Nine year old Anvitha Vijay is the creator of the Smartkins Animals app. Yes you read that correctly. The Melbourne-based student taught herself how to code when she was seven, using YouTube videos and online tutorials.
Her first app, GoalsHi, was built during the summer holidays and won a $10,000 Student Edge prize at the OzApp awards in Australia in 2015. Recently she was invited to attend WWDC in San Francisco and got to meet Apple CEO Tim Cook. www.smartkins.com
LitterbugSmash is the brain-child of 12 year old, Hamish Finlayson from Townsville. Part of the Young ICT Explorers 2015 projects competition, it showcases Hamish’s life-long interest and passion to protect our environment.
LitterbugSmash is a multi-media, multi-channel educational tool, game play and fundraising initiative designed to protect oceans, save turtles and keep everywhere beautiful – especially Australia. www.litterbugsmash.com
The young developer already has a bag of awards receiving the Environmental Excellence and Sustainability Award at the Australia Day Awards and the Encouragement and Innovation Award from US Ambassador, John Berry.
Hamish has high functioning autism and is also working on his next project, which aims to increase public awareness about his mental condition. www.tripletandasd.com
Perth based Kodachat is an app that creates a safer community for kids to socialise online.
The app works by having parents create an account for both themselves and their child. Their child then uses the credentials created by their parent to sign in, add friends, and start chatting.
The app has a feed full of requests for parents to approve or reject, whether they be friend requests or images or links to download.
The app allows parents to set profanity filters and set block-out times that give their child access to the app during set hours, making sure they’re not on the app at school, for example.
Parents can then monitor their child’s chats as often or as little as they like, while the app also allows them to connect and chat with other parents when their kids become friends. www.kodachat.com
Safe Haven, a new innovation by leading full-service security company Threat Protect, takes this portable distress option much further turning smart phones into powerful personal security devices.
With just one tap of a panic button, a distress alert goes to a round-the-clock monitored A1 graded control centre that is then able to pin-point your location and the user is guaranteed an immediate personal response from security professionals.
The company identifies how the person activating the distress option can be helped and, if needed, a security guard is sent to the precisely tracked location.
Offering support and tracking wherever mobile coverage is available, Safe Haven is the result of a year-long collaboration with information and communication specialists.
The team also have well known serial entrepreneur Brad Rosser backing this and is one to watch. www.safehavenapp.com
David Shepherd and Adrian Ciaschetti have created a cool app that takes the pain out of corporate travel.
After a year of research, product development, testing, reviewing, iterating, pivoting and more testing, they have finally developed an offering that makes it the fastest and easiest way to book domestic flights.
Sparrow has been built from the ground up to make travel easy for small to medium enterprises. The founders’ goal was to make something they would love and use themselves. www.sparrowflights.com
Melbourne based Hobspot is a new social media app that allows users to instantly connect with people nearby that enjoy the same hobbies and interests.
Sam Ethell, Gustavo Campos and Alfonso Ordonez are the team behind Hobspot. They came up with the ingenious idea for a social media app to connect people with mutual interests through their own personal experiences.
After being introduced through mutual friends and discovering their shared love for various sports and mobile apps, they became great friends. This fuelled the innovation and motivation to develop Hobspot.
The company has just signed a partnership agreement with Student Edge, Australia’s largest student community with over 870,000 members, and is hoping to leverage platform to grow the app nationally.
Currently rolling out in Victoria, there are plans to expand the app Australia-wide and then internationally. www.hobspotapp.com
Cycliq is a Perth based startup that makes camera and lighting accessories for the growing cyclist market.
The accessories also feature the ability to record and capture video of incidents and any ac- tion that could happen on the road.
Andrew Hagen is the CEO and Kingsley Fiegert is the company’s Chief Financial Officer. They are currently in the final stages of a back door listing with Voyager Group via an acquisition which will allow Cycliq an ASX listing through a reverse takeover from the former energy company.
The company is already selling in 25 countries and no doubt one to watch as it scales post their listing. www.cycliq.com
Clinicloud is a startup that allows people to monitor their health from home using a medical kit based within an app.
Co-founder and CEO, Andrew Lin, is at the helm and has his sights on scaling the app, having already secured a partnership with Doctor on Demand in the USA.
The partnership will allow Clinicloud to gain access to its millions of Amer-icans through its employer or health plans. It already has a presence in San Francisco to provide the company with a base to expand and crack the American market.
Tencent and Ping An Ventures are behind the startup having helped Clinicloud raise $5M dollars in a funding round. www.clinicloud.com
Health tech startup mPort is only three years old but has already signed a deal worth $80M client deal with American health club chain LA Fitness.
Founders Melody Shiue, Andy Wu and Dipra Wu wanted to create a more fun and engaging way in which people could track their physical health.
The company has what is calls “mPods” which displays a person’s visual body progress by tracking more than 200,000 data points relating to their health. They already have 20 of these pods in Westfield shopping centres across NSW, such as Paramatta.
The vision is to scale the business across Australia, but they also have demand coming from the US, and China. www.mport.com
Townsville based startup SafetyCulture is going from strength to strength and is one to watch in 2017. The company has just finished its $6.1M Series A round, valuing it at $50M. Not bad for its founder Luke Anear who originally started it as a safety consultancy.
The growth to date has been from its key product called “iAuditor” which provides organisations with a safety checklist via an app. The app has almost 1 million downloads already.
The company has also just opened an office in the United States to capture the huge demand in the market, with 28.5% of its users from there.
SafetyCulture is also in good hands as it counts Atlassian billionaire, Scott Farqu-har, and well known venture capitalist Bill Tai, as investors of the company.
Health and wellbeing is going to be a big growth area for technology and this company is destined to capitalise on that demand into the future. www.safetyculture.com