Posts Tagged ‘Melbourne’

Eventbrite opens up shop in Melbourne

Wednesday, March 19th, 2014
Photo credit; Bev Sykes on Flickr

Photo credit; Bev Sykes on Flickr

Australia continues to attract online businesses from overseas and the latest to open a branch in the country is San Francisco-based Eventbrite.

Eventbrite, an online platform that allows users to promote and sell tickets to live events, will open an office in Melbourne soon, while file-sharing service Hightail (previously known as YouSendIt) has already opened its Asia-Pacific headquarters in the city.

Eventbrite’s husband-and-wife founders, Julia and Kevin Hartz, visited the city to formalise a sublease deal with start-up 99Designs to house the beginnings of the company’s fifth international office. The company, launched in the US in 2006, already has offices in San Francisco, London, Argentina and Brazil.

The Australian office will focus on sales and marketing. “Australia has always been one of our core international markets since the beginning of time,” said Julia. “We really started to see traction in 2008, just a couple of years in [from launching]. We have localised the site for Australia but we are now interested in really getting in there and having a strong presence.”

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MYER says online business will be profitable within two years

Wednesday, December 11th, 2013
Photo credit; Timothy H on Flickr

Photo credit; Timothy H on Flickr

The Myer department store chain says it is cautious about the year ahead, given the difficult economic environment and weak consumer sentiment, but insists its online division will start seeing a profit by 2015.

Chairman Paul McClintock said that while sales in the first quarter reflected a modest improvement in consumer sentiment following the September election, the challenging conditions have continued.

The group remained “cautious about the year ahead given the challenges of the economic outlook and consumer confidence,” McClintock said, speaking at the group’s annual meting in Melbourne recently.

He said the business would be affected by major refurbishments and face increased operating costs in 2014 and that Myer would benefit the following year from “stronger fundamentals as a result of the completion of major refurbishments, the online business becoming profitable and the ongoing optimisation of our store network”.

During the current financial year, three of Myer’s top 20 stores will be refurbished.

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Brisbane businessman turns disaster into dollars

Monday, September 30th, 2013

Brisbane businessman Michael French turned the raging floods in that city in 2011 into a successful online business by filling a niche that so many people don’t know they need until it’s too late.

Photo credit; johndal on Flickr

Photo credit; johndal on Flickr

While he watched flood waters near his home, French worried about the state of his office, which held his digital marketing company only a few kilometres away. That’s when the idea for his Bizeo app hit him.

Essentially a dashboard app, Bizeo monitors all available data from servers to engines on key machinery, to temperature to exchange rates and social media for a business that is experiencing an emergency like a flood.

“Business owners spend a lot of their time running around checking on things, but this does it for them, and gives them a single indicator that everything is alright,” French says. “Bizeo monitors the status and data across your whole enterprise, and watches everything at once.”

As many Brisbane businesses struggled in the aftermath of the floods, French realized he could add even more functionality to the app.

“Our cashflow was struggling as our debtors blew out and our sales pipeline struggled as many Brisbane groups went under,” French says. “Bizeo now plugs into your CRM, accounting and social media systems.”

Bizeo received a $200,000 grant from Commercialisation Australia last year and French used those funds to hire a business development manager, and file for intellectual property protections such as trademarks and patents and is currently working with clients in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Mexico and London.

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William Hill buys Australia’s biggest online gambling site

Tuesday, August 13th, 2013

United Kingdom online betting giant William Hill has agreed to purchase Australian online betting firm Tom Waterhouse for at least A$34 million.

The online betting site has agreed to pay A$34 million up front and assume A$6 million in debt for tomwaterhouse.com.

It will pay up to A$70 million more on a sliding scale based on tomwaterhouse.com achieving earnings growth between A$10 million and A$30 million in 2015.

Tomwaterhouse.com was established in 2010 and is one of Australia’s fastest growing online racing and sports betting businesses.

It is a privately held company owned by managing director Tom Waterhouse and others and has around 80 employees based in Sydney, Melbourne and Darwin.

“We are pleased to have secured this acquisition,” Ralph Topping, CEO of William Hill. “International expansion is a key part of our growth strategy and making Australia our second home is a priority. Acquiring tomwaterhouse.com gives us a rapidly growing business that appeals to a complementary customer base.”

Australia has the world’s biggest gambling habit per capita.

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I Do in a Day does equal success

Friday, August 9th, 2013

Established in 2012 by Melbourne’s Helyna Van Woerkom, I Do in a Day is a 100% online bridal boutique that features a crack team of wedding consultants to help any bride regardless of location.

Van Woerkom says although she knew she couldn’t provide people with more time in a day, she was well aware that she could do the next best thing and help free up some of people’s most precious resource by offering wedding consultations online.

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Hipkin brings hip clothes to Australian kids, profits for founder

Thursday, August 8th, 2013

After taking note of the dearth of functional unisex clothing for kids being sold in Australia, Katie Brannaghan of Melbourne, Victoria started Hipkin in 2012.

Going back and forth to Europe with her husband, Brannaghan noticed that a lot of the cool, functional brands of children’s clothing weren’t filtering through to her home country and she decided to do something about it. A year later and Hipkin is going strong.

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The Fetch returns great success

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

The Fetch, an online community for professionals to share and discover what’s happening in their city, has been going strong since Kate Kendall started it in Melbourne in 2011.

It has now expanded to include 10 cities from around the world.

“I still classify it as a start-up in beta mode, so I guess it’s been fairly flexible and it’s grown quickly,” says Kendall of The Fetch.

Kendall now runs the business alternating between Melbourne and Silicon Valley in the USA.

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