Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

Today we showcase an exciting and successful venture founded by, Tim Moreillon from, Geelong, Australia, NetDefence . In a recent email-based interview with Tim, 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? Out of school, I worked in the car industry for 8 years, doing everything from sales to IT to administration to compliance to management. I felt like a change after this and decided to focus my attention on the Information technology field. My interests include music, cars, photography and of course, technology! • Please tell us about your venture/company? NetDefence helps businesses protect themselves from technology threats. We go out to the market and find the best-of-breed solutions for our clients and ensure they and their staff can use the Internet and be shielded from malicious threats, scams and fraud. We also help businesses meet their compliance needs. As le...

The 16th participant is ITQSM ITQSM - Information Technology Quality Service Management, is focused on the practical application of specific areas of IT best practice management. A key area of our undertaking is described in ITIL terms as configuration management. At a high level, it is the practice of mapping services to dispersed infrastructure to measure end-to-end cost, availability, risk exposure, service availability and general governance factors. Also on offer is the delivery of IT Training courses covering these management aspects as well a substantial offering of courses dealing with Open Source Software in the enterprise environment. Started by Brendan Martin, in early 2008, it is the culmination of several years of work under the Open Source Banner of www.cmdb.info. CMDB.info hosts several open-source VM guests running a variety of asset and configuration management tools as well as providing downloads references to VM guests covering other areas of IT management. Let us ...

The 11th participant is GoodBarry GoodBarry has created GoodBusiness, the first system born to run online businesses. It's one central console that powers your website and email marketing, your online shop and your customer database. It has re-defined "web hosting" for small businesses with an all-in-one product that replaces up to 10 se parate, expensive systems with one. With good business, you can have a fully-fledged online business up and running in a matter of minutes - including your website, online shop, email marketing and an integrated customer database. GoodBarry is the brainchild of Bardia Housman and Brett Welch from Business Catalyst. Business Catalyst(BC) was founded by Bardia and Adam Broadway in 2003 when the duo saw an increasing need for CRM integration into websites and online businesses. With that in mind, BC created the first integrated Content Management/Contact Management system. This system grew to become a fully-fledged online business platfor...

The 9th participant is Plutext . Plutext enables collaborative editing around docx documents, where docx is the default file format in Word 2007. In simple terms, it's a word processor like Openoffice Writer and Google Docs. Based out of Melbourne, it was created by Jason Harrop in 2007 and this is the second venture he has started, previously he was involved with SpeedLegal (now Exari). Let us explore a bit further about Plutext from Jason, on various facets of his startup: Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A. A couple of months to build a proof of concept, whilst also doing other things, before giving it 100% focus in September 2007. Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional? A. Beta mode. Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture? A. Enable people to work on a Word document at the same time. Provide an environment for doing this irrespective of whether you have Word 2007. Q. What is unique about your ventu...

The sixth participant is Smartpath Smartpath is a software vendor and expert in the asset management industry. Founded in April 2004, based out of Sydney and Melbourne, it began as a services-focused business, now primary focus has become the development and delivery of the core product suite, Loc8 Asset and Help Desk Manager. These suites are offered as Software-as-a-Service model(SaaS) and (perpetual) customer-installed applications. The product suite includes a comprehensive Asset Management suite and PDA-based auditing application. David Hodges and Owen Batt are the founders. David was working in the IT Service management field managing teams of Cisco-based infrastructure engineers and identified an opportunity in the asset auditing and data collection space. In 2004 David hired Owen, who had come from an architecture background and taught himself Flash and PHP development, to create a laptop-based auditing tool. Development of the first tool took 12 months and resulted in a Flas...

Aussie Startups Carnival 2008, kicks off today. We would like to thank all our participants for the time and effort they have put in to make this happen. We are delighted to showcase our first participant Scouta . Scouta , the name of the product and service, owned by Recommendation Ventures Pty Ltd , is a recommendation engine that is provided to retail, media, and content websites via a web service. It's added via javascript and can provide up to a 30% increase in sales or click-throughs. Scout also has a public recommendation service for amateur-generated content like podcasts, video podcasts, and hosted videos (on sites like YouTube, Metacafe, etc.). It has an iTunes plug-in that will provide recommendations for content that is consumed on iPods, iPhones, and AppleTVs. That means a member of Scouta can listen to podcasts or watch videos on their iPod, and receive recommendations that match their interests or tastes. Richard Giles and Graeme Sutherland founded the company. Th...