I had a gread time at the Startup Christmas Party, which was organized by a few very interesting startup organizations from Sydney. First of all there is the Sydney branch of Open Coffee, that organization organizing relaxed and informal meetings for investors, entrepreneurs and developers. By the way, Open Coffee was set up in London by one of my favourite mentors from Kindo-times Saul Klein. The Sydney Open Coffee was started by Kim Heras, a great and knowledgable guy that I had hired into our team at MyHeritage back then. Silicon Beach is originally a newsgroup from Sydney-based tech guys. And the last organization involved was PushStart, one of the first Australian tech incubator’s that will be doing its first round of seed investments soon. Startups can apply there and PushStart gives a low 5-digit funding to a handful of them, in addition to advice and support – Y-Combinator style.

One of the interesting projects I learned about that evening was givesmart, a social enterprise in the making by David Vandenberg. The idea is that it will be an engine for mini-donations to many charities wrapped in game-like features. Kind of a mixture between flattr, justgiving.com, Causes.com (maybe you remember that facebook app), and foursquare’s badges. I’m looking forward to seeing them getting started and hope it will work out.

And the party wasn’t even the first time we had met Australian entrepreneurs. A few days earlier we stayed with Carolyn and Chris, founders of Solar Gadgets, an e-commerce business focussing on solar powered products. While possibly less disruptive than the lets-become-the-next-big-thing type of startups, this one is a business that is highly likely to become profitable very soon.