Next weekend, the Awesome Foundation Sydney will be running our June Board Meeting as an open event, where anybody else can come along and vote to decide who this months recipient will be. It’s a format we’re borrowing from the successful Sunday Soup model and something we’re doing in conjunction with the Vivid Sydney festival.

Here’s how the night will unfold

1) You’ll come along (tickets here, $30 is all it takes!)

2) We’ll serve up a delicious soup dinner. You’ll sit at a table with an Awesome Foundation board member, to give you some insight into how the board goes about selecting an awesome project to support each month.

3) There are 5 awesome ideas that we’ve shortlisted for you. Those 5 people will get up and pitch their awesome idea to the crowd.

4) Everybody votes on what they find the most awesome.

5) The votes are tallied and we select one project to receive the grant.

This will be a lot of fun and it’s something I’m really looking forward to. We’ve recently just announced the 5 awesome ideas that are on the shortlist. You can see them by heading to our Twitter page, @awesomefoundsyd..

There was a Twitter conversation today which got my attention. It seems Australia Post is going to be releasing a new app, for iPhone and iPad, which allows you to do a few amazing things. I wanted to speak about the features, but also what this makes possible in the future. Can you imagine a world where the Post Office has an API that anybody can connect to? Anyways, I digress. They call it the Australia Post Digital Mailbox.

The Features

1) Have a digital inbox. I assume this allows you to opt to receive mail you select as important, such as a bill from phone or electricity company. We’ll see when it launched what this actually does.

2) Pay bills. Australia Post has done this for ages, but now it seems they’ve made that accessible through their new app.

3) Store files in one location. This is possibly the most powerful feature. It essentially allows you to store files in one place. I’m assuming, given point 1, that it will all be electronic and that your files will be accesible through requesting documents.

The API

This one is more speculation about what Australia Post might be up to. I doubt they’ll ever open up an API completely, but imagine the possibilities if they allowed people to create products on top of the services they offer – in a way that’s not to dissimilar to how Amazon’s Human Mechanical Turk or many Virtual PA services.

It’s exciting to see and I congratulate Australia Post on making this step. They must have made some large investments in their core services behind the scenes to make this possible, and it’s exciting to see what possibilities that now creates. I love an innovative ‘utility.’