The cartoonish 3-dimensional consumer metaverse may have retreated, but the industrial metaverse - where businesses invest in digital twins and build solid use cases around AR/VR and IOT interconnectivity - continues to develop strongly and attract investor interest.
Read MoreHere 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.
Read MoreBarely six months have passed since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT onto the savanna and with that release brought the world of generative AI into the heart of business, and increasingly, public consciousness.
Read MoreNvidia’s share price has been trending north all year, and then on May 24th it went vertical, creating the kind of mythical hockey stick curve so beloved by gimlet-eyed start-up pitch-writers. Not bad for a 30-year-old business that was already worth more than half a trillion dollars a day earlier.
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreA new dawn for software company Iress.
Image by Midjourney - the sun rising over Barangaroo.
Read MoreAs 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
Read MoreEconomic upheavals are more akin to droughts than meteorite strikes; they tend to be regular occurrences common across decades and reflect a cycle rather than random catastrophic events (although if we lived long enough, meteorite strikes might feel much the same!)
Read MoreThere were no iPhones loose in the world before June 2007. None. And no Androids either until a year later. Until Apple dropped the first version of its now ubiquitous phone, the best user experience you could hope for was Blackberry’s graphical user interface, gnarly keyboard, and form factor that while sleek, curvy and blue, would barely fit into a t-shirt pocket.
Read MoreeCommerce 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.
Read MoreThe pandemic made them look like superstars. With travel-loving Antipodean consumers locked up at home for months on end, and restrictions on how far they could move from their homes (for example, only 5 km in New South Wales and basically nowhere in Auckland!), consumers headed for the keyboard and engaged in an orgy of online spending.
Read MoreAfter a two-year pandemic-fuelled boom, retail eCommerce companies across the world have experienced what researchers at Insider Intelligence and eMarketer characterise as “precipitous deceleration.”
Read MoreChatGPT is already transforming the world. In this month’s newsletter we explore the duality - the yin and yang - of generative AI, while asking if it is ushering in the next tech bubble.
(Image by Dall-E 2: “a painting in the style of Picasso depicting the rise of generative AI”).
Read MoreChatGPT has kicked off a digital arms race, but it’s only the first shot in the huge generative AI disruption that is coming behind it.
Founded in 2004, Facebook took a year to reach a million users. Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012 for a billion dollars, took two took and a half months.
Read MoreThat didn’t take long. Within weeks of the launch of ChatGPT, as people started to appreciate that the long-awaited AI inflection may have finally dawned, the warnings began.
Read More2022 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.
Read MoreConventional logic is that black swan events are rare and infrequent, cannot be predicted (although they seem obvious in hindsight), and affect markets severely.
2022 seems to have delivered its fair share of rare, hard-to-predict and disruptive events. Whether or not they were black swan events, the cumulative effect has been devastating to many.
Read MoreAs the bells start to jingle and the Auld Lang starts to Syne it’s time to lack back at the year, through the blunt and irrefutable lens on the data.
Read MoreHistory 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.
Read MoreCOVID, the war in Europe, threats of war on Taiwan and longer-term structural changes such as the shift to e-commerce and the drive to build more sustainable and digitised supply chains have created challenges for logistics providers around the world.
But it has also created the opportunity for entrepreneurs to use technology to tackle these problems bringing an influx of investment into the sector.
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