Australian start-up Wattcost wins Rackspace ANZ’s 2014 Small Teams Big Impact Award

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David Soutar, Wattcost.jpgLast night Rackspace Hosting presented Australian start-up Wattcost co-founder David Soutar with the Small Teams Big Impact Award at an evening ceremony in Sydney held at the Cell Block Theatre in the National Arts School in Sydney.

The start-up competition is designed to give start-up businesses or entrepreneurs from Australian and New Zealand the opportunity to pitch their best ideas to an experienced guest panel of judges.

Wattcost is a revolutionary consumer-oriented, technology product to turn any home intelligent through low-cost WiFi-based technology that captures real-time data from electricity meters with a simple “stick-on” optical sensor. Wattcosts’ cloud-based home intelligence platform disaggregates individual home appliance use and costs for real-time appliance-level safety alerts and personalised savings advice on users smartphones and tablets.

Says Angus Dorney, Rackspace ANZ general manager: “We were blown away with the quality of entrants in this year’s Small Teams Big Impact awards, and the six finalists represent the impressive levels of innovation we are seeing in the ANZ start-up community. We saw everything from 3D printing for education to energy saving technology, and ethical e-commerce platforms.”

 

The five other finalists included:

    • Elex Ratio, a legal professional services organisation offering consulting and systems integration services to Courts around the world.

    • Makers Empire, developers of 3D printing software for schools and learning applications.

    • Pasa, an e-commerce platform that aims at assisting ethical co-operatives in low-income countries in  exporting their products all over the world.

    • RecycleSmart, an organisation that specialises in providing visual bin inspections, community engagement and incentives for households to dispose of waste more consciously.

    • Today We Learned, an application designed to encourage parent engagement in school education.

Each of the finalists had five minutes to pitch their business idea to members of the start-up community.

 

The judging panel included Robert Scoble, technical evangelist, author and Rackspace Startup liaison officer, Melissa Widner, co-founder of Heads Over Heels and general partner at Seapoint Ventures, Ben Chong at Sydney Seed Fund and Founder Institute, Chris Ridd from Xero and Rick Baker from Blackbird Ventures.

 

As 2014 winners, Wattcost receives the Small Teams Big Impact 2014 winner’s trophy, a return ticket from to San Francisco with four nights’ accommodation, a visit to Silicon Valley and a video interview in Robert Scoble’s recording studio, featuring on his Social Media profiles (400K+ followers on Twitter, 600K+ followers on Facebook).