Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

Today we showcase a story of a man who is, an entrepreneur and a successful Angel investor, helping a lot of Australian business to realize their dreams. Clay Cook is based in Perth, Western Australia. Let us explore a bit further how Clay is helping others and what he thinks about innovation coming out of Australia. This is what Clay has to say in his interview with me. • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? My "tags" would go something like… Serial tech entrepreneur, Ineedhits, Mint i, Vibe Capital , Gooruze, Angel investor, Father, Husband, Relaxed, Perth, Australia, Nice guy. • What is the name of your venture firm? We are Angel investors and over the past couple of years of years have invested around $500k of our own personal money. • Who are the people behind this and how it started? It is myself and my wife Rachel Cook. We started investing in 2006 when we invested in 1stRed (formally Red Lottery), and then we continued with investments into M...

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...

Today we are fulfilling our promise to bring you an in-depth interview with one of the designers of a new venture, Ben Haylock, from Sydney, Stripe - Australia’s first mobile radio subscription service and the first digital radio network to launch in Australia. It utilises broadband and 3G networks and allows you to listen to any Stripe radio station from your computer and most 3G mobile phones, wherever you are in Australia!. In a recent email-based interview with Ben, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say: Please tell us about yourself, your background and your interests? Hi. I’m Ben Haylock, and I’m a designer of digital media content platforms. Work-wise, I love using technology to create experiences for audiences. My personal interests are riding enduro motorbikes, amateur cheffing and generally spending time with friends and family. Please tell us about your venture/company? Well, Stripe is Australia’s first...

Telstra announced yesterday, the launch of their Bigpond Music Platform , a venture into the online music industry by offering tracks from all major record labels in a format (MP3) that could be transferred between most music players, including the iPod, Sony Walkman, Xbox, PlayStation 3 and home media centres. This offering is in direct competition to Apple's iTunes offering which is a walled garden or a closed system. It was clear how Telstra is opening up another front with Apple in their ongoing battle in the Media and mobile space. The next obvious step for this platform would be online rental movies as Telstra has a service for its rental movies under the  BigPond Movies Entertainment b anner . While pundits were still analyzing the impact of Telstra's new service, Apple has hit back with the announcement that movies from major film studios including 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios In...

As we reported earlier the Online Local Search and Directory Market is Heating up , which is an emerging marketplace as confirmed by the Sensis FY08 report . Today we explore one of the new entrants in this segment, Local.com.au , founded by Ron Brewster of Sydney, Australia. In a recent email-based interview with Ron, 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? local.com.au is a directory of business and services Australia-wide. We allow free advertising for all businesses, including FREE links to websites. For $1 a day, businesses can rise to the top and add pictures and videos to listings. I believe we have the BEST directory model currently on offer in Australia. • Who are the people behind this and how it started? Myself primarily, but I have a very good coder and a series of consultants who I work with. I had the idea back in the late 1990s when I could see tourism embracing the inte...

Telstra's CEO Mr. Sol Trujillo delivered $3.7 billion profit after tax and minority interests for the year ended 30 June 2008. Some of the key highlights of this report are Mobile services revenue grew 12.3% to $5.5 billion Retail broadband revenue grew 49% to $1.8 billion and ARPU increased 2.9%. Retail broadband customer numbers grew strongly to 3.3 million for the year resulting in a market share gain of 2 percentage points to 49% PSTN revenue was $6.7 billion, a 3.2% decline for the year compared with 4.4% in fiscal 2007. The number of retail PSTN lines has grown for 14 consecutive months. Retail sales revenue grew 5.9% for the year. Growth of 3.6% in Telstra Enterprise & Government 3G penetration more than doubled since June 2007 to 47% of our mobile base or 4.4 million subscribers, a feat unmatched by our global peer group. Optus & 3 were caught off guard, but the fight is on. Telstra continues to gain around 20,000 wireless broadband subscribers per month with 5...

I'm delighted to say that our ongoing efforts to cover technology ventures/startups, tech trends and business models coming out of Australia got a boost today. Our Following Startups and Tech Trends portal is now part of the global startup site Alltop . Thanks to all of you who recommended this portal.