SydneyFirehose.com – Coke’s Big Data Startup Competition – The Quest for Big Data, Solutions and Entrepreneurship

This warehouse is emptied every two days. A few small changes to operations can make a huge difference.

Coke’s Sydney Startup Accelerator Team is launching a novel big data competition called SydneyFirehose.com. The team which was founded by Franki Chamaki and Jason Hosking has launched a number of really interesting initiatives over the last six months, centred around solving real meaty problems for Coke and creating new business opportunities and partnerships with startups.

The Sydney Firehose Big Data Startup Competition aims to give real data from a massive business to help entrepreneurs and software guys to get close to a real customer and hopefully start a new business or develop a big data application.

Analysing big data can lead to big insights and a greater understanding of business problems and ways to solve them.

The Sydney Firehose: Big Data Startup Competition  invites entrepreneurs to create something useful, marketable and unique by analyzing a huge set of data (1 TB/150,000,000 records), which will be given to them by Coca Cola Amatil, Coke’s Australian partner and bottler.

The data is basically the company’s supply chain data, collected by the company for the last 3 years. The data includes information of about CCA’s suppliers, clients, products, deliveries and orders.

The aim of the competition is to build an application or business that will make improvements to the companies operations by analyzing this data.

Big Data startups find it tough to find big companies that are willing to hand over their full operational history.

By providing the means and access to a huge set of data, the event aims at promoting innovation and as a result will hopefully help launch a number of new businesses.

The event is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, who want to get access to an enormous quantity of data and use this to gain business insights and develop applications.

The features of the event include :

1. Coca Cola Amatil supplying three years of their Australian supply chain data for the entrepreneurs to access and utilize.

2. A platform to collaborate and learn from fellow entrepreneurs and mentors.

3. A chance for the participant to pitch their idea to a large prospective client, Coca Cola.

4. A great chance to meet extraordinary people from the entrepreneurship world and learn from them. The event will be judged by some great business leaders and entrepreneurs such as : Bruce Herbert, Rick Baker, Gerhard Voster, Ann Parker and Franki Chamaki.

They have some great prizes for the winner, $3000 in cash, startup training and 3 months of co-working experience with the Pollenizer team and the opportunity to pitch Coke as a customer for 3 months.

When and Where ?

The event will be held on the 15th, 16th and 23rd of November 2013. The participants can register on their website http://www.sydneyfirehose.com. The seats of the event are limited and are priced at  $20. There are 20 slots each for  entrepreneurs, designers and engineers.

The event will be held at :

The Hive

180 Commonwealth St

Surry Hills, NSW 2010

The Organizers

The event is co-organised by Pollenizer. A startup that co-founds businesses and organizes startup events like Firehose. Pollenizer was founded by Mick Liubinskas and Phil Morle in 2008. Mick Liubinskas is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist.

Mick and Phil Morle, the CEO of Pollenizer, worked in the team of Kazaa, a P2P sharing application that saw its rise during the end of the first generation of P2P networks such as Napster. In its golden days, Kazaa was downloaded and used by millions across the ‘World Wide Web’ for P2P sharing (over 300 million at its peak making it the most downloaded software in history at the time). They were also part of the team that helped launch Spreets.com which was sold to Yahoo Australia for $40m 18 months after launching.

UPDATE: Mick has taken up a new challenge at Muru Digital, the Telstra backed incubator, he will remain on the board at Pollenizer.

Final Word

The most unique feature of the event is it’s openness. The idea of making normally very tightly held data available to potential startups is a great initiative for the company and the potential startups.

Hopefully this initiative will see new businesses launched with Coke as a customer and help CCA improve its operations.