Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

The 27th participant is OurWishingWell.com Founded by Joseph Renzi, OurWishingWell.com is an online gift registry that allows hosts of any occasion to list items that they need/want and invite guests to view the registry and request contributions toward these gifts. Hosts can list any item – from homewares, honeymoons, a holiday or a house deposit. Guests can view the registry and contribute any amount towards any gift on the list. It allows multiple guests to contribute different amounts to larger/significant gifts that would otherwise not be possible. This is Joesph's 2nd venture entry in this carnival, first one was SwapAce.com . He tells us a bit more about this intriguing venture: • How it started? It started with his team in 2007. The successful site has now expanded into other sites such as; BabyWishingWell.com, BirthdayWishingWell.com and BestFundraiserWebsite.com. • How long it took before it was up and running? The site took less than 6 months to develop before it was ...

The 23rd participant is 3eep 3eep - is a social media enterprise. It delivers technology and commercial services to clients who want to establish their own social media businesses and create social networks in their communities. 3eep’s focus is on local sports communities. Let us learn more about 3eep and the people behind it: • Who are the founders behind this and how it started? Who are the founders behind this and how it started. The founders of 3eep are Rob Antulov, CEO, who was the former head of strategy at Fairfax, and Nick Gonios, COO and Head of Community Development, who has spent time with HotHouse Interactive, Microsoft and Fujitsu. • How long it took before it was up and running? From our initial thoughts about building a sports-oriented social network to launching our first beta version took about six months. We launched our partner Platform product within 4 months of that. • What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional? 3eep is still in...

The 20th participant is Community Enabler Founded by Rob Anderson, Community Enabler , trading under the banner of Cagora.com which is the flagship website , is a project tentatively called the Social Networking Challenge which will launch in March 2008. It is a Social Enterprise that is setting out to do its bit to make the world a better place by fostering Community Building and empowering Business Entrepreneurs and Social Entrepreneurs to achieve their goals. It is run as a Profit Business, but will be launching Not For Profit initiatives such as The Social Networking Challenge which is designed to create a word-of-mouth Tipping Point harnessing the viral connectivity of the Blogosphere and major Social Networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Rob describes the service in his words: It has a shortcut way for people to browse and search the Social Networks for People and Groups. The same interface to enable people to browse on one page thousands of Bloggers, Podcasters and Videocaste...

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...

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 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...