Ex-soldier Sean Mulqueen has a bold plan to honour his army brothers who died

EX-SOLDIER Sean Mulqueen nearly lost his life in Afghanistan and now he’s got a bold plan to honour his 41 unlucky brothers who didn’t survive.

Former soldier Sean Mulqueen. Picture: David Kelly.

EX-SOLDIER Sean Mulqueen nearly lost his life in Afghanistan and now he’s got a bold plan to honour his 41 unlucky brothers who didn’t survive.

The former Army engineer trained to dispose of improvised explosive devices but a bomb blast sent him home in 2010.

Several shoulder surgeries followed and then he had to battle post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Today, he runs a small property maintenance business in Brisbane which employs mostly returned veterans.

But his real passion is to build a memorial garden for his fallen comrades on Chippendall Street next to Suncorp Stadium.

Working in tandem with other veterans groups, Mulqueen hopes to generate up to $100,000 for the project through a physically-gruelling three-day fundraising event at the cauldron next month.

Starting on November 10, he wants sponsors to back teams of volunteers to climb up and down stairs in the stadium wearing 42kg packs for 42 hours.

Each hour represents one of those killed in Australia’s longest war, with a symbolic one extra kilo and one extra hour meant to honour those who came home wounded or psychologically damaged.

“This burden can be split between team members or carried in a single pack, as long as the weight continues to move around the stadium,’’ Mulqueen told us.

Mulqueen kicked off the fundraising last November when he walked solo up and down the stadium stairs for 42 hours and raised about $15,000.

Starting off with a 42kg pack, he shed a kilo every hour in a symbolic display of lightening the load for former soldiers.

COFFEE APP

BRISBANE tech entrepreneur Daniel Filmer was among the first to roll out an innovative coffee ordering and payment app back in 2011.

His TXT4Coffee allowed customers to jump the queue at participating cafes and the idea has really taken off since then.

Nearly 1000 coffee shops and almost 25,000 clients use the free system, which turns over about $1 million a year. But, six years down the track, the business has still not turned a profit despite deploying trial advertising.

That’s forced Filmer to look at a transaction or subscription fee model to invigorate the bottom line.

The company also suffered an embarrassing glitch this month, when a network outage left cafe owners and their customers with a frozen app and malfunctioning website.

Filmer acknowledged to your diarist yesterday that he “really had a bad run’’ in the past two weeks. “I can see where we dropped the ball,’’ he said.

Further complicating matters, Filmer said the rise of competitors such as Hey You had led to a plunge in the number of new customers since early last year.

Even if the coffee app flames out, Filmer still runs software developer Full Stack Labs and has a few interesting irons in the fire.

He just launched the new “Placer’’ app in New York City that allows customers to hire people to stand in line for them, make a booking or pick up goods.

Look for it to roll out in Australia early next year.