99designs - Connecting Designers from Around the World

Vishal Sharma Tuesday, July 15, 2008 , , , , , , , , , , , 0 comments

Today we showcase an exciting and a successful venture co-founded by, Mark Harbottle in 2008 from Melbourne, Australia, 99designs - it connects thousand of designers from around the world with clients who need design tasks completed fast, and without the usual high cost and limited choice you get from most traditional design firms.

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

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
I’m 34 years old. I have a degree in computer systems engineering. I started my working life as a programmer, but I eventually found I was much better at online marketing, which back in 1995 was an area not many people had explored.
I’ve worked with pure internet businesses for 13 years now. The first 4 years after I graduated I worked with one of Australia’s first internet companies, and the last 9 have been spent working on my own businesses. I started sitepoint in 1999 with a business partner in Canada, and I launched a new company earlier this year called 99designs.
I live in Melbourne with my wife and two little girls. When I’m not running around after two kids and two businesses (I’m not sure which is harder) I’ve usually either escaped to the footy or I’m at the gym battling to keep fit.

• What services do you provide for your customers?
99designs can be used to source any custom design work, so logo designs, business cards, web page designs, brochures, t-shirts, banner ads and so on. The difference between 99designs and your typical design firm is that we have access to a large community of designers who contribute to the outcome of your design rather than a single person.
The way it works is like this…
Say you want a logo designed for your business - you post your requirements on 99designs.com for $39 USD and nominate the amount you wish to pay for the finished design, say $300 USD. Designers from around the world view your requirements and start producing designs for you. Over the course of a few days you guide the designers by communicating what you like and dislike about their work. At the end of the process you choose your favourite design, pay the designer the amount you nominated (in this case $300 USD), and you walk away with a finished design.
We currently have around 16,000 registered designers, growing at 100 a day, so there’s no shortage of creative inspiration and variety.

• Who are the people behind this and how did it get started?
The original concept that 99designs is based on was founded by a group of passionate designers within the sitepoint.com forums. These particular designers needed an outlet for their work and they loved challenging each other so they would seek out small design projects and compete to produce the best design.
We noticed that this activity was gaining in popularity within the forums so we invested in building an online platform to better manage the design process and help bring new projects to the table for the designers. We ran a proof of concept for 18 months before deciding that it had enough legs to spin off into a new company.
So you could say our users founded the idea, we just crafted it into a business.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Our objective is to build the biggest designer community on earth. The designers really are the core of our business, so our goal is to provide them with a friendly, professional, and secure environment where they can compete on a level playing field, show off their work, improve their skills, communicate with peers, and build relationships with new clients. We already have many designers from around the world who make their living through 99designs.com.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
As I mentioned 99designs is a community of designers but when business is transacted it’s also an online marketplace, and like every marketplace you have two sides to target – buyers and the sellers. For 99designs, the buyers are the clients seeking design work, and the sellers are the designers selling their services - so we obviously need to cater to both.

• How many people are using your services?
In the 4 months since we launched 99designs has grown to over 35,000 registered users, around half are designers. Traffic has grown from just 1.5 million page views per month in February 2008 to over 6.2 million page views a month in July 2008. It really is going gang busters.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Apart from ad hoc promotions on our sister site (sitepoint.com) we haven’t done any outbound marketing at all – the uniqueness and simplicity of the service we provide and the fact that we’ve disrupting the multi-billion dollar a year design industry has meant that word of mouth has largely been responsible for our growth to date.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools in place to monitor the progress?
Yes, we measure the success of our venture based on a number of key metrics. We have an online dashboard that’s linked to our user database via a number of reports and graphs that provide an instant view of everything that’s going on in the business. We also use third parties tools like Google Analytics to measure traffic and track referrals.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
We charge a $39 USD listing fee to upload your design brief to 99designs.com. That gives you access to our design community who will view your brief and decide if they want to participate. The designer is paid directly by the customer once they produce a design they’re happy with. That’s the way it works now, but we’re moving towards a slightly different model where we charge a small success fee at the end of the process and handle the whole transaction. This will simplify things a lot for everyone.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
There are a few competitors popping up and drawing inspiration from 99designs, however by being first to market we’ve very quickly established a critical mass of both designers and clients and claimed the #1 spot in this space. Obviously we’re working hard to protect our position and continue to grow.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
99designs is built using commodity open source tools, Apache, PHP and MySQL. The site is hosted on Amazon's virtualized clustering product, EC2. Thanks to a number of cutting edge tools, the site can scale up or down virtual server resources based on time of day and traffic demands. This has allowed 99designs to survive a sustained growth that would have outgrown conventional setups several times.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
The development and production servers run Linux. The database servers run MySQL 5 with Innodb.

• The conventional computing model is shifting to Cloud computing. How do you see the future of business changing with the use of this technology?
I see the major change being the lower barrier for entry for small startups. Garage-based companies can now develop applications in weeks that can handle huge volumes of traffic and only pay for what they use. Avoiding significant infrastructure costs up front means less risk, and more funding for innovative ideas. The ability to scale on demand means smaller outfits can hope to deal with the volumes of traffic that sites like Digg and Facebook can deliver without having to provision entire server farms ahead of time.

• What do you think the government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation?
At a federal level they shouldn’t be removing access to key government funding initiatives such as the Commercial Ready Grant. Start ups need all the help they can get and grants such as these are vital for their survival.
In terms of encouraging established businesses to innovate I think if your company has a proven history of success there should more in the way of incentives to encourage you to do more to drive innovation, whether that be via new grants, tax offsets, or rebates.
On a state level, they should be providing incentives for businesses who hire more people not penalizing them – so abolishing payroll tax would be a good start.

• If you are given an opportunity to change the nation, what 3 things would you do?
I would improve our health care system buy looking at examples of what’s working and what’s not working overseas. I would do something about the rising cost of living and housing affordability. And lastly I would build desalination plants around the country, funded by introducing a ‘water tax’ for excess water usage. Seems logical to me.

Thanks Mark 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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Plasq - Creating Software Applications for Mac and PC

Vishal Sharma Tuesday, July 08, 2008 , , , , 0 comments

Today we showcase an exciting and a successful technology business co-founded by Keith Lang, from Canberra, Australia. plasq - Best known for “Comic Life”, is a software company that create applications for Mac and PC. It’s a bit over 3 years old and gained recognition in the Mac community when Comic Life was bundled with all new Macs for a period of a year. plasq has also won various awards for it’s software and works hard to design fun, intuitive and creative visual applications.
In a recent email based interview with Keith, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say:

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
Keith Lang, Co-Founder of plasq. I’m a musician by training, with a Bachelor Degree in Classical Music Composition. I was involved in audio software for quite some time, on the musicians side of things, before getting involved in the software side.

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
Robert Grant, Cris Pearson and Keith Lang founded plasq – based initially around a project to release software developed by a community of people. Musolomo was actually the first release, an audio application plugin built for live performance – coded by Airy André who would join plasq officially at a later stage. The next release was Comic Life -- an application that lets users turn their digital pictures into comic strips and share the fun results.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
The first released product Comic Life had been in production for about 3 months prior, with the original idea by Robert Grant. Then Cris Pearson and Keith Lang joined Rob to improve the user experience.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
To create intuitive, meaningful software that lets people express themselves.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Fun Software!

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Anyone with a reasonably modern computer. And now also iPhones and iPod Touch’s.

• How many people are using your services?
Millions.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Some Google Adwords, some online sites. We’ve never bought magazine or other traditional media ads.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools in place to monitor the progress?
We have various ad tracking schemes to follow the initial click on an ad, to download.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
We are mostly traditionally shareware based. That is, download the software, trial it for 30 days, if you like it then purchase a serial number or the software has its features reduced after the trial.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
We have many excellent competitors, from large companies with overlapping applications like Power Point with it’s callouts/balloons, to online sites which offer some of the features of Comic Life.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
Most of our applications are coded in Cocoa, which is a Objective-C based language that Mac applications usually use. The PC ports (versions) of our software use C+, I believe.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
Most of the Apple technology has really improved in leaps and bounds over the last 7 years, and so now offers a really pleasant and efficient development space.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Only for our website, and occasional ‘generic’ things in the applications.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
I’m not sure what kind of database actually – we have various things for different needs. We use Mac OS X primarily.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
plasq is an unusual company in that we work across continents. Only a small part of plasq is in Australia, and the company itself is an LLC in South Carolina, US. We have people in Norway, France, both sides of the US and work with artists in Austria, Japan and South America.

My personal thoughts on starting a venture in Australia is that people think locally too much. We set ourselves up using free online services like Skype, and have functioned for years using online collaboration tools. Of course, this does not suit every industry, but there are many functions of a company where better talent could be found around the world, or in another part of Australia.

• What’s your thought on the start-ups culture and innovation coming out of Australia especially in media and telecom?
There’s some startups in this country in the media and telco space – but to be honest I believe a lot of them eventually leave for the US, because it’s a hub for this kind of work. Another factor is that this country has such poor internet access. The fact we don’t have affordable broadband for everyone is hurting Australia, in my opinion.

• The conventional computing model is shifting to Cloud computing which is comprised of SAAS, PAAS and IAAS (infrastructure). This has resulted in changes to conventional monetising model? How do you see the future of business in terms of technology and revenue model?
Cloud and desktop/Mobile applications will continue to blur – but I’m not sure how the infrastructure will affect it.

• What do you think the government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation and the telecom industry?
Subsidise broadband for everyone.

• If you are given an opportunity to change the nation, what 3 things you will do?

  • Subsidise Broadband so that everyone has access to it.
  • Get kids involved in computer development early on, not just users
  • Put serious money into Solar Power research
• You are a prolific and a well-established blogger and podscaster. How do you manage this with work?
Well, I’ve just changed my blog to UIandus.com, which is focussing much more on User Interaction design than my previous blog. The resulting overlap should help both my work and blogging.

• How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up? Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
I’ve recently moved to Canberra, from Melbourne for personal reasons. Melbourne has quite a good technical community, and they often meet for social lunches etc. under the umbrella of organizations like tequp.com Canberra has a much smaller community, and tends to focus on Government work, rather than entrepreneurship. I get to San Francisco about twice a year, and really enjoy meeting all the movers and shakers there.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Don’t think you have to spend money to get started. Beg, borrow what you need and start making customers early on. Listen to what they say, and measure your results to improve your strategy. Trust yourself when designing – build the things you want to use and then also ‘eat your own dogfood’. We have found Government grants to not suit us, sometimes it seems better to just build something small you can sell, then scale up to the final idea. Software is great for this because you have very few material costs during the startup period. Build a team of positive, realistic people who are not too similar to one another. Try to find a business-minded person with some experience. Scale up slowly and always have a plan B. Talk to the people who have been successful in your industry as they’re often happy to share their insights. Remember that the customer experience is the main focus at all times. Whenever you spend effort or money, measure the results afterwards. Make sure you are enjoying it most of the time!

Thanks Keith 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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Morfik - Development Tools for Rich Internet Applications

Vishal Sharma Monday, July 07, 2008 , , , , , , 0 comments

Today we showcase an exciting and a successful technology business co-founded by Aram Mirkazemi, from Tasmania, Australia. Morfik - a commercial vendor of professional software development tools. Morfik was established to address the need for an integrated high-end development tool that empowers software developers to leverage their existing skills to build Rich Internet Applications without the need to master Web technologies such as HTML/CSS/HTTP/SOAP etc.

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

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
I am a professional software developer with many years of entrepreneurial experience in developing commercial CAD systems and Web Application Development tools. My interests are Rapid Application Development (RAD), Integrated Development Environments (IDE), Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Using Ajax and emerging technologies, protocols and standards.

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
After a very successful venture in Electronic Design Automation (CAD) that resulted in an Initial Public Offering in 1999, myself and Sharam Besharati (another former Protel employee) started Morfik in 2000.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
Our vision of using the web technologies to develop applications that rival the desktop was considered by many as too radical and unachievable in year 2000. Developing an integrated professional tool to achieve our vision necessitated inventing several new techniques and enabling technologies without circumventing existing standards. It took five years of research and development before all pieces of the puzzle fitted together and we were ready to deliver the first public beta of our flagship product.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
To help software developers who have missed the professional Web development opportunities to join the game and leapfrog to the top.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Software developers who are not active in web application development, as well as existing web developers who prefer to use a professional Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

• How many people are using your services?
We have had over 10,000 downloads to date

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Internet marketing mainly

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

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is there any new model, which is being tried?
We prefer the simplicity of the long-established sale of software licenses. Should there be a demand we will also consider offering a simple subscription model similar to Microsoft’s MSDN.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
The main players are Microsoft, Adobe and Google. However, only Microsoft offers a commercial Integrated Development Environment. Microsoft, Adobe, and Google promote different exclusive technologies. As a development platform, Morfik follows the established standards and is more inclusive. Morfik applications can incorporate some of the technologies promoted by these players. So while commercially competitors, technologies offered by these vendors do not necessarily compete with the Morfik platform.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
Compilers, Relational Database, Web Servers and W3C standards.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
No

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
The development environment is Microsoft Windows. Morfik web applications can run both on Windows or Linux based operating systems including Mac OSX.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
Being an entrepreneur is one of the greatest and most fulfilling journeys in life. It is very easy to be an entrepreneur; you just need to work hard!

• What’s your thought on the start-ups culture and innovation coming out of Australia especially in Software?
There are great Australian software start-ups that are world class. But unfortunately they go mostly unnoticed until they have success oversees. This has resulted in a cultural gap between start ups and the support infra-structure that helps them get started.

• The conventional computing model is shifting to Cloud computing which is comprised of SAAS, PAAS and IAAS (infrastructure). This has resulted in changes to conventional monetising model? How do you see the future of business in terms of technology and revenue model?
With cloud computing now being well on its way to deliver computing as a utility, businesses need to change their focus from IT infra-structure to business intelligence and automation. The market will no doubt experiment with new revenue models and over time the right model will emerge. In terms of software development tools no significant change in revenue model is necessary. The simplicity of either sale of licences or a subscription models will serve the purpose.

• What do you think the government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation and the telecom industry?
They are already doing a great job with the R&D tax rebate and export marketing grants. The federal and state governments are the largest user of ICT technologies. My advice to them is to look at home first otherwise in many cases you will be paying a lot more to buy Australian technology from overseas!

• If you are given an opportunity to change the nation, what 3 things you will do?
I will invest in that which will put Australia in the forefront of globalisation.
I will reward all innovation by assisting in its commercialisation.
I will reward productivity through profit sharing.

• 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?
We are regular visitors and exhibitors in Information Technology conferences and forums around the world. There are no dedicated communities in our city.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Don’t talk about it, just do it.

• Any external funding – from VC, Govt, Self funded
Morfik is self-funded

• Which City you are based in?
Hobart, Tasmania

Thanks Aram 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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Intresto - Intelligent Rearrangement of Stone

Vishal Sharma Friday, June 20, 2008 , , , , , 0 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• How many business partners you have?
None

• Any women business partners?
No

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

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

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

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

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Webdirections - Conferences for Web Professionals in Australia & North America

Vishal Sharma Saturday, June 07, 2008 , , , , 0 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
  • Westciv - to build the best web development tools and resources available
  • Web Directions - to put on the best possible conferences, mixing content, inspiration and networking for web professionals anywhwere in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have a long long long way to go.

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

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

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

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

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

• Why do you think that we have not created many world class companies in technology based business (except, medical science based) as compared to other OECD countries?
I think there are several factors
  • A lack of startup culture - it's just not what folks in the IT industry, IME, see as a big goal of theirs.
  • A risk averse culture - in Australia, failure is bad, and a lifelong stigma in business.
  • It's expensive to live here, and startups require lifestyle sacrifice
  • I often find in Australia business culture what I call "professional cynicism" - Australian business folks often respond to ideas with "why it will fail" as the very first response. No one ever got sacked I guess for not investing in Google. They got sacked for investing in the failed ventures that part of the ecosystem around successful ones.
  • The number of folks who pooh poohed using the web as the distribution medium for software when we started in 1994/5, and predicted no one would come to our conferences far outweighed those who were positive.
My experience of the US (which is reasonably extensive now) is the opposite is true - people give you a hearing, and look at the whole picture far more than just try to pick holes. I always came back from the US much more enthusiastic than when I left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Moodle - Opensource Learning Management System

Vishal Sharma Monday, May 12, 2008 , , , , , , , 0 comments

Today we showcase a story of another successful entrepreneur, Martin Dougiamas, Founder, Lead Developer and Managing Director of Moodle Pty Ltd

Moodle is an open source course management system (also called a learning management system). It's a completely Free web application that educators can install and use to manage all their online learning. The business model is based on services around the free software.
It has 2 portals/sites, the open source community is at Moodle.org the business sides is at Moodle.com

Let us explore what Martin has to say about his venture Moodle and his thoughts on IT, Education and Innovation coming out of Australia. This is what he has to say:

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
I'm 38, live in Perth with my young family. Until I was 12 I lived in central Australia, learning via School of the Air (in those days we used shortwave radio). This probably had some influence on what I do now.

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
I started working on it alone in 2000 as a reaction to commercial alternatives that were available at the time.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
The first complete version of Moodle was August 2002. It's grown exponentially since then.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Provide free tools to help educators do the best job possible and thus support education around the globe.

• How many people are using your services?
Moodle is open source, so we only know about users when they choose to tell us. We know about at least 20 million users including nearly 2 million teachers world wide. See stats for details.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
In the early days I did focus on some SEO to get the word out, but now promotion is almost entirely generated by the existing users through their links on the web, local Moodle conferences, user groups and other activities.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools in place to monitor the progress?
See stats for details. These numbers are generated automatically by our users registering their sites. All registered sites are checked by a human team to make sure they are real sites.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A certain proportion of our users need support services such as hosting, consulting, training, customisation and so on. These services are provided by about 40 Moodle Partner companies around the world (so far), who are part of a franchise-like scheme. They sign up to be allowed to use the Moodle trademarks in promoting their businesses and to get support from the central Moodle company. In return they are subject to certain quality checks and balances and must pay 10% royalties on their gross Moodle-related revenue.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
Some of the ones we run into most are

  • Blackboard
  • WebCT
  • ANGEL
  • ATutor
  • Dokeos
  • Sakai
• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
Moodle is a PHP web application, and can run on nearly any database or operating system.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Indeed, open source is our preference. Moodle can be run on a completely open source stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). We also use development tools like Eclipse, vim, OpenSSH and so on.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
  • Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, Windows
  • MySQL, POstgreSQL, Oracle, MS-SQL
• How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up? Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
I don't really have time to communicate much with people outside the Moodle community. I already go to 5-10 Moodle conferences a year around the world.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
To be honest my head space was never in Australia even though I live here. As someone heavily involved in the Internet since the 80's I've always thought globally. It took a long time to get any recognition at all for Moodle in Australia but I was never worried.

The IT business is fortunate in that the main costs are simply time. Hardware is cheap and you can work from home (as I did for the first few years!). Now we have a decent office and a lot of people on the payroll, I have to say that my most challenging problem at the moment is finding and retaining good PHP developers in Australia. About half the people I'm paying to develop Moodle are located overseas and all the rest are immigrants!

• How do yo see the opportunity in e-learning in context to Australia, as PM Kevin Rudd has laid out plans for delivering Education revolution? Do you think Moodle has a place to play in this space?
Certainly. We are already doing it overseas (Moodle is used by 70% of further education in the UK, for example).

• What Government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact? Have you sought any funding?
None, none and no.

• Do you have any thoughts on our TAFE/Universities and their curriculum in terms of promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation? T
hey should at least provide some case studies to make students aware of what is possible with their skills given enough persistence. I think with the internet these days students are able to work out the rest themselves.

• What do you think the government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation and the telecom industry?
Specify and use open source solutions for all their tenders (preferably local but anything open source is good). If open source solutions can not be found, put some money into helping their development. Too much of taxpayer money is going to pay very high license fees straight to overseas companies. Open source software really opens up the whole software development cycle and allows our local industries and individuals to get involved and innovate in all kinds of exciting ways. Open source is a great fit for an open, democratic culture.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Once you identify a problem, spend as much time as it takes to get a very deep understanding of it and then persevere, persevere, persevere with your solution. It'll pay off in the end!

Thanks Martin for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hearing from you in future on the progress of Moodle. 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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88 Miles

Vishal Sharma Saturday, March 15, 2008 , , , , , , , 0 comments

The 28th participant is 88 Miles

Founded by Myles Eftos, 88 Miles - is a simple time tracking application, aimed at the SME market.
Let us explore more about on various facets of 88 Miles from Myles. This is what he has to say:

• How it started?
88 Miles was founded and developed by Myles Eftos. I developed this for my freelance and consulting business because I realised that I couldn't accurately account for his time when working for clients.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
A beta was out with in 2 months - the final version was launched after about 6 months.

• What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
88 Miles is fully functional

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
To provide an sustainable, un-obtrusive time tracking system that will be useful to other small companies.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Punch-in and Punch out facilities, time sheets, reporting, full REST API and integration with Saasu.com a popular Australian-based Invoicing system

• What is unique about your venture?
It is time tracking that I would want to use. As a consultant, I don't need all the flashy Gantt charts or reports - I need to be able to track my time quickly and efficiently and generate a timesheet for my clients. This is all88 Miles does and it does it well.

• What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
Small to medium design and development firms. I'm also looking at the recruitment industry.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Basically anyone that has to deal with per-hour billing. This includes owner operators and organisations that take on consultants or contractors

• What age group of people will be benefited most?
Anyone that is working I guess :)

• How many users are using your services?
I'm currently up to 24 paid account totalling 45 users which is breaking even on expenses. I am in the process of ramping up the marketing to get the name out.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Mainly word of mouth and Google adwords at the moment. I have started a snail mail campaign - but this is in it's early days. Marketing the system is the next big step I need to take to make the venture viable.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special
mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
Retention rate of users. Although the current numbers are small, those that have paid are loyal users, and the system has become a essential part of their workflow.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
Revenue is subscription based.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
There are a number of players in this market, the biggest is Harvest. There are some other small sites, such as Togglr, Clicktime and Punchytime, although they all use slightly different ways of tracking. 88 Miles is relatively unique in that is focuses on time clocks, rather than updating time sheets after the fact.

• What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
88 Miles is built on Ruby on Rails, relying heavily on AJAX, and REST web services

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
Ruby on Rails

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Yes - all of the tools are Open Source.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of
database you are using?
Currently the production system runs of Solaris

• 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?
Many of the Perth based users are Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) members, so I will see them at AWIA meet ups. If I am interstate, I will try to catch-up with other users if possible.

• How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
I've managed to get 88 Miles going from my own pocket, with little money. I obviously have a way to go, but it has cost me less than $5000 so far (not including my time)

• What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
Cost of hosting and bandwidth locally. You basically have to host in the US to save money. Other than that, there is no reason why an Australian company can't make a financially successful product

• What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
I consider 88 Miles in the SaaS space, which is going to get huge. I think a lot of companies are realising the benefits of hosted services. This is especially relevant to small business owners how need reliable systems but can't afford the upfront capital hit, and to road warriors how don't want the hassle of syncing data between users.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Build your system for yourself - that way you will get a feel for what does and doesn't work. You can't expect to build an awesome system if you are a heavy user.

Thanks Myles for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you in future on the progress of 88 Miles. All the best for 88Miles 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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Invoiceplace

Vishal Sharma Wednesday, March 05, 2008 , , , , , , 1 comments

The 8th participant is Invoiceplace.

Invoiceplace - Easy Invoicing and Quotes from Anywhere. It provides a service for businesses to save time preparing invoices and quotes, and keep track of overdue invoices and record payments received. It provides free, fully functional accounts for up to three customers, and twenty customer subscriptions start at $15 AUD a month.
Scott Carpenter created this in 2006 with the help of some very talented contractors whom he worked with.

Let us explore bit further how Scott and Invoiceplace is going:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. Invoiceplace was launched in November 2006, and was in development and testing for a year before the launch.

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

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. To provide a simple and easy to use service that enables businesses to take control and save time with quoting and billing.
What services it provides it for consumer or customers.
Essentially Invoiceplace provides an easy way to manage billing from any computer connected to the internet. Specifically it provides a means to:

  • Save time preparing invoices, quotes and tracking payments;
  • Create products and track available inventory/stock;
  • Keep track of unpaid and overdue invoices;
  • Create invoices in different currencies;
  • Email invoices directly to customers as a PDF or Microsoft Word attachment (makes it easy to save a copy and print);
  • Easily convert quotes/proposals to invoices;
  • Include taxes and discounts on individual line items (so can have a mix of tax free items on the one invoice, and discounts applied on specific items only).
  • Record postage and handling, with tax.
  • Record partial payments/retainers.
Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. The most significant factor is that Invoiceplace is a SaaS offering, and is typically a very different solution to what our customers currently use. Most customers have used desktop accounting software or used manual invoice or quote templates previously, so this a very new way of managing their business.

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. Small business from one to ten staff typically.

Q. Type of customers you are targeting?
A. We help small business, consultants, contractors and freelancers. Particularly those businesses engaged in export or who need to bill in different currencies.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. I haven’t found one particular age group has benefited over others.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. There are over 700 businesses using Invoiceplace from countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Greece, India, Singapore, South Africa, and more.

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. I use a combination of Google Ads, being part of online communities such as the Joel on Software forum , and commenting (but not spamming!!) on 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. The most significant measures are sales, and the number of free account signups.
We also track visitors to the site using Google Analytics, and watch the results of Google Adwords campaigns carefully.

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. We provide monthly and yearly subscriptions (yearly offer two months free).

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
A. The main competitors are the established desktop accounting and invoicing software vendors and other SaaS services. One of my largest competitors is actually Microsoft Office since there are lot of people using a manual invoice/quote template in Word or Excel.

Q. What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A.

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. I have found the Eclipse IDE a very useful, stable and time-saving tool.

Q. Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
A. Yes, particularly the jUnit unit testing framework.

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using.
A. We use the Linux operating system CentOS, and MySQL 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?
Mostly by being a part of online communities such as forums. I also keep in contact with friends with start up ventures so that we can learn and encourage each other by sharing our experiences