You might have seen viral videos of Wendy’s drive-thru customers in the United States ordering their fast food from the firm’s generative AI bot Wendy’s FreshAI. Most show a very human-like transaction punctuated with cries of amazement at how fast, accurate and polite the system is. While the system and others like it are in… Read more »
Judy Anderson-Firth is CEO of Euphemia, the family office of serial entrepreneur Dom Pym, founder of UpBank. She recently sat down with Cheryl Mack from Aussie Angels and Maxine Minter from Co Ventures to talk about her experience as an investor on their podcast, First Cheque. It’s both an aspirational and practical discussion, where Anderson-Firth shares… Read more »
Australia’s startup industry is entitled to ask itself what are the government’s expectations when it comes to technology? While some of the government’s moves around Big Tech have been encouraging, proposed changes to mergers and acquisitions requirements will likely have a chilling effect on dealmaking and investment in our local startup industry. What’s happened? Last… Read more »
Sexual harassment is often considered to be a person-to-person act, but new research shows Australians are also experiencing and perpetrating workplace harassment in large numbers through technology. Our latest study shows one in seven Australian adults surveyed reported having engaged in workplace tech-based sexual harassment. One in eight reported having engaged in both tech-based and… Read more »
In the free-for-all between the Australian government and Big Tech boss Elon Musk last week, the government had to be on a winner. Most people would have little sympathy with Musk’s vociferous opposition to being told to take down from X (previously Twitter) the video of the stabbing of bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at a… Read more »
Sydney startup Heatseeker, which uses AI to simplify business idea validation and market research, has launched the alpha version of its testing platform to help founders speed up the time to product launch. Heatseeker.ai was cofounded in 2023 by serial entrepreneurs Kate O’Keeffe and Fiona Triaca. They set out to develop a way to understand… Read more »
Earlier this year, Neuralink implanted a chipinside the brain of 29-year-old US man Noland Arbaugh, who is paralysed from the shoulders down. The chip has enabled Arbaugh to move a mouse pointer on a screen just by imagining it moving. In May 2023, US researchers also announced a non-invasive way to “decode” the words someone… Read more »
Australia is a trading nation. Its economy relies on a strong and open global trade environment. Australian governments have historically rejected protectionist industrial policies that undermine fair competition, and Canberra has long been a staunch advocate of the World Trade Organisation, whose rules help “promote and protect the open global trading system”. Yet Labor has… Read more »
Away from the VC mega-round headlines or the hard stories of founders who can’t raise capital at any price, is the solvable problem of how much money a new founder should raise. I’ve participated in hundreds of investments where founders have opted for different answers to this question, and watched the consequences unfold over the… Read more »
No founder achieves greatness without getting spooked along the way. So the challenge is how you vanquish those demons, with the right ghostbusters by your side, that makes all the difference. Funding and customer growth may be the loudest concerns we hear from startups, but there’s a lot more happening beneath the surface that should… Read more »
The federal government will directly intervene to support and subsidise key growth areas such as clean energy and innovative technologies in a significant policy shift that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will take to the next election. In a speech to the Queensland Press Club on Thursday, Albanese set out a “more strategic and more sophisticated”… Read more »
Founder and investor network Innovation Bay is holding a two day conference, Inspire, in Sydney next month to gaze into the crystal ball about what lies ahead for the startup ecosystem over the next 5-10 years. Inspire, May 22-23, will feature founders, VCs and high net worth investors, as well as prominent sector leaders and… Read more »
Outside the world of open-source software, it’s likely few people would have heard about XZ Utils, a small but widely used tool for data compression in Linux systems. But late last month, security experts uncovered a serious and deliberate flaw that could leave networked Linux computers susceptible to malicious attacks. The flaw has since been… Read more »
Victoria’s (and Australia’s) future prosperity is dependent on knowledge-intensive companies that collaborate, innovate, and commercialise successful products globally. But to survive and reach commercial success, these companies must be able to access funding at key stages of their development. Without this, they will fail. In turn, we will fail to create a self-sustaining human healthcare… Read more »
For decades, the pursuit of quantum computing has struggled with the need for extremely low temperatures, mere fractions of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin or –273.15°C). That’s because the quantum phenomena that grant quantum computers their unique computational abilities can only be harnessed by isolating them from the warmth of the familiar classical… Read more »
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