Domm Interviews Mackays Split Spaces Wheelspinner Jarryd Townson

 

We discuss what's happening across Queensland's startup ecosystem from Rockhampton to Cairns and in-between!

Daily Precap - Tuesday 24th July 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Tuesday 24th July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

Samsung users can bask in the glory over their rival iPhone users, according to Internet speed measuring company Ookla, Apple's iPhone X on average has speeds at 29.7 Mbps, well behind Samsung's Galaxy S9 at 38.9 Mbps.

 

This is a significant difference, can mean a much better experience streaming videos, surfing the web or even make for crisper calls.

 

Speaking of speed, 5G is coming.  Qualcomm a chip manufacturer has unveiled its first 5G modules for smartphones and hotspots, which will be available as early as next year.  

 

To explain the significance here, 5G speeds cap out at 20 Gigabits / second, to compare our NBN maxes out with a top plan at just 100Mbps, meaning a 5G smartphone in your pocket will be twenty times as fast.

 

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, just released its latest earnings report for Q2, and it revealed growth of 26% with revenue for the 3 month period of $32.7B, with net income at 10% of $3.2B

 

And that’s AFTER they received a $5Bn fine, meaning their net income was actually 8.2Bn!!!!

 

Our national strategy needs to be better focused on commercialisation of innovation.  We need to look to companies like Google or Alphabet as competitors for our startups to compete against, and not only as easy tax targets for our ATO.

 

Gamers Gamers Gamers, Microsoft is rumoured to be working on two new Xboxes.  The first is to designed to be their flagship device, with the second designed to be a low-powered model.  

 

MOre importantly Microsoft thinks they have fixed the latency issues with gaming.

 

We will have to wait and see,

 

In the US, 10% of households now have at least one smart speaker, with Amazon Alexa the most dominant, and Google and Apple playing catch-up.  

 

But, the smart speakers are expected to be in 55% of households by just 2022, if not sooner.  This represents a remarkable opportunity for startups to capitalise on an entirely new platform, being voice.

 

The opportunity exists now, as a race to connect as much of the digital and physical worlds to these smart speakers as possible.  Booking restaurants, buying movie tickets, buying a new bike; all of these vendors will need to be organised through a voice enabled network; there is a huge opportunity and one Australian startups should be jumping on.  Given at 10% of the US population with a smart speaker, we are talking about a market size of over 32M in the US alone, which is already bigger than the entire Australian population.

 

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews and tip-offs, and the occasional rant about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram and Twitter @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Monday 23rd July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

Be careful translating anything important on Google Translate.  THe service has been spitting out weird religious texts for some users around the world, when attempting to translate inputs like the word ‘dog’ repeated over and over.

 

Although the reason is unclear, some experts believe it may be because Google has used the bible and other religious documents to help train its artificial intelligence engine.  

 

However, Google has dismissed this, and said its simply nonsense in, nonsense out.

 

Ola, the Indian Ridesharing Giant who recently became Ubers newest competitor in Australia, has now completed 1.5 million rides since launching here in February.  

 

Under direction from its newly appointed managing director Simon Smith, the company is promoting a better and fairer deal for driver partners, with Ola taking lower commissions, than its competitors.

 

He may be under fire across the world at the moment, bu Elon Musk will be celebrating after this weekend when his space company, SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Falcon 9 rocket, while putting the Telstar 19 VANTAGE satellite into a high orbit above Earth. The mission marks the 13th launch of the year for SpaceX and the 26th successful landing of a Falcon 9 rocket booster.

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews and tip-offs, and the occasional rant about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram and Twitter @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.

Daily Precap - Friday 20th July 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Friday 20th July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

Now your insta stalkers have a new tool in their arsenal, with a green status dot appearing next to usernames when they are active on the app.

 

Your Uber driver may soon start selling you snacks and drinks with ber partnering with in-car commerce company Cargo.  Cargo provides boxes of items for sale to Uber drivers, and the riders can buy the product through an app, with the driver sharing in the profits.

 

Google is hoping to replace Android, it now has over 100 engineers working on a whole new operating system called Fuschia it hopes will soon replace Android on every IOT device, from smart alarms in your house, to smartphones.

 

Camplify an Airbnb-style sharing economy platform for caravans has got the tax man to budge in a big win for the sharing economy, with an ATO ruling so people can  claim tax deductions on things like maintenance expenses, without having to register the activity as a business.

 

This is a landmark ruling and one that will likely pave the way for other similar sharing economy related tax deductions.

 

As predicted, Afterpay, the buy now pay later service, yesterday released their market update yesterday and what an update it was.  

 

Such strong continued growth that the stock closed more than $2 higher yesterday than the day earlier at a whopping $13.53, valuing the scaleup at nearly $3Bn.

 

Some key takeaways from the update:

Not only do they process 25% of all onlijng fashion transactions, but now they also process 10% of all physical fashion transactions in Australia

10% of Australian purchasing or adult population have used Afterpay, with 2.2M customersWith 92% of their monthly transactions from repeat customers

Having launched around 2 months ago in the US, they have already processed 11M in sales

 

Very impressive stuff, and again, companies like Afterpay, people like its CEO Nick Molnar are who you should be looking to as role models for startup growth, not some bloke down at your local startup who has never done it but loves to preach.

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews and tip-offs about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Thursday 19th July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

Google has copped a $5Bn fine in Europe over its Android mobile operating system.  The European Commission has concluded that Google has abused its Android market dominance in three key areas:

 

Google has been bundling its search engine and Chrome apps into the operating system.

 

Google has also blocked phone makers from creating devices that run forked versions of Android,

 

and it “made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators” to exclusively bundle the Google search app on handsets.

 

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says Android has created more choice, not less, and that Google will appeal the EU ruling.

 

Finally, Samsung has listened, and next year they are releasing a 7” phone that can do the one thing we have all been asking for, bend in half and be folded like a wallet.

 

Seriously, to all phone manufacturers out there, just concentrate on the important things, like not catching fire, long battery life, take really fucking good photos, give us the fastest possible data connections and don’t sell our data.  The rest is fluff.

 

But, luckily, a Silicon Valley company called Light, has just raised $121M, and the company produces cameras with 16 lenses.  They are going to be using the money to take their tech to autonomous cars, and smartphones with as many as 9 camera. Now that would be a bloody good photo.

 

Roblox an MMO (Massively multiplayer online) game, said that malicious code was uploaded to one of its servers in a hack, which results in the virtual gang rape of a 7-year-olds virtual character.

 

This is just one of those atrocious stories that shouldn’t have been technically possible, and then given it was, shouldn't have been what some sick malicious hackers intent was.

 

We have another great booming Kiwi company, Re-Leased.  The company just raised $2.1M, but that’s not the good bit.  The good bit is that this is a company with real traction and is looking to customers as their primary source of income.  The run a commercial property management platform, and they are already managing $250M of rent a month through the platform.

 

Airbike, a Sydney based bike sharing startup has ignored the mortality of other bike sharing startups in Australia and has launched in Canberra.  I dont want to sound like a broken record, but PLEASE we dont want your bikes, we want electric scooters, stat!

 

If you are a founder or co-founder, then drop me a line, tell me what you are working on, I would love to know!

 

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews and tip-offs about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.

Daily Precap - Wednesday 18th July 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Wednesday 18th July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

If you have annoying Instagram followers or stalkers you might be in luck, reports have been circulating of more and more users seeing a “Remove follower” button popup on their Instagram apps.

 

Booking.com parent company, is on a spending spree, I recently spoke about how they had bought up HotelsCombined, but now they have splashed $500M for a stake in Chinese Uber-competitor Didi Chuxing. (CHUSHING)

 

If you are bald, or have red hair, or curly, or white hair, then you are in luck and about to get representation in Apple’s new emoji pack.  Plus, not to mention our very own kangaroo emoji!

 

Amazon’s AWS cloud computing giant has announced a whole range of faster processors and higher memory instances.  But, still dont expect to be able to run a profitable Bitcoin mining operation in the cloud.

 

Google Assistant now wants to manage your whole day, not just tell you the weather, and it has released a visual representation of your day available on it OS and Android apps.

 

We don’t know what the hell is happening at Freelancer.com, because there has been no news, but for some reason their share price has grown by 25% in just the last 3 days.  

 

Listen up startups dreaming of international expansion, Afterpay, is expected to announce their US market update imminently, and perhaps even today.  

 

Afterpay took 25% of online Australian fashion transactions in just 4 years, but the US market represents an exponential leap in growth.  

 

This company is a role model for our startup scene who want to understand how a hugely commercial and massively successful startup grows.

 

If you are a founder, stop listening to some guy bleating the same old regurgitated catchphrase spiels like a broken record down at your weekly startup event, and go find someone in that company who can mentor you with first hand experience.

 

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews and tip-offs about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.

Daily Precap - Tuesday 17th July 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Tuesday 17th July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

To start with the most important news of the day, today marks 8 years of being madly in love with my gorgeous wife Meleisha Holland; thank you for being my everything.

 

Now, today I want to focus on just one important piece of news.

KPMG’s Venture Pulse report has revealed last financial year was a record setter for the Australian VC market with $849M pumped into Australia startups.

 

Globally, the records were smashed also, with $94 billion invested in startups.

 

Amanda Price, Head of KPMG AUstralia High Growth Ventures, called out her concerns on the focus of late stage investment deals in Australian start-ups.   

 

Now I want to deep dive into this as symbolic of an important and critical issue we face in our start-up ecosystem.

 

We are far too risk averse across our ecosystem, from all sides, from start-ups to investors, and corporates.  

 

Our start-ups aren’t shooting for the stars, they aren’t desperately taking global market share.  

 

Instead, our startups are focusing on more modest targets, catering to the local market, whether it be city, state or country focused.

 

Our support networks in our startup ecosystems are majorly facilitated by academics, public servants, and a wave of ecosystem veterans, with little to no commercial backgrounds or success.

 

Now, truly, it is amazing to have such a number of people willing to give up their time and energy to nurture our startup ecosystem;

 

however, the issue we face is that this demographic of supporters are naturally risk adverse and conservative in nature.

 

So, it is little wonder why we are spitting out start-ups mostly lacking any real implementation of global growth and targeting.

 

To the VC front, our VC industry is obviously in its infancy, compared with that of our US counterparts.  

 

But it has grown extraordinarily quickly and overall has done a lot to provide capital to our burgeoning start-up scene.

 

However, I completely agree that there is an ultra-conservative trend amongst Australian VC’s to back company’s who have already shown maturity in their market with the results to back that up.  

 

However, these ‘safer bets’ wont give us the huge exits, and large multipliers VC’s need to offset a whole portfolio of bets on high risk early  start-ups.

 

So, our VC’s are then looking for more safe bets, with lower returns at later investment stages, and then not having free capital needed to invest in the higher risk, early stage companies yet to show real traction or maturity.

 

From a corporate view, this year, the US expects an exponential growth in start-up acquisitions from corporates.

 

In Australia, I can’t see this ringing true.  Our corporates are still incredibly slow to partner with, trial services, or source services from start-ups; let alone, acquire them.

 

Long term this combination of conservative behaviour will be disastrous for our start-up sector if not addressed now.

 

We need round out our start-up ecosystem with highly commercial operators and mentors.  

 

Let’s bring in the founders of successful exits from the US and overseas.

 

Let’s bring in our corporate high-flyers who can cut deals.

 

Lets no longer promote mentorship or take leadership from community veterans that haven’t demonstrated ability.

 

Let’s raise VC funds that are dedicated to betting on high-risk, high-return, early stage Australian companies.

 

Let’s expect to loose money, but let’s also expect to see some companies shoot for the moon, and land.

 

Let’s get our corporate boards pushing their companies and CEO’s to make use of our innovation sector, to trial, source from, and buy relevant start-ups.

 

As a nation let’s stop fearing, and start doing.  

 

Because if we don’t we will be left behind.

 

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews, tip-offs and the occasional rant, about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram or twitter @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

I am Domm, that was your daily precap, or daily rant, thanks for listening.

Daily Precap - Monday 16th July 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Monday 16th July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

Work is gonna get more exciting, Nerf has just announced a new VR gun that pairs with your smartphone.  So now you can have epic NERF battles and dont need to worry about HR calling you into the office for a misshot nerf dart.

 

If you are a meat eater, you may want to find a new place to work.  Coworking giant, WeWork, with 212 global office spaces, has just announced a ban on red meat, poultry and pork at all company events, and will no longer reimburse employees for meals containing meat.

 

Their goal is to reduce their carbon footprint, and they expect to save 15.5M animals in the process by 2023.

 

Analysts estimate, Amazon will account for $258Bn or 5% of US retail spend in 2018, which is the equivalent of 49.1%, nearly half, of their total US online retail spend.

 

The iPhone just wont take off in India, Apple sold less than 1M iPhones in India, in the first half of 2018, in a country with a population of 1.2Bn.  Compare that to Australia, where Apple sells nearly 4.5 million iPhones a year, yet we have a population of just 24M.

 

Finally, someone has found a use for segways, Ninebot the owner of Segway has built a kit that converts segways into Go-Karts.  Now that’s a much more respectable way to ride a segway.

 

Amazon Prime Day kicks off at midday today, so expect some massive deals on the most wanted tech products, for the next 36 hours!

 

If you are looking for a job in tech, all the big names are hiring with vanacies at: Facebook, AirBnb, Automattic - the company that owns Wordpress, Microsoft, Snap and Google.

 

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews and tip-offs about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram and Twitter @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.

Daily Precap - Friday 13th July 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Friday 13th July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

OOO its Friday the 13th, what a spooky day.  And it the future is looking spooky and grim for a hacker that has been caught trying to sell a US Air Force Drone manual on the dark web.  Worst of all he was only trying to sell it for a measly $200 bucks.

 

Luxury carmaker, Jaguar, now has self driving cars on the road.  New Waymo branded Jaguar I-Pace SUV’s have been spotted on the streets of San Francisco.  But the vehicles havent got self driving mode enabled just yet, instead they are collecting data needed for self-driving tests.

 

You can now communicate through morse code on your iPhone.  Google has just released the feature through its 3rd-party Gboard keyboard, available through the app store.

 

Meero, a Paris based company which uses machine learning to automate the post-shoot editing for photographers has just landed $45M to grow its customer base.

 

If you need help wading through the hundreds of applicants you got for your job ad, then check out Greenhouse.  They are in intelligent recruiting platform that helps pick the top candidates, and they have have just raised another $50M to fuel their growth.

 

Microsofts Slack Competitor and group chat tool, Microsoft teams, is now gearing up to really take the fight to Slack, with their new Free tier opening up the floodgates, allowing businesses with up to 300 users to use the chat tool without paying a cent.

 

If you have been on the hunt for a new laptop, Apple just released a new lineup of upgraded Macbook Pro’s overnight.  From the outside its the same laptop, but they have all been juiced up under the hood, with the 15” model maxing out at 32 Gigs of RAM.

 

Paidy, a Japanese fintech startup run by two non-japanese men has just raised $55M to let consumers shop online without a credit card.  Instead, they receive a monthly bill from the payment service for all their purchases, which they pay through bank transfers or direct debit.

 

You can now split your Uber fare with your mates, with the car sharing company now accepting split payments through Paypal’s Venmo payment service.

 

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews and tip-offs about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, have a scary Friday 13th, and a great weekend.

Daily Precap - Thursday 12th July 2018

 

Hey I’m Domm, it’s Thursday 12th July 2018, and this is your daily precap of the latest and greatest technology, startups, and business news.

 

HR and recruiting is typically one of the hardest parts of growing a company and has the most friction for employees, but hopefully it will get a whole better with New Zealand based company, Joyous, landing a $1.5M seed investment, led by Airtree Ventures.  Joyous throws away typical HR conventions and instead enables employee to employer interactions through a conversational style messaging UI. Its the slack for HR.

 

Seatfrog, the Sydney based startup which aims to fill premium seats on planes and trains, by letting people bid to upgrade into empty seats, has just raised $8M bucks led by European venture capital firm Octopus Ventures.  Their opportunity is huge, with empty seats on planes and trains representing tens of billions in lost revenue, annually.

 

If losing all your fake twitter followers over the last couple of months wasn’t enough, your Twitter follower count may shrink by another 6% next week, as Twitter makes a change to no longer count locked accounts in stats.

 

Youtube TV can’t seem to keep up with demand,  It went down in May during an NBA match, and now again during a crucial World Cup Match on Wednesday.  I guess Optus can feel slightly less embarrassed about its World Cup outages now.

 

But Youtube isn’t the only service with outages, Snapchat’s messaging service was down for hours late last night, and also experiencing widespread app crashes.

 

Startup Australia  chief Alex McCauley has come out saying that we are driving startups to Singapore because of bickering between NSW and Victoria, over which is the most innovation and startup friendly cities.  Shockingly, Brisbane, the countries 3rd largest city and with a booming startup ecosystem, didn’t get a mention.

 

Popular hotel booking site HotelsCombined has been bought, as Booking.com parent company looks to expand its Kayak business unit in Asia Pacific.

 

If you bought too much food at Woolies this week, there may soon be a solution with UK company Olio, raising $6M to grow its location-based app and website that lets you list and post a photo of unwanted food items to be sold to other people in the same neighbourhood.

Do NOT miss out on the best news, reviews and tip-offs about the most exciting happenings in tech, startups or product releases, make sure you are following me on instagram @domm, AND subscribe to the daily precap podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

 

That was your daily precap, I am Domm, thanks for listening.