TechYob

Thanks to our sponsors at Hadron & Castle, the Moet and Mullets were out in force last Sunday.  Good to see the art of the reach-around continues to be perfected.   

Darius Coveney, Ex CFO of Adelaide security startup Dtex and fellow HAAS Alumni is now heading to New York to keep Macquarie Bank’s Finances in order.  It seams the barbarians are storming the gates, and if lives up to his namesake, you’ll meet no smoother a battering ram than Mr Coveney.          

Google just did something else right.

Word on the street is that they hired Alan Noble to head up their R&D in Australia.

Ive worked with Alan and seen first hand his energy, intellect and ability to lead teams.  For those who don’t know the 30 second water cooler run-down is

• Australian born and bred.  Attended Brighton High School in Adelaide.
• Masters of Science at Stanford. Speaks Japanese. 
• Holds over 6 patents (co-authored one with yours truly).
• One of the original developers for Rational Rose acquired by a small company called IBM
• Founder of NetMind, the first web synchronization company, which was acquired by Pumatech (now Nokia) for north of $400m and become VP Engineering.
• Now Ex-CEO of NetPriva, one of Australia’s under the radar success stories (shareholders include IBM)
• Whiteboard ninja. 

My prediction is that outside of Mountain View California, Australia just became the best place to launch your Web business.

Disclosure: TechYob holds shares in NetPriva

The mobile-media sharing startup becomes Just Another Web2.0 For Sale On eBay.

After Kiko set the trend with a sale of $258k on eBay, Mojungle looks like the latest Web 2.0 businesses trying to salvage some blood-sweat-and-tears.  

Mojungle hopes to net $500k.  Best of luck guys, but as the immortal Darryl Kerrigan from “The Castle” would say - “tell’em they’re dreamin”

Congratulations on Melbourne-based company Chinswing on the launch of its new audio discussion board.  Its a nice idea, and feedback on Techcrunch suggests that it could be improved with added text support.  Perhaps they might make quick use of Castingwords to convert the audio-files to text, or just go direct at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. 

There looks to be a lot of interest in the area of ‘Creating Conversations’ from other Tech.Startup.Oz companies including Tangler ‘bringing groups to life’ and 3eep ‘communities in conversation’.  Watch this space.  

For those who missed out, STIRR Sydney was a great place to hang out and meet other entrepreneurs that are kickin-A from Oz.  Hats off to Mick from Tangler for organising and Mike Zimmerman from TVP for stumping up some cash to make it possible. 

It seams to me that Australian web entrepreneurs are coming of age and are understanding the power of the subtle sell.  Gone are the days of the elevator pitch, and the enthusiastic bleating of blue-sky boasts.  Everything is either in uber-stealth-mode or private alpha. To such an extent that one VC complained that instead of being courted, most of the startups at the event were happy to leave them to their own devices. 

Is this the start of a shake-out in the Oz venture capital industry? 

Hardly. It just reflects two important shifts

1. Right-sizing.  People are more willing to do the hard yards to boot strap their products.  VC used to be the way that ego-entrepreneurs bank-rolled a pay rise. 
2. The economics of the exit.  If your exit is 5 million with 3 people in 2 years, the numbers just dont add up. 

The event itself showed we have come a long way in Oz since Internet 1.0 First Tuesday pitch-fests.

The tonge-in-cheek rendition of the halfbacked.com game was a highlight. Essentially groups choose two random words and build a dotcom business plan and pitch in 15 minutes.  Mike Cannon-Brookes’ group took the prize with its Shoewave.com business for social tagging of odd socks.  The founder of Atlassian (and an event sponsor) had tough competition from Bananasmell.com’s rhinoplasty locator mashup and videoparachute.com’s air-delivery video service. 

The real prize of the night however, goes to Remember the Milk’s online task management for collecting the most votes for best Web 2.0 Demo.  As soon as I work out how to get it for my Google sidebar, it’ll become a permanent feature of my personal productivity suite.  Which reminds me, Chris Saad from Touchstone sent me a new Alpha download to try out. 

Ill be profiling these guys and other great Tech.Startup.Oz companies in the near future.