We build software to help companies understand how they're spending on AWS and to track compliance - We want to help make everyone be even better at AWS.
We're located in Melbourne CBD, with a team that works remotely / from home part of the time, but onsite as some onsite time is likely required (but we're open to discussions).
We're heavy users of AWS ourselves, and exist within the bigger scope of Versent. The product is developed in a mix of languages, with this role mainly working with Ruby and Go, but we're happy to chat to any experienced backend developers.
Thanks gibybo - Our motivation for region issues is mostly due to being Australia based and constantly hitting issues with finding content (Our TV networks have a pretty bad rep, to the point where we're often one of the top pirating nations for shows - e.g. http://delimiter.com.au/2012/05/22/australia-top-game-of-thr...). giby.tv looks very cool by the way.
It's indeed quiet a hard problem to solve - and I think it's going to be one of the biggest issues going forward for exactly the reasons you mention. Another one on top of that (another fun one: different punctuation in names, inc. in the year and region suffixes).
There are a bunch of data sources we tap into / plan on tapping into the near future that we hope will help solve these issues even more.
(The two of us developers work on music stuff which face very similar issues - the annoyance of dealing with album, track and artist names across services is a constant frustration).
If it's an ruby hash, that's unintentional. I changed one of the I18n paths in the app at 5am (the competition finished at 8am for us) and changed it in most places around the site. I missed the home page (since it uses image replacement) but in some configurations (e.g. I think Retina MBPs in Chrome) it shows up still.
We can't modify code until post-judging, so it has to wait until then to be fixed. And thanks, the cover animation was the work of our wonderful designer, @levibuzolic on twitter.
Hey guys - Our team made findthin.gs in 48 hours last weekend for this years Rails Rumble (http://railsrumble.com/). We built it because we're from Australia and sick of finding online services that are region restricted or don't carry what we want.
Thus, we wanted to make it super simple to find where you can legitimately watch tv series and movies online by taking the hard work out of finding where it's viewable.
Our current version only searches Hulu, Netflix (in the US - If anyone has advice on international API's for them, I'd love to know) as well as iTunes. We're planning to support a bunch more services (in the US, Canada, Great Britain and Australia) in the next few weeks.
Also, it's a bit buggy (due to time constraints) and I'm not sure how well it works in non-WebKit browsers, but we'd love to know what you think.
Also, one thing I missed - there is a definite startup market here for those catering to the mining industry and its boom. I know of at least one (I believe self funded startup) doing just that and they appear to be doing well for themselves.
As another Perth resident, and one working for a local startup I think that whilst all of your points re. increased cost of living are very true, Perth still has a lot of potential in terms of it's tech and startup scene.
One of the biggest advantages IMHO we have over other states in Australia (that I believe makes up for most of the distance factor) is the more relaxed atmosphere which is very conducive to, lacking a better description, "Getting shit done".
Rent is very high across the board, but more frustratingly getting houses is becoming harder and harder - When I was looking a while ago it was almost impossible to find a single bedroom apartment between Mosman Park and Mount Lawley (admittedly, a reasonably expensive area) for under $350, even if they were old, undermaintained places. The demand for them was significant (most viewings had a fair amount of people) - From the people I've talked to searching for places since, that demand has only gone up further - Driving the prices even higher.
With all of that said and done, Perth is finally getting into the swing of having a startup scene - over the last year and even more focused the last six months, there have been more and more startups popping up in Perth (not just as side projects, but as actual companies working full time on products) and there has been a surge of interested. We're still behind other Australian cities, but it is definitely ramping up in a noticeable way.
Disclosure: I work for the funded startup mentioned, Filter Squad.
There may only be one venture fund locally, but there are several around Australia that have invested in startups out of Perth.
Also, That one VC (Yuuwa for those playing along at home) have invested in companies other than Filter Squad (Agworld being one of them - very much a tech startup, despite focusing on very non-traditional web / mobile audiences).
Likewise, Yuuwa invested in a seed round pretty early in Filter Squad (I can't remember exactly when since I wasn't around at that point) - it was just their follow up that was a bit later.