It's a Sydney thing, I think. They've been suffering a long-term shortage of hats and/or common sense.
> The problem with the Australian tech industry is most of the big players are just copy cats.
Yes and no. There's a lot of small and medium firms doing cool stuff, and several of the giants have offices doing important things. IBM's got a mainframe OS lab in Perth and runs a major Linux lab in Canberra. Google are in Sydney of course. Recently I saw a mob in Adelaide (I know, I know) doing cool things with computational intelligence.
But as for consumer-facing stuff, yes, it's mostly copycat. See a foreigner do it and launch something here before they turn up; ideally to sell to them. It's a proven, repeatable business model and investors like that.
Curious minds would like to know more. I know of two companies in Adelaide doing stuff that could be called this and I'm interested which you saw (or other). Email's fine if it isn't appropriate here.
http://www.solveitsoftware.com/
They do stuff with all the cool toys. Fuzzy logic, neural nets, evolutionary algorithms ...
They have a competition for students (edit: actually it looks like anyone can enter) at the moment. First prize is ostensibly $5,000 but what they're really looking for is potential employees.
They aren't exactly a startup though - been around quite a while I think.
I was with these guys for a while, who played in an adjacent space: http://www.intelligentsoftware.com.au/
I'm thinking of all the people who's names I knew at Tomorrow Studio for anyone who was "pm" (if you had your name on your info I might know if I knew you.. :))
We were the iPhone peeps.
EDIT: Wait, we moved out at the end of July 2010, so I must be thinking of the other programmer who was there. Don't remember his name now.
OMG that never gets old!!!! Adelaide is Adelaide. It isn't Sydney or Melbourne, but it's not a rural backwater either - quite a lot of interesting stuff happens here.
her husband works for some mob doing Moodle work
Netspot?
As for Adelaide. You guys seem to have more funeral homes than churches. Surely that's a sign.
I did some work for a social networking startup that was a pure copycat site. I think this is mostly true.
I'm an American living in Australia and I snickered when I first saw Australians wearing their collars popped.
I eventually found myself doing it outdoors in the summer because the sun is so freaking intense here.
I haven't stopped.
Its also one of the reasons tourists get such bad sunburns here as they hit the beach without any protection.
LA has a SPF 30 sitting above it for most of the year. For most of the time, Australia does not.
Ozone relative thickness deficiency doesn't explain the head-cracking sunshine in Cairns, which is closer to the equator than the south pole.
The problem with the Australian tech industry is most of the big players are just copy cats.