Aussie game developer Halfbrick  celebrated 2 years of Fruit Ninja being released on the iPhone app store. So far, the simple game of, well, slicing fruit as achieved some impressive results: 300 million downloads 1.5 trillion pieces of fruit sliced 100 years of Fruit Ninja is played every day around the world More players than the combined populations of New York, London, Beijing, Paris and Tokyo! These are impressive stats, especially when companies like Zinga find that mobile [...]

Over at the Hilton Hotel, Amazon brought the AWS Summit roadshow to Sydney. Featuring Dr Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) and Simone Bronuzzi (AWS Evangelist) it prodided 3 streams of content for Executives, Architects and AWS Ninjas (!). I attended the Executive stream, which covered such things as Disaster Recovery and usage examples from NEWS Ltd, Vodafone and REA group. I wont go into the details as all the videos are online at http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices. I recomend [...]

Spotify, the music streaming subscription service, has arrived in Australia. Uniquely, Spotify is also the first music service to use the Freemium model. There are three levels of service involved. The free low bitrate ad supported service, a $6.99 service which is the same without the advertising removed, and a high bitrate (320kbps) premium service priced at $11.99 Mobile streaming is supported, however there is no free subscription. I found that the android software works nicely on my Motorola [...]

      Normally I shy away from news like this. However, we have covered BIG Commerce in the past, and it allows iTechReport to review the growth of this Aussie company. From the PR release: BigCommerce, the world’s fastest growing ecommerce platform has named Steven Power as the new Chief Revenue Officer of its global operations. Formally from ReachLocal, Powers will be based in Austin, Texas. Again from the PR release: “BigCommerce is transforming [...]

Video game retailer GAME has been forced into administration. Given that the release of Diablo III is tomorrow, there will be a few nervous gamers seeing if their pre-orders of the long awaited fantasy game from Blizzard. Price Waterhouse Coopers has been appoint Voluntary Administrators (under the names of Warwick and Greg Hall). Unlike other retail collapses recently (liek REGGroup, owners of Angus and Robertson and Boarders Australia), pre-orders and gift cards will be honoured if possible, and will be allowed to be claimed as an unsecured [...]

Tea Smith has recently left the Far West (ok, Perth) to a new city (Sydney) and coast work on a startup social media company Schematiq. I asked her some questions on Social media and creating a new company in an area as fluid as social media.

On a whim I attended a Microsoft sponsored Startup Meetup at the Cafe Vivo, Sydney. I did not know this was it’s first time it was being run, however I found the experience quite rewarding. Organised by Catherine Eibner, it is a spin off from the “Silicon Beach“ start-up meetup. Sponsored by Microsoft Bizspark, it was not a Microsoft only event, as I had discussions with both an iOS and Windows Mobile developer/startup, as well as web [...]