Awards

frustration as to the few Australian companies claiming R&D Tax Breaks led an R&D Tax Specialist (myself) with over a decade's experience to create a series of simple online tools to make the R&D Tax Claim process much easier and more worthwhile than is currently available. The goal is to get all the smart SMEs in Australia claiming what they are entitled to, without the need for hours reading tax legislation or expensive consulting fees. Currently only around 7000 companies in Australia claim R&D versus the 30% that claim to be innovative.

We were moving house and reflecting on how much stuff we didn't need. Often these items (furniture, homewares, appliances, clothes, musical instruments etc) get thrown away for lack of a better home. We didn't want money for it; we just didn't want it to become landfill. We realised one of our neighbours might be in need of the precise thing we were disposing of, but how would they know? Yoink was born to be the matchmaker between these unneeded items and the people who had a use for them.

We wanted to help small businesses that couldn't afford our PR fees to generate publicity themselves.

Causium...The new freemium Australian software maker, Atlassian, has pioneered a new customer acquisition strategy called Causium that merges cause marketing with the popular freemium business model. Instead of giving away a teaser product, Atlassian charges a nominal fee of $10 for its starter 10 user licenses and then donates all the proceeds to charity. The results have been an astounding win-win-win for all parties. Over 14,000 customers now have software that they couldn't previously afford, Atlassian has earned over $2M in upsell revenue and Atlassian's selected charity, Room to Read has received over $500,000 for literacy programs in developing nations.

One of the partners receives lots of bills and invoices (10+ a month), varying from handwritten to printed bills, and payment methods all vary. He came up with a simple proposition of a web-enabled service that took care of all your bills to get them out of your headspace by not having to remember due dates or do any data entry to physically pay them.

I realized that plants possess a powerful intelligence which they use to manipulate soil microbiology in order to feed and medicate themselves.

The initial system was developed for a third party in order to replace reversing sirens on large mining trucks. It was soon realised that there was a huge requirement for a system such as this across many industrial sectors (mining, logistics and warehousing, freight terminals, gantry cranes and more) as a system to help reduce risk of collision between any moving machinery and personnel. The current system has been developed over several years of research, development and testing to the point that it is now ready for full commercial release with the aim of saving lives in the workplace.

I moved to Sydney and noticed there are a lot of great time-based deals being offered by businesses all around the place, e.g. ‘Two-for-One cocktails between 6 - 8pm’. At the same time I had just bought an iPhone and quickly realised that the iPhone provided a great way to effectively create a really efficient and effective marketplace for this type of deal information due to its web connection and GPS technology. Having also worked for Wotif.com and seeing the power of their marketplace I was made even more aware of the opportunity.

A couple of women got really tired of employers talking about how important their talent was...and not really meaning it! They decided that they could use software to show big companies why they needed to care about people...and also to help them know how to.

Someone mentioned to one of our team members that it would be great to have a central location for all planned works being conducted by councils, utilities and others to avoid them duplicating effort (after a roadway was dug up and resealed in his street for the second time in 3 months -- once by the Council and once by the water authority). A team was assembled and the business problem was identified before we started to think about what the business solution needed to look like.

I thought of the device while I was living in Broome, WA in 2006. Being a water lover I decided to make a prototype out of some poly pipe and an old real estate sign. While snorkelling with my Watrwing, people would ask me where could they get one. That's where my journey started. It is Australian Trade Marked, USA Patent and Australian Design Patent. The Watrwing is now being used by NSW Institute of Sport and swimming schools around Australia. It is also being bought and used by swimmers in the UK and the USA.

Our idea came about while we were waiting outside a women's clothing store for our girlfriends and we saw the same cars circling the block looking for parking. Having been frustrated at the inability to make informed decisions when finding a parking space -- and more than often walking past a better alternative on our way to our destination, we decided that it was about time someone found a better way! Digging into the parking space we realised that the rates vary dramatically and are not geographically dependent so we developed a rate comparison tool to allow for custom results.

This innovation came to life when we realised a gap in a developing segment in the telecommunications market. With telecommunications becoming commoditised, many entrepreneurs have joined the groundswell of companies offering innovative product mixes in voice, Internet, data, PBX, and hosting segment. While there are plenty of wholesale providers of these services, No one in the market has delivered an end-to-end BSS/OSS platform (front, middle, and back office solution) for these innovators. Utilibill Lite empowers such players to be competitive and offer first-class service while minimising overheads that were previously required to set up a telco.

Founders Sarah Taylor and Jeff Dusting realized how time consuming and unsatisfactory it was to locate, book, and pay for home, health and beauty services, and how few service providers had access to efficient low-cost online trading.

Following the 1998 major hail storm in Sydney (during which our car was extensively damaged), my wife and I were in Narooma one weekend. We heard that a severe storm was approaching the South Coast, and that it may contain hail. Having found that there was no undercover parking available in Narooma on a Saturday afternoon, I tried to find cardboard boxes to protect our car. Luckily it only rained, but it then became obvious to me that a portable shelter would have been ideal. Thus in 2003, Steve Anderson and I started on our project.

Our NPD team started to dream about a way to take Australia's rainwater collection experience to the world. As people globally begin to see how they can contribute to the water cycle through the collection of rainwater we asked, "How can we get Australia's learnings over the last decade, put it all in one product and make rainwater simple? Let's make a product that people won't need to worry about, will find easy to use and will let them contribute to our water system."

The founders were searching for the points of greatest inflexion to help move us to a sustainable economy. We realised that to be successful in this goal, we needed to engage consumers, and work to create a new market from the bottom up. Realising that government and corporate action on climate change was in regulation and artificial institutional markets we saw the need for a retail carbon market that everyday consumers could participate in on a daily basis, and trust enough to want to.

A research team custom-built a 3D laser range sensor for mapping the environment from a moving vehicle. The research group had previous experience with 2D laser mapping and positioning, and when extending their work to three dimensions was required to overcome a number of challenges. Most significantly, acquiring a full 3D scan takes much longer than a 2D scan, and therefore the data is susceptible to distortions due to the vehicle's motion. A software solution was developed and tested with the sensor mounted on a Bobcat driven around our research facility.

We received feedback from a number of our clients who are currently using Expect A Star's Child Care component of the Corporate Family Program. The clients relayed that the current offering is great for their staff caring for young children, but what about the older demographic who may be caring for an elderly loved one? In response to this feedback we developed a comprehensive Aged Care offering leveraging off the existing infrastructure of the Child care offering, but extending the reach of the innovation to an entirely new audience. So far the response to the program has been overwhelming.

We have spent almost fifteen years working in the Victorian education sector, teaching everything from Outdoor Education to Science to History to Geography. After seeing firsthand the increasing frustration felt by many teachers trying to find the best educational opportunities for their students, and how this was matched by an inability by many providers to successfully advertise their products to schools. Having identified a big gap in the market, we looked around at the technology available, decided upon ones and zeros as our medium, and after many sleepless nights and cups of coffee -- Cursions was born!