March Tech Round-Up: Live Commerce Examined: TikTok Takes Over in Southeast Asia

Forget traditional shopping! Live commerce, where you purchase directly from social media videos, is exploding in Asia, spearheaded by the unstoppable force that is TikTok. Buckle up for a wild ride as we explore this trillion-dollar "shoppertainment" trend and how TikTok seems to have cracked the code in Southeast Asia.

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Playbook for Expanding a Tech Ecosystem

In October 2022 we reported on the work being done in the Deep South of New Zealand to help build out the tech community around Queenstown.

This stunning alpine retreat has lakes, fields and mountains to die for. It’s a year-round playground for skiers, hikers and mountain bikers. And yet despite all the fun, beauty and adventure to be had, there’s a dark side to Queenstown - its reliance on tourism, clocking in at around 60% of GDP, making the district vulnerable to economic shocks.

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Scale or Bail: in the Insurance Industry, Grow Fast, or Find an Exit.

Scale, maturity, regulation, environmental factors and … more scale … are the major factors driving the insurance sector today.

They are certainly the common threads that unite the conversations we have had with industry leaders and experts from Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and New Zealand over the last month as we sought to better understand the key thematics of a sector that while hundreds of years old, finds itself amid an era of rapid transformation and disruption.

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Balancing Incumbents and Innovators - the Role of Insuretech.

Our discussions with Insurtech experts across the Asia Pacific region have revealed a diversity of business models, with some striking commonalities.

A common and striking insight is the talent gap at large insureCos – making it surprisingly difficult to deploy internal teams to build digital products. That in turn has consistently left a gap for savvy entrepreneurs to set up, and importantly, to work hand-in-hand with traditional insurers on distribution to a new audience.

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Travel is Unbreakable

The Asia Pacific travel/tech ecosystem is large and diverse. If you’re a player, your prospects depend on what you’re selling, who your customers are, the access you have to technology and capital, and potentially where you are located. We interviewed a dozen C-suite travel/tech executives from Mumbai to Melbourne (and many places in between) to understand what’s new in the post-Covid world.

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September Tech Round-up: APAC’s Regulators are Ramping Up Tech Scrutiny.

After two decades of light touch regulation during the formative years of the digital revolution, regulators and policy makers are once again starting to bare their teeth. Europe’s GDPR is one of the most high-profile examples and the results are mixed. It has certainly brought some of the digital giants to heel in terms of their treatment of consumer privacy and data, but it’s come at the cost of user experience. And competitors to Facebook and Google say it has strengthened the hand of the walled gardens, due to their control of first party data. This month we run the search engine over digital regulation, revealing how approaches are different in the APAC region.

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Technology Investment and Advisory Leaders GP Bullhound and North Ridge Partners Announce Exclusive Collaboration

GP Bullhound and North Ridge Partners (NRP) have today announced an exclusive collaboration which will see NRP support GP Bullhound’s clients across APAC and GP Bullhound support NRP’s clients across Europe, the UK, and North America.

The partnership represents a formalisation of the firms’ multi-year relationship, adding to their mutual strength and depth in global coverage of Technology investors and strategic consolidators. This will help unlock growth in key geographies, supporting founders and investors to access a thriving interconnected technology ecosystem.

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July Tech Round-Up: Remember the Metaverse?

Barely two years ago we were flooded with hype announcing the dawn of the Web3 metaverse economy, worth billions of dollars.  And then it all seemed to dissolve.

However even if the consumer version of the metaverse – a kind of three-dimensional Facebook – is in sharp retreat, the foundations of the next generation of immersive and augmented digital experiences are still being built.  With the attention of the hype cycle now firmly switched to generative AI, this month we have another look at the metaverse.

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