Just a quick note to let everyone know that SMS Poll has won the NSW Pitch ‘08 competition. More exciting news and announcements to follow, but we just wanted to say thanks to all for the support and votes of encouragement!
Stay tuned!
- The SMS Poll Team
Vishal from VS Consulting Group contacted us the other day to conduct an email interview about SMS Poll, the Start Up culture in Australia and even our thoughts on the iPhone / Android debate.
You can check out the full coverage by clicking here
An exciting update with Pitch ‘08. Last Friday (22nd Aug) SMS Poll met with the other 9 finalists and presented to a panel of judges. We’re really excited to announce that we are now one of the five finalists to make it through to the Pitch ‘08 event to be held on Saturday 6th September at the Powerhouse Museum. All the details can be found on the Pitch Australia website.
It’s free entry to the event, so please come along, say hi and of course, vote for us!
And hey, you might even be using SMS Poll to vote 
–
‘Game on!’ for NSW entrepreneurs
Five finalists announced for NSW Pitch ‘08 competition
25 August 2008
NSW Pitch ‘08 announced its five finalists on Friday, as the business pitching competition prepares to pique investor interest at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum on September 6, from 2pm to 5pm.
NSW has proven itself to be a hotbed of innovation, with the five finalists chosen from a large pool of other promising small businesses. Each of the final five will now ‘pitch’ their businesses to a panel of experts and investors during the Sydney leg of the Australia-wide Pitch ‘08 competition.
Pitch ‘08 is a free, public event designed to connect innovative business ventures with development capital.
The five finalist pitchers are:
1. Evolution Tankers Pty Ltd, Daniel Rodgers – Evolution Tankers has developed new manufacturing technology for the production of a lightweight carbon fiber tanker for bulk liquid transport, called the OMNI Tanker.
2. SMS Poll, Anil Sabharwal – Used by educators, public speakers and event planners to gather in-the-moment data, SMS Poll is an innovative mobile voting and live audience polling application that rivals sophisticated Audience Response Systems at one-tenth of the price.
3. Soundsreal Talking, Steven Mitchell of Mantis Design Pty Ltd – Soundsreal.com is a rapidly growing next-generation software company with established cashflows which empowers businesses to harness web 2 presentation technologies in ways never thought possible.
4. The Invisible Clothesline Pty Ltd, Wayne Leighton – The Invisible Clothesline is a new and unique globally patented clothesline design, with many benefits and advantages over existing clothes drying products.
5. Vision Water Pty Ltd, Geoff Ball – WaterCell is an engineered, high volume rainwater harvesting system and an integrated on-site detention facility providing potable quality water for residential, commercial and industrial developments.
“The competition is known for sourcing businesses which are innovative, have a mature business outlook and offer significant practical market potential. These finalists possess all of these qualities,” says Dan Liszka, Managing Director of Alchemy Innovation Development and one of the NSW Pitch ‘08 semi-finals judges.
The panel judging the pitches at the final event includes; Nicky Boustred, Investor Relations, Committed Capital; Michael Harrington, Business Development Manager, NSW Department of State and Regional Development; Mark Fenton-Jones, Enterprise Editor, Australian Financial Review, and; Brookes McTavish, Managing Director, Australian Small Scale Offerings Board. Corporate entertainer Andrew Klein will be acting as MC.
The winning business receives a listing on the Australian Small Scale Offerings Board, valued at $40,000 (based on an average $500,000 capital raising). The runner-up prize is valued at $11,000, and the third prize worth $10,000. A wildcard prize, awarded by the Enterprise Workshop is valued at $2000.
The 10 short-listed businesses received extensive business mentoring through ASSOB and access to presentation, pitch training and audio-visual resources. All NSW Pitch ‘08 applicants received access to free consultations with the intellectual property firm Davies Collison Cave.
NSW Pitch ‘08 is co-hosted by the Australian Small Scale Offerings Board Limited (ASSOB) and the NSW Department of State of Regional Development (DSRD).
AUSTRALIAN CHARITIES TRIAL INNOVATIVE NEW MOBILE AUDIENCE POLLING SOLUTION
SMS Poll Enables Not For Profits to Better Identify Prospective Donors and Engage Supporters
Sydney, 11 August 2008 – Australia’s leading consultancy for charities, Pareto Fundraising, and Australia’s first and only mobile audience polling service, SMS Poll, announced today a partnership that will see a number of local charities using SMS Poll’s innovative offering to better engage with their membership and identify potential new donors.
“We are excited to integrate SMS Poll into a number of our upcoming client campaigns,” said Dan Geaves, Pareto Fundraising’s Group Account Director. “It’s a brilliant opportunity for not for profits to engage with supporters at charitable events, AGMs, and even protests in a manner that was previously impossible or not cost-effective.”
Pareto Fundraising’s clients are some of the biggest names in charity, including The Cancer Council, Amnesty International Australia, National Heart Foundation of Australia, Médecins Sans Frontières and CanTeen.
“We are thrilled to have Pareto Fundraising as a partner,” said Anil Sabharwal, SMS Poll’s Managing Director.
“They have a great record of helping Australian charities raise money, and their early take-up of SMS Poll reflects their passion for developing innovative new ideas in the not for profit sector.”
SMS Poll allows its customers to create, customise and share a poll in minutes without requiring any special software or hardware. Poll’s can be displayed online or in a PowerPoint presentation, with the audience using their mobile phones to vote by sending an SMS or browsing to a mobile friendly webpage. The results animate and update in real-time, right before everyone’s eyes, providing an incredibly engaging and exciting experience. A live demonstration of SMS Poll can be seen at www.smspoll.net/demo.
Having launched less than a month ago, Australian company SMS Poll continues to generate significant traction with Educators, Event Planners, Promoters, Corporations and Not For Profits who wish to gather in-the-moment data from their audiences. The company has also been selected as one of NSW’s top ten finalists in Pitch 08.
We’re pleased to announce that MediaSnackers, one of the UK’s leading Training and Development agencies specialising in the youth and media/technology market have adopted SMS Poll as their tool of choice for understanding their audience’s thoughts and opinions.
MediaSnackers have worked with a plethora of UK giants such as the BBC, BT Education, British Youth Council, Channel 4, Prince’s Trust and many more. Most recently they used SMS Poll at the AMA Annual Conference across two seminars, packing in over 500 participants.
“SMS Poll is so good it made me want to lick the screen. There are so many applications and we’ll be definitely introducing it into our service offerings plus featuring it as a platform to explore and utilise with our clients.”
DK, MediaSnackers Founder / Speaker / Trainer
Everyone loves to customise things to fit their own look and feel. And that’s why we’re pleased to announce that we are now over 50% of the way there to deploying the chart customisation features.
We’ve just deployed the first stage of this, giving you the ability to change the colours, fonts, axis info etc on your chart. You can check this out by selecting a poll from your dashboard and clicking on ‘Customise Chart’ from the options in the left hand panel.
This is just the start of many customisation features to come. We are nearly finished with the development of our other charts styles. We’ll keep you updated on the progress of these on the blog. They’re looking pretty good even if we do say so ourselves!
Have a play around and let us know what you think. We’ve tried to make it as intuitive as possible, trialling and implementing suggestions from frequent users and early adopters of SMS Poll.
Thanks to everyone who provided their initial input. We’ve still got a couple of options to look at for the customisation panel, but it’s pretty much complete now.
Got a cool looking colour combo? Drop a link to your poll in the comments section of this post for everyone to see. It might spark some creativity for other SMS Poll members. We might even set up a poll to vote for some of the best looking polls!
Watch this space.
Being a new startup in Australia, we recently entered SMS Poll into the NSW leg of Pitch08.
If you haven’t heard of Pitch ‘08, it’s a signature event of Small Business September ‘08 (a small business development initiative of the NSW Department of State and Regional Development). Its main purpose it to connect innovative business ventures with development capital.
We were really pleased to receive word this week that we have been shortlisted to the final 10! We will now pitch again and if we’re lucky enough, we’ll be one of five businesses presenting at Pitch’08 in September at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
We’ll keep you posted!
Read the full release here:
NSW reveals ten clever ideas: Pitch ‘08 announces ten finalists
The response in Australia to date has been so positive, that we decided the first thing we would do is offer the SMS Poll service in the United Kingdom as well.
Now when you sign-up for SMS Poll you will be prompted to select the country where your poll will be run / your live audience will be located. We will then give you a local number in that country (Australia and UK only for now, but more countries coming soon!) that your audience can use to vote.
Enjoy!
- The SMS Poll Team.
Break out the bubbly!
We’re proud to announce that as of today, SMS Poll is live and available to anyone in the world who wishes to create and run a live audience poll in Australia.
For those of you who don’t yet know, SMS Poll is the easiest and fastest way to find out what your students, fans, customers, conference attendees, or any other type of live audience is thinking. Requiring no special hardware or software, anyone can create a poll in just a few seconds. Your audience votes by sending an SMS to a local phone number (or by browsing to a mobile friendly webpage) and the results are updated right before your eyes, in real-time, in your PowerPoint presentation or on your website.
We firmly believe that SMS Poll is the simplest and one of the best SMS voting and Audience Response Systems on the market today. Best of all, the power is truly in your hands – setup is instant and anyone can use it. You can create as many polls as you’d like, choose from a variety of different charts and effects to apply to your real-time results, and download the results at any time to Excel for analysis. And if you’re away from your computer or don’t have access to the Internet, you can even have the latest results sent to your mobile phone.
Sign Up for our Free Plan now and give it a try. No risks, no obligations, no catches. And as always, we would love to hear your feedback.
Stay tuned for more exciting news in the weeks and months to come.
- The SMS Poll Team.
Subscribe to our RSS Feed
