Viewing habits are shifting away from scheduled TV to video on demand streamed online – a development that many broadcasters are struggling to grapple with.
If and when VOD moves into the accepted mainstream in Australia, services such as ViKi could flourish. The site houses more than one billion videos of TV and movie content, translated into around 150 different languages.
The founding team, all Harvard graduates, claim that the service will “bring down the language barriers” of online TV.
Shortly prior to SXSW, the founders of Beluga, all ex-Google employees, agreed to be acquired by Facebook. As a vote of confidence, you don’t get much better, but Beluga still hopes to impress consumers in its own right.
Beluga works on the premise that people want more intimate social networking rather than the widespread broadcasts of a Facebook update. It provides a group communication app, which allows users to chat with small groups of people, rather than their entire network. Beluga’s logo is stunningly similar to Twitter’s Fail Whale, which is an inspired or insipid choice, depending on how you look at it.
Continuing in the theme of more intimate, personal uses of social media, Neighborgoods aims to connect people who live close to each other by encouraging them to share items.
Calling itself a way to reduce cost and time, Neighborgoods allows users to post things that they need or items that they are happy to lend to others. Therefore, not everyone on the same street needs a lawnmower.
With car ownership in Australia not set to diminish any time soon, a website and app such as Bump may catch on Down Under.
Bump has assigned every car in the US its own email address and voicemail box. You can email friends or contacts using the service, just by using their licence plate number.
This service is based on the idea that we spend an inordinate amount of our lives sitting in our cars. A fast-food chain in California is taking this to its natural conclusion by using Bump to scan number plates in order to assign orders to customers in drive-through restaurants.
The joint winner of the Startup Bus competition, TripMedi is a solution to a problem that it’s hard to believe hasn’t been solved by now.
Aimed at the burgeoning medical tourism market, TripMedi provides independent advice and information for those planning to make an overseas trip for health or cosmetic reasons.
The site hopes to curb the shonky practices of dodgy operators who take advantage of medical tourists.
Best of all, it was founded by an Aussie, Rolland Dillon, who headed a team that came up with the idea within a 48 hour period on the way to SXSW.
