Natalie Chandler

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."

99designs, the world’s largest design marketplace, has gone and got itself a localised website. The announcement comes snapping at the heels of its whopping $35 million first-round capital investment from Accel Partners – the fellas what invested in Facebook, Dropbox and Etsy -- and the launch of local rival DesignCrowd.

The Australian Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry (AWCCI) has launched the Women in Business Poll to gather the views of Australian business women. According to AWCCI CEO Yolanda Vega, the 700,000-odd lady-folk small business owners are long overdue some attention.

The Parramatta Eels are all over this daily deals malarkey like footie shorts that have just gone through a very hot wash. In an NRL first, the team will offer fans “unprecedented access” to discounted local business services and activities via the brand-spanking new EelsDeals, a dedicated daily deals platform. Accessible via Facebook, email, Twitter, the Eels iPhone App and word of mouth, each day will see a local business deal promoted to Parramatta club fans.

Australian businesses are haemorrhaging moola thanks to the seemingly innocent SMS, according to The Full Circle Group. The telco expense management experts examined business SMS usage and costs over three years, including more than 250 business clients and a whopping two million SMS messages. The outcomes are likely to surprise you.

Australian online department store, CatchOfTheDay, has local supermarket big kahunas firmly in its sights. CatchOfTheDay trialled the discounted groceries model for 12 months before launching GroceryRun. The company offered groceries as part of a two-day event each month. It sold, on average, two grocery items a second, netting more than $1 million in just 48 hours.

Where once the lone salesperson was exalted for their solo efforts on the frontline, now more than ever selling is a social enterprise. The simple phone call to a prospect isn’t where your reach ends – nor is it your client’s final chance to play a killer hand. Blog posts, Facebook posts, tweets and retweets bounce around the internet 24/7, each with the potential to spread positive or negative messages about your salespeople, your business’s promises, your customer service proposition and your brand.

Aussie start-up Joe Button had only been in the online retail game for three weeks when it was shortlisted as a finalist in the Online Retail Industry Awards, up against the likes of Sportsgirl in categories Best New Online Retailer and Most Innovating Online Retailer.

Unless you’re a nerdy boffin whose speciality is mid-noughties mobile companies, you may not have heard of Javaground. Back in the day (well, mid-last decade, which is the mobile equivalent of BC times) Javaground was *the* leading provider of mobile app development tools. The company’s client list included Sony Online Entertainment, Capcom, Namco and Indiagames. It's now Australia bound, following its acquisition by Codengo.

Brand-spanking new Aussie start-up Wyngle is getting all up in online group discounting's business.

Starting up a new business is tough. Ask anyone. Starting up a business in an industry you have little previous experience of… Well, folks looking to poop on your parade might just say that right there is crazy-talk. But that’s exactly what Australian Fresh Leaf Herb (AFLH) founders Jan Vydra (pronounced Yarn) and William Pham did, shedding their corporate careers in the process.

Our guess is there’s a whole lot of ‘Booyah!’ heard in the vicinity of Tapit Media’s Sydney offices right about now. The start-up, which specialises in new Near Field Communication (NFC), recently closed its seed funding round a diddy 22 days after pitching to Sydney Angels. So what is it about Tapit that makes investors part with their moola at breakneck speed?

Google’s recent announcement that it had snapped up Motorola Mobility for a cool $12.5bn cash has techie types all a-quiver. Top smartphone and tablet manufacturers that use Google’s Android operating system to power their devices have put on their game faces following the announcement. However, many pundits have speculated that they're collectively bricking it (our words, not theirs).

Any start-up that’s had to raise funds via Angels and VCs will tell you it’s a white-knuckle ride. Independent game development studio Bubble Gum Interactive (BGI) is no exception. The Australian start-up’s tales of capital raising include near-hypothermia, an encounter with Interpol, and a handwriting analysis test (that they passed and scored $100k.)

Nobody likes being on the receiving end of multiple bills each month – unless maybe you work for an accounts receivable department. Anyhoo. Our point is, for regular folk, a stack of bills can make you feel pretty icky. That’s why new Australian biz billclick has devised an online system for organising what needs paying and when.

New Australian online t-shirt biz, HelloFresco, wants to trim the tricky business of having to choose your own new clobber. Instead of hitting the shops whenever your clothes fail the sniff test, they’ll send you two new tees each month, because “less choice is fresh choice”. HelloFresco founder and tee-signer (thunk that word-play up all by ourselves, we did.) Jono Chatterton says the website is the end result of five years of designing and printing t-shirts for friends.

Australian businesses have been quick to claim a hefty chunk of the growing online outsourcing market - think Freelancer.com and 99Designs to name just two of the global big’uns. And today local freelancing site, RecruitLoop.com, takes aim at the previously unpestered recruitment segment.

A recent list of the World’s Top Tools for Learning is a stark reminder of how rapidly the educational ecosystem has moved beyond the traditional classroom. Most young professionals seem to have readily embraced the ability to learn quickly and interactively, formally and informally, in a real-time environment that was utterly unimaginable only a decade ago -- citing YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter and Slideshare. But where was Microsoft Excel?

Australian company Roar Engine recently wowed ‘em Stateside at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2011. The mobile startup beat out 15 other hopefuls to win one of two coveted Tesla prizes. (Named after Nikola Tesla, the scientist who discovered early mobile communication. Obvs.) Roar Engine pulled off the flashy feat by building a social game in just four minutes. “What if you could build Farmville in a week?” co-founder Clint Walker asked the audience.

As the term ‘Blue Ocean’ gains currency, there’s an increased opportunity for the underlying methodology to be misused, mangled and misunderstood. And, trust me, it often is. Even by some who have read the book, but more often by know-it-alls who haven’t.