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!

In the hunt for property but angry at how Real Estate Agents feel the need to suppress prices on some of their ads?

Robert Reith from Home Price History sent us through a nice little hack for finding out hidden prices from properties listed on both RealEstate.com.au and Real Estate View.

Turns out that both of these sites like to share their info with Google Base…not a bad idea in general, but not a good idea if you want to keep prices hidden.

Just go to either of these sites and when you find a property with hidden pricing information, pop over to Google Base, click on the ‘Housing’ link, then put in the address and Hey Presto! the property is displayed with the missing price.

Here’s an example of a place advertised without a price at 200 Cecil St South Melbourne

And here is the Google Base version WITH price

For people looking to collect information about property (and use services like Home Price History) the ability to bypass real estate agents will be a godsend.

Nice catch, Robert! Maybe use the Google Base API and build an automated service into the next release of Home Price History?

Now that would be sweet!

Some of you may have noticed that we have a new contributor to TechNation Australia - Paul Pajo.

Paul has been pumping out the stories lately, so it’s only fair that we introduce him formally.

“Paul Pajo is an experienced Project Manager, Project Discovery/Integration/Proponent, OD/HR Consultant, and Web Integrator. With over 12 years in Technology Adoption Paul is experienced in delivering, Content Management/Delivery Platforms, BPO (Financial Accounts, Content & Office Management) solutions. Some of his specialties are: Trans-National partnerships, executive search, prototyping and pilot project facilitation of new business models in both post-conflict (Afghanistan) and First World (Dubai,UAE) countries. Also BPO between Central Asia and Middle East, government liaison, arts & media management consulting, e-commerce and new media. He is currently the Chief Evangelist for desiremesh.com - a solution+revolution company”

Welcome aboard, Paul!

It’s been a while since my last post so here’s a quick summary:

The Commonwealth Government’s new Climate Ready grants scheme was introduced in July. It aims to give companies matching funding to cover R&D, proof-of-concept and early-stage commercialisation for processes, products or services which address the effects of climate change.

I’ve been preparing an application based on my project to develop software called Rocksolver which will mimic the way a stone mason builds a dry stone wall by doing the hard 3D geometric manipulations. In the application my focus is on demonstrating that the software will make an industrial process more efficient by allowing the builders of sea walls, for instance, to use unprocessed rock instead of pre-cast concrete blocks. Weight-for-weight, unprocessed rock used as a building material produces 10% the greenhouse gas emissions of concrete, hence my attempt to get Climate Ready funding. I missed the first round of funding and the second round closes soon.

Last week I submitted my draft Climate Ready application to AusIndustry to get their feedback. It looks like the AusIndustry people are the gate-keepers who filter the applications so the final selection committee only sees the stuff that looks like it might have a chance. I received the feedback this week and it’s reasonably detailed, fair and thankfully won’t require me to do too much more work. Mostly they’ve picked me up on the places where I haven’t quoted sources of technical information, which is fair enough. I’ve got until the 26^th November to respond to the feedback, gather all the remaining required documentation (a letter from an accountant saying the company can match funding, proof of ownership of IP, etc) and submit the final application to be eligible for the 2^nd round of funding.

The process so far has been time consuming but the application and AusIndustry’s feedback have certainly made me focus on the hard realities of commercialisation.

Ian Cumming and Scott Woodhouse, co-founders of Travellr, were kind enough to give TechNation Australia an email interview. Here we go:

Please tell us a little something about yourself, your hobbies, what you do when you’re not working on your startup?

Ian: This year I’ve been getting into diving - the water is really cold in Tasmania where we live so it takes a bit of determination to get in the water - but it’s so much fun! I also love to ski and spent my Australian summer with some mates at Niseko on the north island of Japan skiing massive powder runs non-stop every day! Best of all I love traveling! This year I’ve been to Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, the USA, and will be heading off the the UK for New Years. I’ve made some truly amazing friends traveling and had some of the best experiences thanks to meeting locals!

Scott: Outside of Travellr, I’m a marketing consultant at In-tellinc - a Hobart-based tech incubator specialising in early stage startups. Like everyone at Travellr, I’m a big fan of travelling, and take time out for it as much a I possibly can (I’ve already blown this year’s leave out of the water almost two-fold with trips to the UK, Greece, France and the US…..will have to do some some serious negotiation for Christmas). My biggest love is whitewater kayaking, and I’ve toured the US and Canada twice paddling remote steep creeks and rivers. That said, some of the best whitewater in the world exists here in Tasmania….GO TASMANIA!

Any new games/sports you’re currently on that you think the world should know?

Ian: I think that everyone should know about bigstereo.net, my favorite music blog ever!

Scott: Um, the last computer / video games I played seriously date back to the late ’80s on my Atari 2600. If you’re looking for specifics, I guess that California Games, Dig Dug and Enduro Racer are hot favourites that I would’ve recommended to people around that time.

Ian: Travellr is a new online travel startup that will change the way travelers find the best advice and local knowledge about anywhere in the world. Travellr is a service that allows travelers to connect with like-minded locals and past visitors to get the most insightful, relevant, and personalized answers possible.

Scott: Travellr has five core people based in Hobart, with a growing network of advisors and correspondents scattered accross the world. We’re funded by local investors, including Ian’s company Insight4 - a software development firm, and In-tellinc. Right now we’re working hard to finish and launch the private beta by December, raising additional funding to assist with an aggressive product development and marketing strategy, and planning our move to San Francisco in early 2009.

Ian: The concept behind Travellr started out as an idea I had last year while I was travelling overseas. I bounced the idea off Scott and together we developed an initial business and marketing strategy around the idea of a building a service for travelers to be able to ask questions about anywhere in the world. We developed an early stage prototype at the start of the year and then raised some funding and applied for an AusIndustry COMET grant to get the idea off the ground. Last month we took Travellr to Silicon Valley as part of ANZA’s ‘Gateway to the US’ program (http://www.anzatechnet.com/) where we pitched to VCs and investors at Plug and Play Tech Centre’s Fall DEMO event (http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com). We are now busy working on launching our private beta for December this year!

Scott: When you’re travelling, you just can’t beat local knowledge - it’s invaluable. And when you find it, it can totally make your trip. But unless you actually know someone who lives where you’re travelling, it can be very difficult finding qualified information that’s specific to your questions. Sure, you can trawl through review sites, forums, social networks and the like, but it’s a lot of effort, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll even find what you’re looking for. All you want to do is ask a simple question. This is the problem we’re solving with Travellr.

Scott: Initially Travellr will target backpackers and ‘flash’ packers (professionals who backpack), but the service solves a universal problem and we can see it being adopted by all people who travel. In the current economic climate, as people’s shrinking budgets cause them to research their travel more closely, a service like Travellr becomes increasingly valuable.

Ian: We’re still in the development stage of the project so you’ll have to check back with us in a few months to find out our uptake.

Ian: We’ve raised some initial early stage capital with assistance from AusIndustry’s COMET fund (http://www.ausindustry.gov.au/) and local investment, which has enabled us to put together marketing, technical, and business expertise to build the business. We’ve also sought out a some key travel and tourism advisors to help us out and provide additional insight to the team. We are currently looking at raising additional capital via angel investment to assist us with future product development and implementing our initial marketing strategy.

Scott: For Travellr, the biggest and most critical milestone is reaching critical mass - growing the community to a point where people can receive high-quality answers to their questions both a) quickly enough to be useful on the road via a mobile device, and b) from well-matched locals who share similar interests and characteristics. This high standard of user experience requires strategic distribution of users, not only by geographic location, but also according to profile.

Scott: There’s no question that online travel is a crowded (and competitive space), but by focusing purely on travel questions and answers, Travellr sits in a niche. There are a small handful of sites such as GeckoGo, STA Travelers and Lonely Planet that allow users to ask questions, but these guys play predominantly in the travel social network space, offering everything but the kitchen sink, including itinerary and media sharing, blogging and reviews. For them Q&A is essentially bolted on as an afterthought, and as a result is poorly implemented. And to be honest, who wants (or has time) to join yet another social network? I don’t want to post photos, make friends or share my itinerary - I just want to be able to quickly and easily ask locals questions to get information that’s valuable to me!

Ian: I like to think that entrepreneurship is the art of turning a great idea into an even better business.

Scott: Having the guts to believe in what you’re doing and fully committing to it.

Scott: Nothing really, other than maybe taking time to hang out in the US sooner. Pitching Travellr in Silicon Valley is definately the best thing we’ve done for the project to date. It was a good kick in the pants, and forced us to consolidate our core-value proposition, business model and message to investors. The progress we’ve made with Travellr since making the decision to take it to the Valley has been nothing short of remarkable, and we’ve been able to bring back a lot of energy and insight from the experiences we had on this trip.

Ian: Always be open to advice and criticism from others as this is free feedback that will help you improve your idea!

If you want to learn more about Travellr or just chat with Ian and/or Scott, try to bump into them at the upcoming Sydney BarCamp on November 15 at the UNSW Roundhouse.

interview and posted by: Paul “The Pageman” Pajo

Below is the Nov ‘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. This month 57 of the 152 sites listed on the startup-australia wiki made the list.  To get yourself included just add your site to the wiki.

Congratulations to this month’s 6 new entrants: -

• uTag (17)
• Gooruze (21)
• dLook (27)
• Metaverse Journal (47)
• Jam Code (55)
• Elcom (57)

Well done!

————-

CHANGES

We’ve made changes to the list in response to some of the feedback we’ve received.

First of all we’ve added Quantcast rankings to the table. The average (Score) does NOT include the quantcast data. Quantcast looks to be a little too noisy. For example, cushycms(13), momentville(19), and goodbarry(20) all have reasonably comparable Alexa & Compete data, but there is major variation in the Quantcast data for these 3. Quancast also failed to rank 5 of the top 30 sites.

Secondly we’ve added a Rank Change field so you can see how startups on the list are going compared to last month.

Thirdly, thanks to Alan Long at Hitwise, we are able to incorporate Australian specific data. The data is not included in the rankings at the moment, it’s more, like the Quantcast data above, for general interest. The hitwise data is based on Australian Users and represented as a share of all visits for the month of October. Expect the data set to be more complete for future months as Hitwise start to specifically track all sites that make it onto the startup index.

Finally, we’ve turned the list into a sortable table. To change the way the data is sorted, just click on a column header.

Now on to the Index…

UPDATE: A few sharp-eyed TechNation Australia readers have noted that the sorting is not working perfectly for some of the columns. We’re on the case and hopefully will have everything fixed soon.

——-

TechNation Australia has managed to pop into position 92 on the Top 100 Aussie blogs list run by Meg Tsiamis over at Dipping Into The Blogpond.

Not bad considering tech startups are still a pretty niche market here and that the majority of our readers read our full articles via the TechNation Australia RSS feed and don’t actually hit the site.

As always, a big “thank you” to all of you for continuing to support our attempts to increase awareness of local tech startups. Hopefully we’re doing an OK job and you’re finding interesting things on the site from time to time.

Also, speaking of tech startups, Meg (who runs the blog list) does a lot of good work for the community via her blog as well as being an entrepreneur herself through her startups, dLook (No.27 on our Startup Index) and Obits. So, if you get a chance, please go and check out her sites.

Keep up the good work, Meg.

Hat Tip to Nick Holmes à Court (considered #63 out of the Top 100 Influential Twitterers by Shifted Pixels) for bringing this to my attention!

Here’s a screenshot of MyPhatBreak:

A cursory search of “myphatbreak” eventually lands you to a site of someone (an intern named Steph?) who might be working for their ad agency (Shifted Pixels?) as several of their learning goals (about 5 of them) can be gleaned from the posts:

Learning Goal#1: Learn what online strategies can be teamed up with traditional understanding

“Gain understanding of the benefits of a pure online advertising campaign.
Create an online advertising strategy for one of Shifted Pixels current clients based on an existing creative brief. List the advantages and disadvantages of an online campaign.

MyPhatBreak.com”

“Be part of the online blogging process Shifted Pixels uses to start a conversation with influential parties on the internet. List the advantages and disadvantages.”

Yesterday, Steve Ballmer re-announced, during his presentation at Liberation Day in Sydney, the launch of BizSpark.

BizSpark is a new initiative from Microsoft that gives startups access to a wide range of MS development software and support services for free, for 3 years.

Actually “for free” is a bit of a fib. Enrollment is free but there’s a $100 exit fee from the program.

To qualify you need to have a business that’s less than 3 years old, does less than US$1Million in revenue and has been approved by a “Network Partner”

There are a few Network Partners listed under Australia already, so if you’d like to develop on the Microsoft platform definitely get in contact with them.

I managed to pop in and catch Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, speak at “Liberation Day“, in Sydney yesterday and was pleasantly surprised, not only by his presentation style but also by the things that he had to say.

Unfortunately there was no Monkey Dance during his arrival on stage - but there was enough quirkiness and passion in his speech that, whether or not you buy into the Microsoft dream, it’s hard to deny he is a refreshing change from the robotic CEOs of many other leading tech firms.

As expected, he continued the recent PR around Microsoft’s new Cloud Computing Services Platform - Azure (can someone please work out the correct pronunciation for this one quickly? Already we’ve heard “ajour” “assure” “asia” “azooer” …).

I thought the best stuff came in the Q&A session, though.

The first interesting remarks came in response to a question about whether Microsoft intended to create an app market, following on from the iPhone and Facebook lead, so developers building apps on the MS development platform would have the same chance to make some money. 

…No one is making any money out of iPhone or Facebook apps

First of all Ballmer claimed that no one is making any money out of iPhone or Facebook apps. It was a little disappointing to hear him say that. People are making money by coding for these platforms…maybe not Ballmer-style dollars, but money never the less. Discredit your competitors, by all means Steve, but try to stay factual.

Secondly, he hinted at a Microsoft App store coming soon that might be similar, but not exactly the same, as iPhone / Android / Facebook app markets. This may very well be further proof that the rumoured Windows Mobile 7 “skymarket” may actually become a reality. Then again, I got the feeling that this would be more than just a pure mobile play - but time will tell.

What else did he have to say? I’m glad he jumped in on the Telstra/Government debate saying that hi-speed broadband is critical for enabling next generation services and that rather than continue bickering it was “time to get onto it”.

He also mentioned that technology is making software development one of the most creative and interesting jobs going round at the moment. I tend to agree, and I’m not even a coder.

You can check out his whole presentation at the Liberation Day website.