We hope you’ve had an enjoyable break and Lunar New Year celebration.

This month we feature North Ridge Partners’ contribution to the quest to diversify the tourism-based economy of Queenstown Lakes, New Zealand by expanding its fast-growing tech sector. A labour of love we’d like to share.

ChatGPT tells us that Insuretech is the application of technology to innovate and streamline the insurance industry, often using tools like big data and AI. Having just completed a deep dive into Insuretech, this month we roll out crystal ball to predict what comes next.

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.

Global alliance! Hot on the heels of John Moore transferring to Singapore to run  our Southeast Asia practise, we’re proud to announce an exclusive alliance with global tech investment bank GP Bullhound.

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.

Here we are, six months into the global generative AI battleground. The AI hype cycle is running red hot as the titans of the technology world duke it out for supremacy, sinking billions of dollars into new platforms.

Read about the biggest deals beyond Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, learn about where experts think generative AI will have the biggest impact — and with the striking interest in Nvidia this month following its exceptionally strong quarter — discover how hardware providers, chip manufacturers and hyperscalers are fast becoming the pick and shovel salesmen of the AI gold rush.

Enjoy, from all of us at North Ridge Partners.

This month we’re still bringing you all the news, but we are taking a break from our usual original content. Instead, we’d like to understand what you like and what you don’t like about Tech Round-Up. Please answer our quick questionnaire – it’ll take less than 3 minutes.

As the Tech Meltdown of 2022 rolled into 2023, contagion spread to the banking sector. With new dominos still likely to fall, markets are nervous. This month we dive into past crashes and provide some clues on what to expect - including the wave of innovation spawned when things go awry

eCommerce boomed during the pandemic…until suddenly, it didn’t. This month we examine the new normal in ANZ, as well as the rise and rise of Asian eCommerce.

2022 may have delivered unprecedented challenges – even for the most battle-scarred of investors – but it’s important to put this year’s Tech meltdown into longer term context. While the circumstances might be extraordinary, some of the outcomes are remarkably familiar.

History will record this as the time when some of the tech giants started mass layoffs, when quarterly results stumbled, when FTX failed and when Twitter changed hands.

Such turmoil! Yet entrepreneurs and investors are still remarkably positive in selected verticals. One of those is Logistics and Supply Chain. Dive in with us.

Mountain towns around the world transformed into hot beds of tech during the pandemic, as distributed workforces found their way there in search of fresh air and a healthier environment. At North Ridge Partners we’ve been studying successful tech mountain towns like Boulder, Colorado and Bend, Oregon in our quest to help Queenstown - our spiritual home in the Southern Alps of New Zealand - to build out its own tech ecosystem.

Cybersecurity has rocketed towards the top of many risk registries, and IT spending to secure networks, data and systems is growing strongly. That’s good news for cybersecurity vendors and provides ample opportunities for investors in a sector where valuations have already significantly retreated along with the wider tech category

Sovereign states, and even corporations, are pondering the first heavy industrial-scale conflict in Europe since the middle of the 20th Century and some of the questions are being answered far from the trenches … in space. C'est la guerre.

Software may be eating the planet, but today there’s widespread indigestion. After a multi-year tear, software company multiples have given back gains. Profitability is now back in vogue, with value investors finally smiling, as growth investors cringe.