Several events have already been penciled in for Australian cities on June 11. Click the link below for the city nearest you and register your interest now.

• Sydney
• Melbourne
• Brisbane
• Canberra
• Wollongong
• Newcastle

If your city isn’t mentioned, don’t fret. You can create your own meetup at a city near you.

Will you be attending? Post a comment and let others know. Many of the Australian meetup venues are TBC, so perhaps some of our friendly IPitch startups may be willing to share their space for night (as Yext have done in New York).

Read more about TechCrunch’s 5th Birthday Meetups here

• There’s presently a bus rumbling its way to Austin, Texas loaded with entrepreneurs and techies with mobile wifi using the trip from California to Texas to create startups. This crew is headed by a name familiar to the Australian startup scene: Silicon Beach leader Elias Bizannes. The “Startup Bus” has already made appearances on TechCrunch and Read Write Web and the “buspreneurs” are just presenting companies created on the trip are just starting to emerge including sites like DateBrowser. The companies and Elias will present to investors upon arriving in Austin for the SXSW interactive festival.

• In further SXSW news, Melbourne-based company and Tech 23 presenter QMCODES will be providing QR codes on all the attendees badges at the premiere tech event. Last year CEO Antony McGregor Dey was a panelist at the event and this year he will be moderating a panel on QR code technology featuring representatives from publisher Harper Collins and Google. 

• And in even further SXSW news, Australian company 99Designs joins a prestigious group that includes Hulu, Flicker, Foursquare and Gowalla as finalists for the SXSW Web Awards. 99Designs, which crowdsources design, is nominated for the community awards, recognizing sites that have “developed an extraordinarily active multi-user community and an exceptional following of users who assist with content development.” 99Designs will be at SXSW as part of the Victorian trade mission.

• A new coworking office has opened in Sydney and is inviting the city’s techies and creatives to come sample the space March 5. CO-WORKA is located in Dee Why and was founded by Aly McAuley, who uses a bear as the spaces logo symbolizing the urge for small businesses and contractors to come out from hibernation and socialise.

• On Australian Gizmodo last week, it was announced online DVR system myTVR has is now capable of working on Blackberries. The service started out only working with  PCs, macs, iPhones and iPod Touches and Symbian but has since opened up the service to Android and most recently Blackberry Bold. This service is only available in Sydney and Melbourne but allows viewing of DVR television over a 3G connection.

• Australian startup Effective Measure, which provides online audience measurement technology, has just raised $4 million in capital from American VC Fund Rho Ventures. Although the startup is based and created in Australia, they have offices globally and focus much of their effort on the Middle East. Last year, Effective Measure went head to head with Nielsen, the global leader in market research, over the Middle East.

• Time is running out to get involved with the next Innovation Bay dinner. You can read more in past posts on this event, but the dinner brings fresh young tech startups in front of specifically tech investors and has been a fruitful endeavor for companies like Posse. The event is hosted largely by MitchelLake, who are currently helping to cook up a major upcoming tech even for Australia. If you are interested in pitching at the event, contact Phaedon Stough here.

• A recent Australian visit from Silicon Valley blogger Esme Vos of Pajama Entrepreneur has landed coverage for several local startups. Tjoos, Topikality and IPitch member ZapMe all saw coverage on the blog.

• Most events that offer experts like these are going to charge you, but Tom and Fenn of beloved Melboure startup Adioso do it for the love. This weekend the pair will be helping to host the second Melbourne YC and Hackernews meetup. If you aren’t yet familiar with those names, Y Combinator is a unique Silicon Valley incubator and Hackernews is its active message board. Tom and Fenn are former YC alums and you can read more about their experience in Tom’s last interview with IPitch.  The even is at Match Bar and Grill at 3 p.m. on Sunday, find out more here.

• The first Australian Social Innovation Camp is creeping up at the beginning of March. The camp took 35 ideas from a multitude of disciples and whittled them down to eight topics. Much like Startup Camp, teams will come together for the weekend and spend the next two days developing a strategy around that idea and end the weekend with a presentation. Applications closed Wednesday for the March 5th event.

• In other “Camp” news another round of Startup Camp will be launching this weekend with developers, marketing and designers setting off in a mad three day dash to launch a product. Past sessions have given birth to startups such as traffic navigator iTraffic  and event planner Activity Horizon. There are still 13 positions left for graphics designers and developers, find out more here.

Dr. Katherine Woodthorpe
Katherine is the chief executive of venture capital group AVCAL, and has a varied background is in science, technology, HR, change management, government interaction and mergers and acquisitions. For several years, Katherine was the Chief Executive of the Technology Industries Exporters Group, an industry peak body she helped establish to assist technology companies improve their export performance and has also worked as a CEO mentor with The Executive Connection.
Specialties:  Climate and ecology, private equity

Dr. Susan Pond
This woman has a list of accomplishments as long as my arm. She was the first woman to be appointed to a Personal Professorial Chair in the Department of Medicine at the University of Queensland, the first woman to receive the Wellcome Australia Medal, and the first female Managing Director of a Johnson & Johnson Company in Australia. She is concurrently a Director of AusBiotech Ltd, which facilitates the commercialisation of Australian innovation.
Specialties: research collaboration with universities, bioengineering and nanotechnology, Queensland

Dr. Bruce Whan
Bruce directs Swinburne Knowledge, Swinburne University of Technology’s commercialisation unit, and is also CEO of Swinburne Ventures Ltd. Bruce is Chairman of INNOVIC, the Victorian Innovation Centre Limited, which hosts the international Next Big Thing awards and helps Victorian businesses with everything from grants to mentoring. He’s had close links with Swinburne’s Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship for many years.
Specialties: innovation, Victoria 

Nixon Apple
Besides having an awesome name that mixes the worst of American presidents with the best of tasty fruit, Mr.Apple is also the Industry and Economic Adviser for the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union.  You can read a bit more about Nixon’s feeling on Australian innovation and manufacturing in this 2006 ABC interview.
Specialties: manufacturing, government and policy 

Jan Bingley
 You know that thing called WIFI, that thing you probably use like every day? Yeah CSIRO invented most of the key parts of it and that’s where Jan Bingley works as General Manager of IP, Licensing and Technology. She also handles the company’s equity portfolio of around $100 million.That portfolio presently contains businesses like Avipep, Windlab Systems and more. You can read some of Jan’s tips on exactly CSIRO grew its portfolio in this article.
Specialties: commercialisation

Dr. Laurie Hammond
Laurie is the founder of Gold Coast incubation and investment group InQbator. InQbator has a number of tech investments including WindLab Systems, Ivolve and Mantara. He has a storied past with venture capital and seed stage investing on behalf of a number of companies. Laurie has been a member of a number of boards and committees on Australian tax, business and innovation.
 Specialties: Venture capital, Gold Coast

There may be more than four letters in “entrepreneur” but it may as well still be a dirty word in Australia. In this ABC interview retired venture capitalist Chris Golis argues that although the federal government is committed to an innovation agenda (you can see Hitler launch the policy in the above video..just take a minute..it’s worth it), they aren’t necessarily realizing the role that entrepreneurs play in making that innovation happen. Golis has a career in business and VC that spans 25 years and includes work with IBM, VeCommerce and Nanyang Ventures, now Kestrel Capital. Today he is a noted author with three books under his belt and a proponent of emotional intelligence.

The good news? Chris says Australia DOES have it’s own version of Silicon Valley and it’s in Perth. The bad news? It’s not in tech but in mining. But with both Perth and Silicon Valley, he says it’s not just the talent or mineral resource they have that make them what they are; It’s the infrastructure where at every level, from the lawyers to the accountant to the venture capitalists, everyone understands and plays the game and a successful, functioning team can be quickly put together.

In this audio interview he draws a lot on Australia’s history and offers some insight on what can be done to encourage entrepreneurialism in a country where it’s a black term.

In March a spin off of these famous live speaking sessions arrives in Melbourne in the form of TEDx, a privately organized event with speakers, video and discussions. This is the third time for the event, March 13 from 9:30 to 5 at the RMIT campus, and will include sessions from speakers education technology proponent Maurício Buchler and Metric system enthusiast Pat Naughtin.

TEDx also visits Sydney and will be held again May 22 at the Carriageworks. The speakers for the event have not yet been announced, but the organisers are still seeking sponsors and entertainment.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention TEDx is also happening in Perth this Sunday at the Scitech Discovery Centre

• When the iPad finally dropped revealing a screen that was roughly the width of a steering wheel and the ability to run any app store game, the folks at FireMint had to be excited. In their blog, the creators of Real Racing have said they are building the next generation of games for higher definition, more powerful devices….

“Some developers have expressed concerns about longer development times for iPad games compared to iPhone. For us, it won’t substantially change anything. Our background in pre-iPhone mobile phone games has given us plenty of experience in squeezing every last drop of performance out of hardware. We pushed the iPhone OS to its limits with Real Racing, which runs like a dream even on a first generation iPod touch. We’re going to keep pushing the limits of whatever hardware we develop for, and to do that we make substantial investments in our games and technology.”

• The names of the companies receiving the December round of the dwindling COMET grant includes Melbourne favorite Photo Art Gallery. This company, which has made several local appearances in the past year at Melbourne’s The Hive gathering as well as at Sydney capital raising event Innovation Bay, has created a site which allows photographers to monetize their hobby by selling images in an online community. Other recipients include Imallestate, an internet knowledge engine, and BusinessHQ, a SaaS quality management solution.

• Last week popular New Zealand-based online accounting service XEROannounced four Aussie payroll providers that would now become compatible with XERO, including startups ePayroll, Paycycle, Webpayroll and ADP.