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Calling all states: Techboard goes national!

Rafael Kimberley-Bowen Leave a comment

Techoard is hiring.

Techboard recently celebrated its first birthday, and it’s fair to say we’ve come a long way in achieving our goal of raising awareness of Western Australian startups. Techboard is a promotional and investment discovery platform for local startups to celebrate and communicate their successes to potential investors, customers, partners, employees and fans. Companies who have claimed their profiles can make announcements on our ASX style announcements platform. We also publish a fortnightly ranking of trending startups picking up and amplifying the pulse of the startup space here in WA. Our partnerships with the likes of WA’s largest business newspaper Business News, WA’s local startup newsblog startupnews, Techknow Invest Roadshow, TechInvest Magazine and others have enabled us to make that happen.

The next part of the journey is to build on this success and roll out our coverage to the broader Australian ecosystem of startups and tech companies, and to begin publishing rankings of trending companies in each state.

As such, we are now looking to appoint State Community Managers in each state. This is a unique and exciting opportunity, for people who are passionate about startups and tech companies, well connected to their local communities, and who are keen to support their local startups. The role primarily consists of staying abreast of new and trending startups, attending startup events, reading the business press, collating metrics on companies, all in order to generate ecosystem reports and Techboard’s startup ranking, and to encourage engagement by companies with the platform. The role is best suited to a methodical, data-driven type of personality, balanced with an appropriate amount of enthusiasm, people skills and willingness to tackle challenges head-on.

Expressions of interest should be emailed to Raf Kimberley-Bowen at [email protected]. Alternatively, you can call Raf for more information on 0439 829 898.

Techboard Partners with TechInvest Magazine

Peter van Bruchem Leave a comment

Techboard is pleased to announce that in line with our increased emphasis on investment and repositioning of Techboard as an investment discovery platform we have partnered with TechInvest Magazine a new quarterly technology magazine produced by leading Public Relations Firm PPR.

Techinvest Magazine will become Australasia’s most widely circulated technology publication for investors – with approximately 70,000 copies being inserted into the Australian Financial Review (AFR) nationally.  The magazine will also be distributed directly to more than 1000 leading institutional fund managers, brokers, analysts, retail investors and key technology/ business media in Australia.

This partnership will greatly increase the exposure of Companies that are active on Techboard and those performing well in our Startup Ranking. TechInvest will provide exposure of the Techboard Startup Ranking including by publishing an extract from our quarterly and annual rankings. Techboard’s announcements and Investment Discovery Platform will also be profiled to a national audience. Techboard also has online publishing rights for the TechInvest Magazine and any stories featuring companies on Techboard will be connected to those companies’ Techboard profiles.

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New Startup Hub Perthcolator launches workshop series

Peter van Bruchem Leave a comment

New startup hub Perthcolator is running a workshop series designed to teach new entrepreneurs how to start their business. Replicating the educational content of Startup Weekend in a workshop format designed to fit around a day job.

Startup Weekend is a great education for new entrepreneurs. It teaches people how to go from an idea to a business. But Startup Weekends only happen twice a year, and for some people taking a whole weekend out is impossible.

There are other reasons why Startup Weekend isn’t a great start for an actual business: the team is formed of randoms wedged together in an hour on Friday evening. The tech is usually slapped together hackathon style from anything that looks like it would do the job. The goal of the whole event is the pitch, not the business. It’s a great education, and nothing in this criticism should be taken as meaning that it’s not utterly fantastic. But there’s room for more.

We sat down with a few startups and did some extensive interviews about what the experience of starting a business in Perth is actually like. We found that there’s a big disconnect between the people who have done it once (and usually failed) and the newbies. People who have never actually started a business here have no idea how it works.

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Techboard’s Highest Ranked Startups for Q2 2016

Peter van Bruchem Leave a comment

Yesterday we held a lunch to congratulate the highest ranked startups on Techboard for the second quarter of 2016. These were the companies (unlisted and listed) with the highest cumulative total points in our fortnightly Startup Ranking for the 3 months to 30 June 2016. The lunch hosted by our generous sponsors PWC gave the winners the opportunity to have a private discussion with members of Techboard’s Panel of Experts (on this occasion Charlie Gunningham and Sheryl Frame), Scott James and Ben Berthon-Jones from our sponsor PWC and Techboard co-founders Peter van Bruchem and Rafael Kimberley Bowen.

Topics discussed over lunch

A very interesting and useful discussion was had on issues including:

  • startups obtaining funding from public capital markets and the importance of investor relations.
  • the role of intellectual property, exclusive manufacturing agreements and scientific and clinical validation on commercialisation strategy and company valuations
  • the use of crowdfunding by startups and listed companies as a way of generating funding, getting market validation and raising market awareness for a product.
  • changes to the approach taken by the ATO on auditing R&D claims.
  • the new innovation tax incentive.

We won’t be going into the details of those conversations here but will hope to address some of these issues in our Techboard interview series.

So who were the highest ranked startups?

ePat was highest ranked unlisted startup. Nuheara and Shark Mitigation Systems were equal highest ranked listed startups. Here are Craig Anderson from Shark Mitigation Systems, Mustafa Atee from ePat and Justin Miller from Nuheara accepting their awards from our very own Peter van Bruchem and Raf Kimberley-Bowen.

Untitled drawing

28 July 2016

Investing in Australian Startups and Technology Companies – An Introduction

Peter van Bruchem Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 1.12.50 PM

This is the first in a series of pieces on investing in Australian Startups and Technology companies or Early Stage Innovation Companies under the new Innovation Tax Incentive legislation. At Techboard we have been actively exploring how we can support WA companies in raising money and enable investors to discover, research and invest in Australian companies. We thought it might be useful for us to share some of our thoughts and learnings through a number of pieces which might shed some light on what can be a complex area.  Consistent with Techboard being a conduit between companies and company watchers we will be looking at the issue from both the perspective of companies seeking investors and prospective investors looking for their next investment.  

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Perth tech startup to transform Australia’s voting system

Peter van Bruchem Leave a comment

For almost a week after the recent Federal election the nation waited while millions of postal votes travelled at the speed of paper to their home centres to be counted. A group of young Perth entrepreneurs are creating a secure, anonymous and verifiable end-to-end voting process that would see an election result being announced on the same day as the last polling booth closing.

Adrian Petersen and four friends founded veri.vote after the news in 2014 that more than 1300 ballots had been lost in a state election in 2014. The team operates out of the BloomLab at St Catherine’s College, next to the University of Western Australia.

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Techboard and BDO – Investing in WA’s Future – Investor event 3 August 2016

Peter van Bruchem Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2016-07-07 at 10.52.02 PMTogether in One Place – Innovators, Investors and Business Insight

Are you:

  • Interested in finding out more about investing in Australian Start-ups and Technology Companies?
  • Looking to learn more about the new Tax incentives for investment in early stage Innovative Companies? (These are accessible by both sophisticated AND retail investors).
  • Interested in managing the risks of investing in early stage innovation companies?

Then join BDO and Techboard along with special guests Vocus Upstart (a tech accelerator program for Perth start-ups) as we explore investing in Australian start-ups and technology companies and discuss the new Tax Incentives for innovation.

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Introducing the 2016 Vocus Upstart Cohort

Peter van Bruchem Leave a comment

Vocus Upstarts are excited to announce the seven startups who have been selected to join the 2016 Vocus Upstart program, commencing August 1st at Spacecubed.

This years cohort have developed ground-breaking technology concepts and applications; ranging from a secure online voting system to entertainment experiences, and online student job markets to virtual reality training programs.

Focused on supporting and encouraging the WA startup community, the program will challenge its seven startups to launch and build their businesses over 12 weeks at Spacecubed.

For more information on the companies and to keep up to date with all company announcements click here.