Last week, I wrote from Sydney about a number of companies I met in the first couple days of the ANZA Technology Network’s FocUS workshop series. Since then, I’ve taken a whirlwind tour of Australia, visiting Adelaide, Brisbane, and Melbourne before returning to the U.S.
Like Auckland and Sydney, technology innovation is thriving in the cities around Australia. Here are a few of the promising companies I met along the way.
TridentGLOBAL addresses the inefficiencies in the import/export process, where a single shipment generates dozens of forms which can add up to 10% to the cost of goods being shipped. Much of the required documents are electronically generated output which is then manually input into another system TridentGLOBAL streamlines the process, reducing import-related costs by as much as 60%. The company has attracted the U.S. subsidiaries of a number of brand-name companies as customers in Australia and will leverage those relationships, along with an agreement which gives it access to SAP’s global network of resellers, to bring the product to the U.S.
My247.mobi has been the providing Web-based entertainment guides to Australian consumers for nearly eight years, and is now blending that success with mobile delivery and social networking capabilities to make its guides location aware and personally relevant. The wiki-styled guides were launched in June and are now active in 25 countries, including the US, Canada, and the UK. The company will have to build serious momentum outstrip Yelp, TimeOut, and Zagat for top of mind awareness, but My247.mobi’s currency and affinity targeting may be just the trick to get it done.
mintd.com plans to "unleash the niche!" with an e-commerce platform that creates a marketplace where small, independent sellers reach a global market. The site, focused on individual artists, provides free tools to create a Web store, and the means to market that store to a wide audience. The site goes head to head with etsy.com, but already the two markets seem to be finding different audiences.
QuestMetrics is doing for common questionnaires what Visio has done for diagrams: make the tools to create and manage them a part of the mainstream software suite. While you could create forms in a product like Microsoft Word, the word processor doesn’t support the logic, structure, and reusability and so is a tremendously inefficient tool for creating the customer surveys and other questionnaires that are a common part of business communications. QuestDesigner takes the complexity out of questionnaire design, while supporting embedded logic, scripting, and survey deployment in an XML-based format. We’ve seen a number of tools aimed at the market research niche; QuestMetrics has the opportunity to break through into the much larger general business market.
Puttoo.com fills a gap in small business Web sites by providing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool to create and deploy Web forms that allow businesses to collect customer input. The first version of the product will enable some basic feedback and response mechanisms, such that customer input is met with company response. The company plans to evolve its DIY Web forms platform into a link between businesses’ Web sites and their customer-relationship-management platforms.
Ofidium Communications is one of the earliest stage – and most promising – companies I met on this tour “down under.” The demand for bandwidth will outstrip the ability of telcos to deliver it within the next five years. Most researchers are focusing on packing more bits into the optical pipe, and providing software to differentiate the bits as they arrive at their destination. Ofidium takes a different approach, packaging bits together, sending them through the pipe, then decoupling them at the other end. The result is a technology that is capturing the attention of the big telco equipment providers, in large part because Ofidium’s solution is faster and cheaper than even current data and bandwidth management techniques.
