ITQSM

Vishal Sharma Sunday, March 09, 2008 , , , , , , , , 0 comments

The 16th participant is ITQSM

ITQSM - Information Technology Quality Service Management, is focused on the practical application of specific areas of IT best practice management. A key area of our undertaking is described in ITIL terms as configuration management. At a high level it is the practice of mapping of services to dispersed infrastructure in order to measure end to end cost, availability, risk exposure, service availability and general governance factors. Also on offer is the delivery of IT Training courses covering these management aspects as well a substantial offering of courses dealing with Open Source Software in the enterprise environment.

Started by Brendan Martin, in early 2008, it is the culmination of several years work under the Open Source Banner of www.cmdb.info . CMDB.info hosts several open source VM guests running a variety of asset and configuration management tools as well providing downloads references to VM guests covering other areas of IT management.

Let us explore bit further on different facets of Brendan’s venture ITQSM:

Q.How long it took before it was up and running?
A. Its taken about 3 years to get to this stage, although there was never exactly where things were going to end up. The concept of ITQSM has grown from collective years of experience in the IT Consultancy market and the understanding developed over the past few years with CMDB.info. Mainly servicing government departments in Canberra as well as engagements in the banking, telco and other corporate sectors, the need was recognised to provide both software and services within this market segment without requiring a client to undertake lengthy engagements with the larger global vendors.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Would have to rate operations at Stealth Mode at this stage, however we will be actively marketing the offerings as of 1st March 08. ITQSM has partnered with a UK based organisation Square Mile Systems to bring this overall offering to the Asia Pacific market. This strategic partnership draws upon an offering of commercially scalable software, extensive training course material, as well resources with many years experience in delivering consultancy services in this segment.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. The main objective is to promote practical IT best practice management concepts across various scales of organisations.

Q. What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A. ITQSM has 3 key areas of service.

  • Firstly conducting direct consulting with organisations to assist them with resolving problems with the management of their infrastructure. This can range from license management strategies through to mapping of services against infrastructure components or setup of network scanning tools.
  • Secondly, We offer several ranges of software solutions both commercial and open source.
  • Thirdly, we deliver a variety of training courses to introduce the some of these concepts. Courses include service mapping, data centre management, open source software in the enterprise, starting an enterprise open source program of works, advanced application debugging for Microsoft environments, etc.
Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. ITQSM has identified a large gap in the market in terms of offering organisations the opportunity to target specific problem areas or to train their own staff on how best to approach a range of IT management issues without having to procure software tools. Software for this segment is not unique, however this market is dominated by large global software companies such as HP, BMC, & Altiris. Much of the software in the marketplace provides a proprietary view of an organisation’s IT environment. ITQSM’s software offerings will integrate with many of the leading packages in market.

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. The target market for ITQSM in the commercial software space the Financial Enterprise sector where it is critical that a strong risk management approach is applied to the change and the provision of IT services, but the full range of service suits organisations of all sizes in all market segments who are striving towards maturing their IT management practices. The territory extends to the greater Asia Pacific region.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. ITQSM is targeting organisations who are striving towards maturing their IT management practices.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. ITQSM is targeting a commercial market segment rather a demographic age group.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. A variety of organsations in Europe and United States are utilising the commercial software offerings and Squaremile Systems UK are very active in providing specialised training for the European market. Currently, ITQSM is yet to commence commercial operations. (expected March 2008).

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. The approach to marketing is to follow the model of Square Mile Systems UK, in so far that we will be hosting a series a seminars in the major cities in the region. Planned to commence 2nd quarter 2008 and will start with Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. Invitation will be via our mailing list. Also networking through industry recognised “service management” channels. Marketing for such a focused offering is proving challenging.

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. ITQSM does not have anything in place at this stage other than web stats and email forms to register interest from its website.

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. ITQSM will operate under a standard revenue model.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
A. Large global software companies such as HP, BMC, & Altiris, who specialize in service desk offerings or network based asset management.

Q. What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A. Software utilized in the solutions ranges from a Microsoft operating system and MS SQL server to open source monitoring systems, asset management systems, content management systems, Open DB’s and open source operating systems.

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. Vmware and various Linux LAMP builds (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP, Perl)

Q. Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
A. A substantial amount of Open source software is utilized where required or applicable

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
A. MS Windows 2003 Server SQL 2005, Ubuntu Server and Mysql

Q. 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?
A. This is a very specialized area of IT management. I get to catch personally about every 6 months with someone whom I regard as working in a similar space. I chat at least weekly in what is a global community of subject matter experts.

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. ITQSM has grown from a model where no capital input was raised; however the accrued cost of the subject matter expertise and research time devoted over the past few years is substantial to say the least. Financial input is dependant upon many factors. ITQSM is a little too specialized to leverage many of these aspects.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia
A. Some of the primary barriers which will be faced by people wanting to start up a new venture is that there are only limited paths regardless of the offering of the startup. That is, one needs to either provide funding or the expertise themselves long before anyone else is interested in providing operating capital, if at all. Be prepared to work long hard hours for many years. What happens in this area will dictate how much money you will require to get your venture off the ground.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. Interest in the market segment is definitely growing and that is evident from feedback gained from CMDB.info, and what is happening in the European market. The Asia Pacific market is a gaining momentum in terms of striving for mature service management processes.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. One piece of advice is to ensure you are following something you believe will truly benefit others, don’t just do it because you think you can make money out of it. There will be times that your resolve will be tested. Don’t be afraid to ditch an idea or an approach.


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

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GoodBarry

Vishal Sharma Friday, March 07, 2008 , , , , , , , , 1 comments

The 11th participant is GoodBarry

GoodBarry has created GoodBusiness, the first system born to run online businesses. It's one central console that powers your website and email marketing, your online shop and your customer database. It has re-defined "web hosting" for small business with an all-in-one product that replaces up to 10 separate, expensive systems with one. With GoodBusiness, you can have a fully fledged online business up and running in a matter of minutes - including your website, online shop, email marketing and an integrated customer database.
GoodBarry is the brain child of Bardia Housman and Brett Welch from Business Catalyst. Business Catalyst(BC) was founded by Bardia and Adam Broadway in 2003, when the duo saw an increasing need for CRM integration into websites and online businesses. With that in mind, BC created the first integrated Content Management/Contact Management system. This system grew to become a fully fledged online business platform built around that central contact database, including online shopping, email marketing and analytics

In late 2006, Brett and Bardia started to work on bringing BC's technology direct to the small business market. After re-architecting much of the system and a huge user interface overhaul, they relaunched under the GoodBarry brand in mid 2007.
This is Bardia's third venture since he founded Australia's first free email service Start, which was acquired by LookSmart in 1999.

Let us explore bit further how Brett and Bardia are progressing with GoodBarry:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. The first version took about 6 months, but we haven't stopped improving and growing the system (or shrinking in some cases) since it was first being sold.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Fully Functional!

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. Business owners are struggling to get online and make it work for them. Current solutions don't do enough, aren't business-oriented or are too expensive for most businesses.
We wanted to create a single, affordably priced solution that would serve most businesses perfectly - now and into the future.

Q. What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A. GoodBusiness replaces web hosting with an all-in-one platform for online business. Beyond powering your website, GoodBusiness allows business owners without technical knowledge to easily manage their site, run email marketing campaigns, build an online shop and grow a customer database. All from a central, easy to use console.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. Our customer-centric approach allows us to produce amazing analytics that focus on customer actions and behaviour. Many have declared the death of the pageview, but GoodBusiness is the first affordable solution that places the focus on actions and behavior to better understand and optimize your website and marketing campaigns.

Our architecture allows us to do this easily - every part of the system is built on top of a central customer database. This means that every interaction is tracked and logged against a customer record - from blog comments to contact forms, online shopping to email marketing campaigns.
That means you can track the true effectiveness of your website, your online shop and your email marketing campaigns. You'll also build a complete picture of your customer's behaviour, which allows you to make better business decisions.

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. We're targeting small businesses across all verticals, focusing on those with 1 to 10 employees. We're also targeting web designers who build sites for small businesses with our partner programs at BC.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. Tech savvy small business owners who quickly realize they need more than a website to be successful.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. Our technology benefits any one who is running a business and wants to go online - regardless of age.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. We're currently running around 2000 sites through the system.

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. We've used a combination of PR and some targeted advertising

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. We're monitoring our success by the number of signups we get per week. We run our entire business on GoodBusiness, so that's the tool we use to monitor our progress!

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. We're using a paid subscription model, so our customers pay a low monthly fee to use our product.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
A. There are very few competitors who compete with us directly. Since we are an all-in-one platform, we compete on subsets of our features with a few players like Shopify for eCommerce and Constant Contact for email marketing, and a range of web hosting companies. Probably our closest competitor in terms of breadth of functionality is NetSuite, although their price is much higher.

Q. What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A. We're built on Microsoft's .NET platform.

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
A. We're using windows server edition, running MS SQL Server for our database.

Q. 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?
A. We try to keep in touch with the entrepreneur community in Sydney through events like Beer 2.0, Dinner 2.0 and a great OpenCoffee meetup that anyone can attend. Things have been busy lately but we try and go to something at least once a month.
And let's not forget Barcamp - BarCamp 3 is in Sydney in March!

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. A billion dollars is nice, but it really depends on what you're out to do and your business model. If you're planning on offering something free, you'll probably need some decent funding.
We've bootstrapped to here without external funding and little initial seed funding from the founders.

I think it's a simple equation really - how much do you need to pay people? Technology doesn't cost much. You can work out of your home for a fair while until your team outgrows it - which won't happen until you can afford the people. So really you just need to be able to feed yourself and your initial team for as long as you think you'll need to build a working prototype.
Once you've got a working protoype, go get funding or go get customers. Or do both =)

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
A. Many people say that getting funding is hard, because Australian VCs tend to be more conservative in their investments. This is slowly turning around though as more VCs become interested in early stage investments and as more people realise how far a focused, dedicated tech startup can go on $250,000 - i.e you don't need millions anymore.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. Right now, taking your business online is a nightmare of choice and complexity. You've got to work out a web host, choose your eCommerce software, find an email marketing provider and some sort of customer database. Then you find someone to integrate them all (which is expensive) or you constantly shovel data back and forth (which is a waste of time).

GoodBusiness already fixes that, and I think that our market segment will see more and more integration work to address this issue in different ways.

But the next step - and the exciting bit - is the data you get from a truly integrated system. Because GoodBusiness runs your website, your shop and your email marketing, we can do some really interesting data mining. For example, we can tell you exactly how much money was spent in your online shop due to your email newsletter - without any extra reporting code added to newsletters or pages.

Again, we've started down this path but there's a way to go. In the future we'll see more and more complex analysis of online customer actions, more behaviour profiling and and it'll become more and more affordable too. This will be fantastic for businesses everywhere, since it'll really help hone your business performance.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. Have a dream, back yourself, and never say die.

Oh, and learn to be a marketer! You don't want to get beaten by someone with an inferior product but better marketing.

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

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Plutext

Vishal Sharma Thursday, March 06, 2008 , , , , , , , 1 comments

startups, venture technology, consulting, javaThe 9th participant is Plutext.

Plutext enables collaborative editing around docx documents wher, docx is the default file format in Word 2007. In simple terms it's a wordprocessor like Openoffice writer and Google docs.
Based out of Melbourne, it is created by Jason Harrop in 2007 and this is the second venture he has started, previously he was involved with SpeedLegal (now Exari).

Let us explore bit further about Plutext from Jason, on various facets of his startup:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. A couple of months to build a proof of concept, whilst also doing
other things, before giving it 100% focus in September 2007.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Beta mode.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. Enable people to work on a word document at the same time. Provide an environment for doing this irrespective of whether you have Word 2007.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. People can collaborate from within Microsoft Office (ie retain their familiar working environment), and use all the formatting of a docx document.

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. General corporate/government/academia.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. People who need to collaborate together to complete a document, often with a deadline approaching. People who get frustrated when they need to work on a document, but find it is locked by someone else. Existing users of Alfresco - plutext-server is delivered as an Alfresco module.
Potentially, 3rd party document management system vendors who wish to
incorporate our technology.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. 25 to 60

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. Not many yet. Ultimately we expect people to use our yet-to-be-made-public SAAS offering

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. Blogs, mailing lists, the power of open source. At present, we are mainly looking for developer momentum. End user awareness will hopefully follow in due course via the well known technology blogs.

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. Measuring success currently using Google Analytics and community engagement. Later, we will also include financial measures.

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. Avoid dependence on enterprise software sales! Instead.

  • 1. SAAS - Subscription model for end users
  • 2. Services/support for companies using our Alfresco module
  • 3. Potentially, licensing our software to third party document management system vendors.
Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
A. Just Microsoft and Google :)
Google Docs; presumably Microsoft will offer something sooner or later.

Q. What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A. Java, Java Content Repository (JCR), Alfresco, Swing, SOAP, WebDAV

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. Eclipse, JCR, VMware, Ubuntu.

Q Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
A. Yes, exclusively, except for our Word 2007 add-in, which is itself open source, but relies on Microsoft technologies at development and run-time.

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
A. Anything which runs Java. We're using JCR (and Hibernate in Alfresco) to isolate from the underlying database (but its MySQL).

Q. 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?
A. Mainly at conferences - say 5 times per year.

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. Obviously it depends what you are building (development costs, time to revenue, marketing costs, and infrastructure costs). But typically you'll need $30K to $100K to quit your day job and get started. Then you'll need more when you start to scale.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia.?
A. Distance from California. Limited local technical resources and investors.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. Obviously I think Microsoft Office is going to remain the dominant product on corporate desktops for at least the next 4 years.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. Understand yourself and what is important to you. Why do you get up in the morning? What are you willing to sacrifice? How long are you prepared to work at it?

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

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Smartpath

Vishal Sharma Tuesday, March 04, 2008 , , , , , , , , 0 comments

The sixth participant is Smartpath

Smartpath is a software vendor and expert in the asset management industry.
Founded in April 2004, based out of Sydney and Melbourne, it began as a services focused business, now primary focus has become development and delivery of core product suite, Loc8 Asset and Help Desk Manager. These suites are offered as Software-as-a-Service model(SaaS) and (perpetual)customer installed application. The product suite includes a comprehensive Asset Management suite and PDA based auditing application.

David Hodges and Owen Batt are the founders. David was working in the IT Service management field managing teams of Cisco based infrastructure engineers and identified an opportunity in the asset auditing and data collection space. In 2004 David hired Owen, who had come from an architecture background and taught himself Flash and PHP development, to create a laptop based auditing tool. Development of the first tool took 12 months and resulted in a Flash based data collection tool with integrated mapping and image integration. Owen and David joined forces as joint directors of Smartpath in july 2004.

David describes offering of Smartpath :

If we breakdown the products and services into three groups:
  • Asset Management.Loc8 software (perpetual), Loc8 installation and consulting services and asset auditing services
  • Loc8 SaaS - The provision of our Loc8 application suite as a managed service
  • Software Asset Management (SAM) - The provision of software asset management services.
Let us explore bit further how David and Samrtpath is going:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. The business was planned for approximately 12 months prior to establishment. We began life as a services business providing consulting, software development and asset auditing services.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Our product Loc8 is now fully functional with a clear roadmap for future development. Our application suite will be released publicly on distributable CD in April 2008.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. Smartpath's mission is to become recognised as an industry leader in the asset management, maintenance management and help desk markets through the delivery of feature rich, affordable, easy to use and deploy Web 2.0 applications.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. Smartpath has targeted the greater portion of the market with its Loc8 Asset Management and Help-Desk solution. Traditionally, the asset management software market has been characterised by a few, large, global corporations who sell high-end, high-value solutions affordable by only the largest corporations. These solutions are very large and cumbersome to deploy and labor intensive to implement and maintain. Smartpath’s approach is to offer a feature-rich application at a fraction of the cost of existing systems thereby making asset management accessible to all businesses.

Q.What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. Our Loc8 product can be quickly configured to track asset and managed help desks in any industry. We have been successful in the following markets and target them specifically:
  • Health Industry. This includes public and private hospitals, nursing and aged care facilities, area and state health services
  • Education Market
  • Manufacturing
  • Mining and Industrial
  • Retail
  • Software Vendors - SAM
We position our three product offerings (Loc8 perpetual, Loc8 SaaS, Asset/SAM services) to market segments individually.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. We target customers who typically manage and/or track their assets using spreadsheets and typically have as few as 200 or 2million assets. However, Smartpath’s focus tends to be on organisations that have up to 2000 employees..

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. We have approximately 50 customers. We have completed more than 70 projects in the last 3 years and have approximately 100 active users using Loc8.

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Links. We have a PR consultant who works with us monthly. We complete direct marketing campaigns 3 - 4 times each year.
We advertise in industry publications such as the Rust Report, Australian Innovation and are members of the Institute of Asset Managers UK, which provides educational and networking opportunities such as participation at seminars and workshops, etc.

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. Success is measured by the increase in revenues and units sold per year.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment? What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A. Our competitors are generally focused in one of the following areas:
  • asset and audit management software
  • maintenance management software
  • help desk software
We compete with companies like Pinnacle Software, Hardcat Asset Management, Webhelpdesk.com etc

Loc8 is developed using a Java logic layer and Flex/AIR front end. We use a range of databases for data storage. The technology Smartpath utilises in the development of its Loc8 product provides both a technological and competitive advantage. The company constantly scours available and emerging technologies to maintain its advantages.


Q. Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
A. Our databases are open source (with licence components where distributed) most other tools sets are based on the Adobe framework. The packaged operating system is also open source.

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
A. Loc8 is installed as a Virtual Appliance using Ubuntu JeOS (Just enough Operating System) wrapped in a VMware package. Loc8 Supports Windows OS between and including Windows 95 and Vista workstation and server versions, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and HP-UX

Q. 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?
A. Our development team is involved with the Flex development community in Melbourne.

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. In retrospect more than we had :) I think it depends on the product offering, market positioning and growth strategy.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
A. The biggest barrier to entry for start-ups in Australia is the attitude of the Banking and finance industry. Australia’s investment community is generally risk-averse and consequently, mostly unwilling to invest in new ventures. In IT, where the market is international, another potential barrier is the acceptance of products (around the world) developed in Australia. Australia is not know as a innovator and source of leading software – relative to the UK and USA.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. We believe the segments and customers we target will continue to require asset management systems and services. This is because of the increasing incidence of various government, regulatory and corporate governance standards which now impact on the need to have a robust asset management system in place.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
  • Follow your instincts
  • Believe in yourself
  • Be passionate about your products, services and business
  • Surround yourself with people who do things differently and better than you
  • Develop a culture that promotes excitement
  • Research the market, know the customers, develop strategies and implement decisively and measure results.
Thanks David for sharing your thoughts. Some of the points you have raised about innovation and IT industry are quite relevant. We are delighted to cover Smartpath and we look forward to hear from you on the progress of Smart path. All the best.

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Scouta

Vishal Sharma Monday, March 03, 2008 , , , , , , , , 0 comments

Aussie Startups Carnival 2008, kicks off today. We would like to thank all our participants for the time and effort they have put in to make this happen. We are delighted to showcase our first participant Scouta.

Scouta, the name of product and service, owned by Recommendation Ventures Pty Ltd, is a recommendation engine that is provided to retail, media, and content web sites via a web service. Its added via javascripts, and can provide up to a 30% increase in sales or click throughs.

Scouta also has a public recommendation service for amateur generated content like podcasts, video podcasts, and hosted video (on sites like YouTube, Metacafe, etc.). It has an iTunes plug-in that will provide recommendations for content that is consumed on iPods, iPhones, and AppleTVs. That means a member of Scouta can listen to podcasts or watch videos on their iPod, and receive recommendations that match their interests or tastes.

Richard Giles and Graeme Sutherland founded the company. They started the company after meeting for a beer and pizza at Little Creatures in Fremantle, WA. They were bemoaning the fact that it was so hard to find personally relevant online audio and video, and that
it was becoming increasingly harder. They decided to build a recommendation engine to help with the task. After building a scalable service, they realised that it could easily work for any online products, like television, video, music, food, news, etc.

We asked all our participants to share their thoughts on various aspects of their startup and this is what Richard has to say:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running ?
A. From concept to launch it took about 18 months.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. The recommendation service and public recommendation site is fully functional.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. To provide great great personally relevant recommendations to the world. Our main focus is to help online retail, media, and content sites add recommendations to their service quickly and easily.

Q. What services it provides for consumer or customers?
A. Scouta provides a recommendation web service for podcasts, video podcasts, and hosted videos.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. We provide online retail, media, and content companies with an easy way to add recommendations to their sites via a web service. It provides several types of recommendations: similar items, other people liked these, and recommendations based behavior (such as purchases, viewing, etc.).

Our public site also provides personally relevant recommendations for over half a million podcasts and video, and can do this based on what people consume via iTunes based devices like the iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV.

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. Online retail, media and content sites.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. Companies with a large catalogue of content or products that want to increase sales, and increases return visits, customer satisfaction, length of sessions, and greater site interaction.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. Any age group will benefit from personal recommendations.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. We are currently trialling our recommendation engine web service with several Australian web sites that will be announced soon. We also have over a thousand members of our public Scouta site, who are using it for podcasts and video.

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. Currently we are calling CEOs and CTOs personally to talk about the advantages that we can bring to their service.

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. When we add the recommendation engine to a site, we work with the owner of the site to monitor the metrics they normally use to measure their sites success. We also have basic reports that can show the number of recommendations being added to the site.

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. We currently have a monthly subscription fee to use the recommendation
engine. Scouta's public site is free.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
A. There are several companies offering a recommendation engine, but most require the customer to install their software on their own service. Scouta provides a way to quickly and easily get started, with no new infrastructure required. We also allow for a high degree of customisation, and work closely with the customer to ensure as much potential as possible.

On technology front – we asked few questions
Q. What are the main technologies used behind this start-up.
A. Linux, Apache, PostgresSQL, Python, Pylons

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. There are a few technologies that made life really easy:

  • The Internet ;).
  • TurboGears and Pylons, because they gave us a frame work that made it quick to produce and launch Scouta. TG was used for the social web site, and Pylons is now being used as the framework for the Scouta Recommendation Engine web service.
  • We also use a range of tools that means it's easy to collaborate between the Scouta team, including Google Docs, Campfire, Subversion and Skype, all of which made it easy for our team to work on Scouta even when we've been spread across the globe.
Q. Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
A. Yes. (Linux, Apache, PostgresSQL, Python, Pylons)

Q. 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?
A. No, we don't have many offering this even in the world.

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. This depends on your skill sets. If you have a great coder, then it may not cost much at all. The skills required initially are: coding, design, UI, marketing, sales, and leadership. However, it's also possible to wing some of it. After all, it's a startup :)

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
A.
  • Lack of business knowledge about the Internet, leading to an education process when trying to raise funding.
  • Remote location, which leads to difficulty in marketing the venture face-to-face with other influential people.
  • Lack of Venture Capital funding.
  • Lack of skills when compared to places like Silicon Valley.
Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. Internet use will continue to grow, as will the number of purchases and its use for media and content, e.g.: increased use for video, news, etc. With such a large selection available it is becoming increasingly important for companies to offer personalised ways to discover relevant items. Recommendations are a proven method of achieving this.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. Have a clear plan, and just do it. The biggest difference between success and failure is taking action.

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

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