Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

In our ongoing coverage of startups coming out of Australia and interviews with CEOs, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VCs, to gauge the innovation and startup landscape in Australia, today we showcase our interview with, the co-founder of Webdirections - Conferences for web professionals held in Australia and North America, John Allsopp. I did this interview with John to know more about Webdirections , its offerings, its progress and future plans and how his second venture Westciv is progressing. Let us explore what John has to say about the progress of Webdirections and Westciv Australia. This is what he has to say: • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? I'm a software engineer, with a computer science and maths degree, coupled with quite a few arts subjects at university, and most of a law degree. Born and raised in Sydney, I lived for a time in the UK, and Italy in the early 1990s, before starting my first company in 1994 I live just out

Today we showcase the story of another successful entrepreneur, Martin Dougiamas, Founder, Lead Developer and Managing Director of Moodle Pty Ltd Moodle is an open-source course management system (also called a learning management system). It's a completely Free web application that educators can install and use to manage all their online learning. The business model is based on services around the free software. It has 2 portals/sites, the open source community is at Moodle.org the business side is at Moodle.com Let us explore what Martin has to say about his venture Moodle and his thoughts on IT, Education and Innovation coming out of Australia. This is what he has to say: • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? I'm 38, live in Perth with my young family. Until I was 12 I lived in central Australia, learning via School of the Air (in those days we used shortwave radio). This probably had some influence on what I do now. • Who are the people behind

The 28th participant is 88 Miles Founded by Myles Eftos, 88 Miles - is a simple time-tracking application, aimed at the SME market. Let us explore more about on various facets of 88 Miles from Myles. This is what he has to say: • How it started? 88 Miles was founded and developed by Myles Eftos. I developed this for my freelance and consulting business because I realised that I couldn't accurately account for his time when working for clients. • How long it took before it was up and running? A beta was out within 2 months - the final version was launched after about 6 months. • What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional? 88 Miles is fully functional • What is the main objective/mission behind your venture? To provide a sustainable, un-obtrusive time tracking system that will be useful to other small companies. • What services it provide for consumers or customers? Punch-in and Punch facilities, timesheets, reporting, full REST AP I and integr

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 8th participant is Invoiceplace . Invoiceplace - Easy Invoicing and Quotes from Anywhere. It provides a service for businesses to save time preparing invoices and quotes keep track of overdue invoices and record payments received. It provides free, fully functional accounts for up to three customers, and twenty customer subscriptions start at $15 AUD a month. Scott Carpenter created this in 2006 with the help of some very talented contractors whom he worked with. Let us explore a bit further how Scott and Invoiceplace are going: Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A. Invoiceplace was launched in November 2006 and was in development and testing for a year before the launch. Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional? A. Invoiceplace has launched. Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture? A. To provide a simple and easy-to-use service that enables businesses to take control and save time with quoting and billing.

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