In more than a decade of covering Australian startups – nearly seven years as Startup Daily editor – one notable aspect of dealing with the sector is unlike any other I’ve encountered in 30 years of journalism. As LP Hartley wrote in The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”… Read more »
When the Victorian government announced plans to disband LaunchVic, and distribute some of its roles to other agencies, like Breakthrough Victoria, there’s a temptation to treat it as an administrative change: a reshuffle of functions, a rebadging of programs, a matter for insiders. That temptation is comforting – and profoundly wrong. I don’t want to… Read more »
Attempts at communicating what generative artificial intelligence (AI) is and what it does have produced a range of metaphors and analogies. From a “black box” to “autocomplete on steroids”, a “parrot”, and even a pair of “sneakers”, the goal is to make the understanding of a complex piece of technology accessible by grounding it in… Read more »
A developer on my team came to me recently with an unusual request: “Will, can you please give me more work? I’ve finished everything.” That moment captured the promise – and the peril – of the AI revolution. Productivity gains are real. Finance professionals are drafting reports in half the time. Developers are coding faster.… Read more »
X (formerly Twitter) has become a site for the rapid spread of artificial intelligence-generated nonconsensual sexual images (also known as “deepfakes”). Using the platform’s own built-in generative AI chatbot, Grok, users can edit images they upload through simple voice or text prompts. Various media outlets have reported that users are using Grok to create sexualised… Read more »
As Payday Super comes into force, along with growing focus on artificial intelligence, Employment Hero founder Ben Thompson identifies 5 key trends he believes will play a role in the world of work in the year ahead. 1. Compliance and cash flow will be the dominant pressure point for employers Australia is already one of… Read more »
Over the Summer break, Startup Daily is republishing key stories from 2025. This opinion piece from editor Simon Thomsen first appeared in March as news emerged of Meta’s use of Library Genesis, an online warehouse of stolen intellectual property, to train its AI, emerged. This year marks 20 years since Mark Zuckberg launched Facebook, having… Read more »
Over the summer break, Startup daily is republishing some of its most read and favourite stories from 2025. Today it’s about Canva’s profitabilty, published in September. It’s just shy of 20 years since US political satirist Stephen Colbert coined the term ‘truthiness’. He described it as “something that seems like truth – the truth we… Read more »
Over the Summer break, Startup Daily is republishing key stories from 2025. This opinion piece from editor Simon Thomsen first appeared in February amid news that the NSW that the NSW government and UFC fan premier Chris Minns, paid $16 million to the US cage fighting company to stage 3 events in Sydney at a… Read more »
All too often, those of us living in the ‘remote colonies’ consider ourselves too small to make any real difference on the world stage. And yet, according to global media outlets, Australia’s grassroots campaign to ban social media for under-16s is the most important piece of legislation in the world right now. Jonathan Haidt, whose… Read more »
It’s almost too daunting a task to summarise a year that could be best represented by this….. The long blood donation lines (hours long wait for many) to help the Bondi shooting victims. If there is an image that can truly sum up this year full of chaos, violence, war and fragile peace, technological advances… Read more »
When CSIRO announced it would shed hundreds of research positions, the narrative was predictable: another casualty of budget cuts, another blow to Australian science, another sign that we don’t value research. But perhaps the question shouldn’t be whether Australia invests enough in research, but whether we’re getting enough return from the research we already fund. Or have we been optimising for the wrong metric? The research scoreboard Australia’s research ecosystem has… Read more »
The end of the year means holiday celebrations, summer breaks … and for us, one important thing: best books lists. We asked 35 expert readers for their favourite picks, ranging from novelists to anthropologists, scientists to criminologists – and experts in politics, publishing and philosophy. The only rule? The book had to be published this… Read more »
By age 12, your political operating system is encoded. Everything after is confirmation bias with better vocabulary. This is not cynicism. This is archaeology. Dig into any 50-year-old’s beliefs and you will find layers deposited at the kitchen table, in the schoolyard, at church or synagogue or mosque, in the neighborhood where they learned who… Read more »
The tech industry’s unofficial motto for two decades was “move fast and break things”. It was a philosophy that broke more than just taxi monopolies or hotel chains. It also constructed a digital world filled with risks for our most vulnerable. In the 2024–25 financial year alone, the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation received… Read more »
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