• Sydney startup Shoes of Prey has once again been featured in international tech site TechCrunch this time offering a pair of its custom made shoes as a Valentine’s gift for some geek TechCrunch reader or their lucky better half. Shoes of Prey was finalist earlier this year for Best Bootstrapped Startup in TechCrunch’s annual Crunchy Awards.
• The winners have been announced for the Next Web Australia’s Startup Awards, and the name are a pretty unsurprising collection of all of the favorites who popped up throughout 2009 at events like Tech23, Coming to America and The Hive. In the top slot were the same two startups who stole the show at Tech 23. Winning Best new startups was music and celebrity ranking site We Are Hunted, and as runner up ticketing startups Posse took the award. Other notable winners include Perkler as best breakout startup, Mogeneration as best mobile startup and Tjoos Bart Jellema and Pollenizer’s Mick Liubinskas taking top award and runner up respectively for startup person of the year. Click here to see the whole list of awards and check out the videos below to see We are Hunted and Posse presenting at Tech23.
• In other TechCrunch news, Australian-turned Silicon Valley CEO Ben Keighran is finding success with his new iPhone app designed to help find and rate iPhone apps, Chomp. The app got a write up on the site last week and showcased Chomp’s ability to let you subscribe to people’s app activity and to get recommendations similar to the way Netflix can advise similar selections. Ben spoke earlier this year at MitchelLake’s Coming to America event and is the founder of instant messaging service BluePulse.
• After months of buildup, including a stellar Tech23 speech, savings site Myzerr has finally launched. Founder Slade Sherman sums the site up as Ning for coupon offers. Basically, the site has three aspects: individuals, communities of which they are members and finally businesses of which the communities and individuals are members of. So basically if a local cafe wanted to offer discounts to all the members of the local church, Myzerr would be the simple community site for them to do that. You can read more about Slade and Myzerr in this interview on the Myzerr blog.
I should point out one correction - Shoes of Prey is in fact a Sydney startup. As lovely as Melbourne is…