What: OzApps Awards Roadshow with Bill Tai
Where: River City Labs
When: 3 September, 2012
Reviewed by: Lee Mathers, Brisbane Ambassador

River City Labs hosted another of their numerous events catering to all things tech, when Bill Tai, legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist visited to talk about the OzApp Awards and show off some of the very cool mobile apps that he’s invested in over the past few years.

The roadshow, ostensibly designed to encourage local app developers to submit their apps for the now expaned OzApp Awards (it started last year as a Western Australia only event), focused more on what it takes to build a successful app.

Bill spoke at length about the various apps that he’s invested in over the years and help to bring to market which include some relatively big players such as:

  • Tweetdeck: an app that makes it easier to keep track of your friends and other people of interest across all platforms of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and any other social network
  • Maxthon: a fully-featured mobile browser used by millions
  • Tango: a VoIP and telephony client (similar to Viber and Skype) with over 60 million downloads
  • Voxer Walkie Talkie: a “push to talk” app for your mobile phone, turning it into a walkie talkie to use with your friends.
  • Scribd: A digital documents library that allows users to publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents in various languages

As well as backing new app ventures, Tai is a mad keen kite boarder and has helped to develop a kite boarding festival in Hawaii to mix investment in new digital products and applications with his love of the sport.

The session was full of good advice for all of those in the room working to get apps to market. Tai spoke at length about the three things you need to get right: finding the market, putting the team together and funding.

He encouraged developers from Brisbane to pitch their apps to the upcoming OzApps Awards in order to gain exposure and potential funding.