Sydney BizSpark Azure & Phone 7 Judging Panel Announced
The pinnacle of these startup weekends we run is always the the opportunity for each of the participating teams to present their solution to our Panel of Judges. The panel includes technical experts, business experts and investors. Each judge has different backgrounds & experiences and the feedback they provide to participants is always invaluable.
The participants have each received 2 intensive days of training that covers Phone 7 Development & Microsoft Cloud technologies. After these intensive deep dives, the participants have from 9am Saturday morning until 4:00pm Sunday to build their application!
They each receive 10 minutes to pitch to the Judging panel – 1 mins setup time, 5 mins demo/slides & then 4 minutes for questions from the panel.
Each presentation will be judged on:
- Presentation Quality,
- Solution Quality,
- Business Viability,
- Azure Integration,
- Technical Innovation and
- Breakthrough Potential
The Prize pack includes 3 HTC Mozart Phone 7’s plus 4 x 1 hour mentoring sessions from technology consulting, investing and mentoring company Foundry38 https://www.foundry38.com/. Foundry38 specialise in helping startups turn into Businesses.
Our Panel of Judges for this event includes:
Dr Anna Liu Principal Researcher and Research Group Leader at NICTA,
Roger Kermode Venture Consultant
Angus Kidman Freelance Journalist and Editor for Lifehacker Australia
Gareth Rose Lead Entrepreneur, iPitch.com.au
Steve Nagy Azure MVP and Senior Consultant, Readify
You can see each of their Bio’s below:
Dr Anna Liu Principal Researcher and Research Group Leader at NICTA,
Dr Anna Liu is currently a principal researcher and research group leader at NICTA, Australia’s peak research organisation in ICT. She is currently driving the Software Systems research agenda for NICTA and Australia, and leading a team of 80+ people. One current focus for her team is cloud computing - the enterprise consumer perspective. To this end, her team produces technologies and techniques to help enterprise organisations to gain greater visibility and control over their assets running across public and private cloud environments, in order to avoid future silos. Anna also holds an associate professorship at the University of New South Wales. Prior to returning to academia and research, she was the Group Manager of Emerging Technologies at Microsoft Australia, and held Principal Software Architect roles specialising in Service Oriented Architecture, integration and interoperability, Web and Cloud technologies, applied to the financial services domain and government sector. In the more distant past, Dr Liu held visiting Scientist position at the Software Engineering Institute, USA, provided advisory services to the US Department of Defence, and led middleware technology evaluation projects at the CSIRO.
Dr Liu is widely known for her pioneering work in evaluating public cloud environments, her team’s work spotlighted on CNN, ITNews and Slashdot etc. She is a popular speaker on cloud computing including the International SOACloud Symposium and the Cloudcamp series.
Roger Kermode Venture Consultant
Roger is a Director of Alimua (Al-EE_MU-AH) where he consults to technology start-ups. He is also Chairman of Scan2List Shopping List app for Mobile phones and an Advisor to Mobeseek (MO-BE- SEEK) a full service mobile agency. He also runs the MEGA Entrepreneur Course in NSW, and serves as the ANZA Technology Networks's Director of Business Development. Roger holds a Ph.D. and Masters degrees from the MIT Media Lab where he was a Fulbright Scholar. Together with 2 partners, Roger will also shortly be launching PushStart a community focused, mentor driven technology start-up incubator.
Angus Kidman Freelance Journalist and Editor for Lifehacker Australia
Angus Kidman is the editor of Lifehacker Australia, one of Australia’s most popular technology sites which covers how to make your life more productive and efficient. He has been writing about information technology since 1994, covering everything from developer tools to local industry challenges and undertaking such odd assignments as stalking Bill Gates across Australia and testing wireless broadband in a Queensland rainforest.
Gareth Rose Lead Entrepreneur, iPitch.com.au
Gareth Rose is now involved in his 4th startup, iPitch.com.au the Australian online community for startup entrepreneurs. Running iPitch, Gareth has unique exposure to the startup space in Australia, working closely with early stage business investors and engaging with literally hundreds of startup founders about the unique aspects of their businesses.
Prior to iPitch, Gareth spent the last few years building up extensive entrepreneurial experience co-founding the digital comic and retail startup Zynasty G and working in two other startups. Before breaking away from the 9-5 life, Gareth had previously worked in B2B sales and consulting in the areas of software and software services.
With this background and skill set Gareth focuses his interests on tech startups. He looks to bring his business strategy, sales and marketing experience to advise (or partner with) tech or creative skilled entrepreneurs trying to startup high potential businesses.
Steve Nagy Azure MVP and Senior Consultant, Readify
By day, Steven is a Senior Consultant for Readify and a Microsoft MVP in Windows Azure, helping organisations adopt technology and improve processes. By night, he cackles gleefully basking in the glow of his laptop screen as thousands of Azure worker roles carry out his evil bidding.