Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

Today we cover a new startup MomentVille . If you are planning for a wedding then you might want to look at this site. Founded by Geoff Evason, MomentVille is a free, stylish, and easy-to-use personal wedding website builder. Its main aim is to help people share, plan, and remember life’s special moments. Geoff describes: I was looking to build a wedding website. I was unable to find one that was free, fun, and easy to use. I also disliked the fact that most wedding websites charge excessive prices simply because there is a wedding!. So the core team built MomentVille from the ground up making sure it was free, easy and fun! Let us learn a bit more about Geoff, his journey as an entrepreneur and the changing landscape of innovation in Australia. • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? Geoff has experience in a range of companies including startups, and medium and large companies. Geoff’s major interest is in using technology to help make life better. He belie

Australian Startups Carnival 2008 is over now. Our coverage is continuing and expanding. This post is all about summarizing and providing all the necessary links for people who want to read about the carnival. The necessary links are: About FAQ Participants Judges Prizes Judges' Feedback to Participants Results Thanks I hope this helps everyone.

As part of our ongoing efforts  to provide more exposure to startups coming out of Australia and helping them today were are going to showcase Clickfind™ . Founded by Carolyn King and Taco Fleur , Clickfind™ , is an online business directory that charges a monthly fee to businesses that list their products and services. Established for the Australian marketplace, its intellectual property is owned by clickfind Pty Ltd which means the clickfind™ technology and brand can also be licensed to international markets. Taco one of the co-founders describes : The idea of clickfind came about when we wanted to list our own businesses in business directories, one of them being the Yellow Pages. We had an experience that left a bad taste in our mouth, an empty wallet and no results. Thats when we decided to create a business directory/search engine for Australia that is different and excels in the areas others don't. Let us explore a bit more about Clickfind and how they are pro gres sing: •

This has been an incredible experience and journey for all of us. This is the first time in Australia that a carnival showcasing profiles of new business ventures from different domains was covered online. In a world that is becoming flat day by day, as explained by Thomas Friedman, we will see more and more new ways of doing traditional things. Our local VCs on contact couldn’t understand what we were doing, just showed the state of affairs to our VCs. Today we are happy to announce the winners of this carnival. We have already published the feedback and how Judges have marked the participants. If you have missed that please read it here , as it will describe how we have marked all the participants. We have declared our first prize and now updated the page with 2nd and 3rd prizes. We do acknowledge that in comparison to the first prize 2nd and 3 prize winners don’t get much value. But this was our first event and we tried our level best (it was an understatement) to get as many

We are happy to announce that we have successfully showcased 28 Australian Startups in IT/Media/Telecom/eCommerce/Social Networking/Marketing/News/SAAS. We also covered 3 surprise entries that missed the competition by a whisker in registering for the carnival with extended dates :-). This carnival was possible because of all the participants who participated, our elite panel of Judges who have put a lot of time, effort and energy from their personal time with sheer passion to mark all the participants. Our sincere thanks go to  the Judges and all the participants . We would like to thank our sponsors, CeBIT Australia 2008, which is our major sponsor, Smart Path, Cagora, and BuiltWith. Without their support, it's very hard to keep going a long way. We do appreciate and thank them for their encouragement and participation. Judges were assigned the difficult task of marking these startup's profiles. Judges marked them under four major categories : Originality Simplicity Tec

Continuing in our coverage of bringing more surprise entries, today’s surprise entry is Booktagger Co-Founded by Jeremy and Rebecca LeBard, Booktagger is a niche web 2 social community for book lovers. Each Booktagger profile is a graphical representation of your physical bookshelf on the internet. The bookshelf can then be shared with friends, family and others searching for the next good read. Booktagger.com is the first offering, trading under the entity name Amity Agency, which specializes in the creation of niche web communities. Jeremy describes : We hope you'll congregate into book clubs and share reading experiences. Or maybe you'll catalogue all your books and track to whom they've been lent. We are a stand-alone site with a Myspace application due for release shortly. Jeremy gives us more insights about their startup: • How it started? Booktagger started off like any good journey, with a woman. Rebecca, an avid reader and fellow internet addict, could not fin

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 within 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 a sustainable, un-obtrusive time tracking system that will be useful to other small companies. • What services it provide for consumers or customers? Punch-in and Punch facilities, timesheets, reporting, full REST AP I and integr

The 27th participant is OurWishingWell.com Founded by Joseph Renzi, OurWishingWell.com is an online gift registry that allows hosts of any occasion to list items that they need/want and invite guests to view the registry and request contributions toward these gifts. Hosts can list any item – from homewares, honeymoons, a holiday or a house deposit. Guests can view the registry and contribute any amount towards any gift on the list. It allows multiple guests to contribute different amounts to larger/significant gifts that would otherwise not be possible. This is Joesph's 2nd venture entry in this carnival, first one was SwapAce.com . He tells us a bit more about this intriguing venture: • How it started? It started with his team in 2007. The successful site has now expanded into other sites such as; BabyWishingWell.com, BirthdayWishingWell.com and BestFundraiserWebsite.com. • How long it took before it was up and running? The site took less than 6 months to develop before it was

The 26th participant is SwapAce.com Founded by Joseph Renzi, SwapAce.com is an online marketplace that allows people from all over the world to swap, sell, meet, and buy almost anything in a secure environment. It allows you to barter for goods and services; negotiate until you get the deal you want; and make offers to multiple ads without the risk of having to buy everything. It creates and connects communities – both geographically and by interest. This enables you to meet like-minded people and trade within a special interest group. SwapAce.com also has personalised features which allow users to create a list of items they want and when someone posts something on SwapAce.com that is on your list, will suggest potential matches – increasing your chance of success. Let us learn more about SwapAce.com from Joseph, this is what he has to say: • How it started? A gap was identified in the eBay net-based buy and sell model, so I set out to offer net users a unique village marketplace