Smart 100 2011

Since the GFC, western investors -- large and small -- have heightened concerns about where their money is invested, and want to know that it's creating real value in the world. Lending as a Barefoot Angel delivers an unbeatable double-digit return, social impact and environmental benefit via a clearly tangible product and result, with short exit periods of 6-12 months.

Melbourne web development company Propagate decided that sharing their vast online communication expertise was simply the right thing to do; the byproduct of this is the Simply Suite. It provides users with access to a simple online communication system that combines SMS/MSM, survey and email campaign management, all from the one dashboard.

When I came home from London and found it was so costly to move my furniture, I thought there must be a better way. And then I bought a few items from regional Australia and eBay and realised it was more expensive to ship these items then paying for them! I just wanted to create a way to support regional businesses but also create a win-win situation for transport providers.

Over $23 billion is given out annually in grants funding in Australia by government, philanthropy, corporates and NGOs, and there is no standardised solution, application process or management and acquittal process. $23 billion and not one standard operating system. Started from the ground up after a series of "Grants Rage" sessions by grant applicants on the tragic state of technology, systems, process and learnings exchange, SmartyGrants was born.

I was trying to find helpful and useful toys for my nieces and nephew who had too many plastic toys. I was tired of watching the kids devote only a few minutes to an expensive Transformers toy. I wanted to give them products that were also eco-friendly and guilt-free (i.e. less contribution to landfill).

This innovation initially came to life when it was realised that the popularity and hype surrounding mobile apps was not going to be the answer to an organisation's need to service the entire range of future challenges it will face around 'mobility'. Organisations will need a much more strategic approach (and the tools that support such an approach) to deliver useful mobile tools to a range of different users -- staff, customers and business partners.

Two french horn players set out to make it possible for musicians to (a) broadcast a live concert from small venues and sell a 'ticket' to viewers and (b) allow music students to participate in master classes with teachers around the world. They realised that video streaming was both expensive and complicated -- and decided to change that!

My friend and I became new mums and quickly discovered the horrible customer service in baby stores in Sydney. We found how hard it was to find great baby gear and, moreover, nobody was making it easy to give feedback to improve products and services. As time-pressed mums, with consulting backgrounds from McKinsey & Company, we decided to apply our brains to solve this problem, fast. And, when we developed a mobile site for feedback we realised that it is not just baby stores but every single retailer and service providers that could benefit from customer intelligence. And so... CustomerUnderground was born!

Recognised as a world leader by the ATS program and featured in A Faster Future by Brad Howarth, BigTinCan and BuzzMe Beats have attracted world leading artists like Jessica Simpson, and leading music management guru, and former VP Sony Music Jerry Blair to join the team. BigTinCan believes that the future of music on the smartphone can be compelling, yet simple and easy to use. With a fundamental patent pending on the use of mixed alerting on smartphones, BigTinCan is well placed to globally grow our market.

There was a call from the male population for better personal care, but there was no one advertising the fact that they would do the male Brazilian wax. Enter Ouch Waxing Studio. We openly advertise that if you have hair there we will wax it with no embarrassment.

A large global corporation, Westfield Group – the world's largest retail shopping centre owner – approached us to develop a global reporting system for their safety management. We worked with the client to develop a reporting system integrated with integrum Risk & Compliance system to automatically roll up safety data and reports from each site in four countries, to region, country and to head office.

This innovation came to life when my business partner and I were looking into trends overseas and noticed the massive daily deal boom. We knew that there were a few sites already up and running. We thought, instead of setting up a daily deal site and working against some big fish, we wanted to build a partnership with them to help them grow and build some exposure for them.

The IntelligenceBank service has been developed over the last two years to make corporate information easy to find, share, manage and use, all in one central place, and without the need for IT support or infrastructure. It gives an innovative and flexible IT tool back to the people that use it operationally through a very easy-to-use and intuitive interface. The Admin section is so easy to use that your grandma could manage it.

One night I called all the kids for dinner and asked them to bring the cups they were using to the table. They all walked past several cups on the kitchen counter and grabbed a new one from the cupboard. Right then I wished I had a better way to manage all the cups floating around our house. Keeping track of cups in a busy family can sometimes become unmanageable resulting in abandoned cups, spreading of illness and arguments.

The innovation came to life when frustrated with wholesaler services, and because there was no support or innovation from their side. While working one hour with our business coach from Action Coach we came up with the concept we have now come to sell. Our service provides a one-stop shop opportunity for anyone to become a Telecoms company without the large capital normally required and without having to source dozens of different providers to supply them.

This innovation came to life after seeing how poorly managed were many hundreds of keys held in businesses such as real estate, especially building managers' large premises as they used low-security-level paper records to keep track of these valuable keys. I have wanted to introduce this some years back, however my research needed to establish the best way to collect data from keys and their tags.

The innovation came to light when Ruchir Punjabi, who had experience of serving more than one hundred clients with his expertise in web services and products, identified a few fair problems in the web site creation and management sector and decided to spend more of his energy on product development in key areas in the web space. He saw immense potential for the product in a seemingly unorganised web services market in India and elsewhere. He went head hunting for like-minded, passionate individuals in the same space and put together a motivated unit of web developers. This is his third venture.

The three of us where completing our postgraduate studies at The University of Melbourne. We started to work out what could be done to make it easier for people to create diagrams that wouldn't just be pictures but could represent the real world. We entered the Melbourne University Entrepreneur Challenge (MUEC) and with our business plan and pitching won second prize.

It started with some WILD questions about building games for the emerging "social game" space. Crazy stuff, like what if you could build "Farmville" in a week? What if you could press a button and have a cross-platform, scalable, social game application layer instantly available? What if we could distill the core mechanics of social games into a highly configurable, easy-to-use system so that game developers could focus on creating amazing game experiences, rather than figuring out how to build complex server infrastructures...

The inventor, Eric Costas, recognised that he and a large proportion of his office colleagues suffered the despair and frustration of desktop clutter. Tired of misplacing important notes, business cards scattered on his desktop and with an office space that had self-stick notes stuck on any available surface, Eric thought there had to be a better way. So drawing on his engineering background and gaining inspiration from the construction of an office tower, the idea of a desktop tower that could hold and organise notes, business cards and photos came to life.