Aussies go sleepless in Sydney for startup camp

The entrepreneurs, a mix of coders, futurists, web 2.0 enthusiasts, marketers and geeks, were divided into six teams late on Friday, and immediately set about brainstorming and establishing a serious start-up from scratch (see photo gallery right).

The results – or at least the latest work-in-progress code compilations – were presented on Saturday evening to the other teams, and then again on Sunday to a panel of venture capitalists.

“Everyone worked intensively throughout the night,” said Bart Jellema, a co-organiser of the event and director of start-up Tjoos.com.

“At 5am [Saturday morning] there were 29 entrepreneurs still coding. Some teams had an entire crew still there, others weren’t so fortunate.”

The six applications developed included a pet dating website, a custom Google search page that gives charities an opportunity to generate Ad Sense revenue, and a traffic application for iPhone that crowdsources road ‘hazards’ such as speed cameras and traffic congestion.

The pet dating site, called My Pet Needs Love, enables dogs, cats and ‘other’ pets to create personalised profiles and search for mates within their geographic area using Google Maps.

Personal details that can be added include photos, body type, ‘best features’, hair colour, and diet.

The website was developed using the open source osDate as a template, according to project manager, Benjamin Ranck.

“There’s so much spending on pets,” said Ranck.

“There’s plenty of sites out there for people that want to date that also have pets, but we really wanted something for the pets themselves.

“We thought, ‘why don’t we use technology to help other single pets go on dates?’” he said.

Andrew Thornberry, a developer on the project, added: “We’re focused on the animals, but the undercurrent is that it could allow some social interaction between the owners without the pressure you get with a regular dating website.

“People come around and meet because they are looking after their pets.”

Ranck said the site is free to join and contact other pets, and that it would look to make money from targeted advertising.

He said the start-up would ‘start a conversation’ with VCs at the camp but it wasn’t dependent on funding at this stage.

Read about the other five start-up apps developed on page 2.The creators of the only iPhone application, called iTrafficApp, also appeared to win early support from attendees.

Graham Dawson, the press officer for iTrafficApp, said the application meshes with Google Maps and gives drivers audible warnings of impending traffic hazards.

“It’s a crowdsourcing application. If you have an opportunity, such as if you’re stopped at a set of lights, you or your passenger can submit a ‘new hazard’ to the system,” said Dawson.

“If enough people report it then a stronger weighting is applied to it.”

The application will be available for $4.99 via the iTunes store – although the start-up will make it available free for the first 24 hours for people who register on its website.

“It means you no longer have to spend $300 on a GPS system,” said Dawson.

Another start-up, GiveDo, enables charities to create customised Google search pages and earn revenue off Ad Sense clicks.

The page appears as a regular Google search except that it also includes information about the charity and contains two advertising columns.

The one on the left gives Ad Sense revenue to the start-up and the one on the right hand side gives the click revenue to the charity.

“We want to help communities set this page up as the primary place they search in order to drive more money to their cause,” said team spokesperson Brian Menzies.

“Our rollout plan is to directly reach out to chief fundraising officers and IT officers to get them to use the tool.

“It’s giving by clicking,” he said.

Menzies suggested that for sponsored links that appear in both the main search window and in the right hand advertising column that users opt for the link in the right column to ensure revenue is ‘donated’ to the charity.

Three other applications were also developed as part of the Startup Camp II.

Activityhorizon.com scrapes data on activities from the web, collates it and makes it searchable by geography and day. It is intended to enable people to fill holes in their diary by seeing what is happening where on any given day.

Epictweet is a website that publishes ‘the best of Twitter’ and enables people to vote on ‘the funniest, smartest and most interesting tweets’ published.

The application is built using the .NET framework on a SQL Server backend. People wanting to submit their tweets as ‘epic’ can retweet with the hashtag ‘epictweet’ or wait for the ‘ingestion system’ to capture it via keywords and Epictweet users to vote it up or down.

Threefeeds is an aggregator that enables users to present web, blog, and twitter content on a particular subject side-by-side and then to share the aggregated feeds via RSS, social networks or desktop widgets.

More photos of Startup Camp II are online here.

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