Smart 100 2012

I came to realisation that not all recruitment agencies needed to be the same. There was in fact a demand for very responsive and customer-focused recruiters to provide an open-book service. We place a high emphasis on quality and service standards. We employ only the best, most eager young professionals and set the standards for their account management. Our managers remain hands on and lean by example.

Following my 23 years in graphic design and illustration, I was searching for something new but not alien to my background. An interior designer friend suggested I study at her school to learn interior decorating and thus create artworks for designers based upon the rules of interior design. I did this and later the colour psychology course and from this I started the business.

Developed through years of scientific research at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), BuildingIQ is the only scientifically-proven predictive modeling tool for intelligently controlling commercial building energy consumption with virtually no start-up costs for the consumer.

I spent months speaking with independent sellers struggling to find simple and affordable online distribution channels that paid their product due respect. These sellers were also looking to partake in a relevant social cause that made them feel their business has a sense of purpose, and without cutting in to their already slim margins and time poor lives. Andable was born out of desire to provide a marketplace to support independent businesses, both here and abroad.

I was travelling around Australia quite a bit for work, and I found it incredibly difficult to acquire local knowledge about what was on. It was easy enough to understand which really large events were on, but difficult to know what was on at a local level, and where I could find event information, it was relatively limited. The more I spoke with other people about this issue, the more I understood that this was a common problem that people experienced.

As a digital solutions company, we noticed several similarities in our clients' requirements even when they belonged to different industry sectors. They had full-service agency needs, needed to be trained and had comprehensive delivery requirements but low budgets. We built a service package from scratch that could provide all these services but in a process-driven system at a price that they could afford.

We have watched the growing demand for "naming" services offered by crowdsourcing websites. These sites no doubt provide a wide choice of "creative" names at a low price and fast turnaround but are often based on sketchy briefs and shallow thinking. We believe a brand is the very foundation of a business so the name should be driven as much by the underlying strategy as it is by creative thinking. We saw a market opportunity for "strategic brand names".

The purpose of this innovation is to publish a magazine rich in useful advice from real wedding vendors with real experience to help plan real weddings. It is also easily accessible as it's an e-mag and completely free for the reader.

My son was diagnosed with severe eczema at the same time he learned to roll and could no longer be wrapped or swaddled safely to protect his skin. We then resorted to baby one-suit outfits with hand-covers, but these also stop being made with this most useful feature at size 00-0. Distraught and sleep-deprived from being kept awake night after night, I designed the first Bamboo Bubby sleeping bag and it worked!

Now a noted graduate of the Launch48 program, WeTeachMe is a solution to two real problems that exist today: (1) information overload and the inability to retain knowledge; and (2) the inability for people to profit from their passions. WeTeachMe democratises education by putting it in the hands of the masses. Anyone, anywhere at any age can learn anything they want. Anytime they want.

By using new generation LED lighting, we have designed a light with two separate internal circuits -- one to provide permanent low-level light to meet emergency lighting requirements and another light circuit to provide operational levels of light when the space is occupied. The system achieves up to 93.5% energy savings.

Founder Asaf Brukarz identified a market need for an effective real-time, online reservation platform that would connect property developers with sales networks to achieve higher property sales volumes. After speaking to a multitude of industry participants, from property developers to salespeople, a common theme of a lack of transparency and real-time information was identified.

We were at a crowdsourcing discussion group when a small business owner asked what price should he charge for his product. It then hit us: why not use a crowdsourcing model to determine what price to charge and why. We have refined the model to use use "experts" rather than a crowd and created a unique website to facilitate the interaction between clients and experts.

This innovation came to life when I got sick of my wife always being on Facebook. The purpose of this innovation is to get my wife off Facebook and onto a platform that is Australian-owned. WotsDoin is a social platform to help keep families and friends connected without annoying ads everywhere.

CLebLabs will run inside all JANSTONAPPS including the Vinciazee Mother and Baby release for the Vincigenius device. Apart from music and experimentation with sound, there are therapeutic uses in rehabilitation for those with brain damage or various brain disorders, as well as creating perfect relative pitch hearing in babies.

I was tutoring HSC maths students and found they were encountering the same problems I had encountered when I was studying for my HSC maths exams -- namely, that there was not a comprehensive online resource for students to refer to for help with HSC maths. The existing online HSC maths resources just felt like electronic textbooks rather than providing anything different from what students already had in their textbooks.

We looked at the coupon systems used by companies such as Groupon that are bad for customers as they risk not being able to redeem an offer that has been fully paid for, and also bad for merchants as they do not get paid for unredeemed coupons which are kept by the group-buying site. We have removed the risk from both parties while keeping a revenue stream from the website.

We realised that a lot of small businesses had fantastic new products or services but little or no budget to market them. We believe that PR gives "more bang for your buck" than other marketing options when you have a limited budget so we decided to demystify PR, tell people how to run their own campaign and sell media contact lists so they could get started!

Tripping through Europe, I came across the growing economics of "collaborative consumption" and an article in Time magazine about returned US servicemen and women from Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time I was busy writing about video game mechanics and their application to leading Gen Y and Digital Natives. Suddenly I had three solid schools of thought that, when married together, formed a very relevant, practical and easy model for leading upcoming generations.

Whenever any music event is booked, there's always that massive risk of people not turning up. This sucks for artists because it means they have to play in front of a weak crowd, while promoters and venues make a huge loss on the night. GiggedIn was born when a couple of guys realised there was a better way.