Australian Startup Carnival Highlights Antipodean StartUps

The results of the Australian Startup Carnival were announced Sunday, and as a judge I had the opportunity to review every entry. The carnival was entry based, so not every Australian startup was featured, and yet there were some great entries.

The winner was Perth, Western Australia based Scouta, a media recommendations service we’ve featured a couple of times on TechCrunch. The judges felt that although not without competition, Scouta’s recommendations across video as well as music offered something unique. Scouta has also moved into white-label service provision, offering a solid business plan that is already starting to see results.

Second placed was Good Barry, a service we covered in October 2007. GoodBarry’s GoodBusiness is an easy to use hosted eCommerce platform.

Third was a Google Mashup I frequently use myself: SuburbView. We’ve not covered it before on TechCrunch, and although it’s not the prettiest mashup, its ability to pull data from Australia’s leading real estate sites and break down that information into finite detail, from number of bedrooms, price, suburb, and even building type make it a practical service that is ripe for takeover.

A full list of the results can be found on the VS Consulting blog here. Judges comments are available here; it doesn’t take too much guessing as to which my comments were :-)