Entrepreneurs win Lord Mayor’s Grants

Ten forward-thinking Brisbane businesses were today awarded the Lord Mayor’s Global Entrepreneur grant to help them take their products global.

Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner announced the recipients today, with each business awarded $5000 to help expand into global markets and reach new customers. A further two businesses were highly commended.

“These businesses each have a great future ahead of them,” Cr Schrinner said.

“From revolutionary coffee machines to integrated payment systems and unmanned aerial vehicles, the grants will help recipients expand their markets and reach new audiences.”

Cr Schrinner said the ten recipients represented a cross section of the Brisbane economy, from travel and hospitality to healthcare, advanced manufacturing, robotics, fashion and finance.

“These businesses represent some of the exceptional ideas to have been incubated in Brisbane,” he said.

“Brisbane is a fantastic place to build and grow a business, with innovative industry and government programs in place to provide the support business needs.

“One of the recipients, SensaWeb, brought together experts in technology and healthcare to develop an innovative, real time radiation monitoring system. They have developed a world-leading solution right here in Brisbane.”

Brisbane Chief Digital Officer Cat Matson said that beyond the grants, it was support from within the entrepreneurial ecosystem that can be critical for new businesses.

“Whilst there is no doubt that growing businesses desire funds to help them succeed, it is often mentorship which is more crucial” she said.

“Today, these ten entrepreneurs join the Global Entrepreneur program alumni which now includes more than 95 businesses, who have used their grants to connect to international markets, customers and investors.

“The Brisbane entrepreneurial community is extremely open and supportive. I look forward to working with these new grant recipients to help them achieve their growth goals.”

About the Global Entrepreneur Program

The Lord Mayor’s Global Entrepreneur Program assists early-stage, growing businesses to connect to international markets, customers and investors and grow their start-up beyond Australian borders.

The program provides grants of up to $5,000 for use in growth activities, such as participation in accelerator programs, pitching programs, or mentorship programs.

Lord Mayor’s Global Entrepreneur Program round four recipients

In September 2018, AREMDE launched their core product, Nexus One, an espresso machine built in Queensland for the global specialty coffee. Having started with a coffee machine, the ethos behind the company is to create an eco-system for the café, changing the way hospitality businesses imagine flow and process.

Australian Droid & Robot specialises in the design and manufacture of robots and unmanned aerial vehicles, with a major focus on the development of a supersonic drone that delivers medical supplies and communications anywhere in Queensland within 40 minutes.

bot•hello is a chatbot design agency and platform that delivers scalable Facebook Messenger solutions to large consumer brands. In a hyperconnected world, customers demand instant responses to their questions and queries. bot•hello works with these brands to design and deploy Facebook Messenger chatbots. Powered by Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, the chatbots give customers fast and accurate responses that stay true to the company’s brand.

Paypa Plane allows banks to offer their SME business clients a packaged and integrated payment system. This means that businesses do not need to use costly third-party payment providers in order to find the best digital payment experience for their business and their customers.

www.playbook.coach connects athletes to sports coaches for one-on-one, small group, team or online training. All sports. All abilities. PlayBook is the destination to search, book and pay for a sports coach for athletes to play to their potential. It’s all about kids enjoying sport so they stay playing the game and are confident both on, and off, the field.

REVA Hospitality provides a unified digital interface which enables hotels, resorts and casinos to drive additional revenue and enhance guest engagement. Their proprietary geo-location technology ensures hospitality businesses never lose a guest, even if they move from the place they ordered from.

Robe was born from a desire for a garment that could be easily throw on over wet swimmers without having to compromise on style, quality or feel. It has evolved into a lifestyle brand that delivers wardrobe essentials for the fashion-conscious woman. Robe’s signature fabric is a 30% silk/70% cotton blend that retains the best qualities of silk but has added functionality that ensures it won’t be compromised by water – a world-first innovation that has become a cornerstone of the brand.

Radiation monitoring is a multi-billion dollar industry, yet it is stuck in the 1950s in terms of how it is monitored, measured and reported. SensaWeb provides a global-first specialised sensor-as-a-service solution to clients in highly regulated industries having an exposure to radiation infrastructure and/or operations. SensaWeb’s service provides remote monitoring and automated alarms and reporting features that no competing product currently offers.

TravelbyBit is an online travel agency built for the blockchain generation. Customers can book flights and hotels using blockchain payments for travel services from anywhere in the world, in addition to traditional payment methods, and enjoy up to 10% rewards in bitcoin.

Universal Field Robots builds capable, robust outdoor robotics at a price point that is economic and will power adoption and scale. Self-driving control software is applied to mass produced machines to make products that have functionality similar to factory industrial robots. The robotic machines have a tablet GUI and are linked by 4G to a remote operations centre so that humans can take control to deal with complexity.

Arc is Australia’s largest IOT and Deep Tech Incubator running large scale, investor-backed accelerator programs for innovative hardware startups looking to disrupt global industries. Over the past 3 years, Arc has established a state-of-the-art facility housing a myriad of advanced prototyping resources such as 3D printers (in various materials such as polymers, composites, metals and resins), CNC machines, laser cutters and commercial 3D CAD modelling software.

StickyCell™ is a biotech company that has developed the Leukocyte Adhesive Function Assay (or LAFA), which measures human immune system function so that human health can be digitally assessed. This platform offers a unique tool for disease diagnosis and patient management, revolutionising current practices in multiple clinical areas.

This article follows on from the first Brisbane Innovate Summit wrap-up which you can read here.

Step 2 of the Brisbane Innovate journey was to continue working on some of the great ideas that were developed at the Summit in October.

The first follow-up workshops were held on Monday 28 October, where attendees reviewed the following ‘Big Ideas’ from the Summit:

These ideas were brought together because we could see from the ‘Big Idea’ and ‘Cover Story’ canvases there were a lot of similarities and alignment.

Teams were formed based on familiarity from the summit and similarity in ideas. By the end of the workshop, 4 key ideas emerged:

All those interested and able to keep working on the engaging out of town students came together on Thursday 7 November to further explore the Big Ideas that emerged from the Summit:

The discussions across these groups were enlightening, with many common elements to a lot of the ideas.

Pilot projects are being planned for both Epic Innovate and Meet Street in February 2020 …. Stay tuned and let us know if you want to get involved (contact us link).

There were two clear types of ideas that were developed at the Summit in this challenge space:

For the follow-up workshop on 6^th November, there was heavy focus on the online platform for local construction products and the rooftop gardens. With regards to policy, it was discovered there was actually more enabling policy in place than participants realised, including some recent policy changes.

The local construction materials platform is being piloted on a particular project over the next few months, which will inform just how possible and affordable it is to build using only local supplies, which will inform the next steps.

The teams are all self-leading now, with support, guidance and dot-connecting providing as required from the Brisbane Innovate team at Brisbane Marketing (we’ll be nudging everyone along to bring these ideas to life). We’ll publish updates here, so follow us on Twitter to be notified of those updates.

400 people. 38 ‘Big Idea’ canvases. Too many post-it notes to count …

Following last week’s Brisbane Innovate Summit, the team set about collecting and collating all the canvases that were created on the day (all.the.canvases) – the big ideas, the cover stories, the impact matrixes and the walls of ideas.

We then began the process of looking for common themes and patterns in the ideas. And, as is always the case, even amongst the vast array of ideas, we found a number of common patterns with four distinctly prevalent themes:

We also defined and applied a series of weighted decision criteria to help analyse your ideas including:

So what? And now what?

As discussed at the Summit, the journey has only just begun. The next step is to move into more focussed discussions to progress the most promising ideas. Ideas that we, collectively through the Brisbane Innovate lab, have the capabilities, capacity and connections to assist the ideas to move forward.

So with that in mind, we will be progressing the following ideas forward (all titles come from the “‘Our Big Idea” canvases):

We will actively be working on further developing these ideas and looking for opportunities to connect in with existing projects, businesses and resources. The goal is to better connect small business with the information they are after.

We will be working with these two teams who came up with these ideas plus those interested in these ideas, to develop a business model and progress to prototype. We are seeking people who actively want to stay involved in these projects.

Discussion will centre around what it will take to bring these ideas to life in Brisbane and who the key stakeholders are that should be involved.

These ideas relate to policy and planning, so discussion will centre around who will need to be influenced and how we might do that.

This session will focus on further exploration of the market ideas + also looking at how the Brisbane Innovate model can be applied to students to solve business challenges.

These ideas all connect with existing projects being worked on by the Study Brisbane team. We want to use the afternoon to bring together all the ideas, see how they connect with existing and in progress projects and how to keep everyone involved.

Participating in the sessions.

At Brisbane Innovate we were blown away by the number of attendees who expressed interest in continuing the journey on the above projects. And many of you have reached out since, expressing that you would like to be involved in projects that you did not have a chance to put your name to.

We are inviting all Innovate attendees to join us for the followup sessions … come to one. come to many. Wherever you feel you have time, expertise, passion and a desire to contribute, we would love for you to continue the journey with us.

If you have a colleague or friend whom you think would benefit from joining in the process at this point, please ask them to register via this link.

Brisbane Innovate is Brisbane’s largest open-innovation event, bringing together businesses and residents to collaboratively solve city-wide challenges. Run as an annual summit, Brisbane Innovate aims to provide a platform that facilitates civic leadership, civic engagement, civic communication and design-thinking.

In 2019, Brisbane Innovate focussed on 3 key challenge areas:

Amplifying small business growth
How might we make Brisbane a city of small businesses powerhouses for ongoing economic growth and job prosperity.

Innovating for effective, sustainable construction
How might we use technology and innovation within the property and construction industry to drive sustainability, efficiencies and cost savings in the supply chain?

Engaging out of town students
How might we make it as easy as possible for regional and international students to connect with and contribute to Brisbane so that they find it easy to live, work and grow.

By focusing on these wicked and complex problems, Brisbane Innovate aims to find the solutions that will ultimately make the Brisbane of tomorrow better than the Brisbane of today.

We invite you to join us for this unique event. Apply Now.

How the morning ran.

The Brisbane Innovate Summit featured an opening fireside chat, a keynote speech and a large-scale design thinking session.

Bringing together a diverse cross-section of Brisbane’s residents, corporates, businesses, entrepreneurs and academics, the key focus of Brisbane Innovate is to come together to solve some of the city’s stickiest challenges.

Flow of the morning:

Introduction and opening fireside chat
Our MC for the day, Cat Matson, Head of Innovation at Brisbane Marketing opened Brisbane Innovate before moderating a fireside chat with Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner and Deputy Mayor Krista Adams.
Keynote address: Embedding breakthrough innovation within our cities
Matthew Tobin, Co-founder and Managing Director, UAP
Cities are contentious. They are both the backbone and the backdrop to our lives. Enabling us to thrive, to travel, to grow and to hopefully flourish and enjoy life. Through this session we will further our understanding of how new world cities are innovating, not only within the walls of government, but within communities themselves.
Design-thinking workshop
Following the keynote, all attendees took part in in a mass scale design thinking workshop to collaboratively focus on and identify viable solutions for our 2019 challenges.

Speakers.

Matthew Tobin, Co-founder and Managing Director, UAP

Matthew Tobin is co-Founder and Managing Director of UAP. He and his brother Daniel established the company in 1993, as a studio and workshop in which to collaborate with artists and create artwork for the public realm. These days Matthew oversees all operations of the company, spending his time in the Brisbane, Shanghai and New York studios. Matthew’s primary focus is strategic business growth, and UAP’s engagement with advanced manufacturing techniques and Industry 4.0.

Cat Matson, Head of Innovation and Brisbane’s Chief Digital Officer, Brisbane Marketing

Cat Matson is Brisbane’s Chief Digital Officer and the Head of Innovation for the city’s economic development board, Brisbane Marketing. Her strength and love of the digital sector led her to taking a lead on key innovation projects in Brisbane. From educating children on coding to supporting local budding entrepreneurs, as GM of Innovation she oversees Brisbane Innovate, an annual innovation event guided by design thinking to generate solutions for citywide challenges.

Attendees.

Key to the success of Brisbane Innovate is the bringing together a wide cross-section of the Brisbane ecosystem to collaborate and work together to solve our city’s stickiest challenges.

Participants include:

Small business owners
Corporates
Government Representatives
Startups
Not for Profits
Academics
Students
Residents who simply want to make a difference

1. Sign up to Digital Brisbane. This is an easy one – get the latest digital, tech and startup news and advice daily in your Twitter and Facebook feeds, and sign up to our monthly eDM. Digital Brisbane runs free programs for SMEs, entrepreneurs, startups and even digital suppliers. So no matter which one you are, Digital Brisbane is your first stop for industry collaboration and digital development.

2. Refine your website content. Remember the purpose of your website. If you’ve accumulated a lot of unnecessary information on your pages over the past year (like events and news articles) it might be time to revisit your content. While it’s great to be adding relevant content to your website all the time, don’t lose sight of its goal and the value it’s adding to your customers. If customers come to your website and find out-of-date events, old articles and the same old home page content, it’s unlikely they’ll return. Keeping the home page fresh with new, relevant content will ensure they keep coming back.

3. Know your audience. While word-of-mouth has always been important to marketers, the digital space has amplified consumer messages and it’s more important than ever for businesses to get involved in these conversations. Start by finding out where your customers are (digitally). Before you sign up to every social platform, work out which are the most relevant to your audience – and if you’re not sure, simply ask. Social platforms have the power to segment customer groups by demographics and location (at the least) – so, find out the make-up of your audience, where they are, and start the conversation.

4. Come along to a Power-Up program. The Digital Brisbane Power-Up programs are digital workshops for small and medium businesses. Each session covers a different aspect of digital technology and explains how you can apply it to your business to help you run more effectively and efficiently. Keep an eye out for our Power-Up programs.

5. Develop a social strategy. Instead of chugging along with your social media, have your social strategy reflect your marketing and communication plan. Identify your target audiences, key deliverables and key messages, and then set goals. Remember when drafting your messages that a good ratio of direct to indirect marketing messages is about 1:5. Keep the language social and conversational and remember to include engaging content like photos, videos, polls and links.

6. Enrol in the free MaRS Entrepreneurship 101 courses. There’s no such thing as too much professional development – and it’s free?! Take the next step in your startup in 2019 and sign up to weekly lectures on the fundamentals of starting and building a new venture, including product development, B2C sales, start-up culture, pitching and funding.

7. Collaborate with like-minded business people. There’s a reason why collaboration is a strong driving force in startups; why we continue working from a physical workplace rather than signing in from home. The digital space is expanding and there’s more to know than ever before so don’t miss the train!

8. Do something different. Try something new in 2019. Start a blog, engage a new digital supplier, collaborate with a similar business and learn from each other. There’s no time like now for innovation and new ideas in business development.

9. Measure your success. Having the ability to track website performance, social analytics, keywords and Google AdWords allows us to measure marketing results instantly. We no longer have to wait for the phones to ring when a TV campaign goes live, or spend hours working out our ROI for advertising; it’s all there for you. Take advantage of the ability to see who’s clicking what on your social posts, the most-used search terms when looking for your business, and how long users are spending on your website. Use this to plan your future messages or campaigns and deliver relevant content to your customers.

10. Have fun! The digital space for businesses is more fun than ever. The advanced technology behind websites, apps, social plug-ins and mobile means we have many new channels and means to communicate. So don’t let your competitors take over. If you don’t stand out, you’re missing an opportunity in digital marketing. Take a risk in 2019 and put together a fun, interactive campaign. Engage your audience on a live tweet Q&A or invite them to post user-generated content. The cloud’s the limit.

What I’m excited about: Brisbane’s startup scene, our new hardware accelerator & world-class entrepreneurs

What I’m ranting about: personal, “private” data – Cambridge Analytica in cahoots with Facebook, and no-one saw it coming? For real?

This month I am so excited to celebrate Brisbane’s global entrepreneurs. You can read all about our 11 successful recipients here. We have been supporting entrepreneurs since Digital Brisbane began, with the Budding Entrepreneurs Grants, Visiting Entrepreneurs and, of course, The Capital, the city’s startup community and co-working space. But what excited me most about the refreshed Lord Mayor’s Global Entrepreneur Program was the discovery and celebration of extraordinary talent who are building globally meaningful businesses, right here in Brisbane. As you’ll see in the story, these are game-changing small businesses, humble and hard-working, creating high-value jobs and firmly validating Brisbane’s position as a great place to run your startup and business.

This month also saw the opening of Australia’s first hardware incubator, Arc, right here in Fortitude Valley. It describes itself as “the ultimate space for developing and commercialising innovative hardware products” and I believe it. Victor was kind enough to give my team and I a pre-opening tour and I was blown away by the 3D printers, forming and cutting machines – I wished I was more creative as I wondered what I could prototype myself if I could conceive of it. With Arc joining the already strong and networked cohort of startup incubators and support services in Brisbane, we really are the best city in the country to start and build businesses.

By contrast, the world (or tech community, I’m not sure which yet) has been aghast at the revelations that Cambridge Analytica used questionably obtained data to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election and the Brexit leave vote. No. Really?

While Zuckerberg took days to eventually play the victim card in his response (“it happened to us”, not “we’re sorry”), mainstream media and the general public finally started catching on to the real purpose of those stupid Facebook quizzes. I think though this is where I’m cranky. Cambridge Analytica probably executed one of the best data manipulation campaigns we’ve seen (overtly) yet, and while we may question its methods (its motives aside), we, the users, are the ones who have enabled it to do so.

When you sign up to any online platform for free use, you accept that your data is being used for better advertising. What surprises me in this week’s discourse is the mass realisation that data can be combined. If you’re using the internet, your flybuys card to get cheap petrol, your frequent flyer card to earn points and even your bank card to make purchases, you are exchanging beautifully rich data about yourself. Throw into that mix what you share openly on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the videos you watch on YouTube … of course that data will be used by companies who can use it to drive their agendas. As I said when I chatted with Ben Davis on 4BC this week, this isn’t new. And, if you want to participate in this gloriously digitally-connected world, then it’s a fact of our existence. But we need to be conscious. It’s not just about shutting down those apparently banal apps on Facebook, it’s about getting multiple sources of news. If you find yourself regularly nodding vehemently as you read the news of the world, ask yourself if the world is suddenly conforming to your values, or if you’re actually being fed what you want to read. Open an incognito browser, search for the same news topics in different publications – publications you wouldn’t normally read. Get a different perspective. Multiple perspectives. Then build an informed opinion. Long gone are the days where you can “rely” on the bias of your news agency and adjust your consumption accordingly … the same publication will use different headlines to target different readers of different biases on the very same article – so two readers, sitting in the same workplace, can read the same article but with different nuance and meaning.

The positive to come out of the Cambridge Anlaytics/Facebook scandal is that finally people are paying attention to the unintended consequences of the networked world we’ve created. Don’t get me wrong, I love Facey, Twitter, the internet just like the next person (probably more, I’m Brisbane’s CDO after all). But we, the users, are the ones who need to take responsibility. For our use. For our consumption. For the opinions we form and the decisions we make as a result. No-one voted our tech leaders like Zuckerberg, Brin or Gates president of the world, but with the platforms they’ve put in our hands, they have extraordinary power. But they are just the platforms – we are the users. And it’s very much up to us how we use those platforms.

Discover the best software and services to help your business grow. Digital Brisbane has partnered with Recomazing to provide you with business recommendations from industry experts and founders. You can find our favourite tools and services here to help your business grow.

Digital marketing overview: Understanding the black magic of search ranking and social media advertising.

Biggest takeaways:

In this Power-Up episode, Brisbane’s Chief Digital Officer Cat Matson and Alpha Digital’s Managing Director Matt Cooper explain internet search ranking, social media advertising and how to reach your target customers online.

What we cover:

Episode resources:

Google My Business – A really important platform for small business to understand. Claim your business location on Google Maps and ensure your listing is correct including your business name, opening hours, contact details, and customer reviews.

Google Analytics – Understand how people are finding your website, what products/services they’re looking at, what content they’re interested in, why they are leaving your site, and most importantly, are they converting (for example, filling in a contact form or purchasing a product)?

Google Digital Garage – Free courses covering topics like your website and digital marketing. Learn from Australian presenters via video with Australian case studies, and test your knowledge.

Alpha Digital’s Springboard Digital program – Helping small business get online.

You can reach out to Alpha Digital here.

Jump to…

Why Google still rules the world 1.40

Do you need a website? 9.12

Search engine optimisation 10.00

Social media presence 14.16

How to chose a professional agency you can trust 18.58

The Digital Confidence Survey has now ended. Thank you for your participation. Keep posted for the survey results on how confident business owners are to go digital, what challenges exist and what can be done to help businesses.

Brisbane’s startup ecosystem has broadened with the launch of Australia’s first hardware incubator in Fortitude Valley.

The new Brisbane startup space, Arc Hardware Incubator, offers a dedicated area with access to equipment required for prototyping ground-breaking products.

The space is the first of its kind in Australia, with the entrepreneur at its helm, Victor Vicario, promising efficient and affordable access to equipment for resource-intensive startups.

For Brisbane entrepreneurs, the space is a game changer. Arc addresses a current issue being faced by product innovators, who often experience early difficulties due to the costs involved for machinery and equipment.

Mr Vicario said: “Unlike software startups, which can do their product development from a laptop, hardware startups don’t have the luxury of a single piece of equipment that allows them to develop their prototype.”

Arc offers a solution by providing members with flexible access to a range of cutting-edge advanced prototyping and manufacturing equipment.

Resources include computer labs with pre-installed industrial design software, 3D printers including carbon fibre 3D printing, laser cutters, CNC machines and soldering stations as well as assembly and testing facilities.

Arc also has a “media lab”, where members can access audio and video equipment to produce content for use in marketing, crowdfunding campaigns or investment pitches.

While the space only officially launched in February, it is already home to some outstanding talent.

One Arc tenant is developing a wearable device that draws on data collection, sensor technology and an alert system to address the safety risk of mine truck drivers falling asleep behind the wheel.

Another tenant has developed a handheld device that uses sensors to empower people with vision impairments to navigate three-dimensional objects in the real world.

A third is working on a manufacturing machine, with a view to enabling small businesses to compete in the advanced manufacturing space.

To cater for hardware startups at different stages of their journey, from pre-revenue ventures still finalising their core talent through to more established companies, Arc operates a subscription-based model, with access to prototyping and manufacturing technologies from as little as $25 per day.

About the Global Entrepreneur Program

Lord Mayor’s Global Entrepreneur Program round four recipients

400 people. 38 ‘Big Idea’ canvases. Too many post-it notes to count …

So what? And now what?

Participating in the sessions.

Event at a Glance.