Via Dateline Media's e-newsletter, Kevin Maney at USAToday says judging by their start-ups, those Aussies are quite a crafty bunch (and also on his blog).
Despite the artictle title, Kevin doesn't exactly seem impressed with the crop he sees and offers a few somewhat snarky remarks on a variety of Aussie start-ups and research projects he visited whilst downunder.
In his discussion of 5th Finger he seems more concerned with their name than what they do
His company is called 5th Finger, which I find disturbing in a post-nuclear-accident way. Like calling a company 3rd Ear. Maybe he needs to rethink.
He also pays no favors to Steve Bleistein, Karl Cox and June Verner's "requirements engineering for strategic alignment" at the National ICT Australia's incubator:
These folks don't really know how to explain their company — which is charming, other than the fact that I'm lost.
GreenPea is next up and gets a slightly nicer comment ("the demo is pretty slick") but Kevin seems to wonder why Raymond hasn't tapped his Stanford school ties at Google.
Locata are on his Tuesday stop and he says "Locata could be onto something, because location-based services are going to become an integral part of life over the next decade" ....but alas the postiveness is shortlived as "it seems like Locata could take years and lots of money to get to a take-off point".
His last two stops are Animal Logic (digital effects) and Perpetual Water (grey water treatment).
It sounds like Kevin never got over his jet lag. Hopefully he writes something a little more interesting in the next few weeks as it is a long way to go to write just a 1,000 words.
Having said all of that, Kevin is probably right when he says that Australia has "smart people who need marketers the way gin needs tonic". And besides, any airplay in USA Today is probably good airplay.
Update: my bad, looks like Kevin has been writing a few more things about his trip downunder. Such as why Finland is not the right model for Australia (I agree) and National ICT Australia's entrepreneur-in-residence Ralph Petroff.
Any publicity is good publicity when you are an unknown quantity as far as I'm concerned, so its a win for Aussie start-ups.
I picked up on his observation that they badly need marketing help. This is one area where Australia in general is miles behind the US and Europe; the inability of entrepeneurs to see the value of engaging marketing expertise. "Build it and they will come" is still the attitude, especially in tech circles where "marketing" is not understood. Here is an excercise; next time you speak to an entrepeneur with a technology product ask them how much time/money they have, or intend to invest in marketing planning. From my experience, less than 20% will have done anything structured.
Posted by: David Koopmans | June 14, 2006 at 07:36 PM