As we’ve mentioned previously, the Future of Media Summit 08 put on by the Future Exploration Network is being held simultaneously between Silicon Valley and Sydney.

Social media tools are in full use, with a healthy Twitter backchannel and video streaming.

Check out the Summize feed of #fom08, or watch the videos by Pollenizer and Stilgherrian Live.  Check back here for updates and posts after the event.

Just came across buzz.org.au.

The site is ugly as hell (part of the reason I’ve kept their logo so small here) and is a social network backended by Ning’s white label social networking platform.

The pitch appears to be no ads, no apps and a commitment to donate to charity based on the number of members it gets.

In reality it’s a social marketing tool for GMHBA - a private insurance company run out of Geelong, Victoria.

That may not sound too exciting, but they appear to be doing well. Their stats say they have over 7500 members.

Based on the suggested valuation models for social networks put up on TechCrunch a few weeks ago, and assuming that all their users are Australian, their 7500-odd members would value the site at over US$1.1 Million (or over AUD$1.13 Million)

That however, is based on the average annual advertising spend per Aussie Internet user being US$148. At first glance their no-advertising policy would severely affect this, but by using the site as a marketing play for their own private health insurance services they might still be able to do OK.

A quick glance at GMHBA’s policies shows the cheapest annual health cover rate is $368.25 (assuming that the users of Buzz aren’t over 65) for a single with the lowest coverage. Using the NIB as a guide though, where their 328,000-odd policy holders helped them to revenues of approximately $666 Million last year, or $2025 per policy-holder, there’s reason to suggest that each policy holder should be valued much higher.

Either way, i think it’s safe to say that each conversion returns GMHBA between 2.5x and 13.5x the annual revenue of a traditional social network user. Not bad.

It’s all guesswork here as to what the reality is, what the conversion rate is, how profitable each type of revenue stream is etc. but the point is that there are business models for social networks, that can exist outside of 3rd party advertising, for companies who are willing to experiment.

Should be interesting to see how this one progresses. 

More news for Australian MySpace app developers with the announcement at today’s MySpace DevJam in Sydney of the “IGNite the Site” Competition.

Essentially, you build a MySpace app that promotes and captures the spirit of leading gaming site, IGN, and you go into the running to win $4K and the notoriety associated with being showcased to over 2.5 Million myspace users (don’t forget to mention TechNation Australia if you win!)

It’s a slick cross-promotional move by FIM, owner of both MySpace and IGN, and a pretty good reason for  developers to move into the MySpace / Open Social app development space.

You can get more news from the MySpace Developer Platform Australia page.

Things continue to move ahead for restaurant booking service, Booking Angel. Last month they partnered with Boorah.com to rollout their service to over 30,000 restaurants in the US and just a couple of weeks ago they were named at number 7 in the Top 100 Aussie Web 2.0 apps list.

Now CEO & Founder Dean McEvoy is heading off to the States to see if he can raise a formal A round from US investors. They’ve raised funds from an incubator / Angels in Australia and through government grants, so a formal A round sounds like the next logical step.

Dean is going to be blogging about the investment process over on his blog, so it should make some interesting reading over the next few months for those startups curious about how it works.

Data Portability champion and Faraday Media co-founder Chris Saad has recently announced he’s on his way back to Australia after a 6-month stint in the U.S

Data Portability is one of the most important movements in the world of online tech at the moment, so to have Chris back in the country, if only for a couple of months, is a real bonus.

With some luck he’ll be doing the meetup/summit/TechNation interview circuit and updating us on his projects and thoughts about the future of the web.

Welcome home, Chris.

The Future Exploration Network’s Future of Media Summit 2008 is coming up on July 15th (or July 14th if you’re playing along from the Silicon Valley video link). The line up of speakers is impressive, so if you’re in the mood for avoiding the Youth-fest in Sydney next Tuesday you might want to check it out.

To give you a head-start, Ross Dawson has released a Future of Media Report 2008.

As with most of Ross’ stuff, it’s definitely worth a read whether you’re going to the summit or not.

Time is almost up (a couple of weeks left) for nominations to the Anthill magazine Cool Company Awards for 2008. They’re running a little short on nominees for the Online Business award, so if you think you, or someone you know, should be nominated, then head over to the awards information page.

The inaugural Cool Company Awards were launched in February 2006 as a way for Anthill Magazine to celebrate Australian organisations that are doing things differently or defying convention to bring about positive change.

So, what does this mean?
Cool Companies manage to stay one step ahead of the rest. They breed leaders who are rule-makers and rule-breakers. They are organisations that aspire to be admired. They are trend-setters in attitude and action. Quite simply, they are cool.

Anthill has been really supportive of the tech startup industry in Australia so this would definitely be a good award to put in your portfolio.

Let us know if you nominate someone (even if it’s yourself) so we can keep track of how they go.

As part of the rebuilding process, we’ve added a new feature.

You’ll now notice that at the bottom of every post is a button that will allow you to share TechNation Australia posts with friends or with your favourite social news/bookmarking site.

If you hover over the button all the options will appear.

We’ll be adding some more features soon but let us know if there’s something in particular you’d like to see on the site and we’ll see what we can do

Wow. The drama continues. But look out…the monster is back

So here’s what happened.

We suffered a hardware failure at our host – MediaTemple – and then endured their inability to do anything over the Independence Day weekend.

It took them 4 days to get us back up and running. Nothing was recoverable.

Oh yeah, and all this while I was away in Melbourne and our main tech guy was on a surfing safari somewhere.

Luckily we had tested our backups…oops.

So anyway, we’re now slowly rebuilding the site content. It won’t be perfect. We’re missing some images and past comments have gone for good. Other than that though, we should be more or less back to normal.

That having been said, if you sent us an email over the past couple of days, could you please resend it. Mail went down as well

Thanks for your patience and for the support of all the people who contacted us one way or another to ask if everything was OK.

To answer the most popular questions – “no” we haven’t quit, “no” we weren’t shut down and “no” we haven’t been acquired by Google (wtf?)

Now – it’s time to get back to business

With women being a small, yet influential, group in the Aussie tech scene it’s good to see the girls getting together and doing their thing.

There was the recently held Geek Girl Dinner and now Catherine Eibner has kicked off the Geek Girl Blog Podcast over at The Podcast Network.

There’s a quick summary over at Bronwen Clune’s (of Norg fame) blog. It’s worth taking a look because it has names and links to more info on some of the women leading the charge in Oz. 

Hopefully these initiatives will help to bring more women into the industry. If the current crop are anything to go by, that will only result in more successful tech startups for Australia.