Cinergix waves Australian flag

Just one Australian start-up appears to have made the final cut for the US-based DEMO and TechCrunch50 conferences this week: Melbourne-based firm Cinergix, which has produced an online collaborative process design tool dubbed Creately.

Each conference sees a host of early stage technology start-ups present to an audience composed of their peers and others such as potential investors and venture capital firms. Start-ups who impress can expect to receive a substantial amount of interest in their service, and potentially attract funding to take it further.

There are a couple of other Australian firms presenting more informally at the conference, but they're not on the main stage: for example Sydney-based start-up Melon Media is exhibiting their spell-checking tool spellr.us in TechCrunch50's Demo Pit with about a gazillion others.

Information on Cinergix is relatively scarce, however the firm has distributed a press release about its attendance at DEMO, and its profile on the conference site lists three founders: Chandika Jayasundara (currently the start-up's chief executive), Nicholas Foster (chief operating officer) and Charanjit Singh (chief marketing officer).

All three were reportedly international students at Melbourne University; where they placed second in an entrepreneurship competition with their TeamDraw software, on which Creately appears to be based. They also made it to the finals of the Vic Pitch '08 competition.

The company's blurb says it started in 2007, with the company also running a research and development centre in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The trio are planning to set up operations in the United States in early 2009.

"Creately is an online software application that will revolutionise how everyone will model complex products and processes," the DEMO press release states.

"Today, Creately supports problem solving in a variety of domains, from business processes to IT networks, and will soon expand this range to include scenarios as diverse as designing financial investment models or laying out the interiors of living rooms."

It's hard for me to really evaluate Creately as the product is currently in beta form. The tour on the company's website makes it look pretty much like the standard computerised modelling tools I used to use to mock up corporate networks in the late 1990's as an information technology student.

If so, the product probably won't add much to the sophisticated modelling suites already out there. But if it integrates the new breed of Web 2.0 collaboration techniques it could be quite cool indeed; and it could be the kind of thing corporations would pay cold hard cash to use.

We'll keep an eye on Cinergix and see where they go in future.