Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

Today we showcase the story of an exciting venture, from Sydney, Australia, infome - Find Anything Nearby from your Mobile, co-founded by Scott Middleton, Andrew Lowe and Brett McDowall. In a recent email-based interview with us, Scott gave insights into how he is managing and juggling. This is what he has to say in his interview with us: • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? When I was about 12 - thanks to a book my parents bought me - I found out that I could create web pages, I was so excited I distinctly remember tossing and turning the entire night because I began imagining the possibilities, imagining what I could create; especially how I could build websites for local businesses. A year or two later, still excited and full of enthusiasm I’d learnt how to create mobile games, A well-established local mobile developer bought my first game and it went worldwide – it even made it to a top 20 list for Australian developers. Even now, I still love mobile. I

Background : Australian Startups Carnival - 2008 is an initiative by VS Consulting Group . This online (web-based) carnival is all about learning about new ventures started/surfaced in IT, Telecoms, Green Tech, Media, and Web 2.0/Social Networking in the last couple of years. Vishal covered the state of web 2.0  startups in 2006 for ReadWriteWeb . But since then a lot of water has gone under. We are now expanding our coverage, as some great ideas are being put together and executed. We intend to discover the people behind these startups, their motivations, how the future looks from their perspective, what technologies are being used, what market segments they are targeting, their mistakes, their advice and more. Why: One of the main reasons we are doing this  is to make this black art of starting up more open and easy. When we look on the web there is so much high-level information about business models and how companies are doing, blah blah, but not much on how we should go about it

Today we showcase an exciting and successful venture founded by Grant Simonds from Melbourne, Australia, MComms TV - a software solutions company that specialises in live Mobile TV monitoring, digital audio/video mixing, transcoding and Mobile TV Ad Insertion for the telecommunications industry. Their products are used by network operators and content providers globally to deliver innovative Mobile TV services to subscribers. In a recent email-based interview with Grant, 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? MComms Monitor enables video streaming operators to monitor the availability of multiple video streams on-screen and using SNMP traps. Provides a “Video Wall” for staff and customers to view available streaming content. MComms Transcode converts redundant live video streams from the internet, IPTV and analog/digital feeds into compatible Mobile TV video streams. A stream can

The  iPhone phenomenon is global and is doing well in terms of grabbing the market share from other handsets. In Australia consumer is crying, even though it’s a hit with the general public, courtesy of 3 telcos, which have got an agreement with Apple, Telstra , Optus & Vodafone. The main reason consumers are crying is that their pricing plans are the most expensive compared to the other 21 countries where iPhone 2.0 is launched. Well, there are no prizes for guessing that Telstra's plans are the most expensive plans. Most of us haven't been able to understand why Telstra is offering plans that are not suitable for a smart device like an iPhone - it's not a phone it's a mini PC. But now it is becoming clear why this is so. It’s not widely known that Telstra negotiated hard with Apple to allow applications like Whereis (Sensis) to be preloaded on iPhone. This is the usual territory for Telstra, Being the dominant player here they get away with most of the time with

This has been an incredible experience and journey for all of us. This is the first time in Australia that a carnival showcasing profiles of new business ventures from different domains was covered online. In a world that is becoming flat day by day, as explained by Thomas Friedman, we will see more and more new ways of doing traditional things. Our local VCs on contact couldn’t understand what we were doing, just showed the state of affairs to our VCs. Today we are happy to announce the winners of this carnival. We have already published the feedback and how Judges have marked the participants. If you have missed that please read it here , as it will describe how we have marked all the participants. We have declared our first prize and now updated the page with 2nd and 3rd prizes. We do acknowledge that in comparison to the first prize 2nd and 3 prize winners don’t get much value. But this was our first event and we tried our level best (it was an understatement) to get as many

The 22nd participant is Me2mobile Me2mobile is a new entrant in the area of enabling Mobile Interactivity. It is a self-service portal that allows ordinary users to produce interactive mobile applications that were once provided by traditional mobile media companies such as mobile operators and mobile marketing companies. Let us explore a bit further how Me2mobile is progressing: • Who are the founders behind this and how it started? The founders have extensive experience in the mobile industry and have been involved in the mobile content area for the last 8 years. The founders are moonlighting entrepreneurs at present but will be announcing who they are once initial seed funding is secured and the business is launched. • How long it took before it was up and running? The concept was conceived around 18 months ago when the founders realised that a lot of smaller businesses and entrepreneurial individuals faced massive barriers to setting up interactive mobile services. We saw an