2020 has been quite the year, especially for startups. We’ve had fires, floods, pandemics and mass unrest. It’s been a year in which we’ve all pledged to consume less, do more, listen more carefully and unlearn what we have previously been told. As businesses, we’ve watched on the sidelines, guessing when it’s appropriate for… Read more »
The Australian Cyber Security Growth Network (AustCyber) on Monday released a report modelling the potential impact of cyberattacks and sustained digital outages on Australia. The Digital Trust Report’s modelling suggests four weeks of partial “digital disruption” could displace up to 163,000 jobs and damage the economy to the tune of A$30 billion. According to AustCyber’s… Read more »
The COVID-19 crisis has been a challenging time for the world at large, however, there have also been surprising positives. With workplaces changing and more employees working from home, companies have been able to tap into diversity in new ways. Through the pandemic, we’ve seen new attitudes being created towards flexible and remote working. This… Read more »
For many small businesses, this financial year has been a really challenging time. Earlier in 2020, Australia’s bushland was hit by devastating fires followed closely by the COVID-19 crisis, which saw the world and economy come to an abrupt standstill. As the world went into lockdown, local businesses were forced to hibernate. Even for those… Read more »
In an age of isolation, video sharing platform TikTok has emerged as a bonding force for many. But recent headlines allege the service, owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance, is feeding users’ data to the Chinese Communist Party. Earlier this week, the Herald Sun reported that an unnamed federal MP was pushing for the app to… Read more »
Many people will be asking themselves this question over the next year or two: “Am I completely crazy to be thinking about founding a startup right now?” The answer is a resounding NO! The world is going to need re-imagining on an unprecedented scale over the next few years. We have so many important problems… Read more »
Australia has ruled out abandoning the government’s COVIDSafe contact tracing app in favour of the rival “Gapple” model developed by Google and Apple, which is gaining widespread support around the world. Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nick Coatsworth told The Project the COVIDSafe app was “a great platform”. When it comes down to it, is the… Read more »
This is the second part in a three-part series on startup growth by venture capital investor Benjamin Chong. Part 1 is here & part 3 will be published next week. Growth marketing has forever changed the way that successful startups approach marketing. It was reportedly made famous by Facebook, who were one of the first… Read more »
The last few months have demonstrated the kind of volatility we can’t exactly plan for, but for which we can and should prepare. The impact of Covid-19 is multi-faceted, and a collective effort is called for to come out the other side. And there will be another side. In fact, right now, while many might… Read more »
This is the first part in a three-part series on startup growth by venture capital investor Benjamin Chong. Parts 2 & 3 will be published over the coming fortnight. The unemployment toll from COVID-19 was 600,000 in April alone, the largest one month increase on record. So concerning is this consequence of COVID-19 that the… Read more »
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has expressed concern about Google’s proposed acquisition of fitness tracker company Fitbit. The acquisition will let Google add years’ worth of Fitbit users’ data to its already unequalled consumer data collection. This could reduce competition in certain health services and other markets in Australia. Google revealed its plans… Read more »
The worst part of the economic crisis in Australia caused by COVID-19 has been the destruction of so many millions of jobs. The only thing that’s going to bring these jobs back? The work of Australia’s entrepreneurs. We know from research conducted in both Australia and overseas that the overwhelming majority of new jobs are… Read more »
The Australian government is setting out to develop a “bargaining code” to address power imbalances between news media publishers and digital platforms such as Facebook and Google. The creation of this code was recommended last year in the final report of the Digital Platforms Inquiry held by the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC). The… Read more »
Australia’s universities are in desperate trouble, and their first move has been to cut the entrepreneurship and innovation arms they should be defending at all costs. Sometimes, there’s no satisfaction in being right with predictions; like the time back in early March, when I predicted that the tech startup accelerator programs and incubators being offered by… Read more »
Only 566 people have ever travelled to space. Sixty-five of them, or about 11.5%, were women. NASA recently proclaimed it will put the “first woman and next man” on the Moon by 2024. Despite nearly 60 years of human spaceflight, women are still in the territory of “firsts”. Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in… Read more »
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