New frontiers don’t come along every day, but when they do it opens up for a gold rush to get in early and stake a claim. Mobile is still one of those frontiers where there are new ideas and markets to plant a flag in and the Mobile Enterprise and Growth Alliance is doing it’s part to make sure plenty of those flags will be Australian.
According to Justin Brow, the program manager for Victoria (one of the three states the program runs in including New South Wales and South Australia), MEGA was started when mobile companies in Adelaide were hungry for staff and found a lack of eligible employees within Australia. With backing from the government and support from industry leaders, the MEGA program was launched to take entrepreneurs though an 11 week course where they team up and come out the other end with a fully-fleshed business plan to pitch. Program speakers include staff from leading Australia mobile companies such as m.Net, Asatori, and SurfKitchen.
The program just wrapped up its South Australia session with ten companies pitching to an audience of 150 (check out the list of companies formed during the session for a preview of the ideas floating around MEGA) and applications to the Victoria and New South Wales sessions close on July 24. MEGA has captured a few little snippets of their pitch night, the culmination of the MEGA experience, on its Youtube channel.
Recently, South Australia announced that patronizing the program would be a major part of it’s five year plan to improve the state’s position in the digital space. Already MEGA participants are making a name for themselves, most recently with a 2008 graduate of the program taking top honors in user experience for a phone he created during MEGA. Rhys Cooper traveled from Brisbane to Sydney every week to complete the program and ended up winning the best pitch at the end for his phone software designed for the disabled. The Doo Phone went on to win first in the Mobile User Experience Awards in London in May and now Rhys is raising capital and looking to release the software on behalf of his company, Orange Dot, in the second half of 2009.
Although MEGA isn’t free, it’s largely subsidized with government funding and scholarships are available for some attendees. However the price, around $800, is small when looking at the invaluable connections and support that MEGA offers. Applications are being accepted until July 24 for the Sydney and Melbourne programs and both teams and individuals are eligible to apply, although MEGA is fond of putting people into what Brow liked to call the three-legged stool team of business, technical and creative skill.
[...] MEGA Melbourne held the exhibition of its final projects Wednesday and MEGA Sydney will be showing off [...]