IPitch News Archive
Podcast Interview: Denise Shrivell of MediaScope
By Rachel Youens on Friday, December 18th, 2009
Media buying seems straight forward enough, you have TV, newspapers, radio, magazines and billboard. But what about all the infinite other places that have opened up to advertising from blogs to sugar packets to lunch trays? Connecting media buyers with this diverse long tail of advertising space is a complicated process that entrepreneur Denise Shrivell has been dealing with for years and now she’s finally creating a unique solution to a problem that has plagued her industry. MediaScope has recently opened up for companies to begin listing their available advertising spots. IPitch sat down to talk with Denise about her past experience in online companies, such as Essential Baby, and how she has teamed up with developers to tap into the vast amount of non-traditional advertising space.
Pitchworthy News: COMET, Binaryplex, Expanz, IPscape
By Rachel Youens on Friday, December 18th, 2009
• The last of the COMET grants have been announced as the innovation grant is closed to new submissions. Among the last six to receive the funding include Isoflex out of Queensland, which creates vibration isolation technology, Fabtale productions which has an ebook platform, Sensol from Canberra which has created a pressure-sensing mat, Surgical Performance which has created software for surgeons to self-audit the outcomes of their work, Auditflow which offers online audit planning and Elevate Technologies which has created technology to allow users to automatically medical information in a centralized database.
• Tech23 startup IPscape launched he-said-she-said, a hosted voice recording service for compliance that can be implemented in 24 hours. He-said-she-said can be used by call centre agents or sales team members to record inbound and / or outbound customer calls for management, compliance or quality assurance reasons. Using cloud-based technology, voice recording is simply and automatically added to every inbound and outbound call.
• Syndey VC Green Lane Digital’s David Kowalski has announced the groups investment in software development platform Expanz. Expanz presented at Tech23 offering technology that gives an assembly line style process to the complicated task of .net application development.
• HiveMind, an automated expertise discovery engine created by Melbourne startup Binaryplex, has entered closed beta. The service aims to help employees find experts within their organisation without relying on those experts, or others, to manually update their profiles.
Got some exciting news or a juicy scoop you want to share? For IPitch members, include as a pitch, for nonmembers, email us here.
Read more Pitchworthy here.
Pitchworthy News: Cloud Central, Pocketweb, TimeOut, B33hive
By Rachel Youens on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
• Mobile company TigerSpike is making buzz all over London with its work on a collaboration between Time Out Magazine and Smirnoff Vodka. The app is designed to help Londoners plan their social lives by incorporating geo location, the social ability to share what events you are at with friends and update event listings.
• Mobile commerce company B33hive has entered into two deals to deliver music and information to customers mobile phones. A deal with BaZook allows users to tag a song by letting it play into the service on their mobile phone and have the artist and title identified for 1.10. The offer is similar to Shazaam but promises to ignore background noise and work even in noisy nightclubs. A deal with Buzzword will allow customers to sms a “buzz word” to a number and receive a message, that can be regularly changes, in return. The examples B33hive offers for the utility include nineMSN using the service to follow stock quotes or a coach using it to allow parents to stay abreast of team changes.
• Canberra-based startup Cloud Central has opened a private beta launch of infrastructure-as-a-service, hosted from the TransACT data centre in Australia’s capital. Cloud Central is the result of 12 months research and a further 12 months of development and engineering by Kristoffer Sheather, who formerly worked as a software developer and architecture engineer for multiple Federal Government departments. The service offers bundles of compute power, memory and storage from as low as $0.03c per hour, plus GST, network traffic fees and third party software licenses.
• Timely with the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, Volvo is hoping to reduce consumers carbon footprint with a new app from Aussie developers Pocketweb. The sponsored Commute Greener app calculates how much carbon you have used with your method of transportation
Innovation Shoot Out Delivers Aussies to Silicon Valley’s Doorstep
By Rachel Youens on Monday, December 14th, 2009
In what has become one of the largest foreign company promotions held annually in the US, eight Australian companies will visit Silicon Valley in January for a chance to show off their products to American investors and win a prize package to assist in a US product launch. The Innovation Shoot Out is part of the G’Day USA program, an 11-day event that occurs in several major US cities and brings the best of Australian fashion, wine, art, tourism and business in front of US investors and customers.
This year the innovations from the eight companies selected include denial of service attack protection, smart camera technology, supply chain management technology and more. From New South Wales Digisensory and Solar Gem have been selected, from South Austalia PowerHealth Solutions and Zarloc, from Queensland MultiTrode and Synengco and from Victoria Intelliguard and Mid-Corp International.
Although the G’Day USA program spans across several Aussie exports, technology and innovation has several events, the Shootout included, that target technology. Some of the others include a clean tech networking event in San Diego and a business forum in New York for Clean Tech businesses to get face to face with NY investors.
Some of the past Innovation Shoot Out attendees Nuix, Adelaide-based mobile marketing company m.Net Corporation, hearing protection company Sensear based in Western Australia, Tasmanian software company JadeLiquid Software, medical testing company ImpediMed, Melbourne gaming company E Ball Games and colour visualisation company Autech. You can watch video interviews with Nuix and m.Net below.
Links are out, Loops are in: New Professional Networking Site Debuts for Creatives
By Rachel Youens on Friday, December 11th, 2009
Linked In is great if the skills you have easily show on paper, but what of the creatives? Title and job description don’t begin to scratch the surface of the rich visual art, video, web and industrial design that many creative employees offer and so it’s hard to showcase their real skill in the black and white world of Linked In. So it’s time to forget the links and get with The Loop. Last week Australian multimedia professional networking site The Loop launched into beta, offering a new platform to discover not only creative employees but the type of businesses that hire them. The site was created by Pip Jamieson and Matt Fayle, who worked together at MTV, she in marketing he in digital media According to Matt. After years working in online creative, Matt looked at the rich abilities Facebook offered to share photos and videos, but noted that Facebook is more a place for fun than work. He dreamed of creating a site where those in the creative industry could let their work speak for them. The Loop does is this by easily allowing video, photos and sound bites to be uploaded (or tracked in via Vimeo or Yotube) into individual portfolios, showcasing all their work on a single project or with a single employer. At its core, The Loop is designed to match professionals with job opportunities. Standard, Premium and Display ads are offered, and The Loop is introducing a price-capped Cost Per Application model – a new alternative in the online job advertising market - making recruitment costs measurable, accountable and affordable to smaller, boutique scale businesses.
Matt and Pip employed Visiontech Digital to help bring the idea to life after meeting with several other design companies with wide ranging price quotes. In the end they settled on Visiontech because of the company’s experience with real estate sites and Matt recognized that the same values that applied to a house listing (information, pictures, video) also applied to a person and the translation from one to another would be easier for Visiontech than others.
Although it has just entered Beta the site is already well stocked with members as The Loop has reached out to universities and professional organizations including AFI, AFTRS, AIMIA, AWARD, COFA, Billy Blue College of Design, Design Victoria, Metro Screen, Screen NSW. As for the site’s next plans, Matt says the site has no immediate goals to go global but that if it did it would stay with a hyper local aspect and that the local community (as implicated by the .au) is an important part of their vision for the site. Other features they are looking at introducing include groups and the ability to use referrals.
5 Australian Slideshare Presos that can Help Your Startup
By Rachel Youens on Friday, December 11th, 2009
If you couldn’t actually make it to the event, going through the slides is the next best thing. Here is a collection of Australian Slideshare presentations that can aid in your own tech venture.
Search Engine Optimization is a bit of a dark art. What lands you in Google’s top ten searches one day will have you on page ten the next. So it is a brave woman who deals in the temperamental business, and Kritin Rohan is indeed brave, and sassy. With her Sydney-based company Sassy SEO, Kristin Rohan helps business improve their searchability, helps them get more qualified customers and offers marketing strategies to improve visibility. In her presentation from the Sydney Business and Technology User Group, Kristin goes over the basics of SEO.
In the face of a million tasks, it’s easy to become overwhelmed as to where to start. In this BarCamp presentation Marc Lehmann of online accounting software company Saasu addresses some of the enemies of productivity and how he has upped the productivity for his own software as a service startup through automation, back up systems and exercising free and cheap options.
In this presentation Vquence founder Silvia Pfeiffer takes an honest look at the challenges of creating innovative businesses in Australia. In the long list of reasons you should have a startup, she knocks out the ones you can control and then addresses those you should really be worried about.
In this presentation Threat Metrix CEO David Jones looks at a collection of Australian startups and what went right or wrong. He takes a look at where in funding Australia falls short, the reasons why you should break into foreign markets and how to make it work once you get there.
User experience can be tough to gauge but it can make all the difference when it comes to the impression left on your user. This presentation, from the User Experience Conference, isn’t as much useful as it funny, but it’s a good way to get your brain working on failures in user experience as you begin design on your website.
Wales Government Offering Help in Breaking into European Marketplace
By Rachel Youens on Thursday, December 10th, 2009
Breaking into foreign markets in an expensive necessity for most Australian tech startups, but the cost of branching into Europe just got a bit cheaper with the introduction of the Access Wales program helping foreign tech business establish themselves in the country, find funding and make connections. Taking a “try before you buy” approach, the Wales government is inviting businesses to take advantage of a year of free office space and assistance in one of its 15 Technium Centres. Techniums are a Wales-created incubator program that span the tech industries from optics to engineering and take Welsh businesses through a two year period to reap the benefits of office space as well as mentorship and introductions. Although the Welsh government has worked with foreign businesses on a case by case basis in the past to help them expand into the nation, this is the first large scale program reaching out to foreign startups. International Business Wales, the governmental wing behind the Access Wales program, are targeting European, American, Japanese and Australian businesses and according to deputy director Mike Hynda Australia’s strong collection of tech startups and need to grow internationally makes the Welsh program ideally suited for those looking for a way into the European marketplace. Australian companies such as Dyesol, a producer of solar cell technology, and former RMIT testing facility Enex TestLab have both found success in Wales. In April, the Welsh government assisted Enex in moving into Wales where Enex plan to manage its full expansion into Europe.
Access Wales is currently accepting applications to the program with the only caveats being that a business must be in the technology field and must have some concrete growth prospect. Those interested in finding out more information or applying, visit the Access Wales website or call 02 9258 1103 to visit with International Business Wales local representative.
Pitchworthy: Cool Company, Crunchies, Paycycle, Bing, Ipscape, Deloitte
By Rachel Youens on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
• It was a broad group of business solving a broad group of problems that won the Anthill Cool Company awards at the end of November. The winners included a solution to keep dolphins out of fishing nets, the first company to commence human swine flu vaccine trials, a better type of caulking gun and a way to keep advertisers from bugging you. The eight categories awarded businesses in areas like global growth, innovation and social capital. The evenings top winner was Vaxine who have developed novel forms of vaccine technology.
• Keeping its promise to launch by the end of November, online payroll startup Paycycle has launches and opened beta testing to the public. The Victorian business is inviting users to come on and try the site free for 120 days through their basic system and try out new services as they are added. After the trial time a low monthly fee will be added.
• If you were walking down George street in Sydney last week and heard the chime of little bings, it was probably the Silicon Beach crew using their bing bottle opens to pop open a brew with US Bing representative Betsy Aoki. The senior program manager with the new search engine decided to take a day out of her vacation down under to bring Bing love to the Sydney startup scene. You can read more about her visit on her blog and see photos of her with the Tjoos team and other Silicon Beach fans.
• Emantra, a private cloud computing internet service provider, who had record revenue growth of 1756.3% over the last year, is the winner of the 2009 Deloitte Technology Fast 50. The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 program, now in its ninth year, ranks the 50 fastest growing public or private technology companies, based on percentage revenue growth over three years. Other tech startups among the winners inluded mobile marketing company TigerSpike, Tech23 participant IPscape and software company Atlassian.
Got some exciting news or a juicy scoop you want to share? For IPitch members, include as a pitch, for nonmembers, email us here.
Read more Pitchworthy here.
Steve Jobs Comes Down On Aussie App Company
By Rachel Youens on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
It’s a David and Goliath story right here in Sydney as Apple comes down on an Aussie startup. In an article today in the age, Apple software developer Matthew Peterson explained that he might have to lay off half of his staff if the Apple’s legal threats against his product iPodRip hold. The iPodRip app is only one of many products coming out of Matthew’s company The Little App Factory, but it is the one that brings in the most income. Apple sent Matthew a cease and desist letter two weeks ago asking him to stop using “iPod” in his software’s name, remove any Apple-related logos from his product and relinquish control of his domain name, ipodrip.com. Matthew has already changed the name of the product, but worries that relinquishing the domain name could severely damage all the SEO the company has built. The Little App Factory is so distraught that they sent an email to the man himself Steve Jobs begging for a reprieve only to be answered with: “Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.”
This isn’t the first time a little Aussie company has come up against the big guys. Melbourne startup Envato quickly changed the name of its FlashDen site to ActiveDen after receiving a cease and desist letter from Adobe.
