Startup Camp Sydney 2 - The Best Camp Yet
January 18, 2009Startup Camp Sydney 2 is essentially over (only the investor panel pitching to go) and after watching the launches I think I can safely say it has been the best event yet.
6 teams of around 6 people got together at Australian Technology Park in Redfern and in the course of what was essentially 24 hours created some quirky, some useful and some downright sweet apps.
The projects were as follows (in no particular order):
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“Activityhorizon is a collaboration born out of Startup Camp Sydney in January 2009. Its goal is to provide a website to enrichen people’s lives in an affordable and enjoyable way, that in turn will boost the Australian economy.”
Essentially the service grabs information about activities that are going on from various sources then aggregates them and maps them. There was talk about making results more relevant based on preferences and preferences of your friends (oh yeah, there was talk of building in social functionality) but it looks like that will be available in v1.1. The website isn’t really working ATM, but I saw the site during the launch, so I’m sure it will be open to the public shortly.
Final thoughts: seemed like a good idea, but it still had a bit of work to go. That having been said, if they can do what they’re aiming to it has a lot of potential.
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“GiveDo makes it easy for everyone to support charities everyday. Founded in 2009, GiveDo harnesses the power Google search to drive advertising revenues to charities.”
These guys create a search page using Google Custom Search, for charities. So giving to your favourite charity is as simple as searching on their site (it’s a Google search, so the results are not affected), then clicking on one of ads that appear next to the search results.
Speaking of ads, i think the revenue model is a little odd - the team has put 2 separate sets of adsense results next to the search results. If you click on the one further left the revenue goes to the charity and if you click on the one on the right, the revenue goes to GiveDo.
I think I know why they’ve done this. It’s removed the accounting overhead for GiveDo - i.e. they don’t have to employ someone to handle transactions, then pass on a cut to the charity. It also reduces the barrier to participation for charities as they don’t have to rely on GiveDo for payments. Despite that, I think a less confusing system, for the end-user, is probably needed.
Final thoughts: Something I will definitley use. I’ve always said there has to be a better way for charities to raise money and this might very well be it. Also another great addition to the increasing number of technology sites aiming to help charities. Well done, team.
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“Social Search Aggregation & Sharing”
Three feeds allows users to simply and quickly create social media monitoring tools for keywords of interest. You can add various keywords and have them separated on the actual three feeds page or have results aggregated via an RSS stream. There’s even a widget that’s on the way so you can embed results into your website.
From a company perspective, three feeds isn’t a direct substitute for deep social media monitoring and reporting services but what it does do is make it very easy for companies to start down the social media monitoring path.
Final Thoughts: I’d love to use Three feeds here at TNA. For a while I’ve slowly been working out a way to do something like this for a future TNA feature. I’d worked out a way that would use a few separate tools, but three feeds is so simple and powerful I’d dump all those tools for a three feed in a heartbeat.
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“MyPetNeedsLove.com is dedicated to finding your pet a date. Pets need love too you know. My Pet Needs Love was founded out of Startup Camp Sydney in 2009. The founding members felt the empathy of loveless pets and decided to do something about it.”
Built on osDate, the open source dating site platform, MyPetNeedsLove has been heavily customised to produce what is essentially a dating site for animals. Pets’ details are placed on the site and other animals can organise to meet them for whatever it is dogs/cats etc. do on first dates.
Of course the site is directed at the owners of animals, but the different angle, i.e. making the pets stars, will work well with those many pet-crazy people out there. That angle will also work well for their business model of selling products and services to pet lovers.
Final Thoughts: As I explained to team member Tyrone - this will either go down in history as a “wtf were they thinking” moment or a moment of brilliant and inspired thinking. I’m still kind of undecided about which way it will go.
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“Epic Tweet publishes the best of twitter, the most popular micro blogging site. We capture the smartest, the funniest and most interesting tweets as decided by twitterers.”
Ever wanted to cut through the crap on twitter. Well Epic Tweet aims to find the bestf tweets by getting people to retweet epic tweets to #epictweet then having people vote on whether or not they are actualy worthy of the title.
Final thoughts: Good idea, trying to find the most epic tweets, but work needs to be done on the execution. That having been said, it’s a site that people will return to time and time again. Maybe the most valuable outcome is that domain. How was it still available?
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“iTrafficApp is a simple iPhone application that helps users to drive smarter and safer by providing up to the minute information on traffic conditions and alerting drivers when approaching RTA cameras.”
iTrafficApp is almost like TrafficHawk 2.0 (remember the google map traffic mashup from Startup Camp Sydney 1?). The guys grab data from the RTA about traffic incidents/speed cameras etc. then combine that with crowdsourced incident/speed camera information and the GPS functionality of the iphone to get an iphone app that will be extremely useful to many people.
Final thoughts: I would buy this today. Actually I’ve put my name down for the app already. Another example of how the iPhone is disrupting many industries.
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So another great camp, another great group of people and another success. A massive congratulations to Bart and the StartupCamp team.The turnout of people, the support from industry and the increased onsite press coverage just proves that momentum continues to build for the project. All we need now are more startups camps in other cities - maybe Brisbane, which has had rumours of a camp for quite some time but still hasn’t managed to put it together.
The event is not over BTW. The project now moves to the sale of the startups via Auction. Stay tuned for more details of that auction shortly.
