Impressive startups! Report from PushStart Australian accelerator Demo Day

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Incubators and accelerators are blossoming all over the world, with in Australia the seed accelerator space represented most prominently by StartMate, PushStart, and Melbourne-based AngelCube. I wrote about the Australian accelerator scene when PushStart was launched.

Yeseterday afternoon I went to PushStart’s demo day for their first intake. I was very impressed by the calibre of the startups presenting. I took notes through the presentations of the 8 startups, as below, which hopefully offer a fair representation of the companies and what they said. I expect to see more from this impressive crop of incubators.
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Singularity Business Models: The link between lean startups and exponential change

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Singularity University describes itself as “a vibrant innovation and impact engine that generates leaders and start-up companies with the ability to positively impact the lives of a billion people within a decade”.

Apostle of lean startups Eric Ries recently joined Singularity University as the chair of its Entrepreneurship track.

In this video Ries is interviewed by entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa about the link between startups and the Singularity, asking him about how to students at the university can scale their initiatives.


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The rise of micro mavens: Building business empires around personal brands

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Trevor Young, aka PR Warrior, is launching a new site Micro Domination which covers the “Global Microbrand Revolution”.

The site already includes an excellent free e-book The Micro Maven Revolution. You can download it from here or by clicking on the cover below.

Trevor opens the book by practising what he preaches, highlighting his capabilities and brand in a low-key way in front of excellent content. He then describes the core idea:
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What will we do with the extraordinary potential of crowd business models?

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I was just interviewed by Martin Metzmacher as part of his Netrepreneurs series. The 30 minute video interview is below.

While the broad topic of the conversation was about how to use crowds effectively, Martin focused through the interview on my motivations for what I do. At the end of the interview he asked me to summarize what I felt was most important in what we’d covered.
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Open Meeting Protocol and the structure of emergent collaboration

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Last week I had an early evening meeting set up with Indy Johar, the inspiring co-founder of Hub Westminster. When I arrived I found that Indy had invoked an ‘Open Meeting Protocol’, offering £10 to Matt Sevenoaks of KPMG to join the meeting, who in turn invited Shelley Kuipers, the CEO of Chaordix, who as it happens I had conversed with on email as reecently as a few days before but had never met in real-life. Another Hub Westminster member Pamela joined us.

To be frank I don’t completely understand the protocol, even after viewing the very interesting Prezi explanation below from David Pinto. In essence it is a structure for inviting people to join a meeting by paying them (nominally) £10, and thus participating in a value-creating structure.

eco^external on Prezi

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8 crowd insights from 8 crowdsourcing workshops

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[This post first appeared on the Getting Results From Crowds book website]

Over the last two weeks I have delivered 8 keynotes or workshops on crowdsourcing across Western Europe. Most of them have been highly interactive sessions, bringing out new ideas or highlighting common issues or concerns. Part of the intent has been to gather input from many participants on what to cover in

There is much to share. For now, I will quickly review the events I’ve run so far and highlight just one insight that was prominent in the questions or discussions from each event. Many of themes mentioned were in fact echoed across several events. I will write soon in more detail about a number of these topics.

– Ketchum Pleon Amsterdam client presentation
Insight 1: Know when to use open calls and managed crowds.
A question that frequently arises when you discuss crowdsourcing is how to manage the sheer quantity of input you can get. Of course the best approach depends on what type of crowdsourcing you are doing, but the first answer is in the filtering mechanisms that you use, which enable the most valuable input to become visible. However another approach is to use a closed crowd, where participants are selected by quality or profile. In this case you can take a ‘managed crowd’ approach in which a more individualized approach optimizes outcomes. While many definitions of crowdsourcing refer to an ‘open call’, in fact in many siutations restricting the pool of contributors will lead to better results.
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The MegaTrend of Distributed Attention is driving everything

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Yesterday I ran Getting Results From Crowds and Crowd Business Models workshops in Sydney, the first in a global series of crowdsourcing workshops.

In opening the Crowd Business Models workshop, I ran through some of the driving forces that are shifting business models to crowds. I had quickly drawn up the list the evening before the workshop, with the first coming to mind Distributed Attention.

During the workshop we had an awesome panel of three of Sydney’s top entrepreneurs: Rebekah Campbell of Posse, Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin of BlueChilli and Phil Morle of Pollenizer.

Each one of them spoke about how much harder it is to get people’s attention than even a year or two ago. For each of them, one of the fundamental reasons that business models need to start with crowds is that individual attention is increasingly fleeting. You can’t bolt on crowds to a business model as an afterthought – it must be at the center.
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Exploring crowd business models

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For me, the most interesting part of my new book Getting Results From Crowds is Chapter 22 on Crowd Business Models (which you can download here). I knew that after getting the book out a major direction for me would be delving deeper into the wonders of crowd business models. I’m now beginning to do some more exploring, together with lots of other people.

Next Monday I run a Crowd Business Models workshop in Sydney, the first in a global series of crowdsourcing workshops.

My Crowd Business Models framework below, like all my frameworks, is in perpetual beta. Part of the intention of the workshop series is that we will collectively evolve my crowdsourcing frameworks, including the one for crowd business models.


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Entrepreneurship becomes global: the top 25 startups hubs in the world

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The Startup Genome project setup a year ago to gather comparative data on startups around the world. Its Startup Compass allows entrepreneurs to compare statistics on their companies with others in their locality and around the world.

A post on Techcrunch provides a great summary of some of the data gathered in the almost 12 months since the launch of the project.

I was particularly interested in the rankings of startup cities around the world, reproduced below. There is no question that the US is no longer the predominant startup country in a world in which economic and entrepreneurial activity is increasingly global.
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Competition! Win free pass to Sydney workshops on how to grow your business using crowdsourcing

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We are kicking off our global series of crowdsourcing workshops on Monday 16 April in Sydney, with a morning workshop on Getting Results From Crowds and an afternoon workshop on Crowd Business Models.

In the following weeks I will be running crowdsourcing workshops in Cologne, London, Paris, Brussels, and New York, followed later in the year by San Francisco and other leading cities.

In the spirit of crowdsourcing, we are offering a free pass to the full day consisting of both workshops in Sydney to the two best answers to the question:

What new opportunities does crowdsourcing create for growing businesses?

You can answer in two ways:
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