The boys from Oz

I’ve been impressed with the quality of a number of developments I’ve come across recently coming out of Australia. It seems to be a hot bed of Web 2.0 type activity with some world class products.Three that take my fancy are:

• http://www.atlassian.com Makers of Confluence, which is a great Wiki product, and one that for Enterprises makes a lot of sense given its flexibility, plug-in support and in particular focus on security. Yes, I know security is almost anti-wiki, but reality bites. No serious Enterprise will consider a Wiki without SOME level of security. Even those that are happy for open editing will want attribution at a minimum.
• http://www.touchstonelive.com/ These guys are producing what has to be the most ambitious RSS reader I’ve come across. If they can pull it off, then the features they are talking about will make this a real winner for Enterprises who want to provide staff with both a News Reader, but also control, limit and help manage some portion of the content (e.g. everyone in sales MUST get this feed about latest leads).
• http://www.tangler.com I’ve just joined the beta community for this one, not sure at this point in time that it’s an Enterprise solution, but for web-based communities, Tangler looks to have some real winning features. If the thought of mail group type communities with a home and integrated IM sounds interesting, keep an eye on this one.

The point to all this is that there is some great content and ideas coming out of Australia (skills shortage anyone?), although they go to some lengths to hide it (smart marketing — size of Gen-Y in Australia, about 4.2M, in the US over 79M) to the extent of spelling Mum as Mom.Keep it up guys! Lets spread the message that there is some fantastic product coming up.