Just a quick note to let you know that soon I will be redirecting all traffic from Technation.com.au to The Next Web Australia.
While you will still be able to contact me on my old contact details for a little while the best bet will be to start using kim [at] au (dot) thenextweb (dot) com
Hope to see you over there soon 
This is the end, my friends.
It’s with great pleasure I announce that, as of today, TechNation Australia (TNA) will no longer be updated.
Instead, I have joined The Next Web network of tech blogs as editor of The Next Web Australia (TNW AU).
The Next Web is making a concerted effort to become one of the top tech blog networks in the world. Their focus on tech news from all over the world will likely see them successful in their attempts.
To everyone who helped make TNA the best tech-startup focused blog in Australia, I’d like to say a huge “Thanks”. That goes to the writers who helped kick things off in the early days, Geoff Evason, Mike Watkins and Lee Goodman; everyone who read the blog regularly and gave me encouragement through comments in person and on the site; and all the entrepreneurs who had the courage to speak with me about their projects.
The move to TNW AU does not mean that your efforts in helping to grow TNA were a waste. Rather, it builds upon them. The Next Web Australia will bring much greater local and global awareness to the Australian tech startup scene, which can only be a good thing for us all.
In addition to being posted on the TNW AU, most posts will also be posted on the main TNW.com site. The difference in audience numbers between TNA and TNW is significant, to say the least.
For now, my contact details are the same so make sure you send an email to editor at technation dot com dot au if you’d like me to cover your project or have any news you’d like the world to hear about through TNW AU.
As a final note I’d like to ask 2 things:
They’re only 2 small things but they’ll make a massive difference for us all.
Thank you once again, it was fun while it lasted. See you on TNW AU!
Kim
Good to see mainstream media catching up on the growth of Crowd-Sourcing and speaking with some of our favourite local tech guys, Ross “Mr Enterprise 2.0″ Dawson and Design Bay Founder and MD, Alec Lynch.
The story is a good overview of the pros and cons of the crowd-sourcing space, including the debarcle that was “iSnack 2.0″.
Dawson makes some really interesting points about the coordination barriers that have the potential to get in the way of the crowd-sourcing movement. Anyone who’s ever tried to deal with multiple suppliers on any outsourcing or crowd-sourcing site will know that sometimes it feels like it’s just not worth the effort. Interestingly, coordination of resources is exactly the reason that many companies (in the organisational, not the legal, sense) came to life. As such, it’s funny to see that no matter how hard you try, even if you move particular functions completely outside of the organisation, you can’t hide from the coordination bogey man trying to make us less efficient than we could be.
That having been said, the ability of the Internet to create efficient markets is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly and is a reason why there’s so much potential for companies like DesignBay, 99 Designs and other crowdsourcing sites, if they can get it right.
For a couple of years now, the team at WotNews (formerly Plugger) have been using semantic technology to change the way people access and use news. They’ve done it through the self-titled site Wotnews and it’s Austalian, UK and US sites, through the super-popular WeAreHunted and CelebrityHunted and through a leading edge Australian share-trading platform called Macquarie Edge.
The team has now decided to tackle one of the toughest questions in the realm of digital content at the moment - Is there a sustainable business model for news in an era when people don’t want to pay for content the way they used to and supporting industries like advertising and classifieds have been dominated by new, more efficient players?
Their new project, TeamStream, is a new service developed to try and answer that question,
I managed to catch up with TeamStream Founder and Lead Programmer, Stephen Phillips, for his first official interview on the service and to speak about the current state of the news industry, the challenges his team faced and how they plan on changing the way that value can be created around news.
So Stephen, thanks for taking the time. Can you talk me through TeamStream ?
Hi Kim, well put simply, TeamStream is a better way for companies to read the news.
It provides a collaborative, team-based approach to news reading combining a proprietary semantic search platform with the latest in social technologies. To do that, TeamStream filters thousands of news sources in near real-time, letting users create custom channels ensuring they receive the news they need. The TeamStream platform then allows users to put the news to work within their organisation and seamlessly share, annotate, discuss and save it as they go. This process unlocks the collective intelligence within enterprise providing the social and technological tools to maximise its relevance, timeliness and value.
In all we use 3 different ways to create value around providing news:
How did you guys make the progression from WotNews to TeamStream?
Wotnews is a single user experience. Users can search and track topics in the news from a large variety of Australian news sources. The site has done extraordinarily well for us winning two Australian Web Awards this year for best news site and growing steadily to around 700k visitors per month and thousands of registered members.
At the start of the year we launched US () and UK versions of the site to provide the same experience but with localised content. While the sites share the same functionality, they have distinct content sources.
During the year we also launched a music news site called We Are Hunted (WAH) and a celebrity news site called Celebrity Hunted based on the same Wotnews architecture. WAH has enjoyed amazing success and really opened up our tech to a global audience.
All of these sites are free to use and we plan to keep it that way.
A few months ago we commenced a development project to bring the content from these disparate sites together into a single service that we could monetize effectively.
What we noticed looking at the member activity across the sites is how many users from the same organisation were using our sites to track topics in the news. We could see a lot of duplicate activity and sensed that a lot of collaboration was happening, quite ineffectively via email, outside our system. We could see that there was an opportunity to provide tools to allow people from the same organisation to read and share news much more effectively. This would both save time and better capture the knowledge being expressed in a form that could be saved, searched and shared with others across the organisation.
So that outlined our goals for TeamStream.
And what are those goals?
So in summary, the goal of TeamStream is to make your staff more effective news consumers. Simply, it provides a better way for companies to read the news. While it builds on the Wotnews architecture, it’s focus on community and collaboration make it quite distinct in it’s purpose.
The first task of bringing the content together was primarily a technical challenge given the volume of news to be aggregated and the requirement to deliver the news as fast as possible. We need to visit 10,000+ news publishers worldwide and retrieve and process their news articles within minutes of them being published. We have invested a lot of energy into this feature and we are told by independent sources that our delivery is faster than anyone else, even the big guys like Reuters.
The second task of building a closed network for users is less technical and more of a user experience challenge. Luckily several sites have established proven models for doing this effectively. We borrowed a lot of ideas from Twitter, LinkedIn and Spotify. The key idea is to make it as easy as possible for users to find other news readers inside their organisation and share and comment on what they are reading. So we adopted the Twitter ‘follow’ model to make this happen. Users can follow each other and read what their colleagues recommend and comment. Users can follow individual publishers to receive all the news they publish. And finally users can follow and create custom news channels to track specific topics, people or organisations in the news. These custom news channels are very powerful. You can setup a custom boolean search expression combined with a bunch of filters to get exactly the type of news you are looking for.
The custom channels provide the basis for the third key TeamStream feature, rich News Analytics. Once you create a channel, TeamStream collates rich analytics similar to a media monitoring service. You can use these numbers to benchmark news activity across time and export the data for internal anlaysis alongside internal metrics such as media spend.
For most users the collaboration features will provide the most value. For marketers and PR users, the analytics will provide the most value.
And what about Google and it’s renewed efforts in the News space. Are you worried about that?
We love that Google continues to innovate the news experience. Their new Fast Flip product and their new news customization features are great examples of continuous innovation. While the publishers are focused on charging for content, it is the aggregators who are trying to innovate, experiment and actually improve the news experience. Trying to take it to a new level that people will actually pay for.
A lot of people comment to us that we must be crazy to be in the same space as Google. Everyone knows they have more money and smarter techs than nearly anyone else, but we don’t think that matters. The great thing about the web is that it is a battle of ideas and execution, not money. If it was, the big companies would always win, but they don’t. A solid idea and a small group of talented developers prepared to innovate aggressively can compete with any company in the world.
Google News is a great single user news experience. Wotnews is our competitor in this space. And we think our Australian site, in Australia at least, is a superior product mainly due to our local knowledge. They are much stronger in the USA but we are growing fast.
TeamStream’s competitors are companies like NewsGator. They have been going great guns recently with their Microsoft SharePoint integration. That is the market we are going for. We think our product is faster, simpler and more web-like in its execution. We also have the advantage of essentially free marketing to the near 1 million business news readers who visit our network of news sites each month.
It seems that the idea of paywalls or some other sort of paid service is becoming popular again in the eyes of large news organisations . How will that affect TeamStream?
We really hope that the publishers will start charging for news content soon. They should be rewarded for the value they create just like everyone else. It makes it difficult for news aggregators like us to charge for something that is essentially free. Once the publishers start charging, aggregators will be able to develop new payment models to share in the value. With We Are Hunted we have been fortunate to work with the guys from Spotify and have seen how they are transforming the music space. After a decade of mostly failed monetization efforts, the Spotify model of flat monthly subscription for all you can eat music may save the industry.
We think that news publishers, instead of calling aggregators names, should be working together to develop an open model for syndicating content and thereby creating a new marketplace for the next generation of news apps to emerge.
If the big publishers start doing what the record labels are doing right now, and start licencing news aggregators to resell their premium content for flat monthly fees, I believe we will see an explosion of new models for enhancing the news experience. This will save and grow the industry into the future. The lesson from the music industry is for publishers to not try and solve the problem themselves, but create a marketplace for the web entrepreneurs to innovate and solve the problem organically for them.
We are talking to publishers now trying to get them to let us sell premium versions of their content. We will continue to move in this direction aggressively. Once the paywalls go up, we want to be in a position where we have some of the world’s largest companies paying us a monthly subscription to consume news. We will then be in a strong position to charge extra to sell premium content.
And what are you guys are planning on charging for the service?
In December 2009 TeamStream will come out of its Beta phase and launch as a monthly subscription based service.
Pricing will depend on team size though the overall cost will be less than $1/user /day with additional discounts for larger networks.
Cool, well thanks for your time, I appreciate it, and all the best with TeamStream
No problem. Hopefully we’ll have lots of good news for you in the near future
ChipHacker has launched a knowledge sharing community with the aim of bringing electronics hackers from all over the world together to share their skills and experience.
The site is another to use StackOverflow’s StackExchange as its platform (TheNextWeb recently ran a story on another site using it, Startups.com). I have to agree with Zee’s comments in that article in that ChipHacker looks somewhat soul-less at the moment.
On that note, I wonder about the whole Stack Overflow phenomenon and whether or not it’s success is due more to the fame of its founders, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, than the kick-ass-ness of the platform. Don’t get me wrong, I like the platform and how it’s built, but does the site justify the hype? I guess time will tell.
Getting back to ChipHacker, there’s a relatively small but growing community interested in electronics-hacking, whether robotics, arduino or something else, so it makes perfect sense to have a niche site for them to share knowledge.
The site is run by Marcus Shappi, a Startup Camp Sydney veteran and owner of Little Bird Electronics, so you’d expect there to be some sort of online retail play on the site once the traffic picks up.
In the end though, anything that helps promote user-led innovation, whether hardware or software based, is a good thing. So here’s hoping the site can get some traction and play its part in the creation of some cool stuff for us all to play with.
Shmotter, a Melbourne-based start-up, is looking to take on the world of virtual fashion styling by helping wanna-be Rachel Zoe’s perfect their look for the day without having to put a single thing on.
The site allows users to select clothes from their large catalogue, mix and match them with accessories, create outfits and collages, then post those up on the site for discussion and rating.
If you’re thinking that sounds like the leading site in the space, Polyvore, then you’d be right. Shmotter takes it to another level, though, by allowing users to scan in and upload their own clothes, creating a virtual wardrobe. Gone are the days of having to stand in front of a cupboard full of clothes to decide what to wear. With the virtual wardrobe you can do it all online then pull out only the pieces you need. On top of that there’s the benefit of being able to create an archive of all the clothes you have in various bags, boxes and rooms.
Shmotter is looking to take the whole virtual styling thing to another level by moving more heavily into the retailing space. They already get commission from every sale of clothes on the site, but word on the street is that they’re looking to partner with larger sites, like the super successful Net-A Porter.
It’s an obvious next step and one that could help propel this startup from fun fashion site to serious web fashion player.
AVCAL, the peak industry body for the Australian VC and PE industries has released its 2009 Yearbook and things look grim, at best.
Katherine Woodhope, AVCAL CEO , says that while the PE sector is powering along and now rivals that of Europe and North America, she’s hoping the yearbook:
acts as a wake-up call to the risk of near extinction of our VC sector
Ouch.
Key takeaways from the report include:
AVCAL doesn’t report on exits specifically for VC but that might just be because there’s nothing really to report on.
I know last year was a tough year for VCs all around the world, but the local VC struggles go beyond that. There are a bunch of smart VCs and Tech Angels in Australia who are being held back by structural deficiencies, many of which have been addressed by a recent paper developed from the thoughts of over 30 people involved in the Australian tech startup scene.
That having been said, the start-up scene in Australia has never been stronger and the difficulty in sourcing seed-funding and beyond means that founders are much more effective at creating bootstrappable (is that a word?) businesses, which is a good thing.
Aussie start-ups continue to do well both here and overseas (for those who don’t know many Aussie start-ups , watch this space, you’ll get to know many of them soon ). If AVCAL’s report is anything to go by, it looks like Aussie start-ups will be relying on themselves to maintain that success for quite some time to come.
The last time MC Hammer toured Australia it was the early 90’s, Hammer Pants were all the rage, and I had ambitions of being just like his arch-enemy Vanilla Ice.
Almost two decades on, Hammer (can I call you that, MC?) is returning to our southern shores, this time not as a performing star but as an Internet star. His social dancing startup, DanceJam, will soon be acquired for $3 Million if you believe the rumours and, according to WeFollow, he is the 34th most popular person on Twitter with over 1.6 Million followers.
Hammer is coming to Australia to launch the new Xbox exclusive karaoke title Lips: Number One Hits. The game features his chart topping smash hit ‘U Can’t Touch This‘. He’s also going to be demonstrating the new Xbox Twitter feature.
NSW Police have never really seemed to me to be the most hi-tech force in the world but that’s starting to change. The boys in blue are leading the charge with a YouTube channel and Twitter presence in an attempt to embrace social media as part of their policing strategy.
The Police force is looking for help to nab crims by twitter-linking to CCTV videos and images of “people of interest” in various cases. The YouTube Channel also has footage of Police raids and the Twitter account is being used for things like public service announcements.
It doesn’t take a genius to realise that for some components of policing, particularly related to identifying people of interest, the social web has massive potential. It doesn’t even have to be a manual process, I mean how long before the Police try to friend everyone on FaceBook then use facial recognition technology to ID people through their accounts?
It should also be said that not only is the whole thing a step in the right direction for policing it’s incredibly addictive, too. Every time I see a tweet about a police suspect in my activity stream I can’t wait to jump on and see if I know them. The videos are also fun to watch. It’s kind of bland TV, rather than highly edited COPS-style programming, but for some reason the lack of hype in the videos make them even more watchable.
NSW isn’t the only Police Force that has embraced social media and it certainly won’t be the last. For now, though, it’s the best example I’ve seen.
John O’Sullivan, the leader of the team that pioneered the high-speed wireless network, has finally been officially recognised and rewarded by winning the Australian Prime Minister’s 2009 Prize for Science. Apart from the prestige, the prize comes with a AUD$300K (~US$280K) grant.
The prize was announced last night, some 20 years after O’Sullivan started work on using “Fourier Transforms” to reduce signal echo in radio communications.
The end results of his work were patents awarded to his employer, the Australian Government-funded research organization CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation), for the 802.11a,g and n protocols. That’s right, every time you access the Internet or a LAN via WiFi, you can thank O’Sullivan for making your life a squillion times easier.
Earlier this month it was reported that the CSIRO had entered into an approximately US$185 Million out of court settlement for patent infringement with 14 of the world’s largest tech companies. There’s still more to come as new organisations license the technology but other than today’s prize O’Sullivan won’t see a cent.
It’s because of this it’s great to see O’Sullivan recognised for his achievements.
