GeoNext Startup Showcase winners

By Simon Chester on 12 March, 2013

The GeoNext StartUp Showcase gave some of Australia’s newest location-based startups the chance to pitch their ideas to a panel of three angel investors, who provided feedback to them, and chose an overall winner, who received $2,500 worth of cloud hosting from ninefold, and a two-hour strategy session on capital raising with Jack Lowenstein and John Starr.

The three finalists picked for the showcase included:

Geepers – Traditional physical addresses can often be difficult to locate. In some countries, street names are non-existent and street numbers are based on when a building was built rather than its location in a street. Geepers aims to provide a sort of DNS for location, where a simple, unique place or object name – similar to a URL – will be able to link to its place on Earth – the equivalent of a website’s IP address.

Blitzm Systems’ Social Landscape – The ABS census provides a wealth of demographic data about Australia that few people refer to. Social Landscape is a system that aims to provide demographic statistics via a web service to companies traditionally unable to afford full-fledged GIS. Based on the ABS Census, the demographic statistics are accessible via cloud-hosted web services that can additionally be accessed by web and mobile apps.

Gridstone and Ripe Intel’s Emergency app – the Emergency app provides Australia-wide notifications of emergencies – no matter what agency is broadcasting the warnings. Users can set their smartphone to alert them of any known hazards in user-defined areas across Australia – say, a home and a holiday home. Additionally, the app can draw on crowd-sourced submissions from users, to get the very latest information available from those on the ground.

The judges favourite, and winner of the ninefold cloud hosting and two-hour strategy session, was Gridstone and Ripe Intel’s Emergency app.

The audience favourite was Geepers.

Congratulations to the two winners, as well as the finalists, and many thanks to all the startups that entered.

Also, many thanks to the judging panel who generously donated their time, and, without which, the showcase wouldn’t have been such a success. The judging panel comprised: