Australian Incubator, PushStart, Graduates First Batch of Startups

Sydney-based incubator, PushStart, has recently graduated its first batch of eight startups. I was honoured to have attended the inaugural demo day held at beautifully designed York Butter Factory space in Melbourne, and just last night, it also concluded its demo day in Sydney.

I was thoroughly impressed and very pleasantly surprised when some startups included Asia (including China) as part of their long term expansion plans.

Here’s an overview of the startups presented:

1. Adbay (formerly known as Rezon8): Adbay aims to revolutionize the style of advertising on billboards. It has a audience measurement technology in place that allows you to track and identify demographics you wish to target, so you can put up advertisements based on who the audience is. In essence, you can create your advertisement, choose the demographic, location, and budget, and it only charges you when the advertisement connects with people whom they want to connect with.
2. Bleeply: Bleeply is a beautifully simply social tool that allows you to manage your Twitter accounts. It has a collaboration platform in place which aims to stop social media disasters. Team members are able to easily edit and improve on tweets before sending them out, and posts can be discussed internally via a commenting system that Bleeply has in place. Now it allows you to interact confidently on Twitter, anytime and anywhere. Especially when it is web and mobile friendly.
3. GimmeQuotes: Started by two brothers, GimmeQuotes is a hassle-free way to post your job requests, solving the disconnect between local businesses and consumers. So all you need to do is to create a project on any services you require, and matching professionals will eventually contact you with relevant quotes. It cuts down on time wastage browsing directories and calling businesses.
4. Matewire: Matewire positions itself as a Lastminute.com for activities, where it is a mobile social network that allows you to find out the activities which are happening geographically close to you right now. It has a description of the event, date, time, and also shows the people turning up for the event.
   

   Tiny Beans Co-Founders

5. Surfed.at: This is a surfer directory made by a surfer for surfers, allowing you to discover new places to surf, record, and rate the surfing spots. Hence, if a surfing spot is crap, it will not be given a good rating. However, when more people rate a spot, the spot’s ranking goes down as it gets overcrowded. Working just like a bell curve, the spot gets a better score when more people add to it, but after a certain point, the score decreases.
6. Tiny Beans: This is a personal favourite because for one, it promotes family bonding. Two, it has plans to expand to China. Tiny Beans allows parents to create a beautiful record of their children’s growing stages, so it journals the developmental process of their kids, in pictures.
7. Tonight: Tonight is an iPhone app that allows you to find, share, and plan nightlife activities, on top of giving you a personalized live feed of what your friends and other interesting people are up to for the night. It’s social network for what goes on after dark, and by knowing what’s happening ahead of time, you will know where to go, and where you should go, and places that you should not miss out.
8. Werdsmith: I actually think our editoral team (in particular, Rick) might like this. Think Werdsmith as the Github for writers, turning your iPhone and iPad into a portable writing studio, where writers can organize, share, and collaborate their writing projects while on-the-go.

Congratulations to all eight PushStart graduates, and cheers to Kim Heras and his team for a great job on this. We’ll be having more in depth interviews with some of these startups, so stay tuned!