Good news for local bargain hunters. Price Comparison site, Tjoos, is launching an Aussie version of its site soon.

Tjoos is interesting in this space because, unlike most other comparison sites that only compare prices from stores that have affiliate programs (i.e. stores that pay referral commissions), Tjoos compares as many sites as possible irrespective of whether they’ll get a commission or not.

Tjoos is also interesting because although it’s Sydney-based, both founders, Bart Jellema and Kim Chen, are “new-Australians” and the site has grown by focusing on the US and UK markets.

More details as the launch date is confirmed.

So Mike came down and spoke at OpenCoffee this morning. He covered some really interesting points about being a startup and growing your business and also spoke about some of the things he likes to see in companies he invests in as an Angel. Below is a summary of the talk: -

• Some Numbers From Atlassian

- 11,500 customers
- Customers in 104 countries
- Approximately 200 employees
- Revenues of approx $4m / month
- Offices in Sydney, San Fransisco and Poland, soon to be one in Amsterdam and some other extra people working in other cities around the world.

• Timing is Crucial

Mike actually started a social bookmarking app several years before market leader delicious. While Delicious proved the idea was valid, the timing was wrong and the project was not the success that it may have been years down the track. Here’s a link to a blog post Mike suggested we read from Delicious competitor Blink’s founder Ari Paparo about why Blink failed. Interesting stuff.

• Look for Scale

Software is clearly scalable, so they had a product that fit this description. The next thing the guys did was to look at what wasn’t scaling – i.e. support and sales – then make that as scalable as possible. This included building in features like self-correcting software and driving the sales engine through their website.

• Measure

While you should be careful not to be crushed by numbers, measurement of certain aspects of your business is critical for success. Mike suggested that all start-ups should be able to nominate 3 metrics, immediately upon being asked, that are critical to their success. These may change over time and revenue shouldn’t necessarily be one of them. For instance one of the Atlassian team’s metrics was downloads, then they realised that installs, not downloads were more important, so they changed the product around to be able to measure actual installs. When you have these metrics, make sure they’re automated and keep a close eye on them.

In addition to the business metrics, you should be setting measureable goals for strategic plays – i.e. try something and know when it’s not working. You should also be able to measure employee performance so you know when people are doing well and, just as importantly, not doing well.

• Look after Staff

Atlassian has worked hard to build a great working culture. There are the usual tech-ish perks of free beer, pizza, a cool office, flexible hours, but then they also give people 5 paid days off a year to do charity/social work.

Another way of looking after good staff is to fire under-performing or unhappy staff quickly.

• If you’re looking to raise capital, go overseas.

Raising capital in Australia is notoriously difficult. The VC industry here is realtively risk-averse and that makes it difficult to get what you need. Mike stated that the best money you can spend when trying to raise capital is $2000 on a ticket to San Francisco where you’ll double the odds of being funded.

He also mentioned that the recently ended Commercial Ready scheme was one of the worst things that happened to the Australian Tech Startup Industry. We didn’t go too deep into this. (Maybe someone wants to offer a suggestion as to why Commercial Ready may have been so bad)

If I missed anything or anyone had an interesting personal chat with Mike that you think would be relevant to the group please put the details in the comments.

Other than that, it was a really good turnout for another guest speaker (the last one was Mike Culver from AWS) and again proved that there is a real desire within the community to hear from people that have been there and done it. A big thanks to Mike for his time and for giving what was, from all feedback to date, an excellent talk.

Atlassian founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes will be doing a guest speaking spot at Sydney OpenCoffee Meetup tomorrow morning. You can find out the details HERE.

The format will be a 15 minute talk about how Atlassian went from a local startup to an International company with more than 10,000 customers and $3million in monthly sales.

After the brief talk there will be an open Q&A session.

This will be a good chance to pick the brain of someone that’s been there and done it, so try to make it if you can.

A little while ago I had a chat with some single friends that got me thinking about online dating. Not participating (my wife would kill me), but the industry itself. For the maturity of the industry and the amount of dollars around it there still appeared to be a couple of things my friends were dissatisfied with – the look/feel of most sites and the trust issues around meeting people online.

The other day I met Sally Watts from Meet My Mate and I think I may have found something that will change how my friends feel.

Meet My Mate is an Aussie dating site that recently “launched”. I use the term launched lightly because at the moment it looks like they have about 50 users. That having been said, there’s enough there, both at the moment and in Sally’s plans, to get me excited about its potential.

The most obvious thing about the site is the hot UI. Sally comes from a design background and you can tell. Compared to the other dating sites I’ve looked at, this thing is miles ahead in terms of unsleezyness (is that a word?) and simplicity.

When you move on to using the site things are also very interesting. The basic premise of the site is you and your mates work together to both build your profile and to look for people that you might be interested in (or that might be interested in you). The whole referral idea is an interesting one as it’s how we tend to meet people offline.

Now, it should be noted that online social dating isn’t a new idea. For instance, the Meet My Mate concept is somewhat borrowed from a similar site in the UK and TechCrunch recently ran an article on another social dating site called Engage. On top of that more general social apps like facebook/myspace etc. have always been used by a large amount of people as quasi-social dating apps as well.

That having been said Meet My Mate works a little differently. Rather than adding a social layer as a feature, it’s a core part of the sign up process and of the site itself. This really helps with the trust issues around the type of people you’re meeting (and even the friends you’re eventually going to have to hang out with if you hook up)

Having spoken to Sally I know some big plans are also in the works. The first plan is an upcoming promotional campaign to get more users. The second is to finish developing and release some unique features that will truly differentiate Meet My Mate in this space (I can’t say too much but one exciting feature that Sally spoke about is mobile related and uniquely addresses one of the concerns I mentioned above – trust). The third is to introduce new revenue streams.

It won’t be easy to succeed in this space, but if the Meet My Mate team can even do most of what they’re planning it should be happy days.

When the federal government announced their 2008 budget there was one part that caused a fair bit of disappointment in the community. The Commercial Ready grant program has been closed and no new applications are being considered.

The Commercial Ready and Commercial Ready Plus grant programs offered to match existing funds . for development and commercialization of innovative technology. They were among the best government grant and tax concession programs available for startups in Australia. Others include the COMET grant, the R&D Tax Concession, and the EMD Grants. Up to 30% of the recent Commercial Ready grants went to start-up companies, so the closing of the program will certainly be felt.

Those companies who were in the process of applying for such a grant received a letter stating the following:

As part of the 2008 Federal Budget the Government has decided to close the Commercial Ready/Commercial Ready Plus program to new applications. You are therefore advised not to develop your application any further.

I appreciate that you have put a significant amount of time and resources into developing your application.

The application required a lot of planning and forecasting. Hopefully those that were in the middle of the process have found value within the planning process itself and do not feel their time has been wasted.

It’s not all bad news though. The government is currently conducting a National Review of Innovation which will hopefully result in new programs to replace Commercial Ready.

One thing I’d like to see is the creation of an incubator fund similar to the Innovation Investment Fund (IIF). If the government can encourage the development of a few strong incubators, it will have a significant impact on the tech startup community throughout Australia.

Internet startups often only require small amounts of capital to get moving and more often need to lean on some experience and advice to help shape the direction of a good idea and deal with common issues. Venture Capitalists are usually beyond the scope of most of these startups. Incubators, such as YCombinator in California, are important for internet startups because they offer early money and advice. The presence of these Incubators in Australia would no doubt increase the number and success rate of startups. This would really help the startup community flourish.

Is it possible that a country like Australia, with such poor Internet speeds (thanks Sol) can produce a video web service startup that’s ready to take on the world?

I recently caught up with Rex Chung from RoRCraft, a team of 3 Ruby on Rails developers based out of Sydney, and he seems to think they can do it.

Rex and his team have developed a video conversion web service called Ankoder. By using Ankoder’s API and code libraries, developers will be able to easily integrate user generated video functionality into their website. Not only is the development and integration pain taken away but site admins will still be able to maintain control over the whole process. Ankoder is built on top of Amazon’s S3 and EC2 Web Services so scalability and robustness shouldn’t be an issue.

The use case the Ankoder demo site highlights is a scalable mini YouTube site. However, with commercial use rates to be “very cheap”, according to Rex, I think it’s more likely they’ll succeed through volume, i.e. lots of sites (both small and large) using their service, than through someone attempting to dethrone the king of video.

As a proof of concept you can use the Ankoder online file converter. It’s an easy way to convert and download youtube files to a wide range of formats that you can watch outside of the browser or on other devices.

In a little trial, it took 5 mins to convert and download my favourite 8 minute Anderson “The Spider” Silva highlight reel from YouTube to 3gp for my mobile. Impressive stuff for a web service.

I can’t comment on the API and code libraries as yet (I’ll have to have a further play around with the service), but there are a couple of small issues I can see with the video conversion demo, the biggest of which are the potential copyright issues around downloading videos off YouTube. YouTube’s Terms specifically state, “you will not copy or distribute any part of the Website in any medium without YouTube’s prior written authorization”- but then again, when did YouTube ever really care about Copyright or Terms of Service/Use?

There are a few players in this space – Rex highlights Twistage, Fliqz and Hey!Watch - but I still fail to see any reason why Ankoder can’t succeed.

There’s still a bit to go, but the guys have the skills and the experience to make it work. Hopefully we’ll have more good news to report in the near future.

CeBIT Sydney 2008 is here and amongst the special guests is Dot-Com and Web 2.0 entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. I had the chance to catch up with Jason for a few minutes in between some of his more formal press interviews.

Jason actually started off his career in New York, a place that Paul Graham claims can’t replicate Silicon Valley and, as such, is the wrong place for tech startups to start. It was because of this, and the fact that in the end Jason did succeed, that I was particularly interested in hearing his thoughts on whether or not Australian’s were really at a big disadvantage when it came to creating successful tech startups.

I felt the main message Jason wanted me to take away from our talk was that the days of needing to be in Silicon Valley are over…kind of.

Instead, there are 2 things that are critical to success in the tech startup industry. Much more critical, that is, than simply being in the Valley: -

1. Do something that adds value
2. Have good networks

The first point is kind of obvious, so I won’t dwell on it too long. One interesting note, however, is that Jason said he believes that companies that create value can overcome any obstacle, such as a lack of tax incentives for early stage investments, or a lack of Government support, or distance (sound familiar?). I will dwell on this point because I think too often in Australia we’ve been guilty of whinging about the environment rather than focusing on creating products and services that create real value. This is a wake up call from someone who is very heavily involved in the global tech startup industry - less talking, more doing.

The second point is also really interesting. What Jason said was that if you’re a young entrepreneur starting off, without any networks in your domestic market, then maybe going to Silicon Valley and spending a year there is a good idea. Other than that, the more business networks you have wherever you happen to be, the less leaving becomes a necessary option.

Make sense? I think so.

It also ties back into the first point by getting people to focus less on the Silicon Valley dream and more on creating valuable products and services that meet market needs. In many cases, those market needs should be local market needs simply because, for most of us, those are the needs that we are best equipped to understand and address.

I should say that this doesn’t mean “don’t think global”. What it means is that if you work hard to create value by meeting local needs then a couple of things could happen - the first is that you build up a good local business, the other is that the local needs you’re trying to meet are cross-cultural and you can start to build a more global presence.

It was only a few minutes with Jason, but I think it put a lot of things into perspective.

TechNation Australia is a technology news, review and analysis site with a focus on startups and Internet companies in Australia.

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