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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.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreChatGPT 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.
Read MoreScale, 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.
Read MoreThe global Insurtech sector has proven to be just as susceptible to the tech downturn as other sectors. If anything, publicly traded company data suggests that it was hit earlier and harder.
Read MoreOur 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.
Read MoreSXSW in Texas is billed as the world’s most influential innovation and creativity expo, drawing the leading lights from the technology, film, music and gaming worlds. This year SXSW headed to the other end of the world – Sydney – to see how well the idea translates in a different geography. We test drove the event.
Read MoreSXSW in Texas is billed as the world’s most influential – and biggest – innovation and creativity expo, drawing the leading lights from the worlds of technology, film, music, and increasingly gaming. We test drove the Sydney event.
Read MoreThis month we bring out the crystal ball and ask, ‘where are travel and travel tech going within the Asia Pacific region?’ Covid may have presented an existential threat, but travel is back. Big time. Read about it in this month’s Tech Round-up.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreOur first article showed how irrepressible and unbreakable travel is in – even the face of even the most intractable circumstances. But what of the money that flows into travel investments – how much has gone in, how much has come out, and what happens next?
Read MoreAfter 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.
Read MoreAcross the region, governments are pushing back hard against digital platforms, and cracking down on how data can be used. Here’s what is happening in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and New Zealand
Read MoreAustralian regulators are in the middle of a decade long investigation into digital platforms and data practices, with far reaching implications for competition, privacy and media reform.
Read MoreGlobal 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.
Read MoreGP 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.
Read MoreBarely 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.
Read MoreHas the metaverse dissolved? The answer depends on your preferred flavour of virtual world.
Certainly, the idea of a consumer metaverse as an actual destination (the social media model) - rather than a way of digitally interacting (the AR/VR model) - is on the nose.
Read MoreThe 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.
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