"The most valuable commodity I know of is information."
rebelutionary / 2.0
STIRRing in Sydney
Marty and Mick (the boys from Tangler - the longest awaited, least stealthy, stealth startup in Aus) put together a fantastic event on Wednesday night with the first "STIRR Sydney".
I'm proud to say that the judges were clearly vindicated in picking us as Australian Entrepreneurs of the Year because my fantastic team won the Half-Baked startup competition.
Our entry (thought up in 10 minutes after 10 beers) was the innovative, peerflix inspired shoewave.com. I must say, we had a fantastic team, perhaps overly slanted - including Paul McCarney, a hugely successful entrepreneur, fellow investor in HomeThinking and founder of the new Quotify.
So what is shoewave.com? A peer to peer sock exchange - yes, sock exchange, we're creating the sock market after all - that allows you to trade $1 and 1 old sock (which - face it - has $0 value to you) for 2 new socks. What a deal.
If you don't believe missing socks is a problem, check out the team in mid-pitching action to see the problem (hint: look at the feet).
shoewave.com - watch for it on Techcrunch next week, Mike A will love it.
For me, we narrowly won over "ParachuteVideo.com" which was about direct video distribution via parachutes. Talk about targetted marketing.
Coverage?
For the best wrap up, don't miss Cameron's hilarious podcast - a simple, 5 minute video of a lot of the more interesting people in the Sydney scene, almost all drunk (yours truly sadly included) - but hey, if you film a podcast at a Christmas party what do you expect? I also love the "elevator-pitch-in-an-elevator" concept.
Alan wrote up details of the startups that demo'ed on the night. For me, Quotify got robbed. For the record, I like Remember The Milk as a service but as a business it has a few problems - where is the money? Great people, great application, no model.
Mick blogged it including a great wrap up of all the games they had on the night, he's also put up his photos of the event.
Comments
I'm still upset that they didn't take my "angle" on parisvideo.com - it was like printing money! Great to finally meet you Mike and looking forward to catching up in the new year.
About Remember the Milk, what if you combine to do lists with location based services like google maps and mobile.
Then, you're walking past Virgin Records, you have a to do item which say buy the latest Mike Cannon-Brookes Hip Hop Album and your mobile gets an SMS.
They've got the to do list, they've got the SMS bridge, and the google maps API is pretty open. They just need an adwords or free-411 backend.
It's a long shot, but that's where I think they want to go.
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I'm the co-founder and CEO of Atlassian.
I live in Sydney and San Francisco. I'm an Aussie. I travel (a lot). I learn. I read. I talk. I create. I bike. I drink. I'm all in.
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Advising startups is something I've started doing in the last year. It's a fascinating way to use one's brain and experience to solve other people's problems.
I'm loving it.
Besides the few I advise, I've invested in one, HomeThinking.
HomeThinking provides realtor reviews, ratings and metrics (qualitative and quantitive) for home sellers.
I also make a lot of small microfinance loans to entrepreneurs around the world through Kiva. Read more about my on going Kiva Challenge (update).
