The often random thoughts of an Eclectic Architect, Enterprise Technologist, Coffee Addict & Social Media Junkie

 
March 27th, 2007

I’ve been impressed with the quality of a number of developments I’ve come across recently coming out of Australia.  It seems to be a hot bed of Web 2.0 type activity with some world class products.

Three that take my fancy are:

  • http://www.atlassian.com Makers of Confluence, which is a great Wiki product, and one that for Enterprises makes a lot of sense given its flexibility, plug-in support and in particular focus on security. Yes, I know security is almost anti-wiki, but reality bites. No serious Enterprise will consider a Wiki without SOME level of security. Even those that are happy for open editing will want attribution at a minimum.
  • http://www.touchstonelive.com/ These guys are producing what has to be the most ambitious RSS reader I’ve come across. If they can pull it off, then the features they are talking about will make this a real winner for Enterprises who want to provide staff with both a News Reader, but also control, limit and help manage some portion of the content (e.g. everyone in sales MUST get this feed about latest leads).
  • http://www.tangler.com I’ve just joined the beta community for this one, not sure at this point in time that it’s an Enterprise solution, but for web-based communities, Tangler looks to have some real winning features.  If the thought of mail group type communities with a home and integrated IM sounds interesting, keep an eye on this one.

The point to all this is that there is some great content and ideas coming out of Australia (skills shortage anyone?), although they go to some lengths to hide it (smart marketing — size of Gen-Y in Australia, about 4.2M, in the US over 79M) to the extent of spelling Mum as Mom.

Keep it up guys! Lets spread the message that there is some fantastic product coming up.

2 Responses to “The boys from Oz”

  1. Stephen Kelly Says:

    Thanks for the positive feedback about touchstone - we are very excited by the prospects that are available here in Australia.

    Keep an eye out for some new products coming out very soon

  2. Tim Says:

    You’re very welcome Stephen. I think you’ve just proven the worth of Touchstone right there - this Blog has been up for just on 24 hours, my post mentioned Touchstone once and within 1 hour, you’d commented. After thinking Touchstone was now omnipitent, I’ve realised that the default feature in WordPress which submits new posts to Pingomatic on my behalf probably had more to do with it. Still, it’s the attention engine doing what it’s meant to do best.

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