this.

• Do you think Telstra is the major player for the future growth of Australia in a digital economy?
No I don’t. They missed out on search, the missed out in real estate, they missed out in auctions, they have missed out on job classifieds.

• What do you think of new ventures and innovation coming out of Australia? There is a lot of interesting work going on in Australia. You scratch the surface and you’ll find a lot going on. We have a smaller population so it’s harder also our mindset is a little local, we’re a long way away form the rest of the world. The people that get it right have to work twice as hard so you have to take your hats off to them.

• Do you think we can create an entity like Google in Australia?
Yes we have the smarts but Google had luck and timing on their hands. That’s not always easy to replicate. They have implemented well but there was a point it could have gone either way. Luck played a huge part. Geocities could have been Ning, Facebook, etc but it was too early. Broadcast.com should have been YouTube but we were not ready.

• What Government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact? Have you sought any funding?
I don’t have the time to deal with the government. They have no bearing on what we are doing.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Yes – just do it. There are so many reasons not to give it a go, but when you do you’ll find the learning’s are amazing.
Thanks Simon for sharing your thoughts with us. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here

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Vishal Sharma Tuesday, June 03, 2008 Analysis , Consulting , Report , Services , Technology 0 comments

As part of ongoing coverage on new technology trends, startups, business models we have started analysing the local market segments and trends for technology companies. As a result of this we will be publishing our reports on various sectors in coming months. Most of the reports will be freely available on this portal. If any organization is interested in understanding the new market forces and technology trends in local market across IT (Enterprise, Product, Open source, SAAS,Cloud Computing, eCommerce), Telecom (Mobile, OSS/BSS), Media (News, Social Networking), Marketing/Branding, Green Tech (Sustainability, Carbon trading), R&D we can help them with to be ready and prepared for the future challenges.

Following is the list of published reports and analysis.

• Status of Mobile Advertising in Australia
  
• Digital Will Be About M3 and N3
  
• Next Mobile Opportunities
  
• Report on Aussie Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index - Games, True Tones, SMS, Maps, Music, MSN Messenger Most Popular
  
• Fairfax Media FY08 Report Highlights - Online Growth is Strong, Print is Diminishing
  
• Fallout of Apple's iTunes Movies Announcement in Australia
  
• FY08 Report - Telstra & Sensis Performing Well, Expansion into China, Starts Competing with iTunes
  
• Emerging Business and Executive Women of Australia
  
• Report - Mobile Consumption of Internet Services is Abysmal
  
• Telstra lost round 1 to Apple's iPhone, now gearing for round 2 with Google's Android
  
• Local Search & Directories Market Heating Up
  
• Emerging Mobile Startups of Australia
• Sensis and the Australian Search and Directories Market
• Acquisition of EDS by HP is about 3 C’s
• Unholy alliance - Microsoft, Novell partnership
• Top 5 Probable Digg Buyers
• IBM acquires Datapower - Will software be same

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