Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

In the ongoing coverage of exploring new startups coming out of Australia, Today we explore a new initiative by a young entrepreneur, Amir Nissen from Melbourne Australia, Student Entrepreneurs - Agents of Change In a recent email-based chat with Amir, he explained what motivated him to start this initiative. • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? Amir Nissen. I'm currently a fifth-year commerce/arts undergraduate at Melbourne uni. Interested in social entrepreneurship mainly, but also raising awareness of entrepreneurship, particularly amongst the student population. • Please tell us about your venture? We run a few initiatives aimed at promoting entrepreneurship on campus. These range from spotlighting some entrepreneurial students on our site to bringing successful entrepreneurs in to talk about their experiences. Our most recent event was 'Entrepreneurs Week' - comprising a series of seminars on various aspects of entrepreneurship, and an inn

This is a guest post by Rajesh Jain, an entrepreneur based in Mumbai, India, and Founder and Managing Director of Netcore Solutions Pvt Ltd . He has put together his thoughts on the emerging opportunities in the Mobile domain especially focusing on India. Let's explore what he has to say about this emerging platform and the opportunity: The Shift from Internet 1 (Portals) to Internet 2 (Search) The early days of the Internet were all eyeballs and monetisation via banner (graphical) advertising. The business was about creating portals and destination sites like Yahoo and AOL were doing. There was also some eCommerce going via the likes of eBay and Amazon. These were significant opportunities but they paled into what was created by Google with the simplicity of paid search. Of course, Google did not create the base model - that was done by Overture (GoTo.com) which was later acquired by Yahoo. But Google refined it to perfection. Search captures intent - to find or buy. Google first

Today we showcase an exciting and successful venture co-founded in 2008 by Ian McCallam from Sydney, NSW, Australia , SMS Poll - Mobile Text Message Voting Application. In a recent email-based interview with Ian, 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? Born, raised and graduated in London. I now live in Sydney. I’ve always been a bit of an ‘inventor of ideas’ and when the Internet came along I knew I could put down my pencil and paper and start creating things in a new world where they would be seen by people across the world (rather than just my friends and next door neighbour!). I started my digital media career about 10 years ago at a London agency creating online solutions for a variety of blue-chip clients. I spent my spare time writing about emerging trends on the web and across the world as one of the founding writers for PSFK.com. I later went on to e

Today we showcase an exciting and successful venture co-founded in 2007 by Andrew Ballard from Drysdale on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, My Perfect - Don't Search, Choose or in other words it turns the idea of a search engine completely around. In a recent email-based interview with Andrew, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say: • Please tell us about your venture/company? We've developed a revolutionary new type of search engine - so different, in fact, that we've coined the phrase 'choice engine' to describe it. To go back one step - there's a fundamental problem with the way traditional search engines work. So fundamental, in fact, that everyone seems oblivious to the problem. Traditional search engines begin with a single query and return thousands or millions of results. These results are determined by a complex algorithm that takes into account relevance, straight keyword matching, user hi

The Mobile Industry Group of the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA), in collaboration with m.Net Corporation and Ideal Interfaces , has published the results of the fourth edition of the Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index. The report provides invaluable insight into the background, usage behaviour and preferences of Australian mobile phone users. Some of the key findings of this report are: Mobile phone ownership: 49% owned a mobile phone for over seven years. 34% of participants noted that they owned a second mobile phone and/or SIM, with over half of those aged 22–40 years old, 62% of whom were female. Half of the respondents who owned a second mobile phone were married or living together. Telecommunications provider: Optus (35%) and Telstra (25%) were in the same positions as the last survey and were still the dominant telecommunications providers among the participants of this survey. Vodafone (16%) just took the third spot back from 3 (15%). 26%

Today I would like to give you some more insights into how this journey of following Aussie technology startups started and where I'm heading with this initiative. I have been following technology startups coming out of Australia since 2005. I published the first comprehensive list of startups in Australia in 2006 for RWW . Martin Wells & users at Whirlpoolforums provided leads in compiling that list. From their onwards, I have kept a close eye on the new ventures coming out of Australia. In March 2008, I conducted the First Online Startups Carnival which was Judged by Duncan Riley, Ross Dawson & Justin Davies .  During the carnival, we (Judges and I) covered nearly 30 startups. Since then I have covered an additional 40 startups - so in total 70 startups and interviews with VCs & Angel Investors . This list will be growing, as I will be covering more in the coming days/weeks/months/years. In addition to this, I have started publishing market analysis , technology

David Kirk CEO of Fairfax Media presented the FY08 report to the shareholders on Aug 21, 2008. Some of the highlights of this report are : Revenue up 2.9 % Diversified Portfolio - Online, Radio Network, Southern Star, NZ Publishing, Australia and Regional Community Publication Canberra Times' advertising revenue growing strongly Sydney’s Community publications were affected by lower real estate activity In all Regional & Community publications revenue is up by 5.5% Melbourne & Sydney markets are showing a  reduction in advertising (newspapers & magazines). Good growth in magazine revenue Revenue is down 1.0% in Printing across Australia (17 sites) Printing in Wagg, Nowra and Warrnambool is closed; Burnie closure is announced this month. Strong revenue & profit growth in specialist publications. Business Review Weekly is profitable again AFR.com seems to be doing well even though it’s a walled garden. Online revenues up by 33% Leading player in auctions, motor

Today we showcase an exciting and successful venture co-founded by Adele Whish-Wilson in 2002, Momentum Technologies Group - Live Video Streaming Over Mobile. In a recent email-based interview with Adele , she gave insights into her venture and how she is progressing with it. This is what she has to say: • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? My background was initially in psychology and communications, which led to roles in the private, community and government sectors that covered everything from supporting health campaigns to assisting in developing state government department e-business strategies. My interest in finding ways to improve ‘how things are done’ led me to take a role as a business analyst, then onto starting Momentum in 2002 – where I continue to be focused on assisting our clients find a better way to get things done. My interests are long-distance running (completed my first marathon last year, and did Oxfam’s 100km Trailwalker this year),

Today we showcase an exciting and successful venture co-founded by David Jones in 2005, ThreatMETRIX - Security for eCommerce Applications. In a recent email-based interview with David, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say: • Please tell us about your venture/company? We created ThreatMetrix to deliver a new layer of security protection specifically for the explosive growth of eCommerce transactions. With the growth of over 20% pa of online credit card transactions and web 2.0 applications now monetizing, the fraudsters have taken advantage of their anonymity on the internet to steal credit cards, fraudulently purchase products and launder money. ThreatMetrix delivers intelligence to eCommerce sites to detect both good customers and fraudsters using stolen identities. • Who are the people behind this and how it started? The founders and core team previously built security products for SurfControl (now WebSENSE) - we saw the u