Startup & Entrepreneurship

Rackspace Hosting is adding its heft to the push toward cloud computing in Australia. The American web hosting major attracted droves of clients by signing up with highly popular business and startup incubators like Y Combinator, 500 Startups and TechStars. It is attempting the same in Australia and New Zealand by announcing a “zero cost” program that will help startups leverage cloud computing technologies.

In an interview with Anthill’s Cynthia Karena, Simpson recalls the circumstances in which she started out her online gift-buying venture – months after the first dotcom crash of 2001. She says her focus was on creating something that couldn’t be done without the Internet. Simpson also talks about what she has learned, over the past decade, about business, entrepreneurship, creating an “experience” in gifting and managing social media.

What's the difference between a vitamin and a headache cure? There is rarely an immediate, urgent demand for vitamins. But when a headache strikes... Get out of my way! The unfortunate truth is that most organisations are in the business of selling vitamins -- products and services with beneficial qualities. Only a very rare few are in the business of selling headache cures -- products and services that their customers desperately need. Does this sound familiar? Sucks, doesn't it? Well, there is a way to turn this around.

Australia's top biking retail website, BikeExchange.com.au has rolled out some impressive numbers: 535,000 visitors every month, 85,000 database users and over 50,000 bicycles and cycling accessories sold since the site's inception in 2007. In this podcast, Leon and Garry have a chat with Bike Exchange CEO Jason Wyatt about his company's accomplishments and aspirations.

A company pioneering a drug to delay cataracts from forming or slow their growth has won this year's $100,000 Enterprize competition. Adelaide-based Calpain Therapeutics' victory was announced earlier this month by University of Queensland Business School, which has run Australia's richest business-plan contest since 2000.

The name of the seven recipients of the City of Melbourne’s 2011 Small Business Grants, Social Enterprise and Micro Business Grants Program have just been announced. The total of the grants amount to $55,000 which will allow Melbourne’s businesses to start up and expand.

Could Australian start-up Trunk.ly be the missing link in your online life? With Delicious – the Grand Poobah of online bookmarking pre-Yahoo! acquisition -- struggling to recapture that loving feeling post-relaunch, Trunk.ly has the golden, bejewelled crown firmly in its sights.

Simon Baker was the CEO and Managing Director of realestate.com.au during a period of massive growth for the Australian-listed real-estate company, increasing the organisation's market capitalisation from $8m in June 2001 to over $600m in June 2008. In this Q&A interview with Alex Pirouz, Baker talks about all the various elements required to build a great online presence, what business owners need to look for when hiring agencies to help them with their online strategy, the common mistakes most business owners make and (most importantly) how to avoid them.

Small is indeed beautiful when it comes to business structures. Economists who have for long trumpeted the virtues of being small should be able to pat themselves in the back one more time as small enterprises show great resilience, not to mention optimism, despite fears of a global economic crisis. A survey by American Express reveals that a majority of the nation’s small businesses are quickly adapting to the adverse economic conditions and a third expect to increase profits despite from a slowing, and fragile, global economy.

On World Sight Day, judges of the University of Queensland (UQ) Business School’s $100,000 Enterprize competition finals voted resoundingly for an innovation that could control the world’s single largest cause of blindness – cataract, a clouding of the eye’s lens among older populations. Calpain Therapeutics, an Adelaide startup that has developed a drug that can slow the onset of cataract, won the nation’s richest business plan competition, ahead of four others shortlisted.

Its promoters call Eric the Circle "the next generation of tweeting." And maybe it will be someday. For now, we can say with confidence that this website and iPhone app, with which you draw and share simple cartoons, can be a colossal devourer of time. And we say that with a smile.

Ventures in Digital Media, which calls itself a venture 'catalyst', is ratcheting up its profile with a full-fledged acquisition, the first since its founding. The...

We've spoken lately -- and controversially -- about entrepreneurship as art. Creating something out of nothing and making it beautiful -- that's the prime directive. Not accumulating money. We were reminded of business-as-art when we saw this trailer for a documentary about the man behind (inside?) "Sesame Street" superstar Elmo.

He has a track record of show-stopping entrepreneurial feats. He is a relentless supporter and cheerleader for the business-venture spirit in Australians young and old. And every time Anthill rolls out its 30under30 list, there he is again. This time, Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin wowed us with Blue Chilli, a support company for budding online ventures.

Is it possible to attribute Australia's next generation of successful entrepreneurs to the GFC? Look around and it's not too hard to discover a slew of entrepreneurial startups rising from the ashes of the hard-hit banking and finance sector. TopGuest, Greenstride Funds Management, SeeMedia Group, Kaggle and now Paws for Life – were all founded, indirectly, by way of our top banks.

The challenge three years ago was enormous: Two guys whose time on this planet totaled less than a half-century would take on one of the toughest markets in Australia -- home entertainment retail. And they would do it online. Talk about an uphill climb. But Jonathon Green and Elliot Green have proven to be the most gritty of entrepreneurial mountaineers.

If 2011 proves to be the year in which cloud computing transformed from a growing techie trend into an integral component of our wired lifestyles, Sheng Yeo and Alex Sharp will have had much to do with it. The two UTS mates co-founded Orion Virtualisation Solutions (aka OrionVM) in 2010 with a straightforward goal in mind: build the fastest cloud storage platform in Australia. Today, OrionVM competes among the fastest in the world.

Lack of funding is nothing new for many young entrepreneurs. Without assets or experience, traditional funding sources are often out of reach. As luck would have it, 23-year-old Sydney-based entrepreneur Ryan Wardell thinks he’s hit upon a solution. His company, Project PowerUp, pitches itself as "Australia's first crowdfunding platform for startups and small businesses."

Hey, you runners out there (or would-be or should-be runners) -- if you're looking for motivation, perhaps what you need is a big helping of zombie apocalypse. Saving your hide while piling up the distance is one facet of Zombies, Run! -- a smartphone game app that has attracted a horde of attention on Kickstarter.

"People ask me how I manage to work over 100 hours a week," Ruslan Kogan says. "I tell them: I don't work; I live this stuff." For the 28-year-old creator of the wildly successful online consumer electronics company that bears his name, "stuff" is a potent mix of competition, innovation and bravado.