Just spoke to Virigina Choy from Pretaweb after hearing about her involvement in the launch of Australia’s first Open Source Business Cluster last week.

According to Virginia:

The aim of the cluster is to more effectively market, deliver and provide support for Open Source technologies to business and government agencies

The founding members are

• Digital Armour Corporation;
• Syntonic Corporation; and
• Pretaweb

Combined, the 3 companies employ over 40 people and provide a range of skills around Open Source technologies including:

• Website development, Content Management Systems, e-commerce
• ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence
• Networking, VPN, VoIP
• Managed Services, email filtering, system security, site audits
• Data Storage and backup

The cluster’s members remain independent entities but provide:

• a range of complimentary skills and resources to offer end-to-end open source implementation.
• a single point of contact for business and government to obtain advice and quotes for a broad range of OS solutions.
• comprehensive support and maintenance to keep the systems running optimally.

The initiative is supported by a $10K establishment grant from the NSW Department of State and Regional Development, which has embraced Open Source Software and Open Standards in recent years, as well as Google Australia, who lent their Sydney offices for the cluster launch last Friday.

Those interested in joining the cluster should email Virginia at pretaweb dot com.

A quick reminder that BarCamp Sydney is on tomorrow

Details are as follows:

Date: Saturday, 15 November 2008
Venue: UNSW Roundhouse
Time: 9am – 5pm (8:30 registrations – but you can come and go as you please, i.e. you don’t have to be there for the whole 8 hours if you have other stuff to do)

You can register yourself on the wiki here:

There’s more info on the barcamp site and in a previous story we ran about the day.

Try to get there if you can – As I write there are already 157 people registered, so it looks like it’ll be another bumper day!