BarCamp Sydney 5 is over and once again the (un)organisers have put on another super day.

The new venue at ATP was just as good, if not better, than UNSW and this time there appeared to be less focus on deep technical stuff (there was still some there, though, just not as much as at previous BarCamps) and more on discussions and ideas around technology and it’s relevance in various contexts.

There was also a really strong focus on the mobile space – expect a lot of interesting follow up discussions to come out of that on local tech related blogs/twitter accounts etc.

As usual there was a twitter backchannel, this time using the #bcs5 hashtag, so check it out if you weren’t able to make it today to read the blow by blow on what happened.

For pics, the ever reliable @halans has put up a BarCamp Sydney 5 photo set on Flickr.

I also managed to catch up with Ajay (AKA @funkycoda) one of the faces of BarCamp Sydney. Below is a short interview.

Looking forward to BarCamp Sydney 6 sometime later on in the year.

TechCrunch UK has published an email from MySpace CEO, Owen van Natta, to all staff explaining that International staff numbers are going to be cut from 450 to 150. More interestingly, however, is that in the same email, van Natta says:

Upon completion of the proposed plan, London, Berlin, and Sydney would become the primary regional hubs for MySpace’s international operations. 

He then goes on to say:

We are focusing on London, Berlin, and Sydney for two very simple reasons: (1) these are markets where we have a lot of MySpace users as well as the resources to allow us to compete effectively and (2) these are major international commerce centers where a robust MySpace presence can help our company develop new and innovative business partnerships.

The latter of these comments, i.e. the rationale behind the focus on Sydney, is really good news and sees yet another big International Web/Tech name identify Sydney as a place to run a real business rather than just a sales and marketing branch office.

Some recent news in that space includes:

• Google – who have always been good to Aussies by running proper dev teams here and who recently opened up their new Australian head office down in Pyrmont)
• Vodafone – Who are working on global innovations with local Sydney teams
• Friendster – An oldy but a goody, now with an Aussie CEO and being run out of The Rocks
• Yahoo!7 – who have started to reach out to the local developer community through developer events (thanks in part to the Web Directions crew)

Hopefully, between the orgs that have always been here and these newer activities, it’s the start of long-term trend.

Welcome to the June‘09 installment of the Top 100 Aussie Web Startup Index.

An explanation of the index and how it’s calculated can be found HERE.

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THINK THE INDEX NEEDS IMPROVING?

I’ve been listening to many of you who have issues with the way the Index is calculated and I’m going to do something about it. If you want to have your voice heard in the changes send me an email at editor@technation.com.au or just CLICK HERE and I’ll explain how you can be involved.

But remember: No email = no participation = no complaining please.

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PROMOTE THE FACT YOU’RE A TOP 100 MEMBER

I figure that if you’ve made the list you ought to be able to promote the fact.

To get your own badge like the one above (only if you made the list…of course) all you need to do is cut and paste the below code into your site!

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Now onto the list…(NB: The columns are sortable, just click on a column heading)

Top 100 - June 2009

Fell across a couple of interesting articles during my weekend reading catch up.

While not specifically focused on Aussie startups, they’re definitely relevant to Aussie entrepreneurs and well worth looking at if you have a few spare minutes:

• The Young Entrepreneur Myth (via Paul Kedrosky) – Study from the Kaufmann Foundation showing that Entrepreneurial activity appears to rise with age

• Recessions, Startups and the Fortune 500 (also via Paul Kedrosky) – Another study from the Kaufmann Foundation highlighting that half of the Fortune 500 companies were started during a recession or a bear market, prompting the comment – “The Economic Future Just Happened”.

• About that “the World is a Global Village” Theory (via The Inquisitr) – Study on 100,000 facebook users showing that messaging increases exponentially with geographic proximity – i.e. we’re using social media to communicate more closely with people near us, not people on the other side of the world.

And a bonus article…

• Guy #3 (via Seth Godin) - a brilliant video of a spontaneous tribe forming at a music festival along with some of Seth’s usual insightful notes.

To be honest, when I first went to PicDesk and looked at the front page I thought I’d been duped by purveyors of soft-porn.

I went back into the original email I received from the PicDesk crew, however, and realised that it’s not a porn site, rather, it’s a niche image site attempting  to compete with a global giant by providing a tailored, focussed set of images

Co-Founder Simon Moss explains what the site is about:

Picdesk Image Library is the Sydney-based ‘ Getty Images for women’. We license and syndicate high quality images of women that are sold to professional buyers around the world.

Our goal is to build the ultimate rights managed collection of images of women, with a ruthless focus on quality. Our customers include editorial, advertising and media publications such as FHM, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, GQ, Harpers right through to customers looking for images for gyms, posters, products and other things

The site was started by Meg Moss, who used to be the talent scout for Ralph magazine, and her husband (Simon) who looks after marketing and IT and is currently investing in building and launching an existing new revamped version of the existing site

Although the site has actually been around for 3 years, the team are currently looking at ways to leverage new technology, media, social and professional networks to broaden their  reach into their customer base – designers, art and media buyers, advertising and creative directors.

Once such tool which has proven a big hit in the last couple of weeks is broadcasting their customers’ requests on Twitter (I’m guessing they keep the customer anonymous). When a new request for an image comes in, they push it out over twitter immediately and source new material that they may not have in their portfolio.

The site is a good example of an experienced team finding seeing an opportunity in a big market and competing by focusing on one area of that market and leveraging technology.

Make sure you check it out…

The first ever BootUpCamp is coming up and it looks like its going to be a cracker.

Brought to you by the same people who run the extremely useful Startup Camp Weekends, BootUpCamp aims to take that experience a step further by giving participants 2 full weeks to build a web business.

In the organisers’ words:

BootUpCamp is an intensive entrepreneurship workshop where participants will go from an idea to a fully operational web business in two weeks.

Participants apply as individuals and work in teams of two to four. You don’t need to have an idea of what you want to build, teams will brainstorm ideas on the first day.

Each day the teams are given a deadline to work towards. These deadlines are things like “be ready to demonstrate your product by 6pm” or “have a press release and list of journalists to send it to by noon.”

At the end of the two weeks you will:

• have experienced the thrill of starting a business without having to quit your job/drop out of school
• own a share of the business you have built
• have met and learned from some of the best entrepreneurial minds in Australia
• have made some good decisions and some bad ones; learned from them and moved on
• have worked hard and had a lot of fun

Having seen the value of 48 hours spent at StartupCamp I can only imagine how much better BootUpCamp will be for those who are lucky enough to participate.

I spoke to Brian Menzies, one of the organisers, and asked him what type of people should apply. His response was:

BootUp Camp is open to anyone, mainly developers have applied so far, plenty of room for more developers, be great to get some designers, but passion is the important element, so we’ll look at all comers

Details are as follows:

ATP Innovations Pty Ltd
Suite 145, Level 1, National Innovation Centre
Australian Technology Park

4 Cornwallis Street
Eveleigh (Sydney) NSW 2015
http://www.atp-innovations.com.au/finding-us-directions/

Check out the official site for more info.

Looks like the online market for freelancing services is continuing to grow, if the number of local startups working in the space is anything to go by.

The latest to join the fray is ProTask.

As co-founder Richard Garnett explains:

We are a new freelancing website. Our point of difference over other freelancing websites ‘ServiceSeeking’ ‘Ozlance’ etc is that we do not charge any fees at all to either list a task or to bid on a task posted.

Personally, I wouldn’t be betting the farm on price as a long-term point of differentiation in this space, but in what appears to be a growing market it makes sense to lower the barrier to participation as much as possible to build market share. What’s more, the team appear to have some good commercial/development experience, so there’s potential to ID other more sustainable points of differentiation, if they can get the critical mass needed to make markets work.

Of course in addition to these services, which also compete with global sites like eLance and oDesk, there are other local Aussie sites like WhoCanDo, which focuses on tradespeople and, of course, Crowd-sourcing sites like DesignBay and 99 Designs, which are also a form of freelancing.

One thing to note is that that some of these startups have focused on the global market and some are going for a more local approach. It should be interesting to see what the winning strategy is.

The interesting thing about social media is the way that entrepreneurs are able to leverage the reduced transaction / information costs it enables and bring us applications that you would never have really thought about before.

A perfect example of this is My Property Partner.

My Property Partner launched last week “as a new social networking solution to assist property buyers struggling to buy alone”.

Managing Director, Lynton Pipkorn, explains the rational behind My Property Partner:

“In today’s current climate, with continued low interest rates and the extension of the first homebuyers grant, property prices have not fallen enough to ease the housing affordability crisis for many property buyers. We’re trying to keep the dream of owning property alive for this growing segment of the market,” he said.

I can’t help but feel that the users of this service will more likely be serial property purchasers/investors, not the first time homebuyer who can’t get into the market – I mean, which first home buyers are going to have the spare cash to deal with the legal issues around preparing joint tenancy/tenancy in common type arrangements and the subsequent legal documentation needed to ensure that, should there be a dispute, they are properly positioned?

This is reinforced, in some ways, by Pipkorn when he says:

“My Property Partner puts individual investors together to develop investment partnerships and strategies, allowing them to take advantage of the current opportunities in the premium residential and commercial markets.” 

On this note and, once again, not being an expert, I wonder how fund-raising laws will view a consortium of unrelated parties who jointly invest in a fund to purchase property.

In the end though, this is all detail and something that My Property Partner will no doubt have already thought about (or will have to think about in the near future).

The real point of interest here is that the social network even exists.

The fact that people would go online to meet people who might share in what may very well be one of the biggest purchases they make in their life, is amazing. If successful it would go a long way to demonstrating how comfortable people are becoming with relationships formed online and the value that social media can bring to all aspects of their life.

Interesting.

MyHeritage, one of the world’s most popular family Web sites, with over 32 Million family members and 350 Million profiles, has just passed the 400,000 Australian user mark.

You can see the exact stats on their member map – http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/myheritage-member-map2.php

In addition to this, Stefano Sessa, the former Country Manager for Australia has moved on and been replaced by Linde Wolters.

I’ve always liked MyHeritage because, despite the fact that they’re a global tech company HQ’d in Israel, they’ve put real people on the ground in Australia to learn about what the local market wants and needs.

I’ve also enjoyed playing with their leading edge technology – like their facial recognition tools, which let you do iPhoto style facial tagging, but also have fun implementations like their celebrity collage to see which celebrities you most closely resemble and the look-a-like meter which tells you which of your parents you look most like.

The site’s a good mix of technology and local focus, so hopefully Linde can keep up the good work Stefano has done to date.

The first Success in Failure post gained a lot of attention so I’m really glad to have another story of valuable lessons learnt in failure to add to the series so soon.

This episode is written by Paul McKey.

“Paul McKey is an internationally recognised authority in the area of business improvement through organisational learning and performance support”. You can read more about Paul and his incredibly interesting past here.

Now onto Paul’s story, in his own words…

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BigTree Online started in the mid-nineties as one of Australia’s first online learning companies. Based upon a regular and ongoing contract with Apple Computer to manage its Certified Apple Engineer program BigTree zoomed along until a combination of factors brought it down. And that was probably a good thing! Why? Because knowing when to cut your losses, and leave with your experiences and reputation intact is far more important than flogging a dead horse.

Big Tree had the one big client syndrome and needed to diversify. That strategy was fundamentally correct yet the tactics were flawed. Expansion away from and beyond your ‘one good idea’ is risky. We get over confident and think I did it once I can do it again. Maybe.

Here are some of the traps we found waiting when we moved from early startup to growing the business:

First lesson – Keep your eyes on the game not the scoreboard. ( Or when any market is booming keep your money in your pocket.)  As we know from those great historians at South Park, in the late 1990s everyone was collecting underpants with great success. The Internet was booming. Phase 1 – Collect underpants. Phase 2 – ? Phase 3 – Profit! Even when the market is in a frenzy for anything online (as it is again ten years later) it does not mean you should stop market research – particularly before launching a new venture. Ask real people real questions like “Do you intend to spend money on this product/service in the next six months? How much?”

Second Lesson - What in the %$#@ are we selling here? Sometimes you have to ignore the noise that customers make. Focus on one primary market – are you about lowest cost, delivering the best product or providing a great customer experience? While all three are important you must know which game you are in. You can’t satisfy all three profitably. Dell are in the Cost game. Apple concentrate on Product design. IBM focus on the Customer.
See more on this at http://www.bizsum.com/thediscipline.htm

Third Lesson - Developing your own software is fun but expensive. We are sort of excused for this one since we were pioneers in many areas. We developed our own learning management system (LMS). I later went on to another company and we spent several million dollars building a bigger and better LMS. I would never do that today. Open Source and a community committed to an application is a very valuable asset. Use it where possible and then customise your front end.

Fourth Lesson - An idea without legs is a legless idea! Do your biz plan. Double the amount you need to raise. Take the extra 50% of your cash and give it to the hardest bastard you know and implore them to not let you have it back until you have exhausted every other possible revenue stream. Lack of capital kills over 80% of startups. Make sure you have a reserve source. Just when we had an opportunity to expand we ran out.

Fifth Lesson - We had a strong community but didn’t realise its value. We were too busy chasing new customers. Initial sales are thrilling and happy customers let you sleep at night. Yet leaving them alone and not bringing them even closer is business negligence. People drift away if they aren’t getting love. Love hard!

Final Lesson - A ‘failure’ is not a dead end. Serial entrepreneurs tend to build on both successes and failures. If I hadn’t had the opportunity to learn with BigTree I wouldn’t have gone on to found the world’s first global online learning business which raised US$15m in capital. But that’s another story…

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Once again, Thanks to Paul for being brave enough to put his story of failure out there. Hopefully some of you will gain from his experience.

And don’t forget to check out the Success in Failure page to learn more about the goals of the series and how to get your story included.