Seems that big tech companies are really liking Australia at the moment.

• Yahoo have just released a beta version of their new homepage design on the .au site (no sign of their new logo yet, though)

• The NSW Department of Education and Training has just helped Google take 1.3 Million Exchange licenses away from Microsoft by agreeing to migrate all their student email accounts to GMail.

Add to that the recent Ebay/PayPal vs Google stoush and there certainly seems to be a lot of leading edge, big tech, activity in Oz at the moment.

Who wants to predict the next big thing to go down here?

So yesterday, while the Silicon Harbour/Silicon Beach crowd from Sydney were finally off doing, it was time for the Melbourne crew to sit around talking at PubCamp

From all accounts the event was as good as the Sydney gig the other night. Best summary is probably up on Ben Barren’s blog or you can check out the details as they happened and the aftermath yourself.

Interesting to note that they partied hard into the early hours - don’t remember that happening in Sydney - but then again I don’t remember Melbourne having a Top 100 Aussie Web 2.0 list or Apple store launch the following day either - haha - just a little friendly rivalry - please no hate mail.

So the end result from PubCamp ‘08 seems to be another excellent event on the calendar and more mainsteam media coverage - especially from the tech industry’s new mainstream media hero - Renai LeMay

Should be good to see what the PubCamp crew come up with for next year. In the meantime, make sure you keep checking out the various tech calendars floating around to see what’s happening in your neck of Oz.

• http://www.startup-australia.org/events (or check it out at Pollenizer)
• http://www.techevents.com.au/