Aussie Tech Gold Rush
theage.com.au
theage.com.au
There's no reason why a home-grown community can't be grown, rather than a SV outreach program. There's enough cash in Australia, enough smart people, enough regions with nice weather. But the risk-taking and open-minded parts are going to take a while to develop. Hopefully over the next decade things will develop further. I think what's needed is one or two massive wins (ie billion dollar valuations or exits) then the money stays here and goes around again.
It's for Mining/Agribusiness.
Now trying to get a Tech VC community bootstrapped is going to be interesting, mainly because we seem to be stuck in a: Vcs are an oligopoly -> Nobody wants to go through them -> No new companies are formed -> No new VCs start here -> .... Cycle. The influx of a whole new environment to nurture startups recently seems interesting. Things like Fishburners, Silicon Beach, etc. Are doing good things incubating new startups adn getting them networked, but it stands to time if this recent upswing will get us out of the cycle.
Like I said - I think one big breakthrough startup would change everything. It would bring it to the attention of investors, employees, press, everyone.
It would be nice to see one or two more innovative startups around the place though.
99 designs done really well, but freelancer have also now started doing design competitions, and now these guys.
It's an emerging segment, good luck to them!
The problem with the Australian tech industry is most of the big players are just copy cats.
It's a Sydney thing, I think. They've been suffering a long-term shortage of hats and/or common sense.
> The problem with the Australian tech industry is most of the big players are just copy cats.
Yes and no. There's a lot of small and medium firms doing cool stuff, and several of the giants have offices doing important things. IBM's got a mainframe OS lab in Perth and runs a major Linux lab in Canberra. Google are in Sydney of course. Recently I saw a mob in Adelaide (I know, I know) doing cool things with computational intelligence.
But as for consumer-facing stuff, yes, it's mostly copycat. See a foreigner do it and launch something here before they turn up; ideally to sell to them. It's a proven, repeatable business model and investors like that.
Curious minds would like to know more. I know of two companies in Adelaide doing stuff that could be called this and I'm interested which you saw (or other). Email's fine if it isn't appropriate here.
http://www.solveitsoftware.com/
They do stuff with all the cool toys. Fuzzy logic, neural nets, evolutionary algorithms ...
They have a competition for students (edit: actually it looks like anyone can enter) at the moment. First prize is ostensibly $5,000 but what they're really looking for is potential employees.
They aren't exactly a startup though - been around quite a while I think.
I was with these guys for a while, who played in an adjacent space: http://www.intelligentsoftware.com.au/
I'm thinking of all the people who's names I knew at Tomorrow Studio for anyone who was "pm" (if you had your name on your info I might know if I knew you.. :))
We were the iPhone peeps.
EDIT: Wait, we moved out at the end of July 2010, so I must be thinking of the other programmer who was there. Don't remember his name now.
OMG that never gets old!!!! Adelaide is Adelaide. It isn't Sydney or Melbourne, but it's not a rural backwater either - quite a lot of interesting stuff happens here.
her husband works for some mob doing Moodle work
Netspot?
As for Adelaide. You guys seem to have more funeral homes than churches. Surely that's a sign.
I did some work for a social networking startup that was a pure copycat site. I think this is mostly true.
I'm an American living in Australia and I snickered when I first saw Australians wearing their collars popped.
I eventually found myself doing it outdoors in the summer because the sun is so freaking intense here.
I haven't stopped.
Its also one of the reasons tourists get such bad sunburns here as they hit the beach without any protection.
LA has a SPF 30 sitting above it for most of the year. For most of the time, Australia does not.
Ozone relative thickness deficiency doesn't explain the head-cracking sunshine in Cairns, which is closer to the equator than the south pole.
"Also today, professional domain name trader Winged Media, based in Australia but now with an office in the US, announced a $3 million investment from the Carnegie Innovation Fund."
It seems a common problem that "safe bet" ripoff ideas get funding. Atlassian is the big local exception (along with some other small groups like http://crowdhired.com, http://99dresses.com and http://orionvm.com.au). On the other hand you have DesignCrowd, and other funded copycat startups like http://spreets.com.au, http://pygg.co and http://wooboard.com.
OrionVM.... it's a good idea, but not exactly innovative. But then, "innovative" is worth nothing on its own.
Would you mind telling me what gave you that impression?
The most common reaction we get is that we should sell off our tech and not bother being a service provider. Mostly because we are, at the end of the day, a tech company.
Just to take a moment to explain.
From the point of view of the consumer:
- I want to make a virtual server on demand. It must be HA, must have hard disks that are reasonable and I need out of band management in case I lock myself out. - I need a proper virtual network on demand. I need to be able to set my own ip addresses, use multicast (say for db replication for rack), etc. I want to be able to have multiple virtual networks, attach multiple networks to the same machine. I want to be able to connect up over MPLS or a crossover into one of these virtual networks.
Basically, people don't want randomly crippled servers. They want a virtualised datacenter. Can any other provider do this, at scale? We call this the virtual datacenter paradigm and we think that this is the future for cloud.
It's also basically impossible to build, which is surprisingly convenient.
Disclaimer -> I'm Alex Sharp, VP Development at OrionVM.
I thought you were mostly doing the Citrix Cloud.com platform (which manages most of the setup you discuss), on Xen hypervisors.
I'm not discounting the engineering effort here, and I'm sure there is something I's missing.
Disclaimer -> I work for a (very) indirect competitor.
Edit: further discussion makes it clear you have built your own storage platform. That is innovative, but isn't exactly clear from your website.
And then people wonder why their support costs are so high (hint: Cloud.com isn't exactly quality), and why they can't maintain profitability (Those $1m sans....)
But yeah, we're a little different. Think of Orion this way: - Take a standard HPC cluster - Make its DSAN tankier and more customised to deal with virtual disks - Run (very heavily customised) Xen on the (very horribly customized) nodes - Build on a full cloud orch stack on top.
This lets us have a better experience then any other stack, whilst being orders of magnitude cheaper.
So you can have cloud servers with hard disks faster then dedicated servers, that are HA under hardware failure, and that have proper layer 2 private networks between each other and the outside world. All for cheaper then the standard dell server + EMC san arrangement most people end up with.
Yep, I think their storage API is Atmos. (I should say that I think EMC Isilon is very cool, but I don't know a lot about Atmos)
CloudCentral is very modified cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san
They built out a ZFS SAN right?
iirc. Ninefold has a bunch of "cheapie" Dell EMC units, hence their troubles awhile back. Don't quote me on it though.
CloudCentral did in fact build a ZFS San, which they used to great effect.
To add to what Alex said above..
I think the major misconceptions are caused by the fact that most of what we are doing is done much like a "stealth" mode startup.
We -are- a service provider, but under the hood we are very much a tech company building the next generation of IaaS technologies. That is not to say we won't just be a service provider in the future - but only there is much more happening here at OrionHQ.
For instance we have developed a fully distributed block storage platform on Infiniband that does away with the scaling and performance issues of EBS, traditional SANs like HDS/Netapp etc. It is also a fraction of the cost to build and maintain, along with having a ton of other benefits.
We very much pride ourselves on being an innovative company and I just wanted to communicate that we aren't an Amazon clone. But this post is getting long in the tooth and I don't want to come off as a "butthurt founder". :P
Welcome to have a chat with anyone interested in what we do, we are also hiring btw! :)
Capt Obvious Disclaimer: I am an OrionVM founder.
Do you sell this tech?
We are wholesaling this though, and we are looking at massively stepping it up. If you're interested, come talk to us.
I see what you mean about BigCommerce. The admin panel is painful (and I've heard that the actual system is hell for their employees to hack on), but they're definitely doing a roaring trade, and the instructional articles and videos they provide along with their actual product are rather useful.
The environment the Australian startup scene is a bit odd. We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa), so we effectively have a little "bubble" in which we can set up paid products without much fear of the existing US startups stomping all over us.
Interesting times.
They fixed that speed of light problem? :) We're going to be stuck on 100ms ping times until that is fixed (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sydney+to+los+angles+at...)
OTOH, I'm not sure what they will do when Amazon opens their datacenter (if that really is their plan).
We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa)
That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't that big a deal. Plus there is always Paypal. (Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some won't ship here, but that's a different problem)
That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include
this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka
Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't
that big a deal.
Summary: You CAN do it if you have enough cash.
(This post also addresses the PayPal point. You're stuck with Payflow Pro, which is much pricier, especially for a bootstrapped startup.)
(Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some
won't ship here, but that's a different problem)
(They won't usually quote prices in AUD, but that's much less of a problem.)
However it doesn't really pose a risk to our market niche. We differentiate ourselves from Amazon on numerous fronts, primarily performance and paradigm. Both of which are sustainable for the foreseeable future.
Amazon coming to Australia mainly poses a risk to traditional VPS hosting and commodity cloud providers.
Personally, Amazon joining us here shows that validation and maturity of the market in Australia has been reached and is a big boost to our business.
That's what I hear too (I work in an area fairly closely related) - although some think it might be just a CDN node.
[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=45867
[2] http://akb.id.au/2011/amazon-ec2-latency-australian-soil
Also remember that PPC1 when it stops over in Guam can end up coming back into asia via Asia-America gateway/etc. I'm not sure if any of the major providers actually backhaul through there.
No we aren't! We are one of the few rich countries where the economy is growing, and our currency is very strong. At the moment we are very attractive to offshore companies because we offer revenue growth.
Amazon executives are in discussions with several large independent data centre providers in Australia to house another availability zone for its global cloud computing service.
http://www.crn.com.au/News/267585,amazon-hires-first-aussie-...
The shipping thing is either: (a) company has a fear of foreigners, usually instilled via chargebacks from dodgy countries (b) company sells things that have different distribution arrangements for Australia and the local distributor wants their monopoly.
In the case of (a) use a mailbox service like MyUs, in the case of (b) use a mailbox service like MyUs, then ring up said distributor and tell them how much money they failed to extort from you.
Ref: http://www.startupsmart.com.au/technology/domain-start-up-wi...
"No, you can't sit there. That chair is mine... And all those other ones too. I'll lease one to you for $50/hour, though."
I do, however, think that the media in general in Australia is abhorrent when compared with other countries, though.
The term is associated with trashy newspapers, but actually refers to the print size. So describing The Age as a tabloid is factually true.
If you want to drop your IQ a couple of points, swing past ninemsn.com sometime.
EDIT: I just re-read the parent, and is using 'tabloid' in the trashy sense. I'll leave the comment as a general knowledge point.
However, on the ground here I don't just see the big guys. There a plenty of smaller bootstrapped companies that are genuinely innovative. I went to a startup expo at one of the uni's here last month and was completely blown away by the innovation of many of the smaller companies. If I had the money there's plenty I would be betting on.
"Just wait" is what I would say.
Our VC market is very good for farms and for mines and for not much else. It's changing, but slowly.
Going to SV makes this so much easier, but it means that you have to basically expand out of Aus, which is harder said then done.
Here's to hoping things get better in the future :)
Plenty of tech companies being started though so it will be interesting to see how many make it big.