—-

Startup Camp Melbourne (SUCM) has come and gone and once again 3 new Aussie startups have been created in one weekend.

A big congratulations to Bart Jellema and Kim Chen from Tjoos for running the event, Maxim Shklyar and Kisla for providing the space and facilities, and everyone else who helped make the weekend happen by providing stuff and participating. This is a really positive initiative for the local startup scene and one that will have wide-ranging positive effects for a long time to come so you’ve all done an amazing thing.

Now, the whole idea of startup camp is about process not outcome - so it’s not really necessary to review the new projects - but I will anyway… I’m assuming you’ve read a little about the projects from my previous post or from the official site, so I won’t go into descriptions, just thoughts…

——–

Marketbeagle

A good idea and developed using Maxim Shklyar’s XIML. Again, in theory I could see how SMEs might want to have a better system than an Excel spreadsheet to monitor marketing spend and results, but as is, the site is hardly going to set the world on fire. With a few more features that they spoke about, e.g. exporting of data,  it will be a lot more useful. As a stand alone service though, and as is, it’s probably limited. That having been said, in my mind this was the startup with the most potential. The online poll agreed.

iSportster

I told the team I don’t really get how this is different to 3eep/Sports Passion and after watching the launch, I still didn’t get it. They spoke about video analysis of opposing teams videos etc. but I’m not sure how you can do this in a way that scales. They spoke about online scoring for indoor sports, but again there didn’t realy seem to be an execution of that idea. That’s not to say anything bad about the team.  They did a super job to get it even close to a working product in such a short time frame. The problem is just that the core service (i.e. the team sports site) has already been done and I don’t see anything different that would make it an acquisition target (as was suggested by someone following the launch, online).

Bit of Pluck

I still don’t really get this. Then again seeing as I’m not in the habit of meeting strangers I’m probably not in the target market anyway. I can see the potential of white-labeling it for conferences etc. where you have people who are there to network/meet other people, but then again that’s probably a little too niche. I also think that the way most social networks are these days, many of your so-called friends are probably akin to semi-strangers so services like loopt or a GPS enabled facebook iphone app would almost serve the same purpose, in a less scary way.

——–

And how does SUCM compare to Sydney Startup Camp 1?

Call me biased but I think all 3 startups in Sydney were better conceived, better executed and were far readier for launch by the actual launch time which, mind you, was 12 hours less than in Melbourne

I know the Sydney startups weren’t perfect, we’re still working on some core stuff for uTag, but they were functional services that allowed the teams to decide whether they should leave them running as is or keep working. It seems to me that no product from SUCM was actually at that stage. That’s really surprising considering the incredibly talented people that were in the room.

Another interesting thing is that there appeared to be some small dramas during the weekend in Melbourne. Not a lot, but enough to disrupt the room and potentially some of the projects. Maybe it was timeframe pressures, maybe it was professional differences or maybe it’s just like life where not everyone gets on, but one thing I know from Sydney is that everyone, even “opposing” teams, need to be positive and working together to get stuff done in such a short time frame.

Despite all this, however, I think that perhaps more was learnt about how to fine-tune the process from Melbourne, than it was from Sydney, so in some ways it was a better outcome.

Now the naysayers amongst you may say “What does he know? he wasn’t even there!”. And you’d be right. Throughout the whole weekend I was over 1000kms away, watching online from Sydney. Because of that I highly recommend that if you’re interested in finding out more you read what the people who were actually there have to say.

With that in mind there are already posts appearing on the net.

• Steve Hopkins, a member of A Bit of Pluck, has some reflections on the process that you can find HERE.
• Duncan Riley, also from A Bit of Pluck, has put up a post on The Inquisitr.
• Matt Milosavljevic another member of the Marketbeagle team has also posted some thoughts on the process HERE

No doubt there will be more posts as people start to function again after such a hectic few days, so keep tracking the #sucm tag on twitter as people chat about the experience and announce their posts.

The next announced Startup Camp will be in Sydney early next year.

That’s not to say that there can’t be one sooner - we definitely have vibrant enough startup communities in Brisbane and Perth, for example, to set up a local version quickly - so if you’re from one of those cities you should start thinking about how you can get Startup Camp to your town.

I’m certain you won’t regret it.