You’ve probably heard about the “great resignation” which saw large numbers of people resigning from their jobs in the US in 2021 and 2022. We didn’t see resignations over and above what is normal in Australia. However, we did see workers resisting the post-COVID return to the office. To better understand these trends, we conducted a study of 1,400 employed Australians in 2022 to see how they were faring two years after the start of the pandemic. And the answer is: not great. Australian workers are in poorer physical and mental health since the pandemic across all ages and stages. And prime-ag ..read more

Australia is a living testament to the benefits of productivity growth. An average worker today puts in 14 fewer hours per week and takes home a real wage six times that of the average worker in 1901 – all because we are producing more per hour worked. And yet in the past decade that rate of improvement has slowed. Over the 60 years to 2019-20, labour productivity (production per hour worked) grew at an average of 1.8% per year, which sounds small but compounds each year. In the most recent of those decades, the decade to 2020, growth fell to just 1.1% – a drop of one-third. If it remains that ..read more

Welcome to our weekly column on the important things to see and do for the ANZ startup community, brought to you by the director of the Spark Festival, Maxine Sherrin. She picks out 3 things worth putting in the diary for the week ahead. If you’d like to know more, sign up to the Weekly Sparks, Maxine’s roundup of all that’s on in Australian tech and startups, which comes out every Monday.  How to Pitch Your Business Tue Mar 21, 5pm AEDT Launch Pad at Western Sydney University, Sydney Most of the time you will only get a few minutes to pitch your startup idea, if you’re lucky! S ..read more

A new medical technology incubator program developed by the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) during the former Coalition government will offer up to $5 million in funding for early-stage medical research projects with commercial potential. The $50 million BioMedtech Incubator program is being backed by the MRFF and the Medical Research Commercialisation Initiative. Responsibility for delivering the incubator has been handed to Brandon BioCatalyst and ANDHealth, which already deliver a range of commercialism programs backed by the MRFF. They’ll be in charge of finding early-stage medical r ..read more

Online retailer Kogan.com, along with six other ASX-listed companies, have been dropped from the S&P/ASX All Technology Index, as part of a quarterly rebalancing of indices. The change takes effect from today, March 20. Alongside Kogan.com (ASX: KGN), Dubber (ASX: DUB), RedBubble (ASX: RBL), Temple and Webster Group (ASX: TPW), Cettire (ASX: CTT), Frontier Digital Ventures (ASX: FDV) and Fineous Corporation Holdings (ASX: FCL) were also removed from the index. No companies were added on this rebalance. The 7 companies cut from the All Tech Index in its latest rebalance The announcement c ..read more

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) research company behind ChatGPT and the DALL-E 2 art generator, has unveiled the highly anticipated GPT-4 model. Excitingly, the company also made it immediately available to the public through a paid service. GPT-4 is a large language model (LLM), a neural network trained on massive amounts of data to understand and generate text. It’s the successor to GPT-3.5, the model behind ChatGPT. The GPT-4 model introduces a range of enhancements over its predecessors. These include more creativity, more advanced reasoning, stronger performance across multiple l ..read more

Quasar Satellite Technologies, a space communications startup building ground station services to replace parabolic dishes has raised $6 million in pre-Series A. The round by CSIRO’s VC fund, Main Sequence Ventures, and included PAN Group, and Marc and Lindy De Stoop of Climatech Group. The company has also scored a $5.3 million Defence Innovation Hub contract. It plans to use the capital raise to fast-track its Defence contract, while the current team of 14 will grow to 24 this year. Quasar emerged in 2021 from a partnership with CSIRO, repurposing advanced technology developed over the past ..read more

Former Hartsyard owners Jarrod Walsh and Dorothy “Dot” Lee are diving back into restaurant game after Easter with a new venue at the Old Clare Hotel in Sydney’s Chippendale, across the road from UTS Startups. Longshore, a seafood-focused restaurant and bar, will open in mid-April at the former Automata site at the Old Clare Hotel, seating around 100 people.   Walsh, in charge of the kitchen, said he’s thrilled to open the inner-city suburb’s first wine bar and restaurant at a site with such a legendary culinary reputation. “Our menu utilises the whole of Australia’s coastline an ..read more

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone mainstream, but implementing it is still a major challenge according to a new report by the government-funded National AI Centre (NAIC). The report, Australia’s AI Ecosystem Momentum report, spoke to more than 200 business decision-makers and AI service providers about how they were using the technology to grow their revenues and improve efficiency. While companies of all sizes are keen to embrace AI tech, its implementation often requires multi-disciplinary teams to design end-to-end solutions and the problem is that the service provider ecosystem is stil ..read more

Insurance giant IAG’s venture capital arm, Firemark Ventures, has appointed former Fintech Australia boss Rebecca Schot-Guppy a general partner alongside company veteran Bradley Armstrong. The company initially recruited Schot-Guppy  as its leverage and portfolio management manager in late 2021. Armstrong has been with the business for nearly a decade, working his way up the ranks from analyst to director in 2020, and now general partner. The duo aim to raise awareness of their portfolio companies and accelerate Firemark’s ambition to be a top global insurance VC. Schot-Guppy said sh ..read more