
Aussie Tech Gold Rush - nreece
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/aussie-tech-gold-rush-nothing-off-limits-20111103-1mwyn.html
======
brc
I still think there's a very long way to go for Australians. If the US VCs
decide to stop visiting, it's back to zero again.

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.

~~~
asharp
We have a thriving VC community in Aus, with lots of awesome people and stupid
amounts of money.

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.

~~~
brc
Ha don't we all wish to be able to raise capital and get ideas going as much
as a geologist with a promising patch of dirt.

Like I said - I think one big breakthrough startup would change everything. It
would bring it to the attention of investors, employees, press, everyone.

~~~
asharp
I agree.

It would be nice to see one or two more innovative startups around the place
though.

------
dmboyd
Congrats to designcrowd on the funding, however it seems like a clone of
99designs. IMHO I'd think there's a market for a different take on crowd
sourced design, especially seeing as though there's such a huge backlash from
the anti-spec work front. Something like a sortfolio for general design work
perhaps?

~~~
teflonhook
They actually started just before 99 I believe.

~~~
teflonhook
But of course, haven't had the same growth.

~~~
ra
... 99designs grew out of sitepoint; it was a huge springboard having
designers and customers using the sitepoint forums as a marketplace.

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!

------
Dramatize
What's with the popped collars?

The problem with the Australian tech industry is most of the big players are
just copy cats.

~~~
jacques_chester
> What's with the popped collars?

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.

~~~
nl
_Recently I saw a mob in Adelaide (I know, I know) doing cool things with
computational intelligence_

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.

~~~
jacques_chester
These guys:

<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.

<http://www.solveitsoftware.com/competition.jsp>

~~~
nl
Yep, I guessed it must be them.

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/>

~~~
pm
Adelaide is too small. Worked at Tomorrow Studios with Dom (Intelligent
Software) and took Matthew's (Solve IT) Innovate SA course (which is superb
btw).

~~~
nl
I worked with Dom from late 2010 to mid 2011 (at Tomorrow Studio too).

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.. :))

~~~
pm
Paul from No Prisoners. I think I might've talked to you about Lua scripting
at some point, since I think that's what you might've been doing.

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.

~~~
nopassrecover
God HN has grown - few Adelaide users on here now.

~~~
jacques_chester
How do you guys cope with being in Adelaide? I have a sister stranded there,
her husband works for some mob doing Moodle work.

~~~
nl
_How do you guys cope with being in Adelaide?_

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?

~~~
jacques_chester
I _think_ so. Not sure. This officially makes me a terrible brother in law.

As for Adelaide. You guys seem to have more funeral homes than churches.
Surely that's a sign.

~~~
nopassrecover
Melbourne does feel a whole lot more .. enthusiastic shall we say? Still
Adelaide has its perks if you have the right networks, and generally a decent
salary/cost balance for what that's worth. Happy to grab a drink with any
HN'ers that are in/stop by Adelaide btw.

------
rednaught
This is innovation?

"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."

~~~
damncabbage
Aye. I've done work for a startup (flipped, now owned by a larger company)
that has a massive portfolio of domains. It leases out directory listings and
sells domains. :(

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>.

~~~
nl
BigCommerce isn't a rip-off, and it's a really good platform (from what I've
seen).

OrionVM.... it's a good idea, but not exactly innovative. But then,
"innovative" is worth nothing on its own.

~~~
asharp
Not exactly innovative? Interesting.

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.

~~~
nl
Forgive me, I probably have a very superficial understanding of what you do,
and additionally I get all the Australian "Cloud" server providers confused.

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.

~~~
asharp
Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans. CloudCentral is very modified
cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san. Most of the others are all Vmware
and such, all on fairly standard hardware.

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.

~~~
nl
_Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans_

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?

~~~
asharp
Isilon has damn awesome tech, albiet stupidly expensive. Atmos is absolutely
horrific in most senses of the word.

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.

------
Dramatize
The whole article feels so sleazy.

~~~
ra
The age is a tabloid newspaper (as are all newspapers in Australia - even the
broadsheet format ones)

~~~
alastairpat
That's not strictly fair. The Age online is absolute crap, but The Age in
print is marginally better.

I do, however, think that the media in general in Australia is abhorrent when
compared with other countries, though.

~~~
brc
tabloid describes the format (as opposed to broadsheet).

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.

~~~
alastairpat
The Age is definitely a broadsheet in terms of print size.

~~~
brc
My mistake in that case.

------
ra
It's a sensationalist article from a mainstream newspaper.

------
wyclif
Hmmm, a lot of negative comments so far. So in light of that, can anybody
explain why the CW here is that so much of the Australian scene is a ripoff?

~~~
zemaj
I think that the tech "gold rush" is still in it's early stages. It's still
hard to convince investors in Aus that new ideas are worth betting on, so
copy-cats with proven markets are currently leading the way.

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.

~~~
asharp
I'd give you that.

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 :)

------
robryan
I think the problem here is more getting decent angel investments locally, a
lot of the deals mentioned here are fairly big VC deals. Still seems that the
ones getting these kind of deals the easiest are either moving to the valley
or spending significant amounts of time there.

Plenty of tech companies being started though so it will be interesting to see
how many make it big.

~~~
davidjohnstone
There is some stuff happening in the world of angel investments/startup
incubators here. We've got nothing like what the US has, but Startmate (in
Sydney) started last year, AngelCube (in Melbourne) started this year, and
York Butter Factory (also in Melbourne) is about to/has just started. And I'm
sure there's more than this.

------
abhishektwr
Kaggle, another Aus startup, also got funding for big data analysis crowd
sourcing platform (13Million) from Khosala Ventures and others.

~~~
jacques_chester
I know their Chairman. Dr Gruen is a very smart guy.

~~~
jacques_chester
Aha, no I don't. Looks like Max Levchin is chairman these days.

