The last of the startups we need to cover from last weekend’s StartupCamp Australia is Traffic Hawk.

The Traffic Hawk team is: -

• Kim Chen
• Geoff Evason
• Brian Menzies
• Geoff McQueen
• Marcus Schappi

The idea behind Traffic Hawk is simple. So simple, in fact that it’s kind of annoying that it hasn’t been done yet.

NSW (in particular Sydney) roads suffer from a couple of problems

1. There are always traffic problems somewhere
2. There’s no easy way to get information about those problems

The Traffic Hawk team has come up with a way to easily plot current accidents and road hazards visually onto Google Maps, so that in a simple process people can check traffic conditions on their route before they head off or, if they have an iPhone or other internet enabled mobile device, check traffic conditions on the go to decide whether or not to make alternate plans if the traffic starts to get a little ugly.

In addition to the obvious traffic avoiding benefits, there’s also an argument for this being the greenest of all the startups.

“I love TrafficHawk.com.au.  In addition to being a great tool for commuters this could really make a positive impact on reducing carbon emissions caused by cars idling in traffic jams in the Sydney metro area” said Richard Hayes CEO Carbon Free Solutions Ltd.

As with all the other startups, Traffic Hawk was conceived on Friday night and launched 24 hours later. By Sunday afternoon they already had 150 visitors and numbers continue to grow by the day.

Personally I really like the service and have used it every day this week. My favourite feature, other than how easy it is to see where traffic troubles are, is the traffic cameras that are 100 times easy to access than they are on the RTA website.

The obvious question is “Where to from here?”. As a stand alone site it would be good, but there’s no reason why the information couldn’t be embedded into other sites that report on traffic or, better still, incorporated into the RTA’s site.

It looks like the Traffic Hawk team agrees. When asked about future plans, co-founder Geoff McQueen explained: -

…we’re in discussions with a few well known and popular websites about getting Traffic Hawk in front of a lot more eyeballs

I know that the team had a big meeting  with one of those websites today (not sure if I’m allowed to say who with), so they’re not just talking about this stuff, they’re actually out there trying to make it happen.

Another question is, aside from syndication/licensing of the service, where’s the money going to come from?

Brian Menzies, another co-founder, spoke a little about their revenue plans

…We see great opportunity for hyper-local targeted advertising for Traffic Hawk. We’re looking for sponsors and advertisers that want to take advantage of our localised content.

The elephant in the room is the fact that in the US Google Maps already offers traffic information for certain locations and all over the world there are traffic services built into GPS systems. That’s not to say that Traffic Hawk couldn’t compete if these types of competitors entered the market, just that they’ll have to keep running fast to make sure they get the traction needed to stave off the competition that will no doubt arrive some time in the future.

If anyone can do it though, it’s definitely this team.

Good luck guys.

(Disclaimer: Although this post has been written by TechNation Australia writer Lee Goodman, TechNation Australia editor Kim Heras is a co-founder of uTag)

uTag is one of the sites that started life at the first StartUp Camp Australia held in Sydney last weekend.  In just 48 hours, ut.ag went from conception to launch in a weekend of extreme coding, design and marketing (including the birth of a new extreme PR tactic - “TwitterBombing”) .

The uTag team is:

• David Vandenberg
• Hugo Sharp
• Kim Heras
• Matt Fisher
• Nick Holmes a Court

In their own words Ut.ag describe their solution as

“A turnkey system that allows web 2.0 sites and individuals to generate revenue and retain attention from every single outbound link.”

In reality, ut.ag is a URL shortening service with a difference in that it actually attempts to monetise the outbound traffic from a site.  This is achieved by placing a “small” banner ad at the top of the destination page of any link clicked within a site.

According to the ut.ag guys there are 2 billion shortened links clicked on each month within Twitter alone so there is obviously huge potential.

There are currently two flavours of the system, Vanilla and Cherry, the former aimed at blogger and Twitter users with the latter geared towards the website and platform owners.

To enable Vanilla utagging you simply go to the ut.ag site, paste in any external links you will be posting along with your PayPal email and a shortened URL will be provided for you to send around.

To enable Cherry flavoured utagging across your site you simply go to the ut.ag site, enter in your paypal email and a small piece of java script is created that you paste into your site code. This will turn all outbound links into ut.ag shortned URLs. It’s a nice set and forget feature that will probably lead to suprise payments in people’s paypal account down the track.

In both cases you earn revenue from any click through on those links, with ut.ag taking a small percentage.

One thing that immediately comes to mind is that they will need to nail the contextual / targeted side of it to stand any chance of gaining traction.  Internet users already routinely experience unwanted pop up ads and I for one have well developed “admunity”, although the guys do state that the ability close the ad banner easily was a choice they made specifically to address this problem and the web page is still rendered below so there is no clipping of the site’s content. 

ut.ag is already getting a lot of attention if the site’s blog is anything to go by. The idea of outbound links being monetized is clearly going to be a discussion point for some time. Already the community appears to be split on whether or not it is “evil”. Time will tell what the final decision will be.

If ut.ag doesn’t represent a paradigm shift, as the team claims, then if nothing else it at least demonstrates what can be achieved in a massively condensed timeframe when you have a good team with a passion for technology and entrepreneurship.  Pretty impressive by all accounts, can’t wait to see what comes out of the next StartUp camp!

OK - today is the day. I’m going to wrap up StartupCamp Australia by posting stories on all the startups (don’t worry someone else will be writing the ut.ag one)

First cab off the rank is LinkViz

The LinkViz team is

• Ian Naylor
• Lee Goodman
• Ozan Onay
• David Soul
• Linda Gehard
• Richard Hayes

I love cool visualisations - so I love the LinkViz concept. The goal of the site is to monitor your social networks, check out what people are linking to, then represent that in a way that is visually navigable using variables such as size and proximity to denote popularity and relevance.

Think of it as kind of a visual tag cloud for what your friends are linking to with a whole bunch of sexier features.

So - that’s the cool stuff. Now let’s look at a couple of issues.

First of all it doesn’t quite do all that stuff…yet. You can navigate through and popularity is represented by size - but it’s not grabbing my social network data cause I haven’t put it in.

That having been said, it’s close and the concept is only 5 days old so we won’t hate on them too much.

Secondly, there’s no love for Internet Explorer. I’m sure that’s a technical issue as opposed to a philosophical position - but IE still owns the market so if they want real traction they’re going to have to sort that one out.

I spoke to LinkViz co–founder Ian Naylor about what the next steps are and this is what he had to say:

From a LinkViz perspective we have a few on-going developments:

• Full browser compatibility
• Improved pop-up information when hovering on the thumbnails (originating twitter conv, number of social references, better title desc summary)
• Filtering the Social Thumbnail Clouds to trending topics and themes (ie Barrack Obama , Tech etc) this will enable you to really drill down to websites your within your interests.
• Filling out the site with the usual about us, contact us, what we are actually providing etc

In addition to this we would like to add further revenue opportunities, ie per layer one of the thumbnails will be set aside for advertising, with the size/weighting being dictated by relevancy to other website thumbnails (or if successful long term the bid amount if we choose to go with direct advertisers).

That is our current dev list, I’m sure as we get further into it we will do more, certainly the team is (currently) still pumped to progress it.

It’s early days yet - but this could easily turn into a much-loved recommendation/research tool. And with Twitter’s appetite for buying complimentary services, if they get this right there could be a big pot of gold at the end of the LinkViz rainbow.