Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

The 23rd participant is 3eep 3eep - is a social media enterprise. It delivers technology and commercial services to clients who want to establish their own social media businesses and create social networks in their communities. 3eep’s focus is on local sports communities. Let us learn more about 3eep and the people behind it: • Who are the founders behind this and how it started? Who are the founders behind this and how it started. The founders of 3eep are Rob Antulov, CEO, who was the former head of strategy at Fairfax, and Nick Gonios, COO and Head of Community Development, who has spent time with HotHouse Interactive, Microsoft and Fujitsu. • How long it took before it was up and running? From our initial thoughts about building a sports-oriented social network to launching our first beta version took about six months. We launched our partner Platform product within 4 months of that. • What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional? 3eep is still in

We are happy to announce that CeBIT Australia has come on board and is the major sponsor for the Australian Startups Carnival 2008 . We would like to thank CeBIT Australia and Transaction 2.0 . Our special thanks to Mr Gilad Greenbaum Director(IT) of Hannover Fairs , for supporting us in this initiative. All the prizes are sponsored by CeBIT Australia 2008 . The first prize is valued at $2,650 + GST, which consists of: One pod exhibition package for a start-up in TechRamp Pavilion . The package includes one Transaction 2.0 conference ticket and automatic entry to the TechRamp competition . Opportunity to present in the conference (subject to judges panel). 2nd and 3rd prizes are valued at 200 dollars each. We are giving 200 dollar discount on tickets for Transaction 2.0 conference at CeBIT Australia, 2008, priced at 595 + GST We are delighted to have CEBIT Australia 2008 coming on board for this online Startups Carnival. Winners of the competition will be declared on Sunday, March

The 22nd participant is Me2mobile Me2mobile is a new entrant in the area of enabling Mobile Interactivity. It is a self-service portal that allows ordinary users to produce interactive mobile applications that were once provided by traditional mobile media companies such as mobile operators and mobile marketing companies. Let us explore a bit further how Me2mobile is progressing: • Who are the founders behind this and how it started? The founders have extensive experience in the mobile industry and have been involved in the mobile content area for the last 8 years. The founders are moonlighting entrepreneurs at present but will be announcing who they are once initial seed funding is secured and the business is launched. • How long it took before it was up and running? The concept was conceived around 18 months ago when the founders realised that a lot of smaller businesses and entrepreneurial individuals faced massive barriers to setting up interactive mobile services. We saw an

The 21st participant is WhatYah WhatYah , founded by Ashley Smith in January 2007, is a place to catalogue, share and review your movies, TV shows & games with friends. He created it after he realised that sharing movies, games & TV shows between friends should be easier. The idea is that you should be able to search a database and be able to know exactly what your friends own. With WhatYah you can then organise to trade or share titles and even get together to make a social event. Ashley tells us a bit more about his startup, WhatYah: How long it took before it was up and running? From planning to public beta testing it took approximately 14 months What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional? In stealth mode at current, planning on starting marketing within the month. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture? To assist friends with sharing their content legally, as well as being able to catalogue all of their media they can write

Continuing our coverage of bringing more surprise entries, today’s surprise entry entry is WOMOW . Founded by Fiona Adler and Brad Bond in 2006, WOMOW stands for Word Of Mouth On the Web and it’s an online business directory of word-of-mouth recommendations to help people find the best local businesses. All businesses are entered and rated by users who describe their experience, including what they particularly liked or didn’t like about the business. WOMOW helps users find the very best local businesses, using real information from real people. And for businesses, WOMOW is the only place where they can be promoted based on merit (not on how much they spend). And if businesses provide poor service, we believe people should know about this so that they can choose other alternatives. WOMOW gives consumers a voice and evens out the playing field for businesses. Let us explore a bit more about Womow and see how they are doing. This is what Fiona, one of the founders, has to say: How i

The 19th participant is Confer Founded by Rod L'Huillier Confer - is a social news-sharing site especially aimed at an Australian audience providing a platform for content recommendation and news sharing. The content is completely community-driven via member submissions of links to blog posts, news stories or even videos that they have found interesting. Members can also vote on submissions to democratically determine the front-page news and most popular content. The site also allows for discussion of submissions and members also have their own personal profile page with networking features. It aims to be a platform for sharing discovery and engagement in Australian content, particularly from the Aussie blogosphere, and for localised discussion of news and issues be they global or local. Confer in short: Social News Sharing - Content Recommendation Content discovery via community contribution Discussion - Have your say on local issues Collaborative filtering via voting Independen

The 18th participant is ZaaBiz ZaaBiz - is an online social networking site for professionals. It connects Australian’s in business with other professionals in Australia and beyond. Michael Brecht is the founder and CEO of ZaaBiz. Michael has lived in Australia for four years and saw a niche for an online social network that was geared towards Australians. Let us explore a bit further about ZaaBiz. We asked a few questions and this is what Michael has to say: Q. How long before it was up and running? A. 6 months Q. What stage is your company at? A. Fully- functioning networking site for professionals. Q. What is the main objective behind your venture? A. The main objective is to be the leading & profitable social networking platform for business professionals in Australia and beyond. Q. What services does it provide for customers/ consumers? A. Groups, Forums, Articles, Newsletters, Advanced Search & Power Search, finding new business connections and more Web 2.0 application

The 16th participant is ITQSM ITQSM - Information Technology Quality Service Management, is focused on the practical application of specific areas of IT best practice management. A key area of our undertaking is described in ITIL terms as configuration management. At a high level, it is the practice of mapping services to dispersed infrastructure to measure end-to-end cost, availability, risk exposure, service availability and general governance factors. Also on offer is the delivery of IT Training courses covering these management aspects as well a substantial offering of courses dealing with Open Source Software in the enterprise environment. Started by Brendan Martin, in early 2008, it is the culmination of several years of work under the Open Source Banner of www.cmdb.info. CMDB.info hosts several open-source VM guests running a variety of asset and configuration management tools as well as providing downloads references to VM guests covering other areas of IT management. Let us

The 15th participant is Vquence Vquence is an Australian startup in online video technology. Vquence's business is in Social and Online Video aggregation and metrics. Vquence's experts have more than 10 years of experience with new video technology and applications for the Web, as well as an extensive background in data mining and high-availability server infrastructure. The company was founded by veteran entrepreneur Chris Gilbey, former CEO of Lake Technologies, and Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, former Multimedia Science Leader at the CSIRO ICT Centre in July 2006 with funding from ICA (Information City Australia). The funding was used to develop new technology in video search from scratch and prepare a business plan with which to acquire further funding to build a consumer Web service. Let us learn more about Vquence from one of the founders Dr Silvia: Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A. The discussions to prepare this startup had been going on for close to a year b

The 14th participant is Uvouch Uvouch is a social medium to share your passions with the world; from business to politics, music to sports, movies to travel and a lot more. Users can create their own fan communities within seconds and save any type of media in one place. It provides users easy-to-use tools to add videos, links, polls, articles, blogs, RSS, music, playlists and unlimited text modules to their clubs. Uvouch offers global media search functionality by connecting to the top 10 media websites including YouTube, google, yahoo etc. Videos can be simply viewed and added to accounts and fan clubs with one simple click Users can easily create playlists of their favorites, organize their video clips collection and fully customize their channels. Uvouch.com also allows users to bookmark their favourite links, websites, and clipping/annotation from a particular webpage for future reference. Parveen Panwar is the founder of Uvouch. Let us learn more about Uvouch from him: Q How it

The 13th participant is Australiaforum.com Australiaforum.com is a forum about Australia. The idea was to create a place where people could get help with travelling or migrating to Australia. Mike started the website as a solo venture. He has lived overseas for most of his adult life. He describes: It is not always easy living overseas or moving to a new country. I found travel and living overseas forums and information websites often the best sources of information when it comes to visas, costs, housing and things of that nature. So when I started looking around I couldn’t find anything that particularly stood out for people wanting to live or move to Australia. Let us explore a bit further how Australiaforum.com is progressing. Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A . Setting the site up was perhaps the easy part. I hired an overseas company to do the design and it took them around 1-2 weeks. I have then been adding new features to the site over time. Starting a com