Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

Continuing our coverage of bringing more surprise entries, today’s surprise entry entry is WOMOW . Founded by Fiona Adler and Brad Bond in 2006, WOMOW stands for Word Of Mouth On the Web and it’s an online business directory of word-of-mouth recommendations to help people find the best local businesses. All businesses are entered and rated by users who describe their experience, including what they particularly liked or didn’t like about the business. WOMOW helps users find the very best local businesses, using real information from real people. And for businesses, WOMOW is the only place where they can be promoted based on merit (not on how much they spend). And if businesses provide poor service, we believe people should know about this so that they can choose other alternatives. WOMOW gives consumers a voice and evens out the playing field for businesses. Let us explore a bit more about Womow and see how they are doing. This is what Fiona, one of the founders, has to say: How i

The 19th participant is Confer Founded by Rod L'Huillier Confer - is a social news-sharing site especially aimed at an Australian audience providing a platform for content recommendation and news sharing. The content is completely community-driven via member submissions of links to blog posts, news stories or even videos that they have found interesting. Members can also vote on submissions to democratically determine the front-page news and most popular content. The site also allows for discussion of submissions and members also have their own personal profile page with networking features. It aims to be a platform for sharing discovery and engagement in Australian content, particularly from the Aussie blogosphere, and for localised discussion of news and issues be they global or local. Confer in short: Social News Sharing - Content Recommendation Content discovery via community contribution Discussion - Have your say on local issues Collaborative filtering via voting Independen

The 18th participant is ZaaBiz ZaaBiz - is an online social networking site for professionals. It connects Australian’s in business with other professionals in Australia and beyond. Michael Brecht is the founder and CEO of ZaaBiz. Michael has lived in Australia for four years and saw a niche for an online social network that was geared towards Australians. Let us explore a bit further about ZaaBiz. We asked a few questions and this is what Michael has to say: Q. How long before it was up and running? A. 6 months Q. What stage is your company at? A. Fully- functioning networking site for professionals. Q. What is the main objective behind your venture? A. The main objective is to be the leading & profitable social networking platform for business professionals in Australia and beyond. Q. What services does it provide for customers/ consumers? A. Groups, Forums, Articles, Newsletters, Advanced Search & Power Search, finding new business connections and more Web 2.0 application

The 15th participant is Vquence Vquence is an Australian startup in online video technology. Vquence's business is in Social and Online Video aggregation and metrics. Vquence's experts have more than 10 years of experience with new video technology and applications for the Web, as well as an extensive background in data mining and high-availability server infrastructure. The company was founded by veteran entrepreneur Chris Gilbey, former CEO of Lake Technologies, and Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, former Multimedia Science Leader at the CSIRO ICT Centre in July 2006 with funding from ICA (Information City Australia). The funding was used to develop new technology in video search from scratch and prepare a business plan with which to acquire further funding to build a consumer Web service. Let us learn more about Vquence from one of the founders Dr Silvia: Q. How long it took before it was up and running? A. The discussions to prepare this startup had been going on for close to a year b

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 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 tenth participant is Buzka Buzka has taken the first steps to build powerful web applications that introduce new ways for consumers to search and discover the highly relevant brand-focused information they need to make purchasing decisions. Buzka Popnets are patented web applications that harness the power of social networking for businesses that need to build brand value in today’s fragmented media environment. Available to businesses of all sizes, Popnets make it extremely easy for their customers to share all the information they need when making everyday buying decisions, whilst providing easy access to their most trusted source of product referral – their social network. Based out of Perth (WA), Buzka was co-founded by Raphe Patmore and Jinnan Cai in January 2006. Let us explore a bit further how Raphe and Jinnan are progressing with Buzka. Q. Who are the founders behind this and how it started? A. Raphe Patmore CEO (Co-Founder) - has over 25 years of experience in techno

The fourth participant is Suburb View Suburb View is an Australian Real Estate Search Engine. It displays Property listings on Google Maps, and Google Earth, has full RSS Feeds, and is also available on the Mobile phone. As a frustrated first homebuyer, Mark Ferris created Suburb View . In 2006 there were no real estate sites displaying property listings on a map. So he started working on creating these listings in May 2006. He began manually putting properties he liked on a map as major real estate websites had different amounts of listings. In his words, Searching for a property meant you visit one site, view 10 listings, click next etc. Then when you saw all of those listings, you would go to another web site and do it all over again. This is just too consuming, so I created the web site to do this automatically. Suburb View aimed to show all of suburb listings first, and then filter the results you don't want. I have a price range I am interested, and a minimum amount of room