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

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

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 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 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

In our previous post , it has been outlined the reasons for the start of this new initiative. Now to set the ball rolling, the first thing we are doing is we are asking everyone to tell us what they would like to know and learn from the owners/ people behind startups/ventures. We have compiled a list of queries/questions that will be useful for everyone, esp aspiring entrepreneurs. These queries/questions are listed below; please let us know what you think of these queries. If you want to add or remove questions/queries or have suggestions then let us know by contacting us or drop in your comments here. All the information collected will be published here. Questions/Queries we think will be useful to know : Please tell us about your start-up/venture/company? Who are the founders behind this and how it started? How long it took before it was up and running? What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional. What is the main objective/mission behind your ventur