TicketChoice, the ticket reselling site we first wrote about in December last year, have relaunched their site with a bunch of new features that should make it even easier for those with tickets to offload.

Some of those features include:

• A “What’s On” section to show you new tickets being sold
• An ability to embed your listing into your blog/website through automated embed code
• A new way to push your ticket listings out to friends and family on twitter, facebook and a raft of other social networks.

The last of these is similiar to the system another Aussie ticket-selling site, Posse,  uses to help sell tickets - the obvious difference being TicketChoice is focused on reselling tickets while Posse is focused on selling the original tickets. Either way it makes sense to give users a way to leverage their friends, who presumably have similar interests, to sell tickets.

I caught up with Jeremy Reitman from TicketChoice about the relaunch and this is what he had to say:

–
How are your numbers going?

Prior to launching the new TicketChoice, we were easily maintaining around 100 sets of second hand tickets for Sport, Concert, Theatre and Family events. We’ve found the demand for second hand tickets in Australia is extremely high. If you post your tickets on our site, they are generally sold within 3-5 days; and all without any fees to the buyer or seller. The hardest part we find is keeping the supply up to meet the demand. Since launching the site, we now have just under 200 sets of tickets for all different events. The range of tickets is spectacular at the moment. If you find an upcoming concert to be sold out, chances are somebody has posted their unwanted tickets on TicketChoice.

Why have you decided to to relaunch now?

The redesign of TicketChoice has been in the works now for almost 6 months. We felt now was a great time to finally launch due to the fact that Australia has so many great concert tours lined up. From Beyonce, to Britney Spears and of course ACDC. So many of these shows are sold out, we’re confident the second hand ticket market during the summer will come in handy for people who were not able to get in on the original sale.

What’s exciting you the most about the new site?

You’ll see some great new features of the site. In particular, we’ve integrated with many social networks to help people spread the word about the tickets they’re trying to sell. Once a person posts their tickets on the site, they have the option of sending out a message to selected contacts within their social networks to help spread the word. This could potentially be hundreds or even thousands of messages to all of their friends, family and peers.

The site is also fully optimised for SEO. We’ve only launched the site a week ago, and we are already ranking very well in Google for such search terms as Beyonce Tickets, Socceroos Tickets, and many, many more. Again, this will help people get their tickets noticed. The more people we drive to the site, the better chance they have of being able to sell them.

Any last words?

We’d like to ask everyone to help get the word out and grow the TicketChoice community. Remember, buying and selling tickets on the site is completely free. What do you have to lose?

—

Not sure how many people know this, but today’s migration of San Francisco-based GitHub to RackSpace was architected, implemented and will be managed on an ongoing basis by Sydney-based Anchor.

For those unfamiliar with the site, GitHub is a prominent tech startup well-known among the IT world for its web based software management system. It  has a client base of over 125,000 programmers world-wide using GitHub to manage projects and share coding solutions.

Getting the job is a massive win for Anchor, considering they are on the other side of the world to not only the customer, but the physical infrastructure and the company that operates it.

The whole thing went swimmingly, as well, if word on the stweet is anything to go by.

Anchor Managing Director, Andrew Rogers, was obviously very pleased with their role in the project:

Getting the opportunity to design and manage the infrastructure behind what has been dubbed “facebook for programmers” has really been exciting.
It’s very cool that we can do this from down under; we’re doing some seriously fancy technical stuff for these guys to make this work, and implementing it entirely with open source software.

It also appears they have had tremendous support from within GitHub, with co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, saying

I trust the team at Anchor more than any other systems administrators I’ve ever worked with.

For those interested in the details of what Anchor did (it’s an interesting read if it’s your thing) you can find all the details on their blog.

Melbourne-based Flippa, the self-proclaimed, #1 marketplace for buying and selling websites, is going from strength to strength making it easier than ever for people to exit their businesses without having to wait for a knock on the door from Google or Yahoo.

Flippa is another site to come out of the super-successful SitePoint stable (Crowdsourced Design site 99 Designs is another).

Many of you will remember the SitePoint marketplace which was used to auction off Startup Camp projects – well Flippa spun out of that marketplace in June this year.

While most of their traffic originally came from SitePoint, Dave Slutzkin from Flippa tells me that after just a couple of months they’re down to less than 15% from “the mothership”, with the majority of traffic coming directly to the site.  Traffic growth is around 20% per month at the moment as well (Compete has them on about 180K UVs, though that could mean anything…)

It’s a good start for the team and one that they, no doubt, will hope positions them well to take on eBay, CraigsList and the other more niche sites competing in the area.

Mike Nicholls, the former Enikos CEO, and Dale Hurley have been working on a bunch of start-ups together, including Jobfeedr, which we covered late last year.

Well the team has come together again and is working on a new startup, Mortgagecorp, which it hopes will change the Australian mortgage market.

As Nicholls explains

Competition is dead. Everyone knows it, no one knows what to do to solve it. Big banks and their subbrands are writing more than 80% of the Mortgage business in Australia. 

Over the last two years Bankwest, St George, Wizard, RAMs and Aussie are now either fully owned or have significant big bank ownership. Combine this with the disappearance of other lenders such as Macquarie and GE and smaller non bank lenders due to difficulty of raising funds in the market.

As a result there is very little effective competition in the Australian Mortgage market.

MortgageCorp aims to overcome this by making it easier than ever for people to review more than 600 products from over 25 lenders. In contrast to most sites out there, MortgageCorp doesn’t hide the lender details either. They’re even trying to remove the need to speak with a representative by automating the whole loan process – something no other site currently offers

I had a quick chat with Nicholls about the site and this is what he had to say:

—
How’s traffic?

Traffic is still small, 1000+ per month but growing at +40% per month. To be honest we have had limited budget to advertise and have been taking time to fine tune the ad campaigns on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn Yahoo/Microsoft before we turn up the ad spend.

Tell us about the tech you’re using to run the site

Tech behind it, basically running on a lagre VPS, MYSQL backend, XML updates to the data, using a combination of JS and PHP to run. We get a direct feed from the our Mortgage Aggregator who combines all the bank loans etc which we then feed into mySQL backend.

What’s the plan?

Long term we have built the application to be interfaced with a local Standard called LIXI http://www.lixi.org.au/ which is Lenders XML initiative. This is designed to be able to do a completely electronic loan application from broker to lender including applications, valuations and settlements.

We have a backend capable of accepting all data required to conduct an LIXI transaction but there is still missing links in the chain above our company, the gateway provider is not ready for us to do this yet and only about 14 lenders have signed onto the concept, but we will be ready to do it in the future.

So at the moment the application simply takes an enquiry but later it will take a loan application and provide a complete electronic application.

Tell us something sweet about the site that will make people want to use it even before the process becomes fully automated

We have just released a mortgage calculator app that takes your variables and calculates all the stamp duties, estimates the lenders mortgage insurance (which is very difficult to do as you don’t know how much you need to borrow initially), works out the loan amount you need based on the deposit, property price and then the aforementioned costs and then based on your conditions including Loan to Valuation Ration calculates in real time the top 20 loans with each of their payments per month for the amount to be borrowed. It also shows all the loan fees and any other loan details.

—

There’s still some work to do on the user interface, but for now the functionality is good enough to make this a site that you should definitely check out if you’re in the market for a mortgage

For many startups the dream is to go to the US to grow their business.

Mitchel Lake, a company that has always been supportive of the local tech startup scene, is running an event called “Coming To America” on October 15th. It’s all about connecting Australian based entrepreneurs who are thinking about heading over to San Francisco with Aussies who have been there and have relevant, meaningful experiences to share.

It will be an interactive session between attendees in both Sydney and San Francisco.

Many of the guys on the panel have not spoken to or engaged with the community in Sydney previously so it will be a good chance to get some new insights.

According to Mitchel Lake Managing Partner, Phaedon Stough, the Sydney audience will be made up of a mix of angel investors, VC’s, experience entrepreneurs and startups.

The San Francisco Panel will include

• Ben Keighran from BluePulse
• Matt Symons from Accenture
• Ryan Junee from Google (ex Omnisio)
• Tristen Langley from Southern Cross Venture Partners
• David Cannington from Sensear

You can check out all the details on the event site HERE

The event’s not free but there are discounts for entrepreneurs and students. Also, I’ll be there on the day, so make sure you come up and say “Hi”

Tasmanian web travel site, Travellr (who we’ve covered a couple of times), has announced they’ve received investment from the World Nomads Group (WNG).

WNG have travelinsurancedirect.com.au, worldnomads.com and suresave.com.au as some key brands.

While their bottom line is travel insurance, they provide free travel safety information, free language guides, and other resources for travellers, so it’s not hard to see why Travellr is such a good fit.

I managed to catch up with Travellr co-founder, Ian Cumming, to ask him a few questions about the deal:

—
What can you tell me about the deal terms?
World Nomads Group are funding Travellr for two years, and our development team is moving to Sydney to work out of the WNG head office.

What’s the plan going forward?
Our immediate plans are to focus on growth by improving the core service, integrating it with World Nomads Group brands, extending its distribution through a public API and adding real-time functionality to the service.

The long term objective for Travellr is to build partnerships across the travel industry to provide a reputable pool of relevant, accessible travel-knowledge to assist travellers.

So will you be integrating Travellr into the WNG sites, selling travel insurance through Travellr or something else?

The real opportunity here is to tap into the travel knowledge of the customers in the World Nomads Group enhancing both the size and quality of Travellr while adding brand value to their network of sites. We do not believe selling travel insurance on Travellr or a straight advertising model is where the commercial opportunity lies, however we are not at a stage to announce our revenue model yet.

Will you maintain the Travellr branding or are you white-labelling the tech?
We’re still looking at the Travellr branding and how it fits in - but our focus is on Travellr is as a service, not a brand.

And you’ll be leaving your job at Insight4?
I actually decided to quit my management job last December and sold my belongings to work on Travellr full-time. I lived off my savings for six months and couch-surfed around Europe, SE Asia, and North America while working on Travellr from internet cafes and pitching to investors. That experience enormously changed my life and I learned a lot living with just basic necessities - especially the importance of focus!

—

Travellr is a good example of how a tech startup can succeed in Australia with the right people, product and support.

Founders Ian Cumming and Scott Woodhouse are two smart guys with a relevant idea and the skills, experience and commitment to make it succeed.

To get to where they are today they received an AusIndustry COMET grant in 2008, were an ANZA Technology ‘Gateway to the US’company and won a wildcard spot for Webciety at CeBITthis year. They also received help on the deal from ANZAtech and Pollenizer.

Congratulations to Scott, Ian and the team. I’m looking forward to seeing how they progress with WNG’s help.

Startup Camp Canberra kicked off last night and the teams are already working hard on their projects.

As usual you can get all the schedule details from Startup Australia.

There’s also the #scc hashtag on twitter that you can track.

The projects are:

HereNThen
http://herenthen.com/ - user-generated location based stories

8what
http://8what.com/ - recipe finder

JobsDone Network
http://jobsdone.net/ - community-sourcing volunteer jobs

RateMyLoo
http://ratemyloo.com/ - “great shit” - rating site/comments for toilets

FamilyWrap
http://familywrap.com - family profile/gifting site

At first glance, RateMyLoo looks like it’ll be fun and HereNThen looks like a really interesting idea.That having been said, there’s not much to see on the sites just yet, but no doubt that will change throughout the day and night.

Congrats to by Bart Jellema et al. for putting together another great event.

As we highlighted in a post yesterday, Mobile Social Networking company Xumii has been acquired by Global Mobile Software powerhouse, Myriad Group.

Cunchbase says Xumii had raised US$5.5M in funding from Aussie VCs Southern Cross Venture Partners(SXVP) and CM Capital(CM), so the deal is also a good win for the local VC industry as well.

I managed to track down SXVP Managing Director, John Scull, for a quick chat and this is what he had to say:

The deal is good for the company (Xumii)…we’re very satisfied with the outcome

As for the reason for the deal, he said:

We felt it was a great opportunity to connect with a larger company and benefit from its sales & marketing and networks, particularly Telco networks as they were becoming Xumii’s key customers

Of course I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t try to pry some information about the terms out of Scull, but he did well to repel my efforts!

There’s no official information from either side about the size of the deal, but I thought this would be an interesting one to try and work out without their help.

So what can we figure out about the deal?

• SXVP policy is to take “ a meaningful minority position” in their investments
• SXVP were equal partners with CM in the funding round, meaning we can assume that jointly, CM and SXVP took a meaningful position (rather than both of them taking one)
• What’s meaningful? Let’s assume somewhere between 30-40% particularly for early funding rounds
• Scull wouldn’t divulge the consideration paid by Myriad as part of the agreement (dollars/equity/something else) but the fact that he feels the deal is a great opportunity to partner with Myriad would suggest that there’s still some skin in the game for SXVP and CM
• On that point, however, when asked if it was an “exit” for SXVP, Scull said that there was a sale to a company so in their mind it was an exit.
• As explained in an earlier post – venture funds need to average 4x Gross Returns from exits to make an “acceptable” 2.5x net return to LPs. If that is the case, and considering this has been viewed as an exit, the valuation would need to be around $55M-$75M for the number to be acceptable to the VC firms.
• That 4 x Gross is an average, however. Xumii was becoming a star in a high-interest industry,  so you’d think that SXVP/CM would have viewed it as one of the 2-3/10 winners in their portfolio rather than one of the 5-7/10 failures & walking dead.
• This would mean that they’d expect on average a 6.5x Gross return (according to Fred Wilson)pushing the acquisition valuation to somewhere between $90M-$120M assuming the VCs took somewhere between 30%-40%.

So a valuation of between US$90M-US$120M?

There are a bunch of things that might increase or decrease that though. One interesting factor is the risk still surrounding Xumii as a business. Let me explain:

• Myriad says that the deal won’t materially affect their ’09 Fiscal EBITDA.
• Last report put Myriad’s EBITDA at US$3.3M, so it would seem that anything that doesn’t materially affect that number (even considering growth for ’09) would be pretty small.
• This suggests that the deal, as Myriad says, really is to round out their portfolio of software with a leading solution in a growing segment, rather than trying to add to the company’s bottom line immediately post-acquisition

The risk still inherent in Xumii as a business may have kept the price down.

Then again, Xumii was doing really well in a growing segment, so there may have been some premium above the 6.5x GR needed to get them to sell.

There are other things, no doubt…other offers, the ability of the company to grow without Myriad’s help, synergies within Myriad’s business and so on.

All things considered though, $90M-$120M seems like a fair guess at the range based on expected results (even though my feelings say it’s probably too high)

What do you think?

More great news for Aussie startups with the European-based Myriad Group, a global leader in mobile technology with software in over 2 billion phones, announcing that it has acquired the brand, technology and 17 employees of Xumii.

Xumii is a mobile social networking service that we’ve covered a few times over the past year.

I’ve always thought the technology had great potential and a great team of both employees and advisors, so it’s good to see them move to the next level.

There’s not much information circulating beyond the official press release, but I’ll post another story which looks into the detail of the acquisition later on today.

In the meantime, congratulations to Xumii CEO, Jennifer Zanich and the team.

I was glad to receive an email from long time TechNation Australia supporter, Kain Tietzel, the other day, explaining that the startup he’s been working on, PhotoMerchant, has finally launched.

PhotoMerchant is  “a complete online solution for managing your photography business”

The idea for PhotoMerchant was conceived 2 years ago when Derek Clapham (co-founder and CTO) was swamped by the process minutia of running his own photography business. Having spent many, many hours managing the print orders from 300+ high school students he realised there had to be a better way. He searched for an online solution but only found a disparate array of online photography services that were either expensive, had limited functionality or required a lot of technical knowledge. And so he set about building a solution with the idea of offering it available to other amateur, semi and professional photographers.

Two years (and 2.5 Million lines of code) later, and after being joined by Elmar Platzer as Director and co-founder and Tietzel as Creative & Marketing Director, the startup from the Sutherland Shire officially soft-launched last Monday.

Initially targeting the Australian photography market, PhotoMerchant is due to launch in the United States in mid October, with grander plans to roll the service out to UK, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa by the middle of 2010, and then on to the rest of the world.

PhotoMerchant allows a photographer to build a dedicated portfolio website to showcase their craft and enables them to then sell their photos through the build in e-commerce engine. Transactions are conducted in local currencies and cater for all local taxation requirements. Order management tools allow the photographer to automatically generate invoices and emails to keep their clientele informed of the process.

The PhotoMerchant service also offers financial management and reporting tools to enable the photographer to manage their entire business online.

PhotoMerchant currently services “self-fulfilment” meaning the photographer is responsible for managing the ordering process with their print lab. But in the near future, PhotoMerchant will enable “direct-fulfilment” via their print lab partners Nulab in Australia and Burrell Colour Imaging in the United States, meaning orders will go directly to the print lab and be drop shipped directly to the customer.

For AU$19.95 per month, plus a 10% transaction fee, photographers get unlimited hosting, unlimited galleries, unlimited transactions and a comprehensive (and growing) set of business and marketing tools.

That pricing model, and the functionality made available, tells me that while they claim to focus on everything from amateur to professional photographers, their user-base will come more from the professional end.

PhotoMerchant see their main competitors as being SmugMug and Zenfolio. There are local sites that cater to photographers like Photo Art Gallery and RedBubble, but Tietzel tells me they don’t see them as direct competitors.

There’s currently a 14 day trial on, so if photography is your thing, PhotoMerchant might be worth checking out.