Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

The 13th participant is Australiaforum.com Australiaforum.com is a forum about Australia. The idea was to create a place where people could get help with travelling or migrating to Australia. Mike started the website as a solo venture. He has lived overseas for most of his adult life. He describes: It is not always easy living overseas or moving to a new country. I found travel and living overseas forums and information websites often the best sources of information when it comes to visas, costs, housing and things of that nature. So when I started looking around I couldn’t find anything that particularly stood out for people wanting to live or move to Australia. Let us explore a bit further how Australiaforum.com is progressing. Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A . Setting the site up was perhaps the easy part. I hired an overseas company to do the design and it took them around 1-2 weeks. I have then been adding new features to the site over time. Starting a com

The 12th participant is Greenairfares.com Greenairfares.com - is a site that sells airfares along with a carbon offset, based on the details of the flight. Many Australian and European airlines are currently doing this – but many US-based airlines are still far from it. So there is a niche market for it in the US. The website is targeted at US users and will also offer hotel and car booking services. Currently, no air booking system in the US is available that ties flight details to carbon emissions and sells only tickets with this offset included in the total price. It started with an idea in the shower in 2006. The founders behind this will soon announce themselves in March. Let us explore a bit further how Greenairfares.com is progressing. Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A. We are still in development – It's been about 1.5 years in the making. Most time was spent exploring different approaches with many barriers. Finally, a way forward was struck in Novemb

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 7th participant is Global Surfari Global Surfari is a surf forecasting website that provides 7-day surf forecast listings for global locations. It was created by Gary Brewer in London after spending a year in Australia surfing. He finally moved to Australia in 2006 and rebuilt the site to give it more of a web 2.0 feel and also provided support for Facebook, iGoogle, iPhone/iTouch mobile applications and works for MySpace integration is underway. Let us explore a bit further how Gary and Global Surfari is going: Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A. The site uses surf forecasting data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) an American government agency that provides sea data. It took a while to get the data they provided into a format that I could use for Global Surfari to produce the forecasts. However, the initial release of Global Surfari probably took about 2 weeks of solid work. The newest versions and the Facebook integration took around

The second participant is the  Evaluator - Australian Property Reports. Evaluator is a website that aims to make it simple and easy to arrange property valuations, building reports and pest inspections. If you are buying property anywhere in Australia, it is a one-stop shop for all your property report needs. Evaluators also offer fixed prices and guaranteed turnaround times on jobs, so you no longer have to shop around for quotes and waste time following up to get your report. All the report providers are professional, accredited and insured professionals. Their experience and professional skills are backed up by Evaluator’s commitment to quality customer experiences. Evaluator was started by two IT consultants, Craig Brown and Justin Findlay, in Melbourne after working with some major corporations and the IT providers who service them. They saw what services the Corporates were getting and thought they could create a similar quality experience for Joe Citizen. Evaluator partne

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