Following Startups & Tech Trends

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 Friday, March 14, 2008 2008 , Australia , Carnival , Fame , Media , Service , Social Networking , Startups , Web 0 comments

The 25th participant is The Fame Experiment

Founded By Mark Schumann in 2008, The Fame Experiment, is developed to investigate the answer to one simple question, Can the internet be used to generate enough exposure for one person to experience public recognition?
It works on the idea that one person, if seen over and over again in a multitude of places, could experience public recognition, or become famous. The aim is for this person's image to be everywhere, and for that image to become embedded in Internet users' thoughts so that to see this person in public will trigger an I know you moment.

Mark describes, there are two phases:

Phase 1: is about getting the word out about the Fame Experiment. If users have a website, a blog, post on forums, or even email others, it is easy for them to participate.

By selecting the Earn Fame Points link after logging in, they will be given a choice of special code that can be placed on their website, blog, forum or email signature. These links will generate an image linking to the Fame Experiment website, that when clicked on by others, will add to their Fame Points. These points contribute to the final selection of the subject.

Phase 2: involves publicising the selected subject to the large network of sites participating in the experiment.

From the moment the second phase begins, all images displayed on these sites will be changed to include an image of the selected subject, with a link back to the Fame Experiment where the subject's profile will be featured. During this phase, the subject will be encouraged to investigate any difference in public perception, and reflect upon this on their Fame Experiment blog.

Any clicks earned during Phase 2 will be considerably higher than usual and contribute to a likely second experiment.

Mark explains further about this unique venture of his and how he is progressing with it:

• How it started?
I had given thought to the multitude of Internet celebrities that had become famous, mostly for the wrong reasons. I wondered how their lives may have changed as a result, and whether they actually experienced public recognition. This lead me to the idea that some Internet users could actually want such recognition, and that I could provide a means for this in a positive light. The Fame Experiment was born.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
It took around 2 to 3 months for full operation.

• What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
It has just entered a fully functional state, moving straight from "stealth mode".

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
As stated above, the main objective is to investigate the answer to this question:

• Can the Internet be used to generate enough exposure for one person to experience public recognition?

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
The Fame Experiment does not service its users in the traditional way. The idea is that it is a collaborative experiment that all users benefit from. During the second phase, one user will be selected and will (hopefully) benefit at some level from public fame or recognition. Other users will benefit through reading the subject's blog, and earning Fame Points for a second experiment.

• What is unique about your venture?
The Fame Experiment is entirely unique in its approach to investigating the power of the internet in generating real fame. To be suddenly confronted with the same image of one particular person all over the web, and then to investigate the consequences, has not been done before. It is important that this perspective be maintained and that an investigative approach be constantly undertaken.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Users with public internet pages such as bloggers, website owners and social networking users (e.g. Facebook users).

• What age group of people will be benefited most?
Users over the age of 18 are the only ones eligible.

• How many users are using your services?
Currently, under 10, but the site was only launched as of 3 March 2008 (the date of this email)

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word? Initially, posts in forums, word of mouth, etc. However, the marketing model of this website is based entirely on its function. Since the purpose of the site is to build links to The Fame Experiment through banner images, this will also be its marketing tool.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
Stats packages such as Google Analytics will allow a detailed level of information about where people are coming from, and the depth of its exposure through the internet. After a satisfactory level of exposure is achieved, Phase 2 will begin.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
Google Adsense

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment? What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
There are no real competitors, unless a very similar experiment is being conducted that I'm not aware of. See below for technologies.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
Drupal as a content management system for the basis of the website and associated modules.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
As stated above, Drupal is being used to serve the content and manage the Fame Point system.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
The system is served on a Linux server, with PHP and a MySQL database.

• 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?
There is no face-to-face communication with others at present, but this may change.

• How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
Approximately $100 for hosting and domain name registration for the year, and around $250 for custom development using a freelance web developer.

• What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
From a web perspective, not a lot besides cost of development. Server costs are also quite high in Australia if local hosting is needed.

• What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
I believe that the web is becoming the place for all communication and collaboration. We are beginning to develop deeper relationships with people online without ever seeing them in person, and it is important that some face-to-face interaction is maintained. However, the internet is developing further ways to interact with others in a more traditional sense through voice, video and even virtual 3D.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Ensure that you have a clear goal in mind and that you are passionate about what you do.

Thanks Mark for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you in future on the progress of The Fame Experiment. All the best for The FameExperiment and the competition in this carnival.

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Vishal Sharma Thursday, March 13, 2008 2008 , Australia , Branding , Carnival , Marketing , Media , Service , Startups , Technology , Web 0 comments

The 24th participant is Adimade

Co-Founded by Jake Lawton and Nat Graf in 2008, Adimade - is a video-sharing website focused on User Generated Advertising, or UGA. Put simply, Adimade is YouTube for brands. Adimade brings together the talent of the YouTube community with businesses seeking a new way to interact with young consumers.

Nat describes:

Adimade runs ad creation projects on behalf of our project partners. Users create videos; submit those videos to Adimade, then users share and vote for the best clips. The project partner selects the best clip from the finalist’s videos, and is free to use that video for any advertising and promotional purposes.

Adimade gives the amateur video creator the chance to get paid for the entertaining and clever videos they create. By submitting an entry to one of Adimade’s ad creation projects, video creators have the opportunity of getting paid for their work, funding their next film project and getting their work seen by the people who count.

For brands and project sponsors, Adimade provides the prospect to interact with video creators and consumers in a deep interactive way, with the added advantage of obtaining entertaining authentic video content for their brand at a fraction of the cost they would have to pay tradition profession media agencies.

Let us learn more about Adimade and how it is progressing:

• How it started?
We had been discussing how, for years, companies have been paying marketing companies massive amounts of money to make ads people hate watching. Not only that, now consumers can avoid watching TV-style commercials with technology such as TiVO and bittorent.

This is happening in conjunction with declining TV audiences and a rapid increase of alternate entertainment formats such as social networks, gaming and social media. It seemed to us, the traditional 30-second ad was not being utilised in any creative or innovative way to combat these trends.

At the same time we were noticing how the YouTube community had been producing brilliant, entertaining videos on a shoestring budget that people can’t get enough of.

It really wasn’t much more complicated than putting these 2 ideas together to come up with Adimade. The Youtube community has the talent. They need a way to get fairly rewarded for the work that they are already doing. And Brands need a new way to connect with audiences, both utilising existing and emerging online communities and technologies by revamping their traditional conversational efforts, the TV ad.

The founders behind Adimade are:

• Jake Lawton: Currently working in the HR sector, Jake kicked off his IT career working for some of Australia's largest ISP's during the .com bubble of the late 90's.
• Nat Graf: After obtaining a Masters in Economics, Nat has worked as a consultant in the FMCG and IT&T industry for the past 4 years.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
We had first started talking about Adimade in May of 2007. After abandoning another start-up we were working at the time, we decided to bootstrap the Adimade idea and see how it would work.
Development of the website began in September of 2007, and was ready to be deployed in November 2007, however, we held back on the launch until mid-January 2008.

• What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
Adimade is currently in Beta stage. We are, at this stage, completely self-funded and in the process of finalising the details for the first client sponsored projects to be run on Adimade.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
The main objects behind Adimade are to provide a viable platform for the following 3 outcomes:

• An alternate way for Amateur filmmakers to monetise their creative skills or fund future projects by turning their hand to making ads and getting rewarded fairly for their efforts.
• An alternative way for Brands to acquire unique video content that is authentic, edgy and clever at a reasonable price.
• A new way for brands to enter into a dialogue with consumers, where consumers actively participate and direct the course of that conversation.

• What services does it provides it for consumer or customers?
Services provided by Adimade are divided into the services we provide our user community and the services that we provide for out Client/ Project Sponsors.

Users:

• Available projects which they can enter to monetise their creative content
• A simple platform for users to display and share their creative endeavors.
• A Community environment that enables Users:
• The ability to review and rate their peers work.
• Comments and discussion forums so users can discuss each other’s work, ideas and techniques.
• The chance to get their work seen by industry professionals in the creative advertising, marketing and film industries.

Clients / Project Sponsors:

• A low cost and low risk alternative to engage interactively with consumers online.
• A video contest platform that is immediately ready to be deployed or tailored in a white label format to meet the Clients specific requirements.
• Strategic advice and collaboration with Project Sponsors regarding the plan for their brands project drawing on our first hand experiences of what video creators get excited about.
• Adimade hosts and promotes the project to its members, the online video community and amateur/independent video/film makers.
• Manages the project from start to finish. Staying actively involved as entries are voted on, promoted and discussed.
• Ongoing monitoring of created content. We monitor submissions, comments and voting to ensure project content is not inappropriate.
• Adimade gives the client the final decision. At the close of the project the client select the finalists that they think deserves to be rewarded.
• The Copyrights to the winning submissions, and ability to negotiate with other content creators for the rights to their content.
• Adimade provides Clients with measurable results. A project on Adimade provides clients with rich qualitative and quantitative data. Hard data on page and video views, content popularity, track-backs and links. Soft data regarding how people view the client’s brand by the video content they created and the comments they make.

• What is unique about your venture?

• Adimade is an environment that puts the power of the conversation in the hands of the consumer.
• For years, brands have been advertising AT consumers, TV-style commercials that are essentially a one-way dialogue. With Adimade, consumers and video creators get to actively participate in what the brands advertising message should be. Users dictate to brands how THEY want to be advertised to.
• Adimade additionally provides an alternative and unique way that video creators can monetise their content, fund future projects and build a portfolio to get noticed by industry insiders.
• Adimade provides Brands with an alternative way to source creative promotional content for their brand. Rather than paying Marketing/Ad who are not directly connected with their brand, Brand marketers can source this content from the people that count – their consumers.
• Brands are continually finding that Co-creating leads to more successful outcomes. A report from Mackenzie found that when brands collaborated with consumers with respect to new product development and product refinements, that product was successful 75% of the time, whereas when the company did not crowd-source the success rate dropped to as low as 15%.
• Adimade gives Brands the chance to crowd source one of its most important functions. Its Advertising.
• Open platform – utilizing existing tech platforms
• Utilising Youtube – or any other video embedded technology.
  

• What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
At this stage we are targeting the SME and medium size organizations. Although we are not excluding particular market segments, the main segments we see to gain the most benefit from out services are:

• Web 2.0 businesses
• FMCG and consumable goods
• Advertising/marketing (as a sell-on service for their clients)

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Users:

• Creatives
• Heavy Internet users.
• Youtube video community.
• Amateur filmmakers.
• University film student.
• University advertising / marketing students.
• Brand consumers and brand devotees.

Clients/ Project Sponsors:

• New businesses requiring cost effect creative promotional content.
• Businesses/brands needing to engage with consumers online.
• Brands looking to explore creative ways to engage with consumers through new media.

• What age group of people will be benefited most?
In regards to Users community, the core of online video creators would be in the range of the 14 – 35 year old demographic. So this would be the logical targeted demographic for Adimade.

The target demographic may change depending on the nature of the Brand that is sponsoring the project to include the consumer market segments that use, or potentially use, that product.

For Clients, newer brands seeking low cost exposure and existing brands seeking to revitalise their interactions with consumers would be the main targets.

• How many users are using your services?
Users:
In the month since launching we have had about 2500 visitors to the site, 50 registered users and 15 video entries.

We are in the process of finalising the details for the first client sponsored projects to be run on Adimade.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
We have implemented a “bleed” approach to the marketing launch. Rather than launching the website with a Client sponsored project, we decided to put up some of our own cash to run a mock competition. This has allowed us build a base of users, and a stock of original content, so that when we launch our first client sponsored project, there is an existing community base ready to participate with that brand.

The ongoing marketing of Adimade and Adimade projects can be broken down into online and offline efforts:
Online:

• A presence on video sites, mostly youtube.
• A blog so we can ta·lk to our users and clients.
• A presence on video promotional site that list video competitions open to the public
• Getting feedback from users and people involved in the video creating community.
• Sending out our Press Release to online networks
• Participating in the blog community
• Having a presence on social networks such as facebook.
• Contacting Video creators individually to secure their interest and feedback on the website.

Offline:

• Engaging clients, both directly and through agencies.
• Engaging users through targeted campaigns at universities.
• Utilising existing industry contacts in the video and marketing/ad industry.
• Press and press release.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are there any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?

The main metric of success for Adimade is profitability. This is the key headline stat we will use to ensure we are focussed on delivering services that people want.

With respect to measuring ongoing success and progress of projects, we continue to measure and review:

• Site stats such as – Visitors, Registered users, number of videos, comments etc.
• Monitoring of press and online exposure of Adimade.
• User feedback.

• What is the monetising/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
The revenue model for Adimade is to charge project sponsors a fee to run and host their project on the Adimade site. This model is segmented into two service-based areas:

• Basic vanilla solution. This is the model where brands deploy their project on the existing Adimade site and requires little rework to accommodate for their brands project.
• White-label solution. For this model, the Adimade technology is configured to suit the Project sponsor as a stand-alone website.
• Adimade also consults with brands on how they can utilise online video for their brand and marketing activities.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
The main competitors for Adimade currently operating in this space are:

• XlntAds (USA based)
• Zooppa (USA/Italy based)
• Genius Rocket (USA based)
• Ad candy (USA based)
• Ad Bakery (USA based)
• ViTrue (USA based)
• CurrentTV (USA based)
• memelabs (USA based)
• YouTube
• Supervirals (Australian based)

User Generated Advertising is certainly not a new concept and whilst a few companies in the US and Europe are doing similar things, we believe we have an edge over these offshore competitors. We like what they are trying to do, but sometimes it comes across a little too advertiser focused. We're working more from the video creators perspective, helping them boost their profile and get paid for their work.

• What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
It’s a pretty straight forward. PHP based page with some propriety code going into managing the database of users and videos. Some Ajax also involved.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
Adimade is set-up more as a business model than a stand-alone piece of technology.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
We have used various open source tools throughout the development and implementation of Adimade.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
PHP based page and utilising mySQL.

• How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
Our view of capital required to fund a start up is that it can range from zero to millions of dollars. It all depends on the specifics of the industry and nature of the business model.

In this day and age, it is possible for a start-up to kick-off for a couple of thousand of dollars. Site development can be so easy, that market testing can essentially be done in Beta Phases. You have to make it stretch and clearly define the spending and time priorities.

• What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
Main barriers for Start-Up ventures:

• Being Australian based you are faced with a smaller, and at times, less adventurous potential market. If you are seeking to go beyond an Australian core audience, you are then facing the prospect of competing with overseas-based organizations that have better opportunities to raise capital and investment.
• Reduced general interest in start-up and entrepreneurial culture by investors and the media.
• Small opportunity to investment capital.

Positives for being Australian based:

• You have an already pre-defined niche that many overseas competitors may have overlooked and may not be able to service as proficiently as a local based venture.
• A growing web start-up and new media community. Organizations and events like this and MODM, run by Cameron Reilly and TPN, are great ways for this community to develop.
• Great local skills and knowledge base in a community of people who are more than often willing to help you out.

• What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
Online Video is segment that is going to grow significantly in general terms. UGC Video is already quite a mature process, however the monetisation from a creativity aspect is relatively immature.

The potential for this market segment lies in Business acceptance and willingness to explore the new frontiers to engage with consumers. Branded entertainment, which UGA is a subset of, is tipped to grow by 14% in 2008 (PQ Media, 2007). Sponsored websites and video content is tipped to rise by 45% as brands seek to capture online attention of the younger demographic.

The role that YouTube plays in this market will be significant. Although not an old company, it could be argued that YouTube has not been at the forefront in helping their community monetise their content.

The companies that are going to do well in the future in terms of building successful brands are the brands utilise emerging technology to build brand value. Brands that maker a greater effort to engage the consumer and relinquish control of the conversation and their brand, from product development right down to marketing functions.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
It takes one second to start something. It is most likely that you are not the only person to conceive a similar idea. However, being the one person that follows that idea with passion and tenacity will separate you from the pack.

Thanks to the founders of Adimade , Jake and Nat, for sharing their thoughts. We look forward to hear from them in future on the progress of Adimade. All the best for Adimade and the competition in this carnival.

Continue Reading >>

Vishal Sharma Thursday, March 13, 2008 2008 , Australia , Carnival , Media , Service , Social Networking , Startup , Web , Website 0 comments

The 23rd participant is 3eep

3eep - is a social media enterprise. Its delivers technology and commercial services to clients who want to establish their own social media businesses and create social networks amongst their communities. 3eep’s focus is on local sports communities. Let us learn more about 3eep and people behind it:

• Who are the founders behind this and how it started?
Who are the founders behind this and how it started.
The founders of 3eep are Rob Antulov, CEO, who was the former head of strategy at Fairfax, and Nick Gonios, COO and Head of Community Development, who has spent time with HotHouse Interactive, Microsoft and Fujitsu.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
From our initial thoughts about building a sports-oriented social network to launching our first beta version took about six months. We launched our partner Platform product within 4 months of that.

• What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
3eep is still in an early stage of development, but we have three Platform partners in place, one in Australia, one in Canada and one in Germany. Although internally we regard our business as being in permanent beta, we are live in multiple geographies with our services.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
To enable local sporting communities to move their real-world conversations into an online space.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Social media services – enabling the creation of social networks and user generated content for the local communities.

• What is unique about your venture?
Leading provider of white-labelled sports-oriented social media technology platform.

• What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
Local and amateur sports communities.

• What type of customers you are targeting
Sports players, fans, coaches, administrators and parents.

• What age group of people will be benefited most?
All ages who participate in sports either as a player or fan or administrator

• How many users are using your services?
Thousands

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
For 3eep, we are doing very little marketing at the moment, relying on our reference sites to generate interest in what we are doing.
Our partners employ a combination of :

• (a) mass media marketing,
• (b) email, SEO and SEM,
• (c) relationship marketing with sports administrators,
• (d) field marketing and
• (e) viral marketing

•How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
Success is measured by many factors – but the simplest for us are the number of partners using our services, the total number of members they have using their services, and the revenues being generated on the sites.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
Primary revenue model for 3eep is in the provision of technology and commercial services. Primary revenue model for our partners is advertising and sponsorship.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment? What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
No other providers in the same space, but other companies delivering software which enables local sports teams to manage their clubs and competitions.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
We are using Ruby on Rails methodology, and open source software for core social media components.

• 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?
We are running on Linux OS with Ruby on Rails as the application development framework. Database is MySQL.

• 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?
Once a month

• How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
It depends

• What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
Funding and willingness for commercial partners to use these new services (Australian corporate are generally conservative in their uptake of new services, preferring to wait to see if others are using them)

• What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
Strong growth

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Don’t run out of money during the start-up phase

Thanks to the founders of 3eep , Rob and Nick, for sharing their thoughts. We look forward to hear from them in future on the progress of 3eep. All the best for 3eep and the competition in this carnival.

Continue Reading >>

Vishal Sharma Wednesday, March 12, 2008 2008 , Australia , Carnival , Media , Mobile , Service , Startup , Technology , Telecom 1 comments

The 22nd participant is Me2mobile

Me2mobile is a new entrant in the area of enabling Mobile Interactivity. It is a self-service portal that allows ordinary users to produce interactive mobile applications that were once provided by the traditional mobile media companies such as mobile operators and mobile marketing companies.

Let us explore bit further how Me2mobile is progressing:

• Who are the founders behind this and how it started?
The founders have extensive experience in the mobile industry and have been involved in the mobile content area for the last 8 years. The founders are moonlighting entrepreneurs at present but will be announcing who they are once initial seed funding is secured and the business is launched.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
The concept was conceived around 18 months ago when the founders realised that a lot of smaller businesses and entrepreneurial individuals faced massive barriers to setting up interactive mobile services. We saw an opportunity to delivery a self-service portal that took all the pain away from setting up mobile services and allowed businesses to start dipping their toe in mobile interactive services.

The self-service portal was developed over a 12 months period and at the same time connectivity to the mobile networks was established.

• What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
Me2mobile is in beta launch mode. We launched in early February and we are getting huge interest in what we are doing. We are delighted with the initially feedback and have already taking on board some new ideas. Beta mode will continue for 3 months.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Me2Mobile is a business that helps it customers to build successful mobile services by providing mobile messaging and payment services that are accessible and affordable. In return, Me2Mobile will share in the success of making mobile services development more ubiquitous.

Currently, the market is experiencing a rapid movement towards “off-deck” mobile content which means that a growing number of mobile users are starting to look beyond their mobile operator's portal and explore mobile sites and services that are provided outside the operator's domain. At the same time there has been a massive growth in interactive services across multiple channels such as Web, TV, Mobile, etc. These 2 factors place the mobile as a key delivery channel for enterprises and advertisers.

Me2mobile wants to be the premium self-service destination for enterprises, advertisers and content providers who want a low-cost entry into this space.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Me2mobile provides an interactive self-service portal for creating mobile services and generating revenues. Essentially, Me2Mobile is an on-line self-service portal that allows content providers, marketing agencies and mobile application developers to easily create mobile services that encompass mobile payment and messaging services and as a result instantly profit from revenue generating mobile applications.

Me2Mobile allows small enterprises and ordinary users to provide user/community based messaging services such as SMS promotions, SMS voting, competitions, polls, etc.

For the more complex mobile applications, me2mobile provides a web services API for sending and receiving bulk and premium SMS and this allows webmasters and developers to integrate mobile interactivity into their applications.

Me2Mobile provides these services through a community environment that allows the sharing of knowledge and advancing of mobile development. Me2Mobile will encourage community building through the sharing of information and the rewarding of community participation.

• What is unique about your venture?
Me2mobile is the only self-service portal for creating interactive mobile services in Australia. Me2Mobile pricing will be based on low entry level pricing so that small business owners/developers can get into experimenting and using SMS services. It will also uniquely offer revenue share on premium sms services.

• What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
Me2Mobile is targeted at the small enterprise market and in particular content providers, digital creative/advertising agencies and the application/web development community. Me2Mobile provides messaging and payment services that allow ordinary users, developers and entrepreneurs to profit from revenue generating mobile applications. Me2Mobile will target the advertising, marketing and development companies that provide a channel to the small/medium business and content/media/broadcast segment. The SME segment is largely untapped in its use and applicability of SMS and mobile payment services.

• What type of customers you are targeting?

• Marketing & Ad agencies: have a Need for SMS campaigns, promotional websites, mobile coupons, mobile marketing operations
• Content publishers: have a need for creating revenue generating mobile offerings, distributing their mobile content, driving web audience to mobile sites
• System Integrators/Web Developers: have a need for APIs for integrating mobile interactivity into their systems and want ease of use and instant set up
• Club/Societies: have a need for interacting with their members using SMS, News/Information Alerts, Competitions, Promotion of events
• Small And Medium Businesses: have a need for using SMS for informational purposes, Managing client relationships, workflow/Order management, Mobile channel for their business.

• What age group of people will be benefited most?
All age groups but is particularly useful to anyone that has an audience or has great content to distribute.

• How many users are using your services?
Since launching only 4 weeks ago, we already have almost 300 registered users. Usage is growing very fast and we are starting to see some interesting use-cases that we didn’t expect. For example, one guy from a performance car club on the Central Coast set up a service that enables the group to instantly notify each other by SMS when there are speed checks on the F3 (sorry NSW police!!)

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
At the moment we are mainly relying on internet marketing and by providing useful and comprehensive information on building mobile services.

When we have finalised our Beta program we will be launching some big promotion and industry marketing campaigns.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
The success of our venture is based on 2 critical factors.

• Cost Effectiveness: Demonstrable payback for customers in using mobile services to grow their business. The ability to demonstrate to our clients that cost benefits of using me2mobile and clearly show how the costs can be outweighed by the revenue generated by using me2mobile.
• Comprehensive offering with Ease of use:A comprehensive service offering that is a “one stop shop” for all businesses needs in the mobile services area. And this comprehensive offering is provided by a Simple interface where services instantly available. And it is totally self service and takes away the complexity and hides it behind the scenes

We believe if we get these 2 factors right that the venture will be very successfully. Me2mobile is a user community so we will look to measure our performance against these critical factors by constant feedback from our users.

What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
The revenue model is very simple. When people use mobile services hosted on me2mobile the operator charges the users on their mobile phone bill. The operator then shares this revenue with us and then we share this with the person who created the mobile service on me2mobile. (see graphic attached). In cases where revenue generation is not the critical factor for our customers (e.g. ad agencies running mobile marketing or information campaigns), we charge monthly fees to host interactive mobile services on the me2mobile platform and also charge a per-message cost for broadcast SMS.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
When you consider the broader SMS gateway space there are competitors such as Clickatell, Essendex, Mobile Messenger, etc. But we believe we have a unique self-service offering which isn’t offered by anyone else in Australia.

• What are the main technologies used behind this start-up.
Me2mobile is a web platform that is based on standard web technologies such as mysql, php, python and java. And of course, webservices.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
Web services. Me2mobile relies heavily on webservices from enabling its operator connectivity and also for connecting with external application providers.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Yes, as part of our development environment we re-use some useful open-source libraries.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
As mentioned, Me2mobile is a web platform that is based on standard web technologies such as mysql, php, python and java. And of course webservices.

• 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?
Very often, we are regular attendees of industry networking events and also attend some very useful developer "get-togethers" such the barcamps, STIRR, etc.

• How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
Ours is a Web2.0 type business and the start-up costs are inline with this type of business. Additional set up costs are need to cover the operator connectivity.

But in order for me2mobile to be truly successful, the biggest cost will be marketing and promotion. We need to change people’s behaviors and this takes effort/cost to get the message out.

• What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
The biggest barrier for starting this type of venture is the complexity and effort of dealing with operators.

Even though SMS is a relatively mature market the operators still place lots of restrictions on what you can and can’t do and the timeframes and costs for getting setup is a major barrier.

Another barrier is that in order to go global with the premium SMS business you need local connections in the countries that you launch in. This requires cost/effort in dealing with multiple regions.

Fortunately, me2mobile has sourced a global messaging providers that has local connectivity for premium SMS in 28 countries and delivery bulk SMS to 350 countries.

But it’s precisely these barriers that are opportunities for me2mobile. Cause it’s these barriers that are keeping small to medium business out of playing and discovering mobile interactivity. Me2mobile takes all the barriers away for our customers.

• What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
In the medium term we see that the mobile content space will mature and further enablers in addition to SMS and payment will be offered by the mobile operators. We predict that in the next 6 to 12 months, operators will start to offer ways to allow “off-net” video streaming and video telephony based content services.

Furthermore, we predict that we will start to see flexible data carriage models which will remove any price barriers associated with users consumer “off-net“ rich media services.

Me2Mobile plans to capitalize on the introduction of these services and will look to include further rich media services as part of our wholesale offer in addition to SMS and payment

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?

• Try to use past trends to predict the future and then jump in ahead of the game.
• Know your strengths and weaknesses and build a strong team around you
• Hard work but have fun.

Thanks to the founders of Me2mobile for sharing their thoughts. We look forward to hear from them in future on the progress of Me2Mobile. All the best for Me2mobile and the competition in this carnival.

Continue Reading >>

Vishal Sharma Wednesday, March 12, 2008 2008 , Australia , Carnival , Media , Service , Startup , Web 0 comments

The 21st participant is WhatYah

WhatYah, founded by Ashley Smith in January 2007, a place to catalog, share and review your movies, T.V shows & games with friends. He created after he realised that sharing movies, games & t.v shows between friends should be easier. The idea is that you should be able to search a database and be able to know exactly what your friends own. With WhatYah you can then organise to trade or share titles and even get together to make a social event.

Ashley tells us bit more about his startup, WhatYah:

How long it took before it was up and running?
From planning to public beta testing it took approximately 14 months

What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
In stealth mode at current, planning on starting marketing within the month.

What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
To assist friends with sharing their content legally, as well as being able to catalog all of their media they can write reviews on it to help friends see what they might like.
What services it provides it for consumer or customers.

• Catalog & track your media titles online
• The ability to know what media titles your friends have
• Let your friends know what you think about certain titles
• Social networking features
• Create & publish your own reviews

What is unique about your venture?

• Get notified by email & internal mail when your friends get titles you have marked as wanted
• Create your own database of content & share that list with friends
• Complete social network built around the movie, t.v show & game niche.

What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
Social Networking, Personal Movie Reviews, Legal Movie, Game T.V Show sharing.
What type of customers you are targeting?
TV/Movies/Games Enthusiasts who are interesting in social networks and sharing

What age group of people will be benefited most?
The age we are targeting can varyas anyone from age 14+ purchases media and likes to share it.

How many users are using your services?
As we are in stealth mode, we only have 15 users which are currently testing the service.

What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word? Site has yet to be released, no marketing has yet been used.

How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
We use Google Analytics to monitor traffic & analyse users behavior.

What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
At current, we are only using Adsense but plan to start using Amazon and offer a premium service to the community.

Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment? What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
The biggest competitor would be Flixster. They have a strong network, but as WhatYah is offering completely different services I'm confident both can co-exist successfully.

What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
The prototype framework, it comes with great documentation and has made cross-browser scripting a reality.

Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Most of WhatYah has been coded from scratch, but we have chosen to use the javascript prototype framework to assist us with the ajax back end.

What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using.
We are currently hosting whatyah with a dedicated LAMP server.

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?
Perth is quite isolated for these types of events but I do attend Australian Web Industry Association events when they are organised.

How much money is needed upfront to start a venture? Depending on how much you outsource it can cost thousand or tens or thousands. WhatYah was developed in house so at current we only pay for our dedicated server which is roughly $70 a month.

What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia? Networking, I do find that not being able too attend conferences & seminars is quite a drawback.

What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
I have great expectation for WhatYah as there is no quality one stop shop for organising all your media titles.

Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture? Don't quit your day job, until your confident you can support your project entirely. You can't fail if you never give up.

Thanks Ashley for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you in future on the progress of WhatYah. All the best for WhatYah and the competition in this carnival.

Continue Reading >>

Vishal Sharma Tuesday, March 11, 2008 2008 , Australia , Carnival , Media , News , Service , Social Networking , Startup , Web , Website 0 comments

The 19th participant is Confer
Founded by Rod L'Huillier Confer - is a social news sharing site especially aimed at an Australian audience providing a platform for content recommendation and news sharing. The content is completely community driven via member submissions of links to blog posts, news stories or even videos that they have found interesting. Members can also vote on submissions to democratically determine the front page news and most popular content. The site also allows for discussion of submissions and members also have their own personal profile page with networking features.
It aims to be a platform for sharing and discovery and engagement in Australian content, particularly from the Aussie blogosphere, and for localised discussion of news and issues be they global or local.

Confer in short:

• Social News sharing - Content Recommendation
• Content discovery via community contribution
• Discussion - Have your say on local issues
• Collaborative filtering via voting
• Independent and community driven
• Promoting Australian web content

For Confer putting quality over quantity is important and it's about attracting people who want to be members, not necessarily the most members, and having a platform that suits their needs and to follow a natural path of progression with that in mind. Confer would rather be known as a niche property of value as apposed to a very large toilet wall.

Let us explore bit further from how Rod and Confer are progressing:

Who are the founders behind this and how it started?
Confer isn't backed by any company or company structure and is ran by myself, Rod L'Huillier, as an individual with lots of support and assistance from it's founding members. Not having any commercial intent, and as a community site for it's community, the driving force is the community and also the beneficiary.

Further reasoning for creating the site comes from the belief that while it's great to connect on a global level, via sites like digg and reddit, there also needs to be platforms that engage audiences in local content. Particularly from the Australian blogosphere where there is a lot of great content being published. Without local platforms it would be hard for that content, which may only be regionally relevant, to truly be discovered by an audience that appreciates it in a social media driven world.

How long it took before it was up and running?
One month or so and continuing.

What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
Stealthy beta!

What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Aims are for it to be a platform for sharing and discovery and engagement in Australian content, particularly from the Aussie blogosphere, and for localised discussion of news and issues be they global or local.

What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A platform for sharing and discovery of web based content.

What is unique about your venture?
The concept of 'social news sharing' or collaborative filtering/content recommendation in global terms with sites like digg, reddit and netscape are nothing new although Confer offers an Australian site for Australians and their stories.

What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
Local - Australia

What type of customers you are targeting?
No defined target

What age group of people will be benefited most?
No defined target

How many users are using your services?
There is around 50 active members (submitting, commenting and voting) and a larger number of spectator members.

What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
At this point of development there is no outward marketing.

How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
At this point it's all about quality and value over quantity!

What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
The site is currently not monetized, nor is there any immediate goals or requirements to do so. In the future there may be opportunities to look at three way value exchanges as opposed to seemingly unsuccesful two exchanges currently being used across many sites.

Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
Major players, on an international scale, are fairly apparent for example digg, propeller, reddit and so on. I think there needs to be a clear understanding of scale and culture, particularly when developing for a local audience in Australia and niches within that audience. It might be a case of being well known for providing great value in that niche rather than well know at large.

What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
LAMP + JS

Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
The site is based upon Pligg open source software. During the coming months there are plans to add asked for features including Open Id support, abilty to export a users own data and enhanced video and image sharing.

What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
LAMP + JS

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?
Not enough!

How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
This is possibly the greatest feature of the web economy - that there is such a low entry cost, although, in an evergrowing sea of choices the cost to stand out and be noticed is becoming real and increasing.

What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
I think like most things the only barriers are the ones you accept.

What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
I find the topic of monetisation interesting and believe, that on a user content generated site, users should also share in any returns be it capital growth or revenue, I'm sure there will be more debate about this into the future.

I also see mainstream media and news outlets becoming more involved in social media via strong ties with third party sites as a way to facilitate discussion over stories rather than carrying the load on their site - in terms of moderation and the high level of moderation required for brand protection related issues.

I would also hope that the deployment of niche collaborative sites continues to grow and reflect the vast divesity of groups within the offline world and that Australian focused sites are a part of that.

Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Go for it!

Thanks Rod for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you in future on the progress of Confer. All the best for Confer and the competition in this carnival.

Continue Reading >>

Vishal Sharma Monday, March 10, 2008 2008 , Australia , Carnival , Media , Service , Startup , Web , Web2.0 2 comments

The 17th participant is Rave About It

Rave About It, launched in beta mode in November in 2006, aims to provide an enjoyable way in which users can search, rate and discuss what they think of services in their local area and beyond. It is like word of mouth, but online, as this is the most accurate representation of how well a business services their customers. In addition to helping businesses make themselves heard through real testimonials, small businesses are able to market themselves through other features that the site offers.

The concept of Rave About It was first discussed between Mark Rimmer and Tim Griffin in June 2006 at a friend's birthday party in Sydney. It was an idea that Mark had suggested, initially because he was on the search for a recommended local hairdresser. They have refined the idea to support in-depth reviews of any type of business - products and services that were physically, mobile or Internet based. Subsequent research revealed that a strong business review scene was already developing in the States, with the trio of business review websites, Yelp, Insider Pages & Judy's Book being most prominent. Whilst they liked these sites, they wanted to design something with an Australian focus.

Let us explore bit further on different facets of Rave About it from Mark. We were the first business review website in Australia to offer business reviews across all industries and all States in Australia.

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. It took us 3 months to get an alpha version up and running, followed by another month of testing and refinement based on user feedback to reach a beta version

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Fully functional / Perpetual beta ;)

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. Become the most prominent business review website and become synonymous with reviewing technology in Australia.

Q. What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A. Rave About It aims to serve two needs:

• Provide the consumer an environment in which they can search and review any business in Australia
• Provide a business owner the ability to benefit from word-of-mouth feedback, as well as tools to market their own products and services.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A.

• In July 2007, we outsourced our reviewing platform to a major on-line business directory in Australia and are currently the only reviewing platform to do this in Australia.
• Most business review websites are focused heavily towards the consumer - we provide an environment that takes care of a business's needs as well through a complete business profile, that includes features comparable to a premium listing in major on-line business directories
• We fully support open standards and our reviews are indexed by major search engines and can be viewed in Google Maps through our RSS capabilities, for example.
• Every business sub-category in our database has a set of reviewing criteria unique to that industry. For example