Smart 100 2010

Following the 1998 major hail storm in Sydney (during which our car was extensively damaged), my wife and I were in Narooma one weekend. We heard that a severe storm was approaching the South Coast, and that it may contain hail. Having found that there was no undercover parking available in Narooma on a Saturday afternoon, I tried to find cardboard boxes to protect our car. Luckily it only rained, but it then became obvious to me that a portable shelter would have been ideal. Thus in 2003, Steve Anderson and I started on our project.

Causium...The new freemium Australian software maker, Atlassian, has pioneered a new customer acquisition strategy called Causium that merges cause marketing with the popular freemium business model. Instead of giving away a teaser product, Atlassian charges a nominal fee of $10 for its starter 10 user licenses and then donates all the proceeds to charity. The results have been an astounding win-win-win for all parties. Over 14,000 customers now have software that they couldn't previously afford, Atlassian has earned over $2M in upsell revenue and Atlassian's selected charity, Room to Read has received over $500,000 for literacy programs in developing nations.

Someone mentioned to one of our team members that it would be great to have a central location for all planned works being conducted by councils, utilities and others to avoid them duplicating effort (after a roadway was dug up and resealed in his street for the second time in 3 months -- once by the Council and once by the water authority). A team was assembled and the business problem was identified before we started to think about what the business solution needed to look like.

The founders were searching for the points of greatest inflexion to help move us to a sustainable economy. We realised that to be successful in this goal, we needed to engage consumers, and work to create a new market from the bottom up. Realising that government and corporate action on climate change was in regulation and artificial institutional markets we saw the need for a retail carbon market that everyday consumers could participate in on a daily basis, and trust enough to want to.

We received feedback from a number of our clients who are currently using Expect A Star's Child Care component of the Corporate Family Program. The clients relayed that the current offering is great for their staff caring for young children, but what about the older demographic who may be caring for an elderly loved one? In response to this feedback we developed a comprehensive Aged Care offering leveraging off the existing infrastructure of the Child care offering, but extending the reach of the innovation to an entirely new audience. So far the response to the program has been overwhelming.

Melbourne physiotherapist Luke Goodwin wanted to continue to make a difference in the area of falls prevention in the community, aged care and hospital environments. Following on from his internationally successful GripSox product, the REDuce Falls Sox are special ‘red’-coloured GripSox that allow staff members in hospitals and aged care facilities to easily identify a patient who has been assessed as a high falls risk, and therefore is someone requiring extra supervision to help reduce the chance of a fall. The socks therefore provide both a non-slip effect as well as a very important visual identification.

The two founders realised that they weren’t alone with their struggle to learn accounting, particularly so in the business world where financial illiteracy is rife. In Melbourne, in 1992, Mark and Peter started to design a new sort of financial literacy workshop for businesses. Further development ensued in South Africa and we went global in 2000 with a two-day financial literacy workshop. We continued to refine our unique learning system and today this same workshop takes about 5 hours. We have other products with e-versions underway and will launch the Colour Accounting learning system as a product this year.

Looking at the emerging market for cloud-based personal health records, as the sharpest end of smart phone applications where the tensions between authenticity and privacy are so acute, I had an epiphany that Lockstep’s intellectual property for encrypting virtual identifiers could be embedded in each mobile device app. The idea is to bake into each app a unique local handle for the user, indelibly marking all data originated from that app, authenticating the user without necessarily identifying them, and stopping data streams to be linked across apps without the user’s consent.

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Papyrus Australia founder Ramy Azer previously sold traditional papyrus in Europe and realised the demand for this environmentally-friendly paper was greater than supply. After completing a Mechanical Engineering degree in SA, Azer investigated alternative fibre resources readily available in Australia and various manufacturing processes. Following a detailed research and selection process, banana trunks were identified as an ideal choice. Papyrus’ pilot plant was established in Lonsdale, South Australia in April 2007. In February 2008, Papyrus established its first commercial manufacturing facility at Walkamin in Far North Queensland. In November 2009, Papyrus successfully began continuous production of its banana fibre products.

I've exhibited three times as an 'on the wall' artist, and had the thought, "Hhmmmm... what if I bring art onto the streets of Melbourne and start painting clothes? What if... people were the sculpture, and clothes were the canvas?"

We were looking for solutions to our clients’ needs for social media monitoring and analysis. We found many technical solutions that provided data but could not allow for human sarcasm, vernacular, industry jargon, spelling errors, abbreviations, etc., and so provided inaccurate or irrelevant analysis. If someone tweets “I’d kill for a Cadbury chocolate” it would be scored as a negative when in fact it is a positive. We realised that to provide a genuine understanding of how a brand, product, or person was being positioned online we had to have a human being evaluate, analyse, and score every feed individually.

The following SMART 100 profile and the information it contains is a duplication of content submitted by the applicant during ...

I developed an interactive touch-screen system for a food outlet that I owned. The aim of the system was to entertain my customers whilst they waited for their order. The system interleaved in-store advertising in between the ‘entertainmentʾ. My now business partner was a smallgoods representative that serviced the store. He saw the product and, seeing the possibilities, we quickly formed a partnership and collaborated over many years to develop the Q In-Store Advertising System with Now Serving module.

This innovation came to life when we realised a gap in a developing segment in the telecommunications market. With telecommunications becoming commoditised, many entrepreneurs have joined the groundswell of companies offering innovative product mixes in voice, Internet, data, PBX, and hosting segment. While there are plenty of wholesale providers of these services, No one in the market has delivered an end-to-end BSS/OSS platform (front, middle, and back office solution) for these innovators. Utilibill Lite empowers such players to be competitive and offer first-class service while minimising overheads that were previously required to set up a telco.

Invoiceplace was born from the frustration of staying up late to create and send invoices. It was too much of a hassle and was something that ended up being put off, which is potentially disastrous for the cashflow of any business. This grew into a mission to provide a robust and professional online quoting and invoicing service, without being complex and intimidating. Invoiceplace is now used worldwide to help small business do what they do best and grow their business.

From dealing with a number of international brands such as Red Bull, Toyota and Microsoft we realised that Australian subsidiaries have a challenge in identifying local content. Customers had to deal with ‘noise’ as they tried to determine what conversations are local and what they should care about. We needed to work out a way of pinpointing where conversations were happening beyond a domain basis (all the main social media sites are .com so would be attributed to the US). Our technology can now take a conversation sat on any domain and pinpoint the creator down to a suburb level.

The Smart Solar Desk Lamp was conceptualised in 2008 when it was apparent that there was no carbon data available from highly dispersed, tiny carbon emitters like kerosene lamps and cook stoves used by the global poor. Our Solar Desk Lamp had already gained market traction, but it was very difficult to find a method to cost-effectively measure carbon emission savings from eliminating kerosene lighting. Another Australian company, Daintree Networks, provided the basis of inspiration, at a CleanTech Conference, and the Chinese national distributors of a UK technology provided a partner for practical, low-cost development.

Our customers kept asking us about the best way to fill bean bags.

The Lab Creative was launched in April 2009 -- a dynamic live experience agency that deals in producing live corporate events and has revolutionized corporate team building in Australia. Securing some of the nation's largest companies -- such as Coca-Cola, Amatil, NAB, and Wesfarmers -- this is an inspiring story of vision and belief that creativity is the key to unlocking the best potential out of corporations all over the world. We are the interface between the corporate and creative -- it is a proven science.