Tag: smart 100 2011

One night I called all the kids for dinner and asked them to bring the cups they were using to the table. They all walked past several cups on the kitchen counter and grabbed a new one from the cupboard. Right then I wished I had a better way to manage all the cups floating around our house. Keeping track of cups in a busy family can sometimes become unmanageable resulting in abandoned cups, spreading of illness and arguments.

The innovation came to life when frustrated with wholesaler services, and because there was no support or innovation from their side. While working one hour with our business coach from Action Coach we came up with the concept we have now come to sell. Our service provides a one-stop shop opportunity for anyone to become a Telecoms company without the large capital normally required and without having to source dozens of different providers to supply them.

This innovation came to life after seeing how poorly managed were many hundreds of keys held in businesses such as real estate, especially building managers' large premises as they used low-security-level paper records to keep track of these valuable keys. I have wanted to introduce this some years back, however my research needed to establish the best way to collect data from keys and their tags.

The innovation came to light when Ruchir Punjabi, who had experience of serving more than one hundred clients with his expertise in web services and products, identified a few fair problems in the web site creation and management sector and decided to spend more of his energy on product development in key areas in the web space. He saw immense potential for the product in a seemingly unorganised web services market in India and elsewhere. He went head hunting for like-minded, passionate individuals in the same space and put together a motivated unit of web developers. This is his third venture.

The three of us where completing our postgraduate studies at The University of Melbourne. We started to work out what could be done to make it easier for people to create diagrams that wouldn't just be pictures but could represent the real world. We entered the Melbourne University Entrepreneur Challenge (MUEC) and with our business plan and pitching won second prize.

It started with some WILD questions about building games for the emerging "social game" space. Crazy stuff, like what if you could build "Farmville" in a week? What if you could press a button and have a cross-platform, scalable, social game application layer instantly available? What if we could distill the core mechanics of social games into a highly configurable, easy-to-use system so that game developers could focus on creating amazing game experiences, rather than figuring out how to build complex server infrastructures...

The inventor, Eric Costas, recognised that he and a large proportion of his office colleagues suffered the despair and frustration of desktop clutter. Tired of misplacing important notes, business cards scattered on his desktop and with an office space that had self-stick notes stuck on any available surface, Eric thought there had to be a better way. So drawing on his engineering background and gaining inspiration from the construction of an office tower, the idea of a desktop tower that could hold and organise notes, business cards and photos came to life.

We saw the cost of energy rising, the growing frequency of major destructive climate events, the crazy behaviour of office staff wasting electricity by leaving things on overnight and on weekends (74% of the week), the overly complex solutions available....

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.

Duc Ngo, inventor and CTO of JMango, got tired of re-writing every app he made to work on multiple mobile devices. Traditionally, developing apps for multiple operating systems took way too long and required specialist skills resulting to mounting costs. He found this to be inefficient and too expensive, not to mention tedious, repetitive and just plain boring. So he set out to create his own solution and the result was the JMango Mobile Platform.

This innovation initially came to life when I was working on my butterfly and insect farm. I wanted people to be able to experience various insect life cycles in their own home or at school, so that I could share something special with them. I chose a few of my favourites and came up with a prototype for an enclosure that would meet the housing requirements for all of them.

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.

In 2009, we decided to find out what was happening inside Australian small businesses that was holding them up from getting online and participating in the digital economy. Our research showed us that for the majority of SMEs, getting a website was all too hard... too technical, too expensive and too time-consuming. We decided to change all that.

Whilst in my hotel room at night I would search Google for "The best coffee in..." the city where I was staying. I found this process exhausting and it usually came up with mediocre results. So a couple of years ago upon arriving back in Melbourne I had a chat with coffee-loving friends James Crawford (Web Developer) and Adam Lowe (Psychologist) and the concept of Beanhunter was born.

We were writing a news article on an indie game developer and noticed that their official website was a total mess. It had very limited pictures and no videos, and provided no effective ways to communicate with its existing and potential customers. Having browsed around in the iTunes marketplace we discovered a similar problem shared by many indie game developers: one- or two-man teams spend all of their energy on making a kick-ass game, and they don’t have the resource to build an awesome website to showcase the game. This inspired us to develop the Indie Hub.

Olivia Wood was driven by what she saw as emerging trends in "Education/Entertainment" consumer products and the proliferation of personal technology in all aspects of modern life. iMinds has carved a strong niche in the new publishing space, securing all major eBook and eAudioBook distributors and having strong sales uptake from the new information consumer...dedicated to getting the most from their tech devices.

Daniel He, an optometrist, first worked in an optical store in the late 1990s selling eyewear. Too often a customer was dissatisfied with one or more aspect of shape, colour, material or size of the glasses they purchased. Most compromised and settled for something that was mass-produced. Now, a decade on, this problem was a recurring theme. So he out to change this, in an industry dominated by multinational companies.

I became fascinated by Khao Larm when living in Taiwan. I wanted to try my own recipes in it, but never saw it being prepared. Moving to Thailand, I am fortunate to have a neighbour, a lovely old lady we call Yai Yu (Aunty Yu), who prepares Khao Larm by the traditional method. Having observed Yai Yu making Khao Larm by the traditional method for some years, I wanted to use my industrial design and ethnotechnology studies to solve some of the apparent problems.

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.

I was working as a Graduate Engineer on the construction of an onshore LNG Gas facility. We had to maintain extremely high safety standards whilst working at height during construction. I was surprised by the lack of innovation in the safety products available at the time. None of the existing products were able to provide the levels of freedom and safety that we required. I couldn't help but think that there must have been a better solution, which is when I came up with the fundamental concept for the T-Line -- a concept that remains today in the current version.