Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

We had a few late entries for the registration , most of them made it into the final list but a few missed out. So we thought let us cover them as a surprise package. These entries are not eligible for participation in the competition. So today's surprise entry is APPLEBOX . APPLEBOX is the easiest way to rent DVDs ever. It operates as a local store giving customers immediate access to find and watch DVDs as they always have, but our entire catalogue is online which means as well as browsing in-store, customers can browse and make selections from home or work as well. It has dramatically reduced the barn-like size of a Video Ezy to a small comfortable space without the racks and shelving. All the stocks are held in high-density, behind-the-counter storage, and when customers find and select a movie our system allocates an available disc to them. The selected item is available for them to pick up by the end of the day. Search, book, pickup ... simple. The system operates in real-

The 14th participant is Uvouch Uvouch is a social medium to share your passions with the world; from business to politics, music to sports, movies to travel and a lot more. Users can create their own fan communities within seconds and save any type of media in one place. It provides users easy-to-use tools to add videos, links, polls, articles, blogs, RSS, music, playlists and unlimited text modules to their clubs. Uvouch offers global media search functionality by connecting to the top 10 media websites including YouTube, google, yahoo etc. Videos can be simply viewed and added to accounts and fan clubs with one simple click Users can easily create playlists of their favorites, organize their video clips collection and fully customize their channels. Uvouch.com also allows users to bookmark their favourite links, websites, and clipping/annotation from a particular webpage for future reference. Parveen Panwar is the founder of Uvouch. Let us learn more about Uvouch from him: Q How it

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 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