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Winners of Startup Carnival announced! The Australian startup landscape is rapidly evolving

Ross Dawson, March 15, 2008 11:25 PM US PT

The winners of Vishal Sharma’s Startup Carnival have been announced.

The first three prize winners are:
1. Scouta
2. GoodBarry
3. Suburbview

The three judges (Duncan Riley, Justin Davies and myself) scoured through the 24 applications to identify the winners.

My formal comment after judging the field was:

It was very encouraging to see many exciting new market entrants as well as more established firms in the carnival. The depth and breadth of entrepreneurial talent in Australia is rapidly growing, and taking advantage of the massive opportunities emerging in the online space. Hats off to the drive and initiative of the entrepreneurs behind the very impressive array of entries.

This space has been transformed over the last year. As in many other countries, the completely open landscape provided by the online business world is seeing a rapid rise in innovation, as I commented recently in BRW magazine. It’s true that the applicants to the competition are collectively not earning a lot of money. But some of them are well positioned to do very well moving forward.

What’s great is that Vishal has posted each company’s application online on the carnival website, providing some great insights into the entrepreneurial space and how people are going about developing their businesses - it's well worth a look through each company's application. I may reflect in more depth later on what struck me in the submissions.

I am currently working on the next release of our Top Web 2.0 apps in Australia list, which hopefully will be out in the next couple of months. There have been some lessons in judging this competition in terms of the criteria and process used that should help improve the robustness of our list. I think the results will in fact be rather different from the Startup Carnival.