Smart 100 2012

I heard of the devastation caused by the 2010 Haiti earthquake. I realised that I had the skills and opportunity to make a positive difference in similar future catastrophes and set about creating a telecommunications system that could operate without relying on large, expensive and easily damaged infrastructure. My vision has attracted a talented, passionate and dedicated team, who are now turning it into reality.

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.

We realised that what we were doing for ourselves online was way more valuable when applied to bricks-and-mortar businesses. This inspired us to really start the business. We can provide accurate predictions on how long it will take to rank any particular keywords. Because of this we are able to provide month-to-month contracts knowing we can keep promises we make to clients.

As an ex-financial planner, clients were constantly asking me for help with managing their everyday money, and nothing was available. Budgets failed to address the problems. The purpose of this innovation is to show people how to eliminate their debts in the fastest possible manner, saving wasted interest and valuable time.

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.

Jordan and Alex Knight, brothers from Bendigo in regional Victoria, left their employed positions to work in their area of interest without creative limitations: developing applications on new and cutting-edge technologies. As solution architects, graphic and user-experience designers, developers and Microsoft MVPs, we identified that as a small-scale operation we could effectively produce exciting applications with exceptional hands-on customer service to deliver high-quality and rapid solutions.

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!

CEO Craig Deveson is a cloud computing specialist and serial entrepreneur. This is his second cloud-based business and it aims to deliver enterprise services at consumer prices. The innovation came to life last last year when a security software idea was forged with a cloud computing architecture then aimed at the very popular WordPress market.