Pollenizer has been named a Finalist in Anthill Magazine’s Fifth Annual Cool Company Awards, a national program developed in 2006 to recognise Australian companies that are doing things differently to bring about positive change.

Over 700 aspiring ‘cool companies’ were nominated for the 2010 awards, making ‘The Cools’ one of Australia’s largest business awards programs. The winners will be announced at an award’s function on Thursday 16 December 2010 and published on AnthillOnline.com.

“The Cool Company Awards are extremely egalitarian,” said James Tuckerman, Editor-In-Chief, Anthill Magazine. “Previous winners have included two-person start-ups, not-for-profit social enterprises, large private companies and publicly-listed corporations.”

“Judging takes into account far more than mere business variables, such as revenue and wealth. The criteria is geared to consider other qualities, from the disruptive nature of the product or service to the culture of the organisation.”

“Applicants either nominated themselves or were nominated by peers, work colleagues, family, friends and other ‘admirers’. A field of hundreds was examined (and cross-examined) before our judges were able to isolate three Finalists for each of our seven categories.”

The program will conclude with an end of year bash, on 16 December 2010, in Melbourne.

What are Cool Company Awards?

The Cool Company Awards was launched in 2006 as a way for Anthill Magazine to publicly acknowledge and celebrate Australian organisations that are doing things differently to bring about positive change. In its fifth year, the awards attracted nominations for over 700 organisations, making it among the largest business award programs in Australia.

What is Anthill Magazine?

AnthillOnline.com is a digital business magazine that celebrates creativity, inspiration and commercial ingenuity, providing a fresh, exciting and practical perspective on Australian business in a global world. It is among the Top 50 Business & Finance websites in Australia, as ranked by Nielsen Online Ratings, and is home to the Cool Company Awards, the 30under30 and the Smart 100. It’s where ideas and business meet.

If you need venture capital to shift your startup into its next fast-growth phase then Innovation Bay’s upcoming Angel Dinner in Sydney might be for you.

If you are interested in coming to the dinner, have funds to invest or represent a company that is looking to invest in early stage companies, you should contact the Innovation Bay team on info@innovationbay.com.

“From the last 5 dinners over $6m in funding has been raised as a direct consequence of companies pitching at the dinner.  The dinner enables entrepreneurs to pitch in a supportive environment, in front of an audience of technology experienced angel investors and advisors”, say Ian Gardiner and Phaedon Stough, Innovation Bay co-founders.

1. What: Innovation Bay Angel Dinner
2. When: September 21st 2010
3. Location: Table for Twenty in Surry Hills, Sydney
4. What do I have to do? Submit a 90 second video elevator pitch in any video format and send to info@innovationbay.com
5. Application Deadline: 5 pm, Tuesday 14th September 2010
6. Full details: www.innovationbay.com

See you there!

How does it work? When wordle scans your online content, it tracks the most frequently used words (and makes these really big) to the least commonly occurring words. The result is a compelling infographic you can use to see re-occurring themes and keywords in your content. This is great for market research (surveys, interviews) and to gauge sentiment on forums, blogs, twitter streams – wherever content appears! Check out the Wordle gallery for inspiration.

Here are some examples from our website.

Pollenizer.com

Bigger better full size here. From this wordle graph, we can see Pollenzier talks about partners and founders (“co-founders”) and about building businesses that get clicks (“vistors”) and customers (“traffic”) and money in the bank (“results”) because of a unique (“different”) idea.

Our most recent blog entries wordled

Bigger better full size here. What stands out? We like to talk about ourselves (not surpising) but we talk a lot about startups, ideas, business, time and founders.

Try using wordle.net or any other free word cloud tool you find online and instantly learn your business’s keywords and messaging. You could apply this idea to comparing newspaper headlines or political party’s platforms or send your sweetheart a picture message about how you feel. Have fun!

Just discovered: Industrial design magazine and community, Core77. Here are two fun stories tagged under ‘object-culture’ (you get the drift) to give you a taste  of what these guys think about: Early User-Interface Designs and the QWERTY keyboard and I read therefore I roll .

Reading now: Rework by 37 Signals founders Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson and Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur. Just for fun: Fever Of The Bone by Val McDermid (who writes the murder-strewn British TV series, Wire In The Blood).

Skimmed through: Monocle Magazine on start-ups; The Economist (special edition on creativity and innovation in the Tiger and ‘BRIC’ economies), and The Harvard Business Review on leadership in the “age of transparency” and getting caught in the “acceleration trap“.

Listened to: Future Tense on ABC Radio National. Favourite stories included an interview with (author and technology columnist at  The Daily Beast) Douglas Rushkoff about online marketplaces, virtual communities and web businesses; and some contemplative thoughts from ‘radical’ Californian cafe owner Sal Bednarz on why he switches off the cafe’s WiFi when the weekend arrives.

Now, dear reader, it’s your turn.

Sam from Blurb.com next to Sydney Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House

It’s fun and challenging working with clients in different time zones, so it is good for the relationship when you can catch up in person. Samantha Howe (pictured) from Blurb visited Sydney in March to spend time with the Pollenizer Blurboz team; attend Blurb sponsored events; and catch-up with Blurb’s partners. I interviewed Samantha Howe, Marketing Account Manager (Global Partnerships and Business Development) for the Pollenizer blog.

What is Blurb?

“Blurb is an online print-on-demand creative publishing platform which enables anyone to creatively express their individuality through a professional coffee-table quality book.”

Who is Blurb for?

“Blurb is for everyone! It’s your content in a printable book form. It is your poetry, your design, your writing, your photography.”

Why is Blurb so cool?

“We never say we’re cool but others do. I think it’s because our platform is creative and accessible and there are no boundaries. Blurb.com has worked hard to remove barriers to making a book. We’re passionate about enabling people to see their work published in a book.”

Blurb.com at 2010 Semi-Permanent Sydney Design Conference

What is Pollenizer doing for Blurb?

“Pollenizer is our eyes, ears and voice in Australia and New Zealand. This means the team is actively ‘seeding’ the market, talking about Blurb.com with cultural and creative influencers and organisations, and creating opportunities for Blurb.com in the marketplace.”

Tell us about the range of books in the Blurb bookstore.

“Blurb.com prints a book every 10 seconds. We have over 40,000 titles in our online bookstore. We see all kinds of books – photographs of dogs in bow ties to artist exhibitions to stunning graphical illustration, photography and brand books.  Everyone uses our platform for different purposes: as a business tool, agency creds book, writing fiction, photo books, fund-raising. Some titles do raise our eyebrows. As long as the content is not illegal there’s a market for it.”

Billy Blue Design School Students at Blurb.com Presentation

What have you been doing while you have been in Australia?

The team and I went to Semi-Permanent Creative Conference in Sydney as a sponsor and exhibitor.We spoke to creative professionals and students about Blurb.com can be used for portfolios, story-telling, brand books and more.

During this week we hang out with Blurb partner Art Whats On; caught up with potential partners; and met with local Blurb Nation designers.

I then flew to Fremantle in WA for the launch of month-long photography festival, Foto Freo, where Blurb was a sponsor and I did Magnum Workshop presentations. While we were in town, we ran a meet up for our WA Blurb bookmakers. Over 80 people squeeze into a small Fremantle bar to talk about book-making, share stories and show-off their books.

Melbourne was the last stop to to visit partner Red Bubble and cool global utility bag brand Crumpler.

The workshop will give great insight into which technology solutions are available, and how they help grow  your business.

Other speakers include:

• Mike Walsh,  Tomorrow
• Geoff McQueen, Hiive Systems
• Jason Noorman, MYOB
• Stephen Belfer, YTechnics
• Michael Carter, Business Fitness
• Sam Shetty, Netregistry
• Tim Parsons, Quickflix.com.au
• Kate Carruthers, Digital Business Group Pty Ltd
• Stephen Collins, acidlabs

The workshop includes roundtable discussions where you’ll be able to chat with the keynote speaker, and discuss business automation, customer acquisition strategies,  and social and mobile technologies.

At the end of the day, you’ll have a greater understanding of how to maximise your online presence, and how technology can improve profitability and scalable. Plus resources and diagnostic tools to take with you to help you get started.

Technology to Drive Growth Workshop

When: Thursday February 18th, 8:30am – 4:00pm

Where: Sydney Convention Centre

We are in Barcelona working at a client site and on the way back to our company apartment, we got a bit distracted talking about software and, as we walked down the stairs at the Plaça de Catalunya station, we realised that we were on the wrong platform. We had gone down to the railway station instead of the metro. We walked upstairs and as we tried to exit through, the ticket validation machines didn’t allow us to get out, it displayed “ticket not validated at entry”. Now, we were getting confused since we had purchased our tickets that morning, we had been able to get in. After a couple of tries, we walked towards the station master and quickly explained to him our situation. He looked at us and immediately took two “exit tickets” out of his pocket and told us “yes, that’s normal, you cannot exit in the same station you entered”.

Exit Ticket

Now, someone must have created that rule, right? Mauricio and I could immediately think of many user stories that would see a client exiting from the same station that they entered and we couldn’t understand under which circumstances you wouldn’t want someone to be able to exit (remember we were using a valid ticket that had been accepted to get in and we had a valid ticket when trying to exit through machines). The most amazing thing is that a decision was made to create an exit ticket, print it, modify the systems to accept it, instead of fixing the system. Why would one put such a restrictive rule onto a user that holds a valid ticket?

Our next step is now to try this exit ticket at other stations. Could this be a master exit ticket that allows us to exit from any station? That would be even more interesting :) If you have any ideas about this system and why it’s this way, I would be very interested in your comment.

Don’t be tempted by the 98 octane hi-revving twin-supercharged speedster; sometimes it’s a simple, reliable, well-understood and easy-to-repair diesel you need.

One of my favourite episodes from Top Gear is the “Big Trip To Africa”. Jeremy Clarkson and his two sidekicks have to buy a car each for £1,500 and then drive it across Botswana. James May (aka Captain Slow) picks an old Mercedes 230E. Jeremy and Richard Hammond laugh, thinking that driving an old German prestige car across Botswana’s deserts is a rather silly choice. Actually, James’ choice was a smart move. He picked the old German tank because the 230E is one of the most common cars in Africa, giving him access to lots of spare parts and skilled mechanics all along the trip, while Jeremy and Richard struggled to find parts and skilled people to fix their cars.

Building a web business is not exactly like driving across Botswana ☺. But when it comes to technology there is something to learn from Top Gear’s “Big Trip To Africa”. There are some important decisions to make when it comes to the technology choices for your web business. First let’s look at the software component and then the hardware part.

1. The Software: Fast and Simple

You will need to pick a software bundle to power your web business — the stack of layers that will go in-between your hardware and your users. A typical software bundle for web applications will include:

• An Operating System: To control your hardware.
• A Web Server: To coordinate all the elements.
• A Database System: To store data.
• A programming language: To interface with your users.

If you can, go open source. Open source technologies will give you a lot of advantages:

• Code quality: Big open source project such as PHP of MySQL are constantly reviewed by a large community of skilled developers that are committed to localise, flag and fix all bugs and other code issues. The outcome is outstanding code quality.
• State of the Art technology: as they are constantly evolving, popular Open Source technologies are always on top of the game when it comes to modern features.
• Security: when code is Open Source, security bugs and issues are usually quickly identified and fixed.

A good example of Open Source package is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP or Python). It’s a great pick as it will save you cost of licensing commercial software and it’s being widely used to drive many successful commercial web businesses. For example MySQL claims over 11 million customers and as of February 2009 Apache served over 49% of all websites. Other examples of popular web-services making extended use of LAMP are Digg, Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress. The popularity of the LAMP package means it is stable, is well documented in many resources around the web, and developers are easy to find when you need to hire people.

2. Hardware: sometimes having your head in the clouds is a good thing

Now that you have your software bundle you need some hardware to power it. There are two things you have to keep in mind when working on a web service:

1. You want your application to cost you as little as possible, especially when you get started.
2. You want your application to work properly regardless of the number of users.

Scalability

Your application needs to work efficiently regardless of the number of users. Having 10 or 100,000 users will make a huge difference on your hardware. The “cheap” (but at the end expensive) way of scaling an application is to add hardware (one server is not enough to handle the load? Let’s plug another one…). This can become very expensive and may lead to dramatic issues when you scale beyond typical startup size. At some point, adding servers is prohibitively expensive or just not possible anymore. And what happens during the low season? You find yourself with a lot of useless and expensive servers to operate and maintain.

The smarter way is to use computer ‘clouds’ — a very interesting approach that eliminates a lot of scaling issues. Instead of using a single server, you plug your application into a farm of servers and you pay monthly a bill based on the resources you used. Companies such as Amazon and recently Google are offering such service (and some other, smaller, players like Mosso and Joyent).

Cloud computing is great but there are also some basic engineering/coding habits that will help you to deliver at low cost. For example; optimise your code. You don’t want to have to rewrite part (or all) of your code because your idea is successful. So it is very important to write your code always thinking; “Is it the best way to do this? Is there anyway to do that with less code? Can I give the database a break?” The extra amount of work is definitely worth it.

Pay as you grow

What is true for hardware (computing power) is also true for storage and bandwidth. Most semi-pro/pro hosting companies will offer you bandwidth pricing in tiers (and same concept with storage capacity); 100gb/month, 2tb/month… Unfortunately it means that you always pay for something that you are not necessarily using and it also means that you will run into trouble if you exceed your credit limit (usually you pay for extremely expensive additional bandwidth or get throttled-back so some users have a disappointing experience).

To avoid that you want scalability (again). You want to pay for the bandwidth you are actually using and nothing more and you don’t want to be limited. Here again the solution is in the cloud. Amazon provides a great service with its S3 storage / bandwidth service. Putting your files on Amazon S3 will also resolve your storage issue, as Amazon S3 storage capacity is virtually unlimited. And you will pay only what you are using. Google recently started something similar. Probably some very good things are going to happen in the near future in this area.

To conclude

In the past two years, starting an online business has became easier than ever. Open source technologies have now reached a high level of maturity and cloud computing has emerged as a solution to scalability and has drastically reduced initial operational costs. This is good news for Internet entrepreneurs!

What has your experience been like with these new technologies? Are you fighting a prejudiced view internally? Has cloud computing helped your business yet? Please leave a comment about that and… have fun building awesome web-services!

Today, I had the privilege of sharing a panel with Alberto Arévalos (Communications Director for Google in LatinAmerica) and Alec Oxenford (Founder of DeRemate.com, DineroMail and OLX amongst others) during the launch of a series of Technology Workshops for NGOs (in Spanish). I was invited by Juan Cruz Mones Cazón who is heading Idealistas.org in Argentina. Google Argentina generously hosted the event and provided snacks and coffee. The talk was all in Spanish of course, which was a challenge in itself as it’s been almost 10 years since I last spoke in front of an audience in my mother tongue language :)

I was asked three questions:

1) How can new technologies help increase the impact of social organisations?

2) How to use the web to involve citizens in social change?

3) Which do you think will be the revolutions to come with new technologies?

I was given only 30 minutes for my talk and the Q&A session. I have to say that I am the only one that followed the format, both Alberto and Alec had more “free flow” interventions (I saw that Google was recording the event so if it appears on GoogleVideo or YouTube, I will link to it). They had very interesting points and made clear to the 60 or so representatives from NGOs that using the web is simpler now than ever with blogs, GoogleApps, AdSense, etc.

I agree, blogs are very simple to set up and allow NGOs to give their own voice to their message and to also give voice to the voiceless, their consituencies, and more.

Technorati had, in their latest “State of the Blogosphere 2008” numbers that are mind boggling: 133 million blogs, 900,000 new posts every 24h … With numbers like that, it’s easy for your message to get “lost” in the sea of information, so you need to find additional ways so that it doesn’t happen. NGOs need to participate in groups, forums, social networks that are relevant to the issues they want to address. The ability to reach large numbers of users or focussed groups that are passionate about specific topics is now possible without much effort. A topic often ignored in these discussions though it the issue of language. If you are trying to reach a wide audience to discuss an issue of global impact, let’s say like climate change, you need to reach not just the English speaking audiences but the other main languages on the net, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, etc. (for the potential audiences, just look at Phil’s post about his talk and check the numbers he talks about for Chinese or Russian sites).

New technologies are certainly reducing the cost of adoption, especially with GoogleApps, Salesforce or Confluence and other wikis (all have free access or licenses for NGOs and non-profits) so even very small non-profits have now access to tools and applications that were previously only available to the largest ones or companies.

New technologies are not only used to convey your message, they are also used to strengthen the democratic process. I made a specific reference to OpenAustralia, a project started by my good friend Matthew Landauer. OpenAustralia is a non-partisan website which aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their representatives in Parliament. Bringing transparency to the work of Parliament is fundamental in a democratic process and this is an example on how technology enables citizens and organizations to be able to understand what their representatives are doing on their behalf. And get historical information about their positions on any topic that got discussed in Parliament. BTW all the source code for OpenAustralia is free and open source.

Finally, on the topic of the next revolutions, I can’t dissociate the revolutions from the challenges that we will face with new technologies and I couldn’t focus exclusively on web/software as there are some very challenging new times ahead in the area of synthetic biology. I am certainly not an expert in this field however I can clearly see the ethical challenges that we face in this rapidely evolving field and I was pleased to see how some scientists are getting inspiration from the software movement, in particular the open source one.

The issue of privacy (already recognise through habeas data in certain countries) in a more and more interconnected and digital world is certainly something that the civil society has an enormous amount to contribute to.

I think it’s evident that mobile platforms like Android or the iPhone are already revolutionising how people communicate, how people interact and how people shop however I thought it was important to mention it.

It was a very interesting session (IMHO) and the mentions of OpenAustralia and Open Source drew the most attention. I believe that civil society and NGOs need to get more involved and make better use of the amazing new opportunities that are out there and it’s our job, as technologists, to help them understand what they can do with all these possibilities.