Lobby group The Tech Council of Australia (TCA) is looking to take the battle up to Singapore, China and Japan in making Australia the regional tech hub for the Asia-Pacific region, attracting global players to the country. A new report commissioned by the TCA, Turning Australia into a Regional Tech Hub, outlines the existing strengths… Read more »
Earlier this month, posters started going up around Sydney advertising an event called “In the Ops Room, with Palmer Luckey”. Rather than an album launch or standup gig, this turned out to be a free talk given last week by the chief executive of a high-tech US defence company called Anduril. The company has set… Read more »
Global search giant Google is not responsible as a publisher for serving up links to defamatory material, Australia’s High Court has ruled. The landmark decision overturns exisiting rulings by the Victorian Supreme Court and its Court of Appeal involving a $40,000 damages award against Google to Melbourne lawyer George Defteros for a hyperlink to an… Read more »
Tech giant Google has been hit with $60 million in penalties by Australia’s Federal Court for for making misleading representations to consumers about the collection and use of their personal location data on Android phones. The fine resulted from legal action by consumer watchdog the ACCC, which took Google to court in October 2019 over… Read more »
On Wednesday, reports began emerging Google was down. Google down for thousands of users – Downdetector https://t.co/jQYLzHdjNC pic.twitter.com/TIbcYrtImU — Reuters (@Reuters) August 9, 2022 While it has since returned, it once again highlights our dependence on technology service providers and shows how reliant many people are on a single operator for daily functions. There are… Read more »
Less than two weeks after the announcement of its acquisition of US healthcare company One Medical, Amazon is continuing its expansion with a US$1.7 billion offer for iRobot, the manufacturer of Roomba automated vacuum cleaners. The acquisition will bolster Amazon’s line of smart home products and add to the retail giant’s vast store of consumer… Read more »
Earlier this month, the Internet Archive asked a US court to end a lawsuit filed against it by four large book publishers. The Internet Archive is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1996 that lends digital copies of books, music, movies and other digitised content to the public. It aims to support people with print disabilities,… Read more »
Uber has had a controversial history since its founding in 2009, from violent conflicts among drivers to a secret software allegedly used to evade law enforcement. Now, a leak of over 124,000 documents dubbed the Uber files shows the extent to which the firm under co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick capitalised on that chaos… Read more »
The gig economy is in trouble. Rideshare drivers are cancelling in droves. Wait times for food delivery are ballooning out and driver shortages are leading to food waste. So, what’s going on? To find out more, I interviewed 30 Melbourne gig workers who worked as rideshare drivers, food deliverers or for task-based platforms such as… Read more »
Uber’s strategy was clear from the outset: move quickly into markets, operate with dubious legality, create a critical mass of demand, and deal with the consequences later. Now a trove of over 124,000 internal files from Uber – including messages between executives and internal briefing notes – has revealed the scope of the company’s market… Read more »
Uber Australia has struck a historic agreement with the Transport Workers’ Union – a statement of principles that re-regulate work in the Australian rideshare and food delivery industry. This is a major shift to industrial relations in the gig economy. Uber and its rival platforms have largely treated their workforce as independent contractors, not employees… Read more »
A landmark decision by the NSW government disputes resolution body, the Personal Injury Commission, with see the family of a food delivery rider killed in a traffic accident in 2020 receive $830,000 in compensation after food company and its insurer accepted liability for his death. Xiaojun Chen, 43, died in September 2020 after his bike… Read more »
Whether you’re just stepping into Web3, or you’ve been busy paving roads for a while now, there’s no denying that it’s a vast and often confusing place to be. “We are literally rethinking everything from the ground up,” Colette Grgic, Head of Startup Ecosystem, AU & NZ for AWS said at the recent Startups in… Read more »
Twitter pugilist Elon Musk has a new war to fight on the micro-blogging site he’s buying. After ordering his executives back into the office for a “minimum” of 40 hours a week via email, Musk followed up with an all staff email saying “If you don’t show up, we’ll assume you’ve resigned”. Taking a dig… Read more »
Elon Musk’s US$44 billion offer to buy Twitter and turn the social media platform into a private company is almost a done deal. But not quite. While Twitter’s board has endorsed his offer, Musk now needs the nod from a majority of Twitter’s shareholders and US corporate regulators. Before we get on to the details… Read more »
The Canva brand is now worth more than Woolies, Telstra and Bunnings
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NBN Co surfs layoff wave, cutting 500 staff to ‘simplify’ as competition grows
Invest Inya Farmer, a fintech that lets people put their money where their mouths are, plants $1.1 million Seed round
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