The finest truckin’ convoy since CW McCall: 20 OzAPP Awards finalists named, including a freight marketplace

Online freight capacity marketplace FreightExchange, which is currently part of Telstra’s Muru-D program, is one of the 20 startups named as a finalist in this year’s OzApp Awards.

Each of the top 20 finalists from this year’s OzAPP Awards will receive $24,000 worth of hosting, education, mentoring and marketing support, along with six months free service on Hootsuite Pro and Hootsuite University.

They will also present video pitches to be selected in the top five finalists. In turn, the top five will pitch to a panel of leading VCs, tech judges and industry heavyweights at the West Tech Fest on Wednesday February 18 for the chance of winning a top prize of $US100,000.

Freight Exchange co-founder and chief executive Cate Hull told Private Media unlike Uber’s freight offering, the Sydney-based startup marketplace and real-time tracking focuses on long-haul trucking on the east coast of Australia.

“I used to travel a lot, and I always wondered what the excess capacity of those planes, trains and trucks I travelled with was. I did a bit of research and found that one-in-three trucks have spare capacity – that’s $18 billion a year in empty trucks,” Hull says.

“We help companies in the logistics industry save time and money organising transport. We’re a two-sided marketplace – because there’s pain-points on both sides of the marketplace.

“The pain point on the trucking side is that a prime mover costs up to $500,000, not to mention the expense of petrol and drivers, and if that’s not being used, that’s expensive.

“And on the retailer and manufacturer side, getting quotes and availability can usually take days. So our slogan is we let you do what normally takes three days in three minutes.”

FreightExchange, which has been bootstrapped aside from the angel funding it received through Muru-d, is currently working on a pilot version of its real-time tracking system.

“At the moment we’re working with carriers with between 20 and 200 trucks doing a pilot implementation of real-time tracking. We’ve already got two companies on-board for real time, along with our online platform that anyone can use.”

The other finalists this year are:

• APE Mobile: a paperless site app for contractors.

• Assignmenthero: a solution to the problem of lack of effective collaboration in academia for students.

• Churn: Pinterest meets WordPress, designed exclusively for video.

• Class: the fastest mobile-only hotel booking platform in the world and first of it’s kind in Australia.

• Disrupt: allows people to choose their surfboard using a learning algorithm before personalising the design and finish.

• ePAT (Electronic Pain Assessment Technologies) for Kids: an electronic pain assessment device.

• High Ferritin: a referral tool for doctors that enables them to receive a real time outcome.

• JOBDOH: a location based, last-minute booking and scheduling platform to source casual workers.

• Joy Sprouts – Kids Preschool Education: award winning games and activities to develop a range of important skills to help every child’s total development.

• Kindy: helps working parents find quality, affordable and local child care.

• MobiMe: a unique App solution for schools to make Teacher – Parent communication easy.

• OnFlow: a platform for sharing video content of action sports.

• Pamperologist: a social beauty app. It is a fusion of Yelp and Pinterest, but is exclusively for beauty services.

• PEERS (Paediatric Evaluation of Emotions Relationships and Socialisation): a first-in-class assessment tool to identify social impairments in children and adolescents, with future extension to adults.

• realAs: predicts the actual prices homes will sell for within, on average, around 5% of actual sale prices.
• Simply Wall St: visualises listed stocks in Australia, UK and the US everyday.

• Tap Into Safety Interactive Safety Training Tools: interactive, ‘game like’, self-paced safety training and assessment tools.

• Two Hoots: an entirely new way to improve customer satisfaction.

• WiseTime: a passive timesheet platform designed to facilitate a greater degree of freedom and flexibility in workplaces.

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