Muru-D Telstra Start-up Accelerator

The Telstra Muru-D Start-up Accelerator hosted a Christmas party with the Sydney Educational Technology Meetup group (SydEduTech) on 19 December. This was held at Muru-d's offices in trendy Oxford St, Paddington.

Getting into the building provided difficult, as this is a working Telstra telephone exchange and was was on a heightened security state due to a recent incident in the centre of Sydney (the army base donw the road was at SAFEBASE alert CHARLIE). After having my photo id carefully checked, I was escorted to the muru-D floor, which has been converted from holding racks of telecommunication equipment to be a place for start-up companies.

Like many such co-working spaces, muru-D has a warehouse conversion aesthetic, with cable-ways still visible on the ceiling, long rows of desks in an open plan environment . There is space for presentations with bean bags and stackable cardboard stools. Unlike the average co-working space, there is a roof-top deck next to the well equipped gym and kitchen, with panoramic views of Sydney (and glimpses of Sydney harbor and the bridge).

There were a series of typical start-up[ talks from the latest batch of businesses (Telstra selects a small number to be in residence every six months). These were well presented, with the usual enthusiasm (and the usual worry about how viable they were).

As this was a joint event with SydEduTech there was an emphasis on education. Also I noticed a strong connection with Chinese business.

The vent gave me some useful ideas. From January 2015 I am taking over teaching of the Australian Computer Society's "New Technology Alignment" (NTA) on-line postgraduate course.

Fishburners Startup Workspace in Sydney

Last night I attended the Sydney Educational Technology (SydEduTech) Group and talked about "MOOCs with Books" at the Fishburners Sydney Co-working Space. Originally I had assumed that "Fishburners" was the name of a fish restaurant, but it turned out to be a building dedicated to providing low cost shared office space to new start-up businesses (including a 3 days for free trial). The building is an old warehouse converted to offices in New York loft style (there is als an office in Darlinghurst). There is a shared kitchen, games and presentation room, where we had the SydEduTech meeting. It happens that some of the occupants of the building I recognized as fellow participants in the Canberra Innovation ACT program at the ANU, where we were learning how to deveop a new business idea.

The name Fishburners come Fishburn, which was one ships of the first fleet which arrived in Sydney in 1788. It is not clear why the enterprise is named after the ship. But this is not the first hi-tech venture to have a confusing name.