Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

The 12th participant is Greenairfares.com Greenairfares.com - is a site that sells airfares along with a carbon offset, based on the details of the flight. Many Australian and European airlines are currently doing this – but many US-based airlines are still far from it. So there is a niche market for it in the US. The website is targeted at US users and will also offer hotel and car booking services. Currently, no air booking system in the US is available that ties flight details to carbon emissions and sells only tickets with this offset included in the total price. It started with an idea in the shower in 2006. The founders behind this will soon announce themselves in March. Let us explore a bit further how Greenairfares.com is progressing. Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A. We are still in development – It's been about 1.5 years in the making. Most time was spent exploring different approaches with many barriers. Finally, a way forward was struck in Novemb

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 businesses with an all-in-one product that replaces up to 10 se parate, expensive systems with one. With good business, 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 brainchild 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 platfor

The tenth participant is Buzka Buzka has taken the first steps to build powerful web applications that introduce new ways for consumers to search and discover the highly relevant brand-focused information they need to make purchasing decisions. Buzka Popnets are patented web applications that harness the power of social networking for businesses that need to build brand value in today’s fragmented media environment. Available to businesses of all sizes, Popnets make it extremely easy for their customers to share all the information they need when making everyday buying decisions, whilst providing easy access to their most trusted source of product referral – their social network. Based out of Perth (WA), Buzka was co-founded by Raphe Patmore and Jinnan Cai in January 2006. Let us explore a bit further how Raphe and Jinnan are progressing with Buzka. Q. Who are the founders behind this and how it started? A. Raphe Patmore CEO (Co-Founder) - has over 25 years of experience in techno

The 9th participant is Plutext . Plutext enables collaborative editing around docx documents, where docx is the default file format in Word 2007. In simple terms, it's a word processor like Openoffice Writer and Google Docs. Based out of Melbourne, it was 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 a 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 ventu

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 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 a bit further how Scott and Invoiceplace are 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.

The 7th participant is Global Surfari Global Surfari is a surf forecasting website that provides 7-day surf forecast listings for global locations. It was created by Gary Brewer in London after spending a year in Australia surfing. He finally moved to Australia in 2006 and rebuilt the site to give it more of a web 2.0 feel and also provided support for Facebook, iGoogle, iPhone/iTouch mobile applications and works for MySpace integration is underway. Let us explore a bit further how Gary and Global Surfari is going: Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A. The site uses surf forecasting data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) an American government agency that provides sea data. It took a while to get the data they provided into a format that I could use for Global Surfari to produce the forecasts. However, the initial release of Global Surfari probably took about 2 weeks of solid work. The newest versions and the Facebook integration took around

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 the development and delivery of the core product suite, Loc8 Asset and Help Desk Manager. These suites are offered as Software-as-a-Service model(SaaS) and (perpetual) customer-installed applications. 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 Flas

The 5th participant is Plugger . Cofounded by Stephen Phillips, and Richard Slatter, Plugger  is a search engine that focuses on Australian business news. Plugger monitors, indexes, organises and analyses business news - Australian business news. Since its inception last year has already become one of the best sources of Australian business news on the web. Plugger enables you to: Read the latest and most reported Australian business stories as they break. Monitor the biggest newsmakers - which companies are most mentioned? Which business leaders and politicians are dominating the media? Stay on top of the big issues in your industry. Monitor news about your own company or investments - your customers, clients, prospects, competitors and so on. The service is totally free. You don't even have to sign in or register although if users want they can. In addition, users can register (still free) for an extended service. We call this extended service PluggerPlus. Plugger was created in

The fourth participant is Suburb View Suburb View is an Australian Real Estate Search Engine. It displays Property listings on Google Maps, and Google Earth, has full RSS Feeds, and is also available on the Mobile phone. As a frustrated first homebuyer, Mark Ferris created Suburb View . In 2006 there were no real estate sites displaying property listings on a map. So he started working on creating these listings in May 2006. He began manually putting properties he liked on a map as major real estate websites had different amounts of listings. In his words, Searching for a property meant you visit one site, view 10 listings, click next etc. Then when you saw all of those listings, you would go to another web site and do it all over again. This is just too consuming, so I created the web site to do this automatically. Suburb View aimed to show all of suburb listings first, and then filter the results you don't want. I have a price range I am interested, and a minimum amount of room

The third participant is Tiinker . Tiinker  is the name of the service, owned by Deep Grey Labs Pty Ltd, It is an intelligent news aggregator which uses A.I.-like technology to determine your interests and then adapts to show you the news stories you will find most interesting. In laymen's terms, it gathers stories from news sites and blogs around the world and learns what you like reading about. It filters and explores to bring you just the interesting stories. It was founded by Alex North and Oleg Sushkov, both young Sydneysiders who met at UNSW. Let us now learn more about Tiinker from Alex, one of the founders, on various facets of their startup: Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A. We made our first public release a year after starting Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional. A. It's live, although still in very active development Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture? A. To bring AI research o

The second participant is the  Evaluator - Australian Property Reports. Evaluator is a website that aims to make it simple and easy to arrange property valuations, building reports and pest inspections. If you are buying property anywhere in Australia, it is a one-stop shop for all your property report needs. Evaluators also offer fixed prices and guaranteed turnaround times on jobs, so you no longer have to shop around for quotes and waste time following up to get your report. All the report providers are professional, accredited and insured professionals. Their experience and professional skills are backed up by Evaluator’s commitment to quality customer experiences. Evaluator was started by two IT consultants, Craig Brown and Justin Findlay, in Melbourne after working with some major corporations and the IT providers who service them. They saw what services the Corporates were getting and thought they could create a similar quality experience for Joe Citizen. Evaluator partne