Local ICT innovations draw crowds to Tech23

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 27 October 2009 07:22

IT Industry - Strategy

NICTA chief David Skellern spoke at a pre event breakfast to the 23 companies presenting and urged them to focus on collaboration, without which Australian innovators would find it difficult to succeed on the world stage.

The standout presentation of the early sessions seemed to have already learned that lesson. Posse is the brainchild of Rebekah Campbell, who also runs a music management company, and who has set up Posse as “Amway for Gen Y.”

Realising that it was hard to sell concert tickets in some markets, Posse has been designed to piggyback on social networks, encouraging music fans to sell concert tickets, and ultimately other goods, to their peers in return for a commission.

Posse is currently available in a beta version in the UK, US, and Australia and has signed up a swag of partners including Ticketmaster, to manage the ticket sales themselves. Campbell said that in a recent concert series for former Australian Idol finalist, Lisa Mitchell, 20 percent of sales had been made via Posse, with users incentivised to make ticket sales by the promise of a back stage pass for the Posse user who sold most tickets.

“This monetises social networking,” said Campbell, who is also in discussions about the possibility of an iPhone application to allow users to market tickets on the move.

Gartner analyst Robin Simpson who is attending Tech23 said the event confirmed that “Innovation is alive and well in Australia.” He believed that the advent of the NBN “might put a fire” under applications such as Posse, and other consumer focussed technology which was showcased at the event.

Other sessions during the day are showcasing enterprise technologies, mobile communications, green technologies, digital media and cloud computing applications. With regard to innovation in the Software as a Service and cloud space, while panellists agreed this seemed to be the preferred delivery mechanism for the future, they maintained that it was a challenging model for start-up companies which relied on bootstrapping their business.

The large up front costs associated with development and infrastructure required to launch a SaaS or cloud based service represented a major challenge for emerging companies in the first year or two after launch, and until they developed market traction.