Caught up quickly with Omnisio co-founder Ryan Junee about the acquisition.

His hands are very tied re: talking to the press - so no new details here.

However, I asked him if he had any words for Aussie tech entrepreneurs and this is what he had to say.

Lately I’m seeing a lot of Aussie entrepreneurs doing great things out here in Silicon Valley.  I hope we’ve inspired more Aussie’s to take the plunge and have a go at a startup themselves

It’s broad enough to keep him out of trouble but specific enough to show they’re still interested in the success of Aussies overseas, which is good to hear.

I’ve promised not to interrupt their champagne drinking anymore, so we’ll have to wait for more official announcements for new info.

Looks like great news for the Omnisio boys with rumours floating around this morning that Google has acquired their business for $15 Million in cash.

Omnisio, an online video play, is a Y Combinator veteran from only a few months ago . We recently ran a 2 part interview (Part1, Part 2) with co-founder Ryan Junee which went through their time at YC and their future plans.

The companies only funding was through Y-Combinator. With 3 founders they would have received $20K. YC’s usual equity position is 6% which would put their cut of the sale at approximately $900K or a 45x exit. Nice.

For the Omnisio team its an excellent result as well. Particularly considering they only started working on the project part time in early 2007 and full time in October.

The best bit? Another Aussie success story and another team of guys with experience to pass down to the rest of us.

I’ll wait for the exact details (including a formal announcement - that would probably be good too..) as well as some more info from Ryan and update you all soon.

UPDATE: The boys have posted an anouncement on the Omnisio site.

If you’re near Melbourne and sick of working by yourself on your project, why not check out the Melbourne Jelly Co-working event on Friday.

You can get all the details on the Melbourne Jelly Wiki

Thanks to Ross Hill for the heads up.

Sydney-based Internet marketing company Geekdom is getting serious about their tech incubator Geeksville with the updated site to go live tomorrow (30th July)

To quote Ian Naylor, the “Mayor of Geeksville”

Our aim with the Geeksville Incubation Programme is to take ideas in there early inception and develop them to a VC ready or cash positive state, using the huge pool of resource and specialised companies available to us within the Photon Group.

The Photon Group (ASX:PGA) he’s speaking about is a group of marketing and communications companies from all over the world. After listing in 2004 as a group of 13 companies, they now have over 50 companies and 6000 full time and casual staff.

Ian will be looking for people to enter the program soon so keep an eye out for details on the site

Tough times for Starbucks globally have filtered down to Australia with the Aussie boss announcing they’re closing 61 of their 84 stores locally.

It wasn’t that long ago that starbucks was the only multi-site company that that you could get guaranteed WiFi access at. All over the country startups were planned and worked on at various Starbucks locations and now many of those stores will be gone.

The end of an era perhaps? Then again, perhaps the era had already ended…

Some really good conversation going on over at the Silicon Beach Australia Google Group.

The question? How do we replicate silicon valley in Australia?

The answer? We probably can’t.

The problem? See Paul Graham’s thoughts on the matter. Essentially - Silicon Valley is the result of a set of circumstances that aren’t easily replicable.

The solution? We have to iterate and create not a silicon valley but something that works within the environment we have here in Australia. Who knows…maybe in 10 or 20 years there might be discussions in Silicon Valley about how to be more like Australia…

With that in mind, below are what I believe are 5 steps, off the top of my head, that WE can take to improve  the aussie tech startup industry. These are things that we can work on right now and that don’t rely on others like the Government. If things such as tax incentives, for instance, improve, then great. if not, the plan goes ahead.

Step 1. Stop Hating on VCs and Angels. It’s a poor excuse.

As is being explained in the discussion, if you have good businesses, the investment will follow. That having been said there are lots of reasons why VCs aren’t right for most tech startups. These include the amount of dollars they have to invest to make the investment worthwhile, the types of returns they’re seeking and so on.

VC’s don’t hate tech.

Neither do angels for that matter.

It’s just there’s no compelling argument for them to invest money in tech when they can get better returns from investing in mining, or blue gums. VCs and angels don’t work for charities. They invest money to to make returns. Once we can demonstrate to these groups of investors where the value in tech startups is then maybe we’ll start to see more investment. Note that by value it might be something different to money. Most of these guys aren’t dumb. Actually they’re pretty smart. Give them a genuine reason to invest in your company over another investment option and they probably will. In the meantime, my promise to you is that I will continue to do all I can to raise awareness of Aussies tech startups and their potential within these groups.

Step 2. Build businesses that create value

This one is fundamental. Businesses that create value have a far greater chance of being successful than those that don’t. Sounds kind of basic, right? Well how many people can honestly explain the value that their project/company creates?  I get the feeling that there are alot of people out there that think if they develop a site that they think is cool then they’re entitled to be bought by Google. This leads me to my next point…

Step 3 - Set your expectations correctly. 

Users and Investors will NOT come just because you build it. Be honest and ask yourself how much value your project really creates. On top of that, how much effort are you really willing to put into it? There are a whole bunch of other questions that you should be asking yourself but those two will help you set your expectations re: how much might be able to get back in terms of interest from users, first of all, and potential investors, secondly.

There’s nothing wrong with building a site to get a couple of hundred users, or focussing only on Australia, or trying to be the next Facebook. What’s wrong is when you kid yourself about the true potential of your project or fail to commit to the project and the goals you claim to have set then whinge about how the local tech scene sux cause you haven’t made a gazillion dollar exit within 12 months.

Step 4. Build awareness

The guys in the discussion are speaking about the need for a Techcrunch Australia. How’s about we just start by trying to make a good TechNation Australia?

That having been said, there’s a problem that will stop either site from taking off. There are heaps of projects out there but the vast majority of people don’t talk about what they’re doing. Most people I know and speak to hold what they’re doing way too close to their chest.

Talk guys. Seriously. Talk. 

It’s not just about sharing ideas its also about learning HOW to talk about what you’re doing - how to promote yourself and your project. Users, mainstream media and Investors (whether developers who you give equity to, angels, VC’s or Investment Bankers) want to be excited about projects. They want to believe in what you’re doing. So you need to lose this perception that self-promotion is a form of arrogance. It’s not. Figure out what it is you’re doing and why it adds value then tell as many people as possible. If it has potential, over time you’ll fine tune your message into something that gets others excited.

Step 5. More Doing

Discussion is great. Action better. At least in this case. The truth of the matter is that nothing is going to change quickly. We can lobby Government to change tax incentives, we can have lots more successful startups, we can have more funding, but it will take a while to get the underlying infrastructure up to have a sustainable, successful tech industry in Australia. That probably means that our best guys are still going to head overseas for the foreseeable future. As long as they eventually put something back - kind of like we’re starting to see with overseas football players coming back to the A-League - then we should be OK.

There are lots of people trying to do good things in this space. A lot of them are involved in the Silicon Beach discussion group. A lot aren’t. Either way, why not join them? If you don’t have time to actively start something then make sure that you at least support gtheir efforts.

 ——-

I’m sure I’ve missed some points, but those are my initial thoughts.

I’m keen to hear yours.

Often it might seem that we write a lot about mid-to-large sized startups here at TechNation Australia.

But that’s not the site’s sole focus. What we really want to do is write about Aussie tech startups of all sizes. Sometimes that’s not easy because of the lack of information out there, but from time to time we come across people that are willing to tell their story. Like Nicholas from Wedding Countdown.

I ran into Nicholas yesterday at Sydney Open Coffee and we spoke about his site - Wedding Countdown.

Wedding Countdown provides desktop and website widgets that countdown to the big day. If you’ve never been married, then you might say, so what? If you have been married, or have been involved in the wedding process, then you’ll know that (whether you’re on of them or not) there are a lot of people out there that would love something like this.

There’s a link off the site to Our Wedding Scene another site developed by Nicholas that lets people create their own free wedding site. This is similar in concept to TechNation Australia writer Geoff Evason’s super successful site Momentville.  (maybe this is another cluster forming in the Aussie tech startup industry )

In any case, wedding websites and widgets are gold because you’ve always got new, enthusastic users coming through. So far Nicholas tells me his Wedding Countdown widgets have been downloaded a few thousand times, which shows that there’s a market for this sort of thing.

We’ll keep an eye on Nicholas and some of the other plans he spoke to me about in the near future but, in the meantime, if you’re working a smaller project make sure you don’t sit back and think that we’re not interested in covering you, because it’s not true.

Just contact us and we’ll have a chat. Promise.

Two of Australia’s biggest networking plays, Zaabiz and 3eep seem to be getting cosy lately.

If you don’t know them, Zaabiz is a business networking site (think LinkedIn) and 3eep is a white label social networking platform for (sports) teams.

Zaabiz announced today that they’ve opened a Sydney office in Buckingham St, the same street 3eep is in. I’m betting they’re in the same building as 3eep as well. (funny side note and completely unrelated to these businesses but Buckingham St was the street full of brothels I was referring to here - lol)

On top of that, I was speaking to 3eep co-founder Nick Gonios this morning at Sydney Open Coffee and he mentioned that this Friday 3eep is going to officially launch their B2C play “Sports Passion“,  which they plan to use, amongst other things, as a kind of sandbox for features that they want might want to incorporate into their B2B platform.

Jump onto the Zaabiz blog and you’ll see that this week’s “featured group” is none-other than a group called Sports Passion moderated by someone named Rob Antulov :).

Not sure if it’s coincidence or by design, but hopefully this is yet another example of what I was alluding to in an earlier post when talking about clusters creating competition and cooperation that leads to competitive advantage.

UPDATE: Zaabiz founder Michael Brecht has confirmed that they are, in fact, in the same building as 3eep, which is excellent news for the local scene.

Rentoid continues to get good press all over the place. They seem to be popping up on radio (ABC Melbourne, 6PR Perth) and TV (ACA, 9am ) all over the place.

Below is the story from A Current Affair the other night in case you missed it.

 
Well done to Steve and the team for getting so much mainstream media attention. This type of thing can only help the tech startup industry as a whole.

Mobile social service aggregator Xumii has launched a blog.

Not really news, right?

Wrong!

Xumii is that rare breed of Aussie tech startup that has received VC funding. On top of raising $4.3M from CM Capital and Southern Cross Venture Partners last year, they’ve got a product in the so-very-sexy-at-the-moment mobile social networking space and they’ve got the team at Pollenizer helping them out.

Sounds like they’ve given themselves every chance at success so it’ll be interesting to see where they go from here.

Whether its massive success, down in flames or something in between, at least we’ll have a front row seat.

Keep the posts coming guys