Announcing our Winter 2012 shortlist

By Peter Huynh

Wow – make no mistake, this has been tough.

The team has gone through a massive process over the last few weeks since we announced the Optus Innov8 Seed Program, travelling across Australia to meet with as many start-ups face to face as we could and reviewing a mountain of applications since last Wednesday.

To say that the response has been overwhelming would be an understatement – but after an intense process we now have our list of 10 shortlisted start ups.

I’d like to tell you a little bit about our thinking process in getting to the shortlist.  I think the first thing that you might find unusual is that we asked ourselves this about each application – “what can WE do for this team?” – rather than the other way around.  We had to have a clear view as to whether we could help the shortlisted start up in a meaningful way.

Each application was reviewed multiple times across the team members here in Australia and in Singapore – we treated each submission with the utmost respect because we knew that they embodied the blood, sweat and tears of each of the teams involved.

To the teams that didn’t make it – thank you for applying and thanks for being brave enough to get out there, to build something and create value in our economy.

There are a lot of amazing startups that are not on our short list because the fit was just not there – but that does not make them any less amazing – I’m sure some will end up being very successful and we’ll be cheering you along the way.

To the teams that were shortlisted – Congratulations and get ready to pitch!

This is just the start for our Program and from the validation that we’re getting from across the tech community I can only see it getting bigger over time.  Thanks to everyone who’s been apart of it so far.

The Shortlist

In no particular order, the Winter 2012 shortlisted startups are:

• Lexim
• GoCatch
• Wooboard
• Happy Inspector
• Tapit Media
• VenueMob
• FlikGift
• Young Republic
• 121cast
• Tinybeans