Delimiter » development

iOS conference One More Thing set for May

Vijith Vazhayil, Chillibreeze — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:49:40 +0000

news The second edition of One More Thing, a conference of iOS developers and designers, has been scheduled for May 25th and 26th in Melbourne, Australia.

One More Thing is Anthony Agius’ brainchild. Agius, erstwhile founder of giant Australian Apple forum MacTalk and co-host on the popular MacTalk podcast, along with Melbourne-based graphic designer Lauren Watson, semi-regular co-host on the MacTalk Australia podcast, has organised One More Thing for the iOS industry. “If you’ve ever wanted to make a living off the App Store, making your own apps and setting your own agenda, One More Thing is where you want to be,” declares the OMT Conference webpage.

It’s not a traditional programming conference, say the organisers, but a meeting ground for professionals, amateurs and those who are interested. They say: “You won’t directly learn to code better. Your UI probably won’t improve either. But you will leave with more confidence in your abilities as an iOS developer or designer.” One More Thing is directed to those whose code is solid, but who are unsure of going it alone. In an interview with Macstories, Agius said: “The overall theme of the conference is still the same as 2011 – get developers confident, psyched, and ready to move from dreaming of making apps, to just doing it.”

Going one step up from last year, when all the speakers were independent developers based in Australia, this year the conference will feature 17 recognized independent iOS developers from all over the world. May 25th, was set for mini-conferences, with 30 people per session, in order to make the interactions with iOS programmers and designers more personal. Two sessions have been time-tabled: the morning session for Design, and the afternoon one for Code. According to the website: “We’ll start off with a casual presentation from each speaker about a topic they’re passionate about and then you’ll have the chance to pick the brains of these experts.”

Speakers for the mini-conference are:

Code:

Loren Brichter, Atebits (Tweetie) – Philadelphia, USA
Karl von Randow, Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) – Auckland, NZ
Layton Duncan, Polar Bear Farm (Air Forms) – Christchurch, NZ

Design:

Neven Mrgan, Panic – Portland, USA
Jeff Broderick, Freelance UI/Visual designer – San Fransisco, USA
Sebastiaan de With, CCO, doubleTwist – San Fransisco, USA

The main conference on May 26th will have the iOS developers and designers “tell their stories of App Store success.” Speakers for the Main Conference are:

Raphael Schaad, Flipboard – San Francisco, USA
Winter Wong, Quoord Systems (Tapatalk) – Shanghai, China
Lee Armstrong, Pinkfroot (PlaneFinder) – London, UK
Julian Lepinski, Debacle Software (Pano) – Toronto, Canada
Matt Rix, Magicule (Trainyard) – Toronto, Canada
Adam Kirk, Mysterious Trousers (Calvetica) – Salt Lake City, USA
Igor Pušenjak, Lima Sky (Doodle Jump) – New York, USA
Kepa Auwae, Rocketcat Games (Hook Champ) – Seattle, USA
Shaun Inman, (Last Rocket) – Chattanooga, USA
Justin Williams, Second Gear (Elements) – San Francisco, USA
Dave Howell, Avatron Software (Air Display), Portland, USA

Podcasts from OMT have featured introductions to the speakers and a sense of what to expect from One More Thing, 2012. The conference venue will be the Melbourne Convention Centre. Tickets to the main conference are priced at $349 (an early bird price of $249 is available till April 12th), while the mini-conference session tickets cost $499 (limited to 30 people only).

Image credit: One More Thing conference

Atlassian buys HipChat

Nayantara Mallya, Chillibreeze — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:44:24 +0000

news Australian enterprise software firm Atlassian revealed this week that it had acquired San Francisco-based HipChat. A hosted private chat service for companies and teams, HipChat has over 1,200 customers including Groupon, Wired and Hubspot. Atlassian will include HipChat into its growing portfolio of software and help teams at over 18,000 companies work better together and develop software more rapidly.

Pete Curley, HipChat CEO and co-founder stated in a media release that Atlassian provides an ideal environment to scale the HipChat business. “The no-friction business model, the customer base, the culture, the free beer – all things that are perfectly aligned with where we want to take the business. We’re excited to join Atlassian to change the way teams work together,” he said. Curley and the other two co-founders, Garret Heaton and Chris Rivers, are scheduled to join Atlassian in San Francisco to continue to grow and develop the HipChat product and business.

HipChat, a group chat platform, enables collaboration in real time between teams and entire companies. HipChat’s dynamic environment for real-time communication, group collaboration and file sharing is accessible through a Web browser, native Windows and Mac clients and native applications for popular mobile devices. The platform allows access and search for conversation histories, permitting new team members to catch up and avoid missing an important conversation.

CEO and co-founder of Atlassian, Mike Cannon-Brookes (pictured above, left, with co-founder Scott Farquhar), said that HipChat is perfect for product teams, and indeed for any team. Cannon-Brookes felt that connecting and sharing in real time allows teams to progress faster; he opined that this is something that HipChat does better than any product he has used. “Its use absolutely exploded at Atlassian, demonstrating the viral adoption potential of a modern communication system for teams,” he said.

Atlassian’s blog posts indicate that the company, half of which is already using HipChat, is highly satisfied with the platform. “We always say that our best customer is ourselves — if we love something, it’s likely our customers will love it too.”

HipChat provides a wide-ranging set of integrations to popular products and Internet services that publish targeted notifications from other products directly into the concerned team chat rooms. Integrations are on hand for Bitbucket (a free source code hosting service which Atlassian bought in September 2010), Atlassian Bamboo, GitHub, Heroku and MailChimp. New integrations that were released yesterday are for Atlassian JIRA, the industry-leading project and issue tracking software; Confluence, its content collaboration product; and two popular developer tools, FishEye and Crucible.

HipChat is available for a free 30-day trial and can also be bought for $2 per month per user. The platform has no ads, obscure screen names or failed file transfers, according to Atlassian’s blog. It supports all modern social networking conventions, like @mentions to help direct specific messages to specific people quickly and easily. HipChat can be accessed not only from any browser, but also through desktop apps for Windows or Macs or any Jabber (XMPP client) and from mobile phones through native iPhone, iPad and Android apps or SMS.

The CMO at HubSpot, Mike Volpe said that his team members use HipChat and love it for its simplification of building closer connections on a day-to-day basis. “And we use JIRA and several other Atlassian products to help build HubSpot. Now that Atlassian and HipChat are the same company, I can’t wait to see what they can do together,” Volpe said.

Outlining HipChat’s growth, Atlassian’s blog post says: “HipChat has grown organically to over 1,200 organisations — a huge number of whom are already part of Atlassian’s 18,000 strong enterprise customer base. We’ll be expanding the team to tackle their growing feature backlog, improving each of their clients, adding our own support and service expertise and better integrating HipChat with all of the most popular tools teams use today.”

opinion/analysis
This sounds like an extremely natural acquisition for Atlassian, and I really admire the way the company tested out HipChat internally with its own staff before deciding to make an offer for the company. It’s exactly the right approach and shows Atlassian will have deep knowledge of the technology it’s buying.

In a broader sense, I also admire what Atlassian is doing at the moment with broadening its software stack. In the tried and true fashion pioneered by Oracle and Microsoft, Atlassian is gradually making it so that its software stack is so compellingly well-rounded and integrated that customers using one portion will rapidly start to use all of the other portions. It’s great to see the company doing so in such an intelligent fashion.

Image credit: Atlassian. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

Do Australia’s video game developers have a future?

External Contributor — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:49:14 +0000

This article is by Sebastien Darchen, a lecturer in planning at the University of Queensland. It first appeared on The Conversation and is re-published here with permission.

analysis For many years, the Australian videogame industry has been trying to carve a niche for itself internationally. There have been moments of success and moments of decline, but the sector’s true potential has never been fulfilled. But could we now be on the verge of a sustainable videogame industry in Australia? It would seem so – and, to be honest, it’s about time.

The nation’s game industry emerged in the late 1980s and experienced significant growth in the next decade-and-a-half, with the establishment of many game development studios. These studios were located mainly in Brisbane and Melbourne. They included (in Brisbane) studios such as Auran (1995), Wildfire Studios (1995), Krome Studios (1999), Pandemic Studios (2000) and Halfbrick Studios. In Melbourne they included Torus Games (1994), Tantalus Interactive (1994), and Blue Tongue (1995).

But the past few years haven’t been great for the industry, with several pioneer studios in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney closing their doors. Among these are Pandemic Studios in Brisbane, which closed in 2009, Krome Studios, which closed in 2010, and THQ’s Brisbane and Melbourne studios, which shut down in 2011. There are three main reasons for the downturn in this sector:

The rise of the Australian dollar
Tax breaks for game developers overseas (for instance, the Quebec government in Canada subsidises 37.5% of videogame studios’ payrolls)
The decline of middle-ground games (that is, games that fall between triple-A titles – such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – and smaller, independent games, such as Flight Control).

These challenges collide with the fact that, according to the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association’s (IGEA) Digital Australia 2012 report, 92% of Australian households have devices for playing games (compared to 88% last year) and that Australians spent $1.7 billion on videogames in 2010.

But Australia respresents only 2% of the world market, so Australian game companies need to export if they want to survive. One primary concern with the closure of keystone studios in Australia is the fact many professionals, or “talents”, are leaving to find work overseas. All of which raises the big question: where to from here?

If we look at interactive entertainment in Australia in 2006/2007, the industry’s total income was A$136.9m, with A$116.9m (85% of income) coming from the provision of services to other businesses. Of this service income, 93% came from overseas sources. In comparison, the film and television industry relies less on fee-for-service work.

The film and television industry in Australia has experienced more government support than the video game industry because it employs more people: 13,844 people in June 2007 compared with 1,431 workers in video games. (These 1,431 people were spread across 45 game development businesses, located mainly in Queensland and Victoria.) The fact the Australian game industry was mostly relying on international game studios and publishers (which is especially true for Queensland) is one of the main weaknesses of the industry.

Victoria has been the most proactive in supporting the industry and it was the first Australian state to provide government funding for its game industry in 1996. In 2000, it launched Game Plan, a statement of support for the computer game industry, followed by Game Plan: the Next Level in 2001. With the creation of Film Victoria in 2001 – which administers the Digital Media Fund – Victoria has a long tradition of supporting the videogame industry.

Videogame studios have also had support in Queensland, but to a lesser extent than in Victoria. At the national scale, the Game Developers’ Association of Australia (GDAA) has four objectives:

To promote the growth of the game industry in Australia
To represent the interests of GDAA members
To attract capital and publishers from offshore
To retain and attract talent in our local industry and to promote a sense of community within the industry.

Since 2006/2007, the make-up and focus of the sector has changed. There has been the closure of studios focusing on console games, and the emergence of many independent developers specialising in online games and games for mobile devices.

As one representative responsible for the game industry at Multimedia Victoria told me: “Our strategy is now to encourage local game developers to develop their own IP [Intellectual Property] through the Digital Media Fund. Australia has never been able to deliver a huge triple-A title … our aim is now to nurture the local industry, even though we are still active in trying to attract international video game companies. The objective is to develop a sustainable video game industry”.

The State of Queensland (through the Department of Employment and Economic Development) is also trying to adapt its policies to the recent changes in the industry. A government ICT business advisor told me: “The attraction of large studios won’t be our main focus … we see the mobile [games for mobile devices] as the way forward … we are also starting to look at the Asian market [Korea, China] … why not try to swap IPs from one country to another, take a successful Australian mobile phone game and ‘Koreanise’ it for the Korean market?”

While there are obviously plenty of opportunities to develop a sustainable video game industry in Australia, the key appears to be an ongoing dialogue between industry and policy advisors at a state level, and an association such as the GDAA. The Australian game industry should “play” with its strengths (local talent, proximity to the Asian market, expertise in online gaming and mobile games, competitive university programs in computer programs, etcetera).

It needs to make the move from being a “contender” to being an international hub for the video game industry.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article. Image credit: Mykl Roventine, Creative Commons

19-year old Aussie pumps taxi booking app

Chillibreeze — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 04:09:08 +0000

news A 19-year-old Australian developer, Zac Altman has successfully launched an online service for taxi users in Australia focusing on mobile bookings, thrusting himself into an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

According to a statement issued by Altman’s company, Taxi Pro, this week, the developer learnt iPhone development in his free time in high school. Taxi Pro was conceived and developed by him while he was in his final year. He was then awarded a scholarship to the University of technology Sydney. His iPhone application attracted over 40,000 users even before it was formally advertised, predominantly by word of mouth.

Taxi Pro released its Android application on 17 December 2011. This won Altman the second place in the Optus’ Unleash Your App competition that invited entries from all over the country. The prize included $1000 in cash and a Samsung Galaxy S II Android smartphone. Apple has featured the application a number of times and it is very popular because of its simplicity. Users in Sydney can book a taxi within 5 seconds, making it one of Sydney’s fastest and most simple taxi booking service.

At present Taxi Pro supports taxi networks in places like Sydney and Adelaide but not in Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane. Efforts are on to cover all these cities and more.

The service allows users to make their bookings through various cab networks like Premier Cabs, Taxis Combined and Legion Cabs, seeing its main competitor as CabCharge. This is the largest taxi conglomerate whose services extend internationally to Singapore.

There are many other booking networks that keep cropping up and attempting to make taxi booking simple and reliable. However, according to Altman, this is not as easy as it sounds, requiring a perfect balance in the complicated two-way relationship between the taxi driver and the application itself. Altman’s approach towards taxi booking is to directly connect with the networks while allowing them full control over fulfilling their bookings. This, he says, provides Taxi Pro users with the best booking experience.

Altman says: “Taxi Pro allows users to book taxis, plain and simple. Users don’t need excess features like a taxi whistle or data-heavy maps. They just want to get a taxi and that’s what I care about. You can buy users with advertising but to keep them, you need to provide a great experience. Users keep coming back to Taxi Pro because I provide the best experience.”

The developer says there have been offers to purchase the Taxi Pro application. However, so far he has declined these offers, saying that he prefers to continue nurturing Taxi Pro and working to maintain its popularity in Australia.

opinion/analysis
Great to see a young guy like Altman getting up an app like Taxi Pro and making something of his own straight from high school. It looks like Altman’s part of UTS’ Bachelor of Information Technology scholarship program. I was part of a similar program when I was at the University of NSW back a decade ago, and at that stage there were quite a few people in the program who were getting their own IT businesses off the ground even while they were still students. I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t as savvy back then, or else Delimiter would be a decade old by now ;)

It will be interesting to see what Altman does next; if he’s developed and commercialised Taxi Pro in such a short time, I expect big things from the developer over the next few years.

More pics of Taxi Pro, on iPhone and Android:

Image credits: Taxi Pro. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

NSW appoints digital economy taskforce

Renai LeMay — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 05:06:51 +0000

new The NSW Government has taken another step in meeting its commitment to put development of the state’s technology sector at the front of its priority list, announcing today the formation of a taskforce that would help form a ten-year action plan to develop the state’s digital economy.

The state has previously announced the taskforce will be chaired by IBM Australia director of research and development Gelnn Wightwick. However, in a statement released yesterday, the state’s Deputy Premier Andrew Stoner announced a further eight members of the taskforce.

Some — such as Telstra executive Deena Shiff, Ausgrid executive general manager Peter Birk, CSIRO information services group executive Alex Zelinsky and Foxtel chief information officer Robyn Elliott, come from large organisations and work in technology-focused roles. However, others come from startup groups or early stage companies working in the technology sector. Examples of such participants include Freelancer.com chief executive Matt Barrie, Omnilab’s Tom Kennedy, The Project Factory’s Jennifer Wilson and OneVentures managing director Michelle Deaker.

“The Digital Economy Industry Action Plan will provide a strategic long-term vision for our digital economy, including regional perspectives, to identify and harness future growth opportunities while addressing identified challenges,” said Stoner — also the state’s minister for trade and investment.

“The Digital Economy Industry Action Plan will focus on subsectors expected to support long-term productivity and innovation growth, and export opportunities including digital content and applications, information services and analytics, and smart networks and intelligent technologies.”

The taskforce will seek wider industry and public input into the development of its plan through a number of avenues — such as forums, consultations, a formal request for submissions and through its web site and social media.

Associated with this week’s announcement, Stoner also announced the Government would allocate $3 million over two years towards an Interactive Media Fund to support creative digital content — including electronic games and transmedia projects. The move follows on from a May announcement regarding funding for 20 creative digital content projects.

“We’re also increasing the amount of enterprise funding available under the Interactive Media Fund from $100,000 to $250,000 to better help expanding companies bring in specialist skills to work across complex projects,” said Stoner.

The Deputy Premier made the announcement at the NSW Pearcey Entrepreneur of the Year awards, which went to Simon Poole and Steve Frisken from Finisar Australia — a manufacturer of switches for optical communications networks. “These individuals are contributing to a dynamic and strong digital economy which will be essential for driving our state’s economic growth into the future,” said Stoner. “The NSW Government is committed to growing our digital economy.”

opinion/analysis
I love what the NSW Government is doing right now to support the development of the technology sector in its state, and I support its moves to do so.

However, I do feel that most of those appointed to this taskforce probably aren’t really experts in the field. The large organisations represented on the panel — IBM, Telstra, Foxtel and the CSIRO — are not regarded as being at the forefront of innovation, at the moment — and they don’t have a huge amount of expertise dealing with startups. Before you say the CSIRO does, remember the organisation specialises in long-term R+D, not the rapid innovation that Australia’s ‘digital economy’ is going through.

And yes, Telstra and IBM, I know you do innovate, but you’re the dominant forces in your industry. You innovate in a horribly large and big corporate way. You get results, through throwing money at projects ;)

Of the smaller companies represented on the panel, a number of people have pointed out to me recently that Freelancer.com primarily makes its money from skimming off the top of the cheap overseas labor force, while the other companies don’t have a large name for innovation in Australia. I’m sure OneVentures’ Deaker knows what she’s on about, but I’m not so sure about the rest.

My gut tells me that most of the really innovative forces in Australia — say, the boys from Pollenizer and the Atlassian team, or on the financial side, Domenic Carosa — probably have better things to do right now then get involved in a government committee in what has historically been one of the most stodgy states in Australia. It’s from this bunch of people that I’m seeing the most innovation emerge in Australia right now … but I’m sure they’re busy with their own projects ;)

Image credit: Dane Munro, royalty free

Troubling allegations swirl L.A. Noire

Renai LeMay — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 04:04:45 +0000

blog When blockbuster cross-platform video game L.A. Noire was released last month, many Australians got a wee bit patriotic and teary as we realised the game was substantially put together by Australian development house Team Bondi, as the nation’s biggest ever and most successful video game project.

However, since that time, a series of troubling allegations have emerged. A number of former developers have put together what they have described as a “complete” credits list detailing over 100 developers who worked on the game but were not given kudos in its actual credits — due to the fact that they left Team Bondi, either by choice, or through being fired or made redundant. And late last week, a new bombshell arrived: A detailed, tell-all, old-fashioned investigative journalism piece on IGN chronicling the history of L.A. Noire’s development.

Perhaps one of the harshest paragraphs from the story:

“Another source who left the company in 2008 called his experience at Team Bondi the biggest disappointment of his life. “I left because of stress and working conditions, mainly. But the trigger was this: I received a reprimand for ‘conduct and punctuality’ for being 15 minutes late to work. I arrived at 9:15am – despite the fact I had only left work around 3:15am the same day, and paid for my own taxi home! I never would have thought you could put a sweat shop in the Sydney CBD.”

Freelance journalist Andrew McMillen, who is based in Brisbane, put together the article and has posted some background on his personal blog.

Now, there are obviously two sides to every story, and we’re not going to pretend that the sort of troubled development history that Team Bondi looks to have gone through with L.A. Noire is unusual in the fast-moving video games industry. One need only mention the name ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ to realise what we’re discussing here … an industry with constantly developing technology, artists confined within tough corporate strictures, moving development targets and so on. It’s a tough gig, and there’s no doubt about it.

However, if the story is to be believed, it does seem that Team Bondi could have done more to look after its staff, as well as putting more governance controls around what is, after all, a massive, lengthy and expensive endeavour. In all large technology development efforts, good governance and professionalism are always core … and the key is to keep ego on the sidelines.

Image credit: Rockstar Games/L.A. Noire

Startup nation: Is Labor’s NBN focus a little myopic?

Renai LeMay — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 06:00:03 +0000

Over the past few years, the term “information technology” has appeared to become increasingly out of vogue within the Federal Government, with Australia’s IT sector having to divide its attentions between the communications and innovation portfolios when it came to pushing the cause for its own industry development.

The elevation of Kevin Rudd’s Labor team in November 2007 brought a new term to the table — “the digital economy”. And it’s one that has become increasingly prevalent in the debate about how Australia’s technology sector might grow stronger, especially as Labor pushes its case that its flagship National Broadband Network project will have a broad productivity effect on the wider economy.

“The digital economy will ultimately encompass the entire economy and almost all facets of our society and the Gillard Government is ensuring it has the infrastructure in place to take advantage of the opportunities it will present,” said Communications Minister Stephen Conroy last week as he announced a partnership with chip giant Intel on the NBN.

The pot has also been stirred further by Conroy’s appointment to advise Prime Minister Julia Gillard directly on how the implementation of the NBN can boost the entire economy.

But is it dangerous to view the development of Australia’s entire technology sector through the lens of the infrastructure-based NBN? Following last week’s announcement, we asked two innovative technology companies — one big and one small — what they thought.

“I hope not,” says Intel Australia chief Philip Cronin, speaking from Melbourne in an interview.

Cronin’s view is that the NBN is a stepping stone to greater things for Australia — he claims that the infrastructure rollout would not just deliver fast broadband, but that it could also act as a lure for foreign investors to help kickstart Australia’s technology sector.

“You have to have a reason to attract capital investment,” he says. Part of the MoU with the Government is that Intel’s capital arm will look at opportunities to invest in Australia. Intel invested $37 million in local wireless telco Unwired in August 2005 — but is not known to have made a substantial investment in an Australian company since that time.

Cronin says he wants to get Intel’s capital investment team to Australia on a regular basis to investigate opportunities — “based here, if possible”. “If you’re venture capital guy sitting wherever, we’ve got to give them a reason to look at Australia. Let’s get on with that job of giving them reasons,” he says.

The chip executive compares the potential development curve of Australia’s technology sector to that of the successful film industry, which has been able to attract blockbusters like The Matrix to Australia for filming and production, for example.

The NBN — and Intel’s partnership with the project — is about taking the reins, Cronin says: “If you’ve got a leadership position, you’d better get out and lead.”

For example, one aspect of Intel’s NBN partnership will see it experiment with the new telecommunications capability to see what new possibilities will open up through universal fibre access. Cronin says those lessons can then highlighted to the world as examples of Australian innovation.

“Part of what we’re trying to say is that there is a lot of stuff to happen now,” he says, noting Intel wanted to look at what were the real benefits across a number of different areas of industry and life.

Mick Liubinskas, the co-founder of Australian startup incubator Pollenizer — which has grown like a weed over the past few years and co-founded more than 15 online companies — is broadly positive about Labor’s project, but says the difficulty with putting all of your eggs in the basket of the NBN is the lag factor.

“We’ve got to build the NBN — roll it out — and get people used to using it. Then the supply will come,” he says.

In short, Liubinskas says, it will take NBN Co a while to actually build the NBN — more than half a decade to achieve any significant scale. And then it will also take a while for Australians to work out what they can do with the fibre and start to build new business models around universal fast broadband.

“Businesssses are always in advance trying these things, but in depth it takes a while,” he says.

Liubinskas — like Cronin — believes part of the path forward to develop Australia’s technology sector into an innovative powerhouse is to attract more capital to fuel the growth of fledgling technology ventures. However, where the pair differ is that Liubinskas wants that money now — because he can see businesses that could use it productively.

Pollenizer sees about 20 startups a month that only require between $10,000 and $500,000 to get them off the ground, he says. But the Government’s tax incentive schemes aren’t geared to motivate investors to fund that size of company.

There is a capital structure — the Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnership (ESVCLP) which does help investors investing larger amounts — higher than $500,000. And there are at least two known funds already using that structure to target venture capital investment in Australia — the Sydney Angels Side-Car fund which recently launched, and another group in Melbourne called Aurelius Digital. Another group led by online veteran Domenic Carosa is also targeting early stage investment through a separate structure.

But Liubinskas says this doesn’t help the minnows — who need much less money than most of the funds want to dole out.

To solve this problem, Pollenizer itself has pledged to invest in 10 web startups this year. And a number of other angel investors are pooling their resources in a new seed fund dubbed ‘Startmate’.

But the startup veteran says the Government should make those kind of early stage ‘angel’ investments tax-deductible — that way, Australians would stop parking their money in “olive trees and macadamia” nuts and fund technology startups instead.

Taking this sort of action could accelerate the industry’s growth as part of the NBN vision. “If you want to grease the tracks a little bit, you need to make some changes to the investment environment,” he says.

Image credit: Michal Ufniak, royalty free

Monday Startup: expanz

Renai LeMay — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:34:43 +0000

Every Monday we’ll profile an Australian startup from the technology, telecommunications or video gaming sector. Drop us a line if you would like to have your company profiled.

Matt Clarke (pictured) was working for a large financial services company which had decided to take development of a new application in-house when he first met Radek Cerny, the software engineer who would become the other half of the founding team behind Australian startup expanz.

Clarke, now expanz’s CEO, knew he had met someone special when Radek Cerny, after being hired as the project’s first developer, built the entire application by himself in six weeks flat.

“At that point Matt asked him how the hell he managed that, and from there the idea to start a business using the application platform he had built up over the last decade took shape,” the company says in a statement responding to our questions about its formation.

The key to understanding expanz’s technical foundation is contained in the programming experience.

Over many years of application development, Cerny had realised that a high proportion of development time was taken up with re-creating common functions. In response, the company says, he created an extensive class library and code palette that he used in his projects. After Microsoft released its flagship .NET platform in 2002, the developer foresaw its future growth and ported his platform over from Sun’s Java.

The platform — which launched with expanz in May 2008 — introduces what the company calls an “assembly line approach” to .NET development. Applications are simply assembled from pre-fabricated components and can be deployed on a customer’s premises or in the cloud.

Although the pair had put together a business plan to build expanz from the ground up, it was never going to be an easy process.

For example, although the company is funded with the founder’s own money and some angel capital, their business plan didn’t have much scope to make money in the first 12 to 24 months. “It was all about investing in the business,” says Clarke.

Fortunately, expanz was able to bring a foundation customer on board who paid for the company to build it an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system — knowing that it would also entail building out expanz’s wider offering.

“He was able to accept it wasn’t a finished product,” says Clarke.

Even from that point it wasn’t plain sailing. The company had challenges picking up the high-level enterprise customers it needed.

“The thing that we’ve had the biggest challenge with, is because we’re targeting the high-end customers, is the risk thing,” says Clarke. “They’ve fallen in love with the technology. But they say: ‘How do I buy the technology from a couple of guys in Manly?!’”

“They’ve fallen in love with the technology. But they say: ‘How do I buy the technology from a couple of guys in Manly?!’” — Matt Clarke

To get around this problem, expanz had to sacrifice a few things, including revenue and margin, in the short term. But in the long term, a handful of customers willing to take a risk on the firm have now morphed into converts helping to win new business.

If you were to say where expanz is right now as a company, you’d probably say it is ready to take the next step. It now has six staff, is about to launch a free community version of its platform in February, and is partnering with major global tech giants like Logica and VMWare and telco and hosting partners like MelbourneIT to gain scale.

Logica, for example, is using expanz’s platform to re-build a core system involved in the next state elections in NSW.

The company makes money in three ways — through selling platform licences, through professional and support services, and through selling software as a service subscriptions to its expanzERP platform.

But expanz is also staying true to its roots. Its staff work out of a Sydney office near Manly Beach. “RIght this moment a beautiful 2.5 foot swell is rolling outside,” says Clarke. “The nature of startups is that you have to get your hands dirty. But we’re pretty flexible about lifestyle and families.”

As with many smaller companies, for expanz’s staff it’s more about output than time spent on the job, about getting lots of stuff done rather than having staff siloed into one little area.

Ultimately the company would be happy if it was mentioned in the same sentence with other software houses with their roots Down Under, like Atlassian and Springsource, which was recently acquired by VMWare. Proving you can build a great global business from Australia.

Sounds very much like the Australian dream.

Image credit: expanz