IPitch News Archive
Entrepreneurial Co-working Space Investon Launches in Sydney
By Content Manager on Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
Written by Irina Belsky
While no man is an island, entrepreneurs often find themselves working alone. Separated by a deviant way of thinking, non-standard working hours and a stubborn refusal to integrate into the mainstream, they need an alternative to the corporate workspace.
This is where co-working spaces come in. They provide entrepreneurs, freelancers, sole traders and other free agents with a collaborative work environment where they can dictate their own rules and benefit from the knowledge of other people.
Investon is the new addition to Sydney’s co-working scene. Founded by Paul Page and Steve Grant from 724.com.au, the self serviced office will open its doors this Friday.
IPitch spoke to Paul Page about Investon and the role it intends to play in facilitating business development.
New Accelerator Program Launches in Sydney
By Guest Author on Wednesday, December 21st, 2011
Written by Irina Belsky
What can Santa give your tech startup this Christmas? A new accelerator program, obviously.
Pushstart has picked the festive season to launch a three month accelerator program for early stage tech startups.
We chatted to Pushstart co-founder Kim Heras about the program.
Program overview:
Ten successful startups will receive $20 000 funding to propel the development of their business ideas, collaborate with mentors and pitch their ideas to investors during a series of demo days at the end of the program. In return Pushstart will take 8% common equity in each startup.
Startups Wanted – Startup Office Space and Struggling Table Tennis Comp
By Gareth Rose on Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
The office’s Table Tennis competition (the GLD Ping Pong Championship Cup) is struggling for players…
On a more serious note, Green Lane Digital has some empty offices and a couple of workstations which we would love to fill with worthy occupants such as startups, entrepreneurs, or related service providers.
With iPitch, 2 Angel investors, a SEO specialist, a web development firm and other startups working out of the same office, as well as string of useful startup contacts popping in and out, this is the perfect place to build your startup.
Oh, and did I mention the table tennis table?
Growing Entrepreneurship Education Will Produce a New Generation of Entrepreneurs
By Guest Author on Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
Written by Irina Belsky
Teaching entrepreneurship can benefit both budding entrepreneurs and early stage investors. Knowing how to avoid the obvious pitfalls can allow young entrepreneurs to make better decisions and come up with successful ideas, while investors may place more trust in entrepreneurs with a specialised business education.
“The whole point of teaching entrepreneurship is to help students avoid some of the obvious mistakes, so they don’t have to fail quite as often or quite as fast” says Dr. Martin Bliemel, the director of the UNSW Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Dr. Bliemel says common mistakes made by entrepreneurs include “pursuing an idea just because you feel its a good idea but not seeing if the market is ready for it, if the financials are ready for it, if you’re making enough revenue to offset the costs or if you’ve missed some assumptions.”
How to Start up - iPitch Business Workshop - Event Summary
By Gareth Rose on Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
The iPitch How to Startup Workshop was held last Friday 13th May 2011. Overall the day went very well, with a great response from the startup founders attending (see video below). The workshop was full with 20 founders, and it was great to have a small group to work with and give personal attention. We also got some useful feedback and learning about refinements for next time.
We achieved our goals for the workshop:
- Educating the founders with a clear understanding of an effective start up process
- Helping the founders to analyse their own startups (and ideas) to identify assumptions, poorly defined problems and target customers, possible business models, effective marketing and sales strategy… and more.
- To help the founders avoid the common product focused mistake of spending a lot of time and money making something no one wants. Instead to provide the founders with a clear focus on the customer, first testing and validating their business concept, and then moving forward to build out an MVP
Interestingly enough the group was mainly business skilled startup founders at a very early stage so it was good for the group to relate with each other. That said, the few technical founders attending were also able to get a strong understanding of starting up a viable business, business models, marketing and sales which can often be a failing of technical founders starting out.
Startup Weekend Melbourne - Friday 6th - Sunday 8th May 2011
By Gareth Rose on Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
With Startup Weekend’s running all around the world, Melbourne now kicks off Startup Weekend in Australia!
Startup Weekend Melbourne is on Friday 6th – Sunday 8th May 2011 at the Sensis Head Office in Melbourne.
Startup Weekend Melbourne is a 54-hour event where over the course of one weekend technical entrepreneurs and non-technical business entrepreneurs form teams to plan out and then build a web or mobile app with real commercial prospects.
The event is designed to provide experiential education for entrepreneurs of all sorts based on action, innovation and education. There’s also a very real chance participants will leave the event with a real startup to work on! Startup Weekend is a non-profit, community-building event for software developers, marketers, designers and more.
The weekend starts with participants having the option to pitch a business idea. The ideas are refined and teams are formed to work on the top ideas. The teams build out their idea into miminim viable products and commercial prototypes. Finally the weekend culminates with demonstrations in front of an audience of judges and potential investors.
Australian Startup Launch: OrionVM
By Gareth Rose on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
Australian startup OrionVM has just launched the OrionVM Cloud Platform, the fastest Cloud Storage Platform in the World. We were able to speak with OrionVM co-founder, Sheng Yeo.
iPitch: What is the biggest challenge you faced so far?
OrionVM: Our biggest challenge so far has been building the high performance storage solution as well as the command and control architecture. As we use a completely custom solution, we had to write every line of code that drives the control systems and hosting platform.
iPitch: What is the biggest highlight so far?
OrionVM: Our biggest highlight was finishing and launching the platform last week. It is a great sense of achievement to finish the product and release it after 13 months of hard work. This launch high, in combination with the performance benchmarks we have achieved have been our highlight (fastest Network-Backed Cloud Storage platform in the Globe).
iPitch How to Start up Business Workshop – Sydney – 13th May, 2011
By Gareth Rose on Friday, April 1st, 2011
Learn how to startup. Take your business idea OR seed stage business, develop it during the workshop and leave with a comprehensive strategy and the knowledge to start up.
In this full day workshop you’ll get a comprehensive education in How to Startup that has taken proven entrepreneurs years to learn…
What you’re going to learn:
Australian Startup Launch: Carmooch
By Gareth Rose on Thursday, March 31st, 2011
Carmooch is an Australian startup on iPitch. The startup has been in development for a number of months and has just launched! Check it out at carmooch.com Here is our interview with George Skentzos, founder of Carmooch:
iPitch: What problem is Carmooch trying to solve?
Carmooch: Over 90 per cent of new car buyers use the internet to research their new car purchase. But with over 268 models on offer and opinions from several different publications it can be difficult to decide on which one to buy.
Online ad spend by the automotive industry expected to grow to $3.9 billion1 by 2014 in the US alone. This is a burgeoning market which has yet to be catered for in the social space.
iPitch: What is Carmooch’s solution?
Carmooch: Carmooch takes the hassle out of comparing not only new cars but also new car reviews by collecting opinions from several professional sources as well as consumer reviews, so new car buyers make the right choice.
Carmooch will allow car makers to launch social campaigns from their own dedicated brand pages and interact with genuine consumers to add value to their new car buying decision.
With so many car makers embracing social media but struggling to develop a presence even half that of the latest reality TV star, Carmooch provides and in-built audience of genuine new car buyers and a highly flexible, generously proportioned campaign platform to interact with them.
SydStart II - back by popular demand
By Gareth Rose on Monday, February 14th, 2011
The second SydStart is on Thursday March 31st 2011. After the massive success of the first SydStart back in September, Peter Cooper has again organised this hugely popular Sydney startup event.
It’s the same format as last time, this time with an even bigger line-up:
9-10 experienced entrepreneurs talk about their experience in their own startup ventures and their lessons learnt. Guys like Kim Heras, Mike Cannon Brookes, Ric Richardson, Nic Lowe, Dean McEvoy, Phil Morle and more…
Following this is the “pitch-fest” where 10+ startups pitch for funds, resources, partners, awareness and more.
The event is an awesome networking opportunity filled with startups, entrepreneurs, students, investors, incubators and related service providers.
If you’re in Sydney at the end of March make sure you attend SydStart.
