Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

Today we showcase the story of an exciting venture, from Melbourne & Sydney, Australia, Front Foot - Media Solutions for mobile phones and the internet, co-founded by Anton Sher, Ben Astill, and Richard Lennox. In a recent email-based interview with Anton, he gave insights into how he is managing and juggling. This is what he has to say in his interview with us: • How long it took before it was up and running Front Foot started in April 2006 and we launched our first mobile site in January 2007. Since then we have built several mobile sites, including the Winner and Runner-Up at AIMIA's 2009 industry Awards for EA and Sky Racing respectively. • Stage of Venture Three years on and our portfolio is growing. We now have a mobile ad server, billing and alert systems, and video platforms, and are integrated into Australian carriers. Currently, Front Foot is looking at several export opportunities. • Which Market Segment Front Foot provides mobile solutions for all market seg...

Telstra announced yesterday, the launch of their Bigpond Music Platform , a venture into the online music industry by offering tracks from all major record labels in a format (MP3) that could be transferred between most music players, including the iPod, Sony Walkman, Xbox, PlayStation 3 and home media centres. This offering is in direct competition to Apple's iTunes offering which is a walled garden or a closed system. It was clear how Telstra is opening up another front with Apple in their ongoing battle in the Media and mobile space. The next obvious step for this platform would be online rental movies as Telstra has a service for its rental movies under the  BigPond Movies Entertainment b anner . While pundits were still analyzing the impact of Telstra's new service, Apple has hit back with the announcement that movies from major film studios including 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios In...