Smart 100 2011

We were working closely with one of our clients, a locksmith, who was having difficulty managing the day-to-day activities involved in a do-and-charge business: providing quotes, booking jobs, using staff effectively, and remembering to invoice. We saw that the issues with our client were not locksmith issues, but issues almost every small business faces. We knew that through the power of the iPhone and a clever web app, we would completely change how small business operated. ServiceM8 was born.

My friend and I became new mums and quickly discovered the horrible customer service in baby stores in Sydney. We found how hard it was to find great baby gear and, moreover, nobody was making it easy to give feedback to improve products and services. As time-pressed mums, with consulting backgrounds from McKinsey & Company, we decided to apply our brains to solve this problem, fast. And, when we developed a mobile site for feedback we realised that it is not just baby stores but every single retailer and service providers that could benefit from customer intelligence. And so... CustomerUnderground was born!

Melbourne web development company Propagate decided that sharing their vast online communication expertise was simply the right thing to do; the byproduct of this is the Simply Suite. It provides users with access to a simple online communication system that combines SMS/MSM, survey and email campaign management, all from the one dashboard.

Vickie Johnson (founder & director) was working in her car between coffee shop meetings in the North Queensland heat in December 2009. Sweating and watching the battery power of the laptop depleting, she reflected on the fact that using her iPhone right now she could book a hotel room or a flight to England, but here she was working in the car and having meetings in coffee shops with no other options. Being a woman of action rather than negativity, she set about creating a network providing businesses with access to work or meeting space Australia-wide.

Russell Bolden of Glenbrook, NSW, had one those light bulb moments after a visitor to his home asked what direction the township of Katoomba was as they looked out over their spectacular view of the Blue Mountains. This was a question he had been asked by others too many times before without ever being able to give a satisfactory answer. The eureka moment was thinking of a direction plaque (as commonly found at lookouts) and then Google Maps and how the two could be brought together.

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.

Absolute Data Group's Product Development Manager, Michael Halter, believed he could hugely expand and extend ADG’s military-grade technical maintenance and training systems, which were being successfully used by Australian and international defence and aerospace clients. Michael wanted to integrate ADG’s software with product lifecycle, configuration management and asset management tools, to help ‘civilian’ companies benefit from the same superior tools as used in Defence.

With the state of the stock markets, economic turmoil and inflation, GoldSwap helps people preserve their purchasing power. Gold is the best protection in terms of financial preservation, and passing wealth from one generation to the next. A dollar today is not necessarily going to be a dollar tomorrow...but an ounce of gold will always be an ounce of gold.

My mum always used to catch the initial volume of cold water discharged from her shower in a bucket and use it on the garden, but a few years ago, when she hit her mid-70s, she abandoned the practice because it was just too much hard work. With water restrictions also in place due to the drought, I decided to invent a better way to collect and use that water. The Cullector is the result of that inspiration, although it’s taken several years and 14 prototypes to perfect it!

I invented a device to block drains and then automatically to draw water from drains. It was called the everydrop water harvester and appeared on the New Inventors and won the episode people's choice award. I then found it was difficult getting a pump that could draw water from below it and continue to hold prime. Such pumps that could do it like diaphragm pumps were more expensive, less efficient and not usually for the domestic market. Further, even these pumps were prone to shorter life when left to run dry for too long. Hence I developed this new product.

Two Harvard Business school students met and exchanged ideas about whether crowdsourcing could be applied to the fashion industry. We identified a way to leverage the internet to connect independent fashion designers with customers around the world, and have the crowds curate the marketplace.

A potential client, the British Ministry of Defence, was having problems with the extreme weather conditions in Afghanistan affecting their pump systems and regulatory changes meant that they could not leave their sewage at the site of their camps. We have had 25 years of experience using vacuum technology for sewage networks in Australia and so managed to come up with a way to containerise the system and handle the conditions.

Aviator is a venture spun out of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. Leveraging UTS’ proprietary software around thought classification for controlling electronic devices, the venture is developing a wheelchair control solution to respond to the needs of the severely disabled and paralysed.

A good client asked for a unique team-building program that would enhance the team's ability to think creatively, collaborate towards a result that created a legacy, embedded the team's purpose and values and led to a deep level of understanding between team members. I combined my corporate team-building experience with my songwriting and recording capability and designed the team song experience.

There was a call from the male population for better personal care, but there was no one advertising the fact that they would do the male Brazilian wax. Enter Ouch Waxing Studio. We openly advertise that if you have hair there we will wax it with no embarrassment.

We discovered there were no online platforms/marketplaces that empower young or emerging Australian designers to reach their goals. The purpose of this innovation is to empower young and emerging Australian designers.

After working with companies that needed to store massive and growing data collections on computers that could no longer match their growth in I/O capacity each year, we realised that eventually all these companies must resort to parallel processing of their large data collections. They simply have no other direction to go in. Our approach was to bring together the best available technologies to make the world's fastest MPP system that permits simple expansion beyond the size of the largest systems in operation in the world today.

After starting Pole Dancing classes and travelling to Sydney each week, the need for my own Pole took hold, but my landlord at the time did not share this same enthusiasm for installing a pole. This predicament forced me to design and have made a freestanding pole that did no damage to the precious roof.

Thinking about the lack of a working online fitting room, we reaslised that although shoppers can’t describe their body's shape/size, they actually don’t need to as the clothes in their wardrobe do that for them; people only buy and keep clothes that fit well. Fit2Buy lets shoppers compare the size/shape of items online to the items in their wardrobe; because they know the items in their wardrobe fit, if the clothes online are a similar shape and size then they will fit the shopper too.

I was responsible for managing access to a "preferred supplier panel" for one of the big banks. It was a debacle. Suppliers worked really hard to get onto the panel and got little for it. Staff just used the same suppliers as always because they didn't have time to do a better comparison. Procurement had little visibility of what was going on. When I realised these issues were common, I started Magnetized Markets. Our goal: make it easier to do business with preferred suppliers with less time and risk.