Last week I gave a brief introduction to the Commonwealth Government’s new Climate Ready grants scheme. This week I’ll talk about getting started in the application process.

Before even thinking about applying for a Climate Ready grant the best thing to do is have a look at the sample application form, customer information guide and eligible expenditure guidelines which can be downloaded from the AusIndustry’s Climate Ready site. If reading those documents doesn’t scare you off then the first step in the application process is to submit a “customer enquiry form” available from the same site. I found the form relatively easy to fill out and submitted it on 31st July. A few days later I was sent a CD containing an application form. Then an AusIndustry customer service manager (CSM) contacted me to discuss the project and to inform me that if I want to get into the first round which closes on 4th September I’ll need to submit a detailed draft application by the beginning of next week. The pressure’s on.

Because I was already in the system from previous contacts with AusIndustry I didn’t have to provide too much extra information to the CSM but an applicant new to the system might be required to have a face-to-face meeting with AusIndustry people before they are given the application form. They seem to be keen on ensuring only applications which are competitive are submitted.

Even though the application process is a cut down version of the old Commercial Ready scheme it is still a lot of work. Because I’m new to marketing and commercialisation I’d estimate I’ve spent about two months work gathering and refining the information needed for a grant application. I’m doing all the work myself although some applicants will use a consultant to help them draft the application and to act as middle-man between the applicant and AusIndustry. Total consultant fees vary widely from about 5% to 20% of the grant amount so thoroughly check what exactly it is they do, i.e. how much work do they put in and how much will they require the applicant to do. One disadvantage of a consultant is the extra layer of communications which can slow down the whole process. An experienced mentor could be just as good as a consultant.

Another source of good advice is AusIndustry itself as the CSM will usually return the draft application with feedback about how it can be improved. Only after AusIndustry officially accepts the application can the project spending be counted as being eligible expenditure. Although there’s still no guarantee the grant will be successful so the applicant needs to take that into account when budgeting for the project. I’ll be applying for a grant in the lower end of the scale, around $80,000. I don’t know what someone does if they can’t scrape up the minimum amount for matching a grant ($50,000), I suppose they get nothing as punishment for being poor.

Atlassian has released version 2.9 of their Enterprise wiki software, Confluence, and it’s come with some pretty cool new features.

Coolest of all is Office Connector, which allows users to edit the wiki using Microsoft Office apps. I see how important this could be in the enterprise as execs attempt to move towards better forms of collaboration while users struggle to understand WYSIWG editors, let alone wiki markup.

In addition, the team has released SharePoint Connector into production after releasing it in beta last year.

The new version confirms Confluence’s place as a leader in the Enterprise wiki space and further strengthens the ties between Microsoft and Atlassian.

With SharePoint being one of the fastest selling server products in the history of Microsoft, Office needing to find new points of differentiation to compete with the Google threat and wikis and other web 2.0 style technologies becoming more and more popular in the enterprise, I wonder if Redmond has ever considered making an offer for the Confluence division or even all of Atlassian.

It would make sense from a technology perspective and the teams worked together to bring SharePoint connector to market, so there’s already a good relationship.

hmmm…should i call it so I can say I got in first?

Anyway, you can check out all the new features including demo videos on the Atlassian blog

Well done, guys.

Well the iPhone is still selling like hotcakes; I recently heard a story of 25% penetration in one Sydney based Consultancy Company, maybe Steve Jobs’ predictions of the iPhone being as profitable as the iPod will prove true yet.

Now the iPhone has been on these shores for a little while I thought it might be a good time to hear from someone who has been through the process of developing an application for one.

So Graham Dawson from OzPda has kindly offered to share his experience of building the popular Oz Weather application:

Having been a bit of a weather geek for most of my life (and even studied it an uni), I have a keen idea of what I do and don’t like about many of the existing web-based weather services out there and when the iPhone 3G storm started brewing I was keen to see what kind of weather application Apple had built in. Well it was certainly attractively done, but the application was supplied by Yahoo!, who themselves had sourced their data from weather.com ie. a US supplier. Although this was disappointing for me, it did immediately suggest that there was an opportunity to build something more useful for us (ie. Aussies).

iPhone applications come in two varieties:

• Web applications – Web applications cannot be listed in Apple’s App Store – rather they can be found by users only by looking through Apple’s web-based listings pages (free submission), or else via good old web search.

• Native applications – These are applications which can be built only on Mac computers with Apple’s developer tools. Consequently they can take full advantage of all the whiz-bang functionality that Apple’s design geniuses have seen fit to include. These applications can be made available in the App Store and iTunes, and sold for a nominated price from which the developer receives 70% – provided that you register as an Apple iPhone developer, pay the US$99 fee, and have sufficient patience to await their approval.

The first choice I had to make was which type of application to build. Whilst a native application has many advantages (a bit sexier, lets say), it does take considerably more resources and time to build one. Also it seemed eminently reasonable to build, launch and run a web application first, and then later convert it into a native application.  So that is the course I chose.  I am glad to be able to say that I was encouraged and supported in this by Mick Liubinskas (www.pollenizer.com) from whom I also received some screen layout and design input (Pierre Sauvignon of www.pxcream.com fame).

Given that I already had PHP code in place to obtain and store Bureau of Meteorology data every 10 minutes (permission gratefully received), the main job involved the design of an attractive interface that fits into the 320 pixel available width. Two weeks later, the site was up and running: http://i.ozpda.com/ozweather/, and as I queued to buy my own iPhone from the Apple store at 6:15am on Monday morning, I was rather chuffed to be able to demonstrate it to a queue-mate on their iPod Touch using Apple Store’s own WiFi network.

Although an iPhone web application can be made available and advertised on the web like any other website, to have any real chance of success, the application should be registered with Apple, for appearance on their own listings: http://www.apple.com/au/iphone/webapps/. However, Apple’s submission process was fairly painless – and two days later the Oz Weather web application listing appeared on their site – complete with a “Staff Pick” endorsement.

Although I have an idealistic streak which has always made me shy away from adding third-party advertising to my sites, I wanted to try to at least re-coup some of the time and effort involved. Further advice from Mick at Pollenizer indicated that Google AdSense and AdMob were two good possibilities to try. AdMob have been heavily promoting their iPhone-dedicated advertising, so I decided to give them a go first. The addition of a few lines of code to the site allowed for a single ad, with a customisable background colour to be placed across the top of the page, hence not interfering too much with the visual flow of the page.

Although the AdMob advertising started well on the first day (during which a Sydney thunderstorm attracted a peak in site usage), the placement of ads available suddenly dropped to almost zero for the next two days, despite apparently having plenty of inventory.
In the meantime I decided to go ahead with a conversion and enhancement into a native application, including current weather radar images and more detailed current observations. That is one of the advantages of putting out a web app first – lots of great suggestions for new and better features for the next iteration. So keep watching this space for more news as it happens… though will perhaps not be updated quite as often as the weather data on Oz Weather!

Great news for the team at Australian social news aggregator, Kwoff, with their inclusion in the “Share this article” toolbar in stories on News Corp’s Sydney tabloid,  The Daily Telegraph.

Apparently the person who drove this inside News Digital was Chris Dafel – Nice work, Chris and well done Kwoff.

Hopefully this is the start of something much bigger.

This is Part 2 of a post on Australia and semantic apps. In Part 1, which you can find here, we were introduced to David Petar Novakovic, his work and semantic apps.

In Part 2 we look a little more closely at semantic apps and Australia’s role in the future of the semantic web

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Computation Linguistics, Semantics and Natural Language Processing (topics we covered in Part 1) are all thought to be part of what will eventually be Web 3.0 – where do you think we’re at in terms of the development of practical apps that use the theory that’s currently out there?

The Smart Web is fast approaching, these technologies are already being used in real apps. Our own platform is being used to help power some technologies being used by some rather large publishers. This will be a slower adoption by companies to stay ahead of the curve, unlike the huge boom caused by Web 2.0.

There are companies popping up that are doing search, or basically competing with Google. I don’t believe search as it exists now will create big waves in the future. Instead smaller apps that provide specific functionality built on semantic technologies will pop up. These small apps will make recommendations and suggestions and learn about us. Because browsing exposure will be made of up sequences, or mashups of these smaller technologies, we will become less dependent on search.

Examples of early versions of this behaviour have been around for a while. Widgets like Minekey that display related content in other websites, recommended friends in Facebook or even “related blog posts” at the end of a post are machines making suggestions.  Using these means there are less situations that arise where we need to search for something. Add to this the effect of collective intelligence, or “lazy web” like twitter and friendfeed, we really are needing search less and less. I don’t think Google will ever go out of business, but Peter Norvig from Google has said he thinks “semantic stuff” is not really the future. In reality they use a lot of statistical approaches in their own search technology, and the boundaries between “semantic stuff” and their own technologies are becoming less well defined, he probably wouldn’t reiterate that comment now.

There are great opportunities out there for companies to provide apps built on these technologies. Hence why I started working on a platform to provide this kind of functionality. In fact i wanted to develop the small apps, but I needed the platform in the back end to provide the smarts first.

Where do you think we’ll be in the next couple of years

The boundaries between what is recommended by humans (tagging) and what is recommended by machines will blur and eventually won’t matter any more. Ontologies and the Semantic Web will be married with smart semiotic engines, bringing the technology closer to the real information. Combined with semantic and microformat aware browsers and devices, more and more possibilities for engaging interaction will occur.  Information both online and offline will always be personally relevant, no matter where you are and what you are doing, whether it is on the web or not. Data Portability is one of the key enablers of this new wave of relevance, control and engagement.

Is Australia well-placed to be at the forefront of that world, or do we have a lot of catching up to do?

From a technology and IP point of view, Australia is up there with the rest of the world. The problem with Australia is that most of the investors don’t understand these technologies and shy away from the young entrepreneurs. On top of this, investors over here need the harder sell, something that rarely comes naturally to young technologists. I know this is a gross generalisation, but it is not far from the truth.  Think about Powerset, it would have been a lot harder for them to get funded over here, let alone make an impression in the US, but because of where they are, and the people willing to make a commitment to their vision, they sold to Microsoft for something around $100mil after getting a series A round of $12mil. Anyway, that is a topic for another post.

A lot of this stuff is still very much driven by research, Queensland University of Technology has a very strong IR/COLING cluster that is involved on the international stage. There are also strong groups at other universities around Australia.

I’d like to see the universities introducing these concepts at least as a single subject earlier in the degree, give people a taste of what is going to be driving the next generation of the web. We need more things like Silicon Beach.

Who (besides you, of course ) should we be keeping an eye on in the space, in Australia?

Faraday Media, they have the vision, technologies, prowess, momentum and support to deliver a whole family of next-gen technologies that will change the way we use the web. Keep an eye on them.

Any last comments?

Anyone interested in having a look at some technologies useful for these kinds of calculations should check out Toby Segaran’s “Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications”. A very cool introductory book.

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So there it is. A big thanks to David for taking the time to to give his thoughts. Rumour has it there will be some big announcements from Comvine in the coming weeks so keep and eye out at TechNation Australia for more news as it arises.

While we talk about how to build a better Aussie tech startup industry that will keep startups here, it might be prudent to think about what you need to do if you’re planning to head over to the US to build your business.

To help you do that, the ANZA technology network is holding a series of 1-day workshops throughout August

ANZA Technology Network is the leading independent organization connecting the Australian, New Zealand and US innovative technology sectors. Through its Gateway and Fast Track to the US programs ANZA has assisted hundreds of Australian and New Zealand companies as they enter the US market—more than any other non-government organization.

The sessions are led by leading global tech analyst Chris Shipley, Southern Cross Venture Partners and ANZA CEO Viki Forrest, so there’ll definitely be valuable information.

You can get the details here and the calendar here.

FYI – the sessions are US$495 (about AUD$560 with the plummeting Aussie dollar) and for that you get to bring 2 people from your company along. It’s not cheap, but in the context of the costs associated with trying to enter the US market it’s probably not that much.

There’s no doubting that semantic apps are going to play a very important role in the future of the web so I’m always keen to speak to people who are positioning themselves and Australia to play a key role in that future.

One of those people is David Petar Novakovic and this is part 1 of a 2 part post I’m going to do on his work and his thoughts on how Australia is positioned to compete in the future of the web.

Queensland-based Novakovic has been working on a technology called Mango that is a semantic space technology. Mango uses “high dimensional representations of concepts, people, documents, or anything, to find relationships and connections in the vast amounts of data on the web”

The technology has an interesting history having its origins in a now defunct Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) based at QUT called the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC). It was later purchased by DistIP, a company owned by Queensland based ICT incubator, inQbator, which was created to commercialise research from DSTC. DistIP subsequently spun-off the technology into a new company called Comvine, which is where Peter is working at the moment.

InQbator says that: -

Comvine is a powerful contextual search engine and semiotics platform which searches on the meaning of phrases rather than on pure text. It captures the concepts that subscribers write about and connects parties, content and groups interested in the same topics. It will form part of the new breed of web applications in the Smart Web (Semantic Web/Web 3.0).

Interestingly, inQbator also lists another semantic technology under the DistIP heading called ShEBA which it calls “a powerful and disruptive patented decision-support technology” so keep an eye out for more info on that.

But back to Comvine, Mango and my interview with Novakovic.

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Do you work by yourself or in a team? If a team who else is in it?

Recently Nathan Oorloff joined me on the team, we are working together on the code and scaling of the platform to deal with the load coming in from our partners. We are both really interested in large scale systems, so we are having a great time. I also have a great team of investors and advisors in inQbator, who fund my work and have been very supportive since day 1.

What got you into CompLing, semantics, natural language processing etc.?

Actually, my work did. I met Peter Bruza who was the information ecology project leader at DSTC through my work with trying to understand the technology. At the time I was looking around for something to do for my master’s degree and I think Peter saw that I was getting really interested in this stuff. He asked me to do my Masters by Research with him, so I did. As it turns out, Peter is a world renowned information retrieval researcher so I was really lucky to have him as my supervisor. It has been a very hard couple of years of full time work and full time research, but also has been very fulfilling. My work and research have both fed off each other, without either of them I would not be where I am now.

Can you explain, for the reader who has never heard of these fields, what they’re all about?

Generally most of these technologies target specific areas of what used to be known as Artificial Intelligence. AI became a bit of a cliche term, and a lot of the sub fields of AI rarely associate themselves with it any more. Generally machine learning, computational linguistics, natural language processing and information retrieval are fields that busy themselves with helping computers understand information in a way that enables them to help us humans do things better. Previously lots of systems used lots of rules to teach computers how to reason about things, but writing lots of rules doesn’t scale and is brittle (cat is an animal etc). These new breed of technologies are based on statistical methods that learn from real data, or high quality training data, no need to feed them manually written rules.

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In Part 2 of this post we’ll look beyond Comvine and consider semantic apps, and Australia’s role in the future of the web, more closely…

I recently had an interesting chat with Chris Carpenter about his latest
project, Widgely.

Widgely is an online document generator that allows users to build ‘templates’ that can be shared, downloaded or embedded in websites easily and quickly using the drag and drop GUI. It is still in
its early stages and has been entirely developed and self funded by Chris.

My first thoughts when I visited the site were that the website in its current release only had a small number of ready made templates and the purpose beyond creating certificates or simple invitations was not immediately obvious. This ties in with Kim’s recent post about improving the Aussie tech start up industry and the comments about adding value, the value of this service was not immediately apparent and I think Chris will admit himself that he adopted a kind of ‘build it and see’ type approach.  However he has now switched his focus to developing some commercial offerings using the technology behind Widgely to create more targeted services that can be monetized, he hopes to announce these soon, I can say that they will offer value and there is significant potential for Widgely as a ‘platform’.

The site has not been officially launched yet but even from the very small user base Chris has achieved so far he is getting some decent conversion rates and quite a few repeat users, which at least hints at a market. He has spent the last month making the code base more modular and portable for use in other projects, so hopefully we can expect to see some document based web applications ‘Powered by Widgely’ at some point in the future.

This is the first post in a line of regularly monthly posts that will provide a traffic ranking of Australian startups. This feature will be referred to as the Aussie Startup Index. It will typically be posted around the 10th of every month.

Below is the July ’08 installment of the Aussie Startup index. Sites are ranked based on an average of Alexa and Compete traffic data. Only sites that are ranked by both Alexa & Compete and that have an average ranking of < 1 million will be listed.

To get your own startup on the list just make sure that your company is listed on the Startup Australia wiki list of startups.

In my mind Perth/WA has always been a hotbed of startup activity and success in Australia. A few examples are Vibe Capital, Recommendation Ventures and Norg Media. Even Australia’s most prominent tech writer Duncan Riley used to write for TechCrunch from his home in Western Australia (before moving to Victoria earlier this year)

In that context it comes as a surprise that the man with no blog, Gary Barber, writes that people in Perth think that things often pass them by.

Whether true or not, if you’re in Perth then put the 6th and 7th of November in the calendar. The Australian Web Industry Association is putting on the Edge of the Web conference and it looks like it’s going to be a good one.

You can find out about the details for yourself at the conference site  - but let me just say that the program looks excellent and the speakers top class.

Definitley one to check out if you can.