IPitch News Archive
Pitchworthy News: Perkler, IPScape, MOB, CloudCamp, DDX
By Rachel Youens on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
• Virgin Blue certainly has love for the Aussie startups. After featuring Just One Teaspoons eco-friendly filtering water bottle in the December issue, the magazine included a feature on customer loyalty program startup Perkler.
• AIMIA has announced the finalists for its 16th annual AIMIA Awards. 122 entries have been named finalists across 25 different categories. Winners will be announced at the Digital Content Industry Night of Nights in Melbourne March 5 with entries being judged by industry experts from around the globe. Some of the nominees include Melbourne-based startup RedBubble in the Best Cultural and Lifestyle category with their art printing and sales site, Tech 23 presenter DDX with its GLU platform for best export achievement, MOB for its Sculpture by the Sea augmented reality app and Wotnew’s newly released TeamStream site.
• Last week IPscape, the Australian cloud-based contact centre provider, launched Keep in Touch (KiT), a cloud-based, integrated telephony service for salesforce.com that can be accessed anywhere and from any telephone. KiT provides contact centres with IPscape’s advanced telephony features and call centre functionality from within the salesforce screen. Call notes and voice recordings are automatically inserted into the salesforce.com record for enterprise and unlimited edition users.
• Startups across the nation are busy applying for the newly opened Commercialisation Australia grant and they are documenting on their company blogs and sites. You can read about startup Shoes of Prey’s experience with the Proof of Concept grant on their 22Michaels blog and read more about the specifics of the program here.
• For those living and working in the cloud and loving, the Sydney CloudCamp, set for March 4, is an opportunity to network with fellow early adopters about advancing the technology. This free event, organized in a similar fashion to other “unconference” barcamp, will be held at the Australian Technology Park and is currently taking registrants.
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.
New Macquarie Hire a Positive Turn for Green and Clean Oz Startups
By Rachel Youens on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Green tech and clean tech are heavy buzzwords in the investment community, but are still somewhat untested investment prospects. They often need large scale investments in order to take a product to market and deploy it globally, and as this great article from GreenBiz.com shows, the price tag falls in an odd place that is too low for large banks that like to fund giant infrastructure products and many investment bankers don’t have the knowledge to assess these deals. That’s why GreenBiz is excited over the appointment of Bill Green (isn’t that surname just so appropriate?), a former leader of several green companies including Ecolink and Strategic Chemical Management Group, to Macquarie Capital Funds.
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Sydney Startup Puts Shopping Into Facebook
By Rachel Youens on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
For many small businesses with limited budgets, social media may comprise their entire marketing strategy. Facebook fan pages have become a textbook way to find new customers and keep them updated, but the major failing of this technique is the leap it requires customers to make from a company’s Facebook page to their official website if they actually want make a purchase. That’s not a big leap, but it’s wide enough that many customers won’t make it and will never go on to actually complete any sale. Sydney startup Moluko is aiming to answer this problem with a new Facebook application that integrates purchasing directly into Facebook and allows businesses to post galleries of their products and sell directly from their Facebook page.
According to founder Hendro Wijaya, he began noticing more and more businesses using their Facebook fan pages as their exclusive website. This strategy has an incredible ease of use for customers, since they are already on Facebook, and doesn’t require them to be bombarded by email newsletters from a brand but Hendro identified the lack of a point of sale as a real failing in this new trend. Moluko uses Paypal as a payment gateway and plugs it directly into Facebook, allowing a low cost option for creating a Facebook storefront. Moluko is currently set at an introductory price of $15 per month for unlimited product listings and free for six listings.
This is not the first startup for Hendro and his company Blind Optimists. Hendro is a regular at Sydney startup events and an active Silicon Beach group user, and his company was behind online accounting service SandTable. The application is live to test and Moluko is soliciting any input or suggestions on its own Facebook fan page.
Ten Things to Know About Commercialisation Australia
By Rachel Youens on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Well all our Wii’s and Kindles weren’t the only Christmas gifts we received this year. Not long after Christmas the Commercialisation Australia grant finally opened up for applications, years after the announcement of the closure of the COMET grant. Australian businesses are already beginning to file for grant money, and if you’re considering joining them, here are ten things to know about this new gift from the government:
1.Like most comets do, they eventually burn out, so was the way of the COMET Commercial Ready grant, which gave funding to some of our favorite Aussie startups including TradeSlot and Just One Place. Commercialisation Australia replaces COMET after it was chopped from the 2008 Federal Budget. This new incarnation is set to receive $196.1 million over the 4 years to 2013, with ongoing funding of $82 million a year thereafter.
2.Commercialisation Australia is merit based, which means it will be competitive. Australia is already a competitive environment for this sort of funding but the gap of time between the Commercial Ready program and Commercialisation Australia means there are likely to be a lot of people hungry for it.
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Aussie Note Taking App Allows Apple Users to Sync Across Devices
By Rachel Youens on Friday, January 15th, 2010
Australian iPhone development startup Syncode has announced the release of its new Synotes app in the app store. The notes and task management system syncs your information across Apple devices and into the cloud and is available as a web, iPhone or iPod touch application. According to Syncode, the interfaces makes it easier to access both basic and advanced features, such as search and offline editing. Offline editing enables users who don’t have an active internet connection on their iPhone or iPod touch to continue adding, editing, deleting and rearranging notes.
“Synotes is the first Syncode application to use our new Smart Sync technology, which only syncs what you need it to when you need it to. It’s all about being more efficient and invisible to the user,” said co-founder Matthew Lesh.
The Syncode company was originally started by three high school students, and the company has already released iTweetReply, one of the first Push notification providers for popular micro-blogging site Twitter, and Syncopy, which takes your clipboard into the cloud.
Syncode has also released an open REST API for developers to create applications on the Synotes platform. “We hope we see some exciting applications being available to our users in the coming days, weeks and months” Matthew said.
SourceBottle Opening Lines Between Media and Sources
By Rachel Youens on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
PR is generally seen as a one way street where agents, or even companies or people going it alone, are constantly pushing out press releases and hoping that media will take the bait. But Melbourne-based startup SourceBottle has flipped PR on end, creating a system for media to reach out for sources and allowing experts to answer their calls.
After career in legal, PR and marketing, founder Rebecca Derrington created the site as mutually beneficial resource for both sides of the PR equation. Based roughly on leads services like American site HARO (or Help A Reporter Out), created by marketing extrordinaire Peter Shankman, Source Bottle allows companies, experts or just average folks to sing up for a email containing requests from media for sources, editorial contributions, giftbag contributions and more.
Users can tailor this emails to their own particular interests, ranging from “internet” to “lifestyle”, and can opt to simple browse through the site if they prefer not to be emailed. On the other side, journalists, bloggers, talk shows and more are able to submit free call outs, even appearing anonymously if they choose, requesting the times and specifics they need for a source.
For a startup seeking some free PR, some possible SEO and a way to build up their expertise in the field, it’s a no brainer. For example, Rebecca sites Australian company Tipsy Toes as one of her bis success stories. Shortly after replying to an anonymous callout from SourceBottle for innovative products, the founder of the company that produces cheap slippers for tipsy nightclub patrons found herself on a A Current Affair showcasing the shoes in a full televised segment.
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Pitchworthy News: Crunchies, Atlassian, Shoes of Prey, Creately, MyTVR, BinaryPlex
By Rachel Youens on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
• Pay what you will…sure it worked for Radiohead, but is it actually going to work for your tech product? Startup Creately, which offers an online diagramming application backed by the company Cinergix, decided to test the theory and came up with some interesting results. Customers paid between $1 and $100 and the company found a pretty direct correlation between how much customers paid and how involved they ended up becoming with the application. You can read an in-depth analysis over at the company’s new blog.
• During your holiday travel you may have spotted Australian startup Half A Teaspoon in the December issue of the Virgin Blue Voyeur magazine. The company works to promote conscious use of water and has developed an eco-friendly water bottle. You can read more about the filtering water bottle in the case study on the Design Victoria website.
• Melbourne startup MyTVR launched its new mobile TV service just before Christmas. This new product allows users to record and playback free-to-air television on their mobile device anywhere, anytime. Delivered via broadband or 3G, TV programs can be watched on Mac, PC, iPhone, iPod Touch and most Nokia and Android devices.
• Two Australian tech companies were featured in this year’s Tech Crunch Crunchies award. Sydney company Atlassian were finalists and got the runners up award in the Best Enterprise App category, while custom shoe site Shoes of Prey were finalists in the Best Bootstrapped Startup category.
• Startup BinaryPlex is seeking Twitter users to test out its new site, Twendly. Twendly is a Twitter people search engine that utilizes BinaryPlex’s HiveMind engine. On the BinaryPlex blog, the company has created some illustrations to show how Twendly allows users to search through what people are talking about, rather than people themselves, and helps to sort out who the most relevant people talking about that search term are.
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.
