PushStart offers CeBIT showcase opportunity to tech start-ups

Australian tech seed fund PushStart is offering web-based start-ups the opportunity to showcase their ideas at CeBIT Australia’s Webciety pavilion for $25.

CeBIT is the world’s largest trade fair featuring digital IT and telecommunications solutions, offering an international platform for tech companies.

The concept behind Webciety is to create a “walk-in” internet, whereby companies operate their own home bases, via a laptop, which serve as complete digital staging zones.

The Webciety pavilion at CeBIT Australia – which is being held in Sydney – will feature mobile, tablet and web applications, collaboration tools, communities, blogging, real time web and other interactive internet services.

The Webciety space includes specially designed booths for presenting commercially viable web and mobile applications.

“Web-based enterprises have different needs than companies selling concrete products, and the ideas characterising the internet also need to be presented differently,” a Webciety spokesperson says.

“The concept behind [the] Webciety area reduces the show to a maximum… High above everyone’s heads hangs a structure composed of a network of light beams – symbolising the internet – which can take on any color.”

“Individual projection screens are located at the nodes of this network structure.”

To have a presence at Webciety, via one of the exhibition pods, normally costs around $4,500, plus insurance. PushStart is offering start-ups the opportunity to present at Webciety for $25.

PushStart was launched earlier this year with the aim of boosting the Australian start-up scene. It was created by online entrepreneur Kim Heras, venture capitalist John Haining and technology executive Roger Kermode.

PushStart’s main focus is on providing start-ups with experienced mentors to guide less experienced entrepreneurs, and save them from making mistakes others have made the hard way.

“PushStart has signed up for a pod… Instead of hogging the pod for ourselves, we’ve decided to do what we promised when we launched PushStart and focus on helping the community,” it says.

“To do that, we’re going to split the three days of the exhibition into blocks of two hours where start-ups can have the PushStart pod to themselves. Think of it as a kind of collaborative consumption project.”

“You’re free to put your own marketing materials, to speak to whoever is there about your start-up and to get involved in peripheral activities.”

PushStart outlines the eligibility criteria:

• You have to be a web-based or mobile web-based start-up.

• You have to be live; no stealth start-ups.