As we reported last Friday, Startup Camp Sydney 3 was on this weekend and 7 teams of strangers came together to brainstorm, build, launch and pitch their new startups all within 48 hours of the kick-off on Friday night.
And here is the outcome with pitch videos under the description of each startup.
Enjoy.
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Thinkers Garden is, at its heart, a simple ideas site that aims to be a repository of ideas people have. Instead of having and throwing away ideas, the plan is to get people to put them in a place where others can find them and action them.
There are definitely other players in the space but Thinkers Garden is a little different.
It differs a little from Get Satisfaction, because it’s not so company focused, from Half Bakery, because the ideas are meant to be serious, and from OneEyeDeer because the focus is on a single idea from a single person rather than acting as a problem solving platform more generally.
It’s not the first attempt at this type of site, but in the end, as with all user-generated content sites, traction is what counts and SUCS3 is a great platform for getting that initial buzz that can kick things off.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtzfmAp9iAY[/youtube]
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Frendorsed is all about seeking social approval for your choices. Want to see what people think about a hat, a motorbike or anything else? Post it, spread the word through twitter and other social networks, and get feedback from your friends on whether you should go ahead or not (or should have gone ahead…)
The idea itself is ingenious in its simplicity, and you can see the potential that exists not only for it to go viral but also to start generating the type of information that would be highly valuable. I mean, you can easily see this becoming a trend-spotting tool, or even a market-research tool for companies.
The pitch is also worth watching, if only for the Dom DeLuise reference. LOL.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4U6iczYqfQ[/youtube]
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Punch My Phone
Put simply, Punch My Phone is “An iphone app to consolidate coffee loyalty and improve loyalty card management for cafes and their customers.”
The big thing of interest here, for me at least, are the metrics and direct communication with loyalty card holders that the app enables. That goes far beyond any need that might exist to reduce the amount of loyalty cards sitting in your wallet from the consumer side.
As such, while the selling to multiple small businesses isn’t easy, the scale that can be achieved as they push the solution onto their customers is huge.
There are no doubt big issues around implementation inside cafes/bars etc. and also the issue of not everyone having an iPhone – but if that can be sorted out in the coming weeks and months there’s potential in Punch my Phone.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jV5il7NctE[/youtube]
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Chef me up aims to help out those people who can’t be bothered going out for a meal, but don’t want to cook at home either.
The site matches up chefs, or those who want to cook for others, with people who want a meal cooked in their house by someone else.
It’s an interesting idea but one that has limited scope, in my opinion. The elephant in the room with this one is who is going to get a stranger to come in and cook for them at home?
Then again, I know of plenty of wealthy people who have chefs or caterers come in and cook for them, so this may very well be the democratisation of that system.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QO2NhGEbh0[/youtube]
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Platefeed aims to take advantage of the renewed popularity in home cooking that shoes like MasterChef etc. have generated by creating what is essentially a social network for home cooks.
On top of helping people find recipes and getting people recognised for their recipe building skills, the site also allows people to build their own custom cookbooks and to make money by getting royalties from cookbooks produced by the site that include their recipes.
It’s a nice idea that is focused on a large enough niche in the community so there’s definitely potential.
The obvious struggle will be the competition from well established players in the market, but by going even more niche, e.g. focus only on Australia, they can start to build that traction I spoke about before that is so critical in getting UGC sites off the ground
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEK054VA5QM[/youtube]
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The plan here is simple, create a simple photography site that allows a community of photographers to easily share and find vantage points from wherever they’ve been.
The way they do this is by focussing on geo-tagging pictures with social features like ratings etc.
Again, this another idea that is great in its simplicity in that it focuses not so much on the photographs that are being geo-tagged, but the potential that exists in the location for others to go and apply their own skills to.
It’s hard to know how appealing this is for photographers, mostly because I’m not that into photography, but it seems to make sense.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EWcDQfBD-M[/youtube]
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The easiest way to describe this one is the official summary:
“So you tend to meet a lot of girls, you are actively dating, but you can’t always remember which one is which? You have a date tonight, but was her name Michelle or was it Melissa? Was she the one who was allergic to dairy, or was that Sarah from last week?
Wotsername is the answer to your problems. Stop forgetting which one is which and which one has an abnormal love of spiders.”
So, yeah.
If you have the problem of meeting too many girls (or guys for the future release of wotsisname) and need a database of information about each of them then this is the perfect site for you, I guess.
If this somehow offends you remember the old saying – “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f0WyJOljRk[/youtube]
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OK so a few things.
First of all, some of the sites don’t appear to be up, but that’s not that big a deal. Some of the sites were no doubt up for the launch but have been taken down to do some more work. In any case, I’ve added the pitches so you can see what they’re about even if you can’t hit the site at the moment.
Secondly, I have some favourites in the group – Frendorsed and Punch my Phone are two standouts – and clearly I like the thinking behind Thinkers Garden.
That having been said, I don’t want to focus so much on which is the best or worst startup – rather the most important thing is that once again the process has worked and in 48 hours, 7 interesting and different startups have been created as well as a bunch of new networks and friendships amongst the local tech startup community.
This isn’t the end of the event either.
The startups will all be up for auction (I’ll post details once I have them) so if you like any of the ideas, go and bid on them.
Congrats to Bart, Brian and Kim for another successful event and to everyone who attended the camp whether in person and online. It has, once again, been inspiring.
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