Startup & Entrepreneurship

Slexicon, founded by school buddies Vito Grigorov and Andrew Iliadis, finds a lot wrong with the daily deals. On top of their list is the high fees that are apparently killing margins and businesses – two-thirds of businesses that once participated in a Groupon deal suffered losses, according to a study in the U.S.

Finding a tradesman is getting much easier in Australia thanks to a new partnership between Trade Saver, the ambitious group buying platform for findings deals on trades and renovations, and OMG, Australia’s largest online directory network.

Dr Richard Hames was recently described as one of this century’s most foresightful corporate philosophers, and by Forbes Asia, as one of the smartest people on the planet. He points out that today’s start-ups are far better placed to tune into the changes driving society and community than big business.

The program will pick five winners, each of whom would get $100,000, “based on the most progressive ideas that represent entrepreneurship and innovation around technologies, processes and business models.” Additionally, GE and its partners will help commercialise these ideas, which is where the bulk of the $10 million program will kick in.

New website www.nakedoffice.com.au has put Australian employers on notice: you’re no longer the only ones that can deliver career-changing feedback.

Researchers at Manchester Business School have now found a way to de-mystify creativity. Their goal is to make creativity in business more than just a catch phrase, or pipe-dream, but an applicable and achievable reality.

So, you’ve slaved away long and hard, begged and borrowed the funds to get your business up and running. And then, something happens. What happens when you have the problem, not your customers? This is when “impossibility remediation” becomes the hottest skill on the block.

DetailsbySven is curating about 100 gift items. Besides the popular men’s line of wallets, belts et al, there are some exotic goods too –sunglasses made from used skateboard decks and rare coffee beans. And a mix of Australian and Scandinavian products.

Local social media monitoring service, BuzzNumbers, has been bought by Sentia Media. You may remember Sentia Media by its previous name, Media Monitors.

For those who do not know Jeremy, he is the founder of trendhunter.com, which has just clocked up 1 billion impressions and is the no.1 crowdsourcing vehicle for trend spotting. Interestingly, he says not only you cannot predict the future, but that if you do, you will extrapolate the present and end up in the same place as your competitors.

Ever had that feeling that you have missed something? Have you ever been totally devastated to learn that there was an employment expo held just around the corner, but you didn't even know about it beforehand? Maybe your favorite local band played at show two weeks ago, but you didn’t get the memo?

I've said it before, earlier this week in fact, and I'll say it again. Science is the new sexy. How sexy? In less than 20 hours,...

This week marks two years since I dissolved my successful band management company to focus full-time on my startup. I'd just completed my first large fundraising round where 21 individuals had written me personal cheques to invest in the business. These angel investors came from a variety of backgrounds. I found them through speaking at pitch events and by presenting my PowerPoint deck an estimated 700 times over the previous year. Raising the first round of capital was the hardest thing I'd ever done. It required a huge amount of personal energy and growth, and at the end I had a massive sense of achievement from pulling it all together. Now, I thought, the fun could begin!

Now, other than immersion in the athleticism, is there anything else we can take from the recently concluded London 2012 Olympics? Well, there's plenty! The lessons our athletes have provided, some by having it the hard way on the world stage, are fully applicable in the business world. Some of the athletes will show you the right moves and others; well, they will show you exactly what you should avoid.

The Business Monitor, which surveyed 1,004 SME operators, found online business activity such as online transactions, email marketing and social media to be in decline. Less than a quarter (24%) used search engines to promote their business, down from nearly one-third (31%) in March. Social media activity on Facebook, YouTube and Google+ fell three percentage points to 15% and professional networking on LinkedIn fell six percentage points to 13%

A strong focus of the app platform is the ability to engage and reward users. That has come from Al-Attas’ belief that “an app is useless if it doesn’t add value to the life of the user.” He also held the view that current apps “weren’t offering fans anything more than what they could find online.”

Crowdsourcing – or involving multitudes of people in a project – is not as new as many might think. For decades, much before the Internet came into being, The Oxford English Dictionary was driven by thousands of people writing in with word suggestions, etymology, usage and more. In more recent times, the human genome project used crowdsourcing, and leveraged the computing power of thousands.

Israeli designer, Izhar Gafni cycles as a hobby. While buying parts for his bike, he heard about someone who had built a canoe out of cardboard. At that was it. The idea was in his head. He wanted to build a bike out of cardboard. So, he did.

Australian CEOs are sceptical about the next six months. Many were doubtful that overall business and economic conditions would improve by the end of the year. Less than a third (31%) thought they would be better in six months’ time, while almost one in four (22%) thought they would get worse.

Call our SMEs old-fashioned but they would rather pursue the traditional channels. Email was the most-favoured with 47% backing, face-to-face networking scored 30% and 25% preferred direct mail.