Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

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 ...

I'm delighted to say that our ongoing efforts to cover technology ventures/startups, tech trends and business models coming out of Australia got a boost today. Our Following Startups and Tech Trends portal is now part of the global startup site Alltop . Thanks to all of you who recommended this portal.

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...

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 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 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...