Anthill Magazine

It takes more than a little effort to make car washing cool. The folks at Sydney-based Nanotek have pulled it off, though, combining a slick (literally) product with an aggressive franchising strategy that has established beachheads in more than a dozen nations.

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You would think that a company that models and fabricates giant shoes, soda bottles and coffee cups would be slam-dunk cool. But Big Kahuna Imagineering takes it further, vowing to give the client what they want, not what BKI can handle. “We’re rarely in a comfort zone,” he says.

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Reactive is one of Australia’s largest and longest-running digital agencies. It was started in 1997 when its two founders, Tim Fouhy and Tim O’Neill were both 21 years old. Today, the agency has a multinational footprint, with full-service offices (not just sales staff) in Melbourne, Sydney, London, Auckland and New York.

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Yellow Pages, you’ve been put on notice. The young men behind the job-bid website Service Seeking want to put you out of business. But, well, short of that, they want to continue the biggest site of its kind in Australia, giving consumers a place to compare quotes and prices from local businesses.

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Brightgreen is a Melbourne-based company that specialises in energy-efficient LED lights. Founders/brothers David and Barry O’Driscoll say they’ve concocted lights that have the same brightness as a 50-watt halogen bulb, but with 15 times the lifespan.

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Oomph, a company that offers a easy-to-use, highly customize publishing platform for tablets, hit the ground running when the iPad arrived in 2010. The principals behind Oomph, operating under another company name, already had about 50 iPhone apps under their belt.

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Inspirational businesses often are created from the synergy of founders from disparate backgrounds. Web designer and marketer. Retailer and foodie. Engineer and artist. And, of course, lifeguard and law student. That would be Clint Miller and Kate Miller, who created a business that links Australian youth to projects in developing communities overseas.

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In less than two years’ time, LeadBolt has become one of the world leaders in an industry boosts revenue for online publishers and advertisers via a method called content unlocking. In essence, site users encounter a screen that makes an enticing offer; the user must engage and react to the offer in order to continue seeing the site content.

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Leaping into the online music service market is like standing next to a speaker at a Motorhead concert: It’s not easy to be heard. Guvera, a company spawned on the Gold Coast, has bucked that challenge with big-amp angel backing and an approach to ad support as unique as a Coltrane solo.

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We suspect the first word in this small telecommunications company’s name has nothing to do with liplocks and everything to do with “keep it simple, stupid.” Founded in Melbourne, Kiss Mobile offers a pay-as-you-go alternative to the contractual phone plans from the big telcos.

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