Pollenizer: Building and Investing In Australian Web Startups

Sometime ago I wrote a blog post advertising a Project/Product manager position open at Pollenizer. I received a flood of applications, some good ones, some bad ones as you can expect. Today I received a nice email from James Goldie with this video attached: Now that’s what I’m talking about! Needless to say that we [...]

Are you ready to start a web business now? Apply for Startup Bootcamp today. It’s a practical and informative program to help you hone your idea and understand the full picture of building a successful business. What’s the commitment? 4 nights of 3 hr hands-on workshops over 4 weeks. You will learn from a team [...]

If you haven’t played with word cloud creation tool Wordle by Jonathan Feinberg, you should! You can create pretty pictures out of your website or blog’s content. Wordle grabs all the words on the page or website you are ‘wordling’ and creates cool visual models or infographics which you can customise (typface, colours, layout and [...]

Photo Credits: BenJTsunami – See original here. From time to time one of our portfolio companies gets to be featured on a prime time TV show (A Current Affair, Today Tonight…). This has obvious benefits for the business in terms of publicity, but it comes at a price for the poor servers that have to [...]

Pollenizer wants to be co-founder of your next web business For years we have been preaching focus. It aligns your team, simplifies most things, combines your energies in one direction and generally makes life better. This applies to us as much as it does to the companies we work with, and now we’re further tightening our [...]

Signing NDA’s is impossible for Pollenizer given that we see about 20 new businesses a month. We certainly keep all information confidential and never, directly chase a new idea brought to us from someone. Pollenizer’s integrity is and must be on public show and our reputation depends on living it. Openly though, it’s rare that [...]

I saw Steve Hopkins post today on hypotheses based testing and thought I’d share some ideas we’ve been using at Pollenizer. A lot of startups we see and work with are getting better at doing customer development, but they sometimes aren’t quite sure what to do with the results. Very rarely do you finish one [...]

This week’s Pollenizer Podcast is a little different, where I talk with the Public Interest Journalism Foundation’s chairman Margaret Simons and Secretary Melissa Sweet. I am also on the board, which you can read a little bit more about here The Foundation was set up to explore new approaches to news through technology – more [...]

This is a guest post by Chris Hitchen, CEO at getprice.com.au in celebration of Mick’s new son, Samuel. Startups and babies… The launch date is never certain and often late It doesn’t come out the way you expect it to It costs much more than you think There are lots of bugs along way No [...]

In this week’s podcast I talk to Mark Pesce, one of the co-inventors of VRML. Mark and I chat about what drives him to take an idea and see it through to completion. What’s more important for success, the person or the idea? We also, chat about his new project Plexus – a personal, portable [...]