Smart 100 2012

We saw that government was responding to social media risks by shutting down and adding bureaucratic approval processes that destroy the conversational spirit of services like Twitter. When we heard they had a Twitter committee that would meet once a week to approve tweets we knew we had to do something. Our idea was to add a simple time delay to social media updates, just like a live TV broadcast.

As we all get old, cataracts is an issue most of us will see. Applying the correct prescribed drop dosage is important for the healing process. After interviewing some patients at the hospital and observing my grandparents, I found that there were numerous hurdles to applying a compliant dosage of eye drop with the conventional packaging. I then set out to design ENEdropp.

I was travelling around Australia quite a bit for work, and I found it incredibly difficult to acquire local knowledge about what was on. It was easy enough to understand which really large events were on, but difficult to know what was on at a local level, and where I could find event information, it was relatively limited. The more I spoke with other people about this issue, the more I understood that this was a common problem that people experienced.

Developed through years of scientific research at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), BuildingIQ is the only scientifically-proven predictive modeling tool for intelligently controlling commercial building energy consumption with virtually no start-up costs for the consumer.

Despite the lack of data management, businesses have come to depend on data for core operations and the cost of this data not being accessible in a timely fashion can be staggering. Virtual DBA came to life to meet the day-to-day challenges of availability, performance and administration of an organisation's critical Microsoft SQL Server databases.

We built a cloud-based online training platform to give the experience of being guided through social media platforms in real time. This was technically difficult, since we wanted users to experience the real technologies, not a video reproduction. After a lot of trial and error, we had it: an online training software with a video guide and an interactive window. We took it to clients, but they wanted the software, not the course.

My son was diagnosed with severe eczema at the same time he learned to roll and could no longer be wrapped or swaddled safely to protect his skin. We then resorted to baby one-suit outfits with hand-covers, but these also stop being made with this most useful feature at size 00-0. Distraught and sleep-deprived from being kept awake night after night, I designed the first Bamboo Bubby sleeping bag and it worked!

We gave our eldest son a cooking set but he didn't have a play oven to accompany it. With quick thinking, I turned the box the cooking set came in, into a cooktop by sticking some paper hotplates to the box -- problem solved and he absolutely loved it! I started to think about what other inexpensive toys could be created from a cardboard box...then came the idea of moving plastic parts to make them even more realistic and interactive, some stickers to make it more authentic...and the Imaginabox product line was born!

Having spent close to two decades working in the male-dominated corporate arena of investment banking and professional services, I recognise sport is a key way to build rapport with colleagues, clients and senior executives. The Australian culture is pervaded by sport and for those who have not grown up watching or playing Australian sports it can be difficult to engage with others, particularly when much of our corporate networking and social interaction relates to sport.

I was looking for an unusual promotional item to sell at a pet and animal expo. While watching Man vs. Wild I suddenly had some inspiration: what if I could make eating bugs not as gross! So I took something really unfamiliar (the bugs) and put them in products that people love to eat. The products were so popular we decided to make them part of our regular range.

Following my 23 years in graphic design and illustration, I was searching for something new but not alien to my background. An interior designer friend suggested I study at her school to learn interior decorating and thus create artworks for designers based upon the rules of interior design. I did this and later the colour psychology course and from this I started the business.

Our co-founder swore off using expensive recruitment agencies in his (50-person) business forever. He began a mission to slash the cost and time it took him to recruit new employees. He initially found a contract recruiter who would charge him an hourly rate. He could outsource the process, but save 90% compared to an agency. Then his friends started asking for her details. There was demand for this model!

We all have a passion for giving something back to the community. We wondered if there was some way that we could combine our charity work with business. As a result the concept of Karma Contacts was born. We believe that people should be able to change the world simply through their daily purchases of everyday items like contact lenses.

Technigro CEO Nick Bloor realised that traditional commercial boom sprayers -- which are unuseable in even moderate winds -- created a lack of predictability for when our spraying activities could be carried out and, ergo, a lack of predictability for our clients. He therefore put the challenge to Technigro's R&D department to develop a solution that would allow spraying to be undertaken in all kinds of weather conditions, and thus make it easier to let clients know when work would be carried out.

A large consulting client asked us to build yet another mind-numbingly boring and inadequate paper-based safety tool. Enough is enough, we decided. We founded Synaptor to free workers from the tedium of OHS paperwork and to enable supervisors to manage risk in real time.

Two innovators from Cairns established a statewide pool fence inspection business. A customised iPhone app and a bespoke database for managing the inspections was designed and developed. After 14 months and 3,500 inspections, the app achieved highly efficient outcomes. A team of 30 inspectors was managed by a single support person...but why limit this to pool fence inspections?

CLebLabs will run inside all JANSTONAPPS including the Vinciazee Mother and Baby release for the Vincigenius device. Apart from music and experimentation with sound, there are therapeutic uses in rehabilitation for those with brain damage or various brain disorders, as well as creating perfect relative pitch hearing in babies.

We have watched the growing demand for "naming" services offered by crowdsourcing websites. These sites no doubt provide a wide choice of "creative" names at a low price and fast turnaround but are often based on sketchy briefs and shallow thinking. We believe a brand is the very foundation of a business so the name should be driven as much by the underlying strategy as it is by creative thinking. We saw a market opportunity for "strategic brand names".

I was building a house in Tassie, partly from the rock rubble lying around the building site. Packing irregular shapes together to form a nice-looking regular structure was hard work and I thought, "A computer can do this." I realised that as well as solving an intellectual problem, the software would enable the use of a local resource, unprocessed quarried rock, which is about 10% of the price and its production results in just 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions compared to manufactured and processed masonry material like concrete, brick and dimension stone. So, great for sustainable development.

The purpose of this innovation is to change the way channels to market (supply chains) work to give everyone in the channel -- Manufacturer, Distributor, Reseller or End User -- equal access to a single source of truth (think Facebook for channels).