TechYob

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.

Ive previously riffed about one of the guys who invented Captchas - Dr Vohn Ahn.  One of my other favourite geniuses, Seth Godin, gives his take on how to commercialise it. 

Provide it as a free service, except instead of just random numbers place the highest paid advertiser.  Granted, you can already get it for free, but his take is original none the less.  I just love it how he puts this stuff out there. 

I recently bought Seths book Small is the New Big for a long time friend for his birthday.  Its the perfect ’thought of the day’ for people trying to bust out and make a difference.  Given my friend put me onto Unleashing the Idea Virus, it was the least I could do.  As Molly Meldrum would say, do yourself a favour and buy it. 

Friedman is talking about the Flat World.  Bezos is building it.

Techcrunch lets the cat out the bag today about Amazon’s yet-to-be-released SDS Service - rumoured to stand for “Simple Data Service”.  This coincides with an article I read this morning over breakfast in the Australian Financial Review about Amazon’s web-services-as-a-service venture.  Rob Hof gives an insight into the tech offerings that may well position Amazon as one of the leading players in utility computing.  

Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud and Simple Storage Services just made it easier for kids to start their own Web 2.0 company with some loose pocket change.  Back in the dot-com boom when working for Accenture I remember the massive tier-3 architectures we’d build and deploy for ecommerce companies.   Now I can enter the game for 10 cents an hour for a server computer, and 15c per gigabyte per month for storage. 

This got me thinking back to a comment made to me by one of the respected wags here in Sydney over a couple of Pale Ales

“I can’t afford a million dollar house in Paddington.  But I can rent one!”

Bezos may have some doubters on Wall Street, but Im a believer. 

Im looking forward to STIRR Sydney next week and catching up on living, breathing Oz Web 2.0 talent.  Thanks to Mick Liubinskas for helping to organise.  As well as being Tangler’s marketing guy, he is also Bob the Trainer from the Biggest Losers twin brother - see the pics for proof.