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...

Background : Australian Startups Carnival - 2008 is an initiative by VS Consulting Group . This online (web-based) carnival is all about learning about new ventures started/surfaced in IT, Telecoms, Green Tech, Media, and Web 2.0/Social Networking in the last couple of years. Vishal covered the state of web 2.0  startups in 2006 for ReadWriteWeb . But since then a lot of water has gone under. We are now expanding our coverage, as some great ideas are being put together and executed. We intend to discover the people behind these startups, their motivations, how the future looks from their perspective, what technologies are being used, what market segments they are targeting, their mistakes, their advice and more. Why: One of the main reasons we are doing this  is to make this black art of starting up more open and easy. When we look on the web there is so much high-level information about business models and how companies are doing, blah blah, but not much on how we should go...

In the ongoing coverage of exploring new startups coming out of Australia, today we explore a promising startup in the online video platform segment - WasabiTV . It was co-founded by Ananth Sarathy from Sydney Australia. In a recent email based interview with Ananth, he explained how he is progressing with his venture. • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? Ananth Sarathy and Daniel Brunet met at an Apple reseller and remained in contact over the next few years. Ananth Sarathy, Co-founder/The Digital Media and Strategic Partnerships Clown.- Has a degree in Business and IT, who has worked for Australia's Largest retailers as a Senior Business Analyst and like Daniel has a passion for All things Australia, whether it be Content or Intellectual Property and Innovation. Daniel Brunet, Co-founder/Code Monkey - Is a freelance web designer and developer, bringing his interest in the Arts, Video and Music to life with the tools of the web. A Graphic guru was able ...

This is the second 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 News and Content in a Digital World. Let's explore what he has to say: On Friday (August 1), I was part of a panel at an event organized by Afaqs - “ The Future of News. ” My panel’s topic was “Who will subsidise Digital Content?” Here is a gist of what was spoken: It’s not about subsidising but about monetisation: Thinking subsidies necessarily implies that the primary source of revenue is somewhere else. How can we look at the digital world independently and see how content can be monetised? On the Internet, the only revenue stream is advertising. My belief is that the mobile is where the big action and opportunities lie. On mobile, one can create multiple monetisation streams - from not just advertisers, but also subscribers, merchants and enterprises. For this, creating a direct-to-consumer ...

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% ...

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Innovation (CCI) presents findings, from the first survey undertaken by the Australian component of the World Internet Project, titled The Internet in Australia. This is definitely quite an intriguing work that reflects upon the activities of a general population affected by the Internet. Before I jump into my summary/conclusions, some of the highlights of this report for me are : Nearly 80% of home has broadband. Only 25.3 % of people use wireless devices to access the internet. Only less than an hour/week on a mobile device to access the internet. Email is the most popular means of communicating online. 82.8% of users never made an internet phone call. 20% of people use messaging daily. 59.2% of internet users pay bills online. Only 70.9% of rural households have broadband access compared to 83.0% of households in capital cities. Internet users spend less time watching television, listening to radio and reading newspapers than nonusers. Cop...

Australia's free to air broadcaster ABC TV has launched its internet TV service, ABC iView . ABC iView is a streaming video service which provides full-screen, high-resolution video designed to run on computers with a high speed broadband connection (like ADSL2). Users can watch the six channels - news, documentaries, kids, shopping & others, or create their own by selecting individual programs and adding them to a playlist. All the channels are free and it is developed in-house by ABC Innovation. It is available on all major platforms like Mac, Linux & Windows (PC). It's not available on a mobile device yet, but content can be downloaded and watched on other devices. It's restricted to viewer's in Australia, due to programming rights management, which prevent them from making this content available in markets other than Australia. ISP iinet is offering its customers unmetered viewing of iView. The ABC is in negotiation with other ISPs to offer ABC iView unme...

Today we showcase an exciting and successful venture founded by, Alex in 2006 from Melbourne, Australia, Mostyle ! - comes from “Mobile” + “Lifestyle” - a telco-independent mobile ecosystem that not only provides the tools to build a mobile site but offers the distribution, community and multiple enablers for the monetising of mobile content through advertising or micropayments. In a recent email-based interview with Alex, 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? I have a Computer Science degree from RMIT University and am nearly done with a Master of Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Swinburne University. Over the past 10 years, I’ve been working in different areas of mobile gaming and entertainment, dealing with content, portals, industry building and development. My range of professional experiences has mainly been with Nokia (Mobile Entertainment Platform)...

In our ongoing coverage of startups coming out of Australia and interviews with CEOs, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VCs, today we showcase a successful venture and an exciting entrepreneur Ben Barren, co-founder of Gnoos - Australia's Largest Blog Search Engine for Consumers and Enterprises. I recently met Ben through our common friend Duncan Riley. I was highly impressed by his breadth of knowledge and enthusiasm. I followed up with him to do an email-based interview with me to explore his thoughts on the progress of his various ventures and new emerging trends. This is what he has to say: • What is the name of your company, the people involved, and can you provide some background on the venture? Red Lion Ventures Pty Ltd owns Feedcorp Pty Ltd and Gnoos Pty Ltd . Red Lion Ventures was co-founded by Michael Leone and Ben Barren. The business has doubled revenue in the last 3 quarters so we’re hitting a real growth spurt. In early 2005 Michael and I believed there wa...

The 25th participant is The Fame Experiment Founded By Mark Schumann in 2008, The Fame Experiment , was developed to investigate the answer to one simple question, Can the internet be used to generate enough exposure for one person to experience public recognition? It works on the idea that one person if seen over and over again in a multitude of places, could experience public recognition, or become famous . The aim is for this person's image to be everywhere, and for that image to become embedded in Internet users' thoughts so that to see this person in public will trigger an I know you moment. Mark describes , that there are two phases: Phase 1: is about getting the word out about the Fame Experiment. If users have a website, a blog, post on forums, or even email others, it is easy for them to participate. By selecting the Earn Fame Points link after logging in, they will be given a choice of special code that can be placed on their website, blog, forum or email signatu...

The 24th participant is Adimade Co-founded by Jake Lawton and Nat Graf in 2008, Adimade - is a video-sharing website focused on User Generated Advertising or UGA. Put simply, Adimade is YouTube for brands. Adimade brings together the talent of the YouTube community with businesses seeking a new way to interact with young consumers. Nat describes: Adimade runs ad creation projects on behalf of our project partners. Users create videos; submit those videos to Adimade, then users share and vote for the best clips. The project partner selects the best clip from the finalist’s videos, and is free to use that video for any advertising and promotional purposes. Adimade gives the amateur video creator the chance to get paid for the entertaining and clever videos they create. By submitting an entry to one of Adimade’s ad creation projects, video creators have the opportunity of getting paid for their work, funding their next film project and getting their work seen by the people who count...