Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

Today we showcase the story of an exciting venture, from Brisbane, Australia, ApartmentReviews - Australia's Largest Dedicated Apartment Resource , founded by Shane Moore. In a recent email-based interview with Shane, 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 From the initial concept to having the first basic site live was around 3 weeks. The current design took another month or so to get right, at which point I started advertising through Google Adsense and posting on forums. • Stage of Venture The site launched in 2007 and since that time I've been concentrating on building traffic and attracting real estate agents to list their details. The next step will be to transition the 30 or so real estate agents we have into paying customers (currently it is free for them). • Which Market Segment Anyone looking to rent or buy a residential apartment. • Customers Any

Today we showcase the story of an entrepreneur, Aulay Macaulay, from GoldCoast, Australia, founder of JustRosters - a web application for Staff Rostering. In a candid interview with us, 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 to launch It took 3 of us 6weeks from brainstorming to launch @ about 25 hours per week each. That is around 450 man-hours all up. • Stage of Venture Launched on the 3rd March 2009. • Which Market Segment Industries that employ a high number of part-time staff (Hospitality and Retail) Industries that employ shift workers. (Health, Emergency Services, and Manufacturing) Industries that have staff working at multiple locations (Building and Construction) Industries that sub-contract on an irregular basis (Government and Contractors) • Customers Business owners/managers. Whoever is in charge of rostering for the businesses identified above? • Targeted Age Group All ages. • Users U

In the ongoing coverage of exploring new startups coming out of Australia, today we explore a promising startup in E-Learning - Clivir . It was founded by Simon from Perth Australia. In a recent email-based interview with Simon, he explained how he is progressing with his venture. • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? I have always been interested in teaching people. I have been in training/teaching for about 8 years. I was a high school science teacher for a while then moved into training people with disabilities. For the last few years, I have been training specialist software. • Please tell us about your venture/company? Clivir features tutorial-style lessons that can be created by combining text with web-based resources from sites like YouTube, Photobucket, Flickr and Scribd etc. These lessons are grouped within member-created classrooms that provide informal learning environments for discussions and member interactions. Don’t let tutorials get lost in

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

Today we explore an exciting venture in the Real Estate Industry - PTY Auctions Pty Ltd . It was founded in 2006 by Gavin Stuart from Sydney, Australia. In a recent email-based interview with Gavin, 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 was responsible for the development and implementation of property applications for PTY Auctions. The development and implementation took approximately 2 years with the majority of that time spent working with the regulators to ensure the service complied with each of the State's regulations. Since 2002, I have been involved in successfully conducting live online auctions worldwide selling ‘speciality coffee’. I also oversaw the development and implementation of a global document storage solution for the International Task Force for Commodities Risk Management – members of this task force include: ABN AMRO, Rabobank, Mitsui,

Today we explore an exciting venture in web-based content management software - Millstream . It was founded in 2006 by Adrian Lynch from Perth, Australia. In a recent email-based interview with Adrian, 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 studied Graphic Design, graduating in 1990, and have run my own businesses since then. I have always been extremely interested in the technical side of 'design' especially developing automated systems to remove the incredible amount of wasted effort that goes into publishing. I still do a bit of design work, but I now spend most time coding or on system design. • What is the name of your venture/company? Millstream Web Software, our product is Spring CMS. • Please tell us about your venture/company? Since 2006 we have focused on turning Millstream from a 'web design company' into a product-based 'SaaS provid

Today we explore an exciting venture in the Online Video Platform, Ankoder (pronounced encoder). It was founded in 2006 by Rex Chung from Sydney, Australia. In a recent email-based interview with Rex Chung, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say: • Please tell us about your venture/company? We're more than just a white-label video platform. We provide a flexible API that allows developers to easily integrate videos on their site while keeping full control of the videos and encoding options. • Who are the people behind this and how it started? Ankoder is a product of RoRCraft, which was founded by Rex Chung in 2006. We started this project in-house in house since late 2007. We got this idea from thinking about how can we capitalise on the power of cloud computing. We've designed our application to automatically scale using Amazon's EC2 so that we can guarantee the videos don't need to wait in a queue, and we open

Today we explore an exciting venture in the Real Estate Industry - StreetAdvisor.com.au . It was co-founded in 2007 by Adam Spencer from Melbourne, Australia. In a recent email-based interview with Adam, 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? My name is Adam Spencer, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of StreetAdvisor.com.au • Please tell us about your venture/company? StreetAdvisor.com.au is a website devoted to helping people find the best place to live, it’s as simple as that. We have reviews of streets, cities and neighbourhoods from all around the world written by locals in the area. We also have photos, videos, guidebooks, forums and much more. • Who are the people behind this and how it started? Jason Spencer (Co-Founder and co-CEO) and I came up with the idea for a website about helping people find the best place to live. It was an idea born out of frustration with o

In the ongoing coverage of exploring new startups coming out of Australia, Today we explore an emerging entrepreneur Isaac Forman who has set up two ventures, Linky and GymPrices . Linky is an exciting venture and it got some encouragement from Fred Wilson (see the comments section). In a recent email-based interview with Isaac, 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 worked in web development for more than 10 years, and run my own company, Triplezero ( since 1998. Online ideas are a habit I can't break. I enjoy reading about them (and thinking 'I should've thought of that!'), seeing new ground being broken, or trying my own hand at online services. • What is the name of your venture/company? I have quite a few in progress, but two recent efforts are Linky and GymPrices . • Please tell us about your venture/company? Linky is ess

Today we showcase an exciting and successful venture co-founded in 2007 by Andrew Ballard from Drysdale on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, My Perfect - Don't Search, Choose or in other words it turns the idea of a search engine completely around. In a recent email-based interview with Andrew, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say: • Please tell us about your venture/company? We've developed a revolutionary new type of search engine - so different, in fact, that we've coined the phrase 'choice engine' to describe it. To go back one step - there's a fundamental problem with the way traditional search engines work. So fundamental, in fact, that everyone seems oblivious to the problem. Traditional search engines begin with a single query and return thousands or millions of results. These results are determined by a complex algorithm that takes into account relevance, straight keyword matching, user hi

As we reported earlier the Online Local Search and Directory Market is Heating up , which is an emerging marketplace as confirmed by the Sensis FY08 report . Today we explore one of the new entrants in this segment, Local.com.au , founded by Ron Brewster of Sydney, Australia. In a recent email-based interview with Ron, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say: • Please tell us about your venture/company? local.com.au is a directory of business and services Australia-wide. We allow free advertising for all businesses, including FREE links to websites. For $1 a day, businesses can rise to the top and add pictures and videos to listings. I believe we have the BEST directory model currently on offer in Australia. • Who are the people behind this and how it started? Myself primarily, but I have a very good coder and a series of consultants who I work with. I had the idea back in the late 1990s when I could see tourism embracing the inte