Australian tech news
January 2023 round-up
Australian tech news headlines in January of 2023 covered subject areas including ChatGPT’s impact on exams and essays in Australian higher education, Queensland’s potential in the battery industry, tokenized deposits and stablecoins, the country’s ongoing challenges with cyber-attacks, and more.
And for our other editions, spanning daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly updates on Asia’s technology spaces, here’s an outline.
Digital Assets in Australia – Tech Council / Accenture
- ICYMI: Australia and the United States enter the CLOUD Act Agreement to facilitate access to electronic data in investigations of serious cross-border crime
- Download: Digital Assets in Australia, 2022 Final Report, from Accenture (pdf)
- “Australia’s a bike-sharing graveyard but new players are betting big on Sydney.”
“More than 100,000 suspected login details for Australian gov’t agency portals have been discovered on a dark web forum with fears they’re part of a new massive global data breach.”
- Australia: Techstars to join Sydney’s Tech Central district, bringing mentorship, programmes, capital and global connections to Australia’s startup space
- AI, ChatGPT and education: “Australian universities to return to ‘pen and paper’ exams after students caught using AI to write essays…”
- “…in Australia, 87% of current jobs require digital literacy skills, and by 2025, the country will need another 156,000 digital technology workers according to recent research by Deloitte.”
Mobike Australia: “More than 1600 bikes with a total value of around $1.3M built by Chinese startup Mobike have been left in warehouses and on the streets of Australia’s east coast.”
- Australia: Queensland ‘battery industry has the potential to contribute $1.3 billion in annual gross value-add and produce 9,100 jobs by 2030’ suggests discussion paper
- Musk’s Twitter destruction continues: “…Twitter is in the process of ending its physical presence in Australia, cutting the handful of staff that survived its previous rounds of layoffs.”
- Australia: Recharge Industries plans Au$300M factory to build lithium-ion batteries, aiming for production in late 2024, in bid to provide a supply free of China supply chain risks
- Hub Australia unveils 62 purpose-driven companies for Flexi-Impact Program
Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in the Asia Pacific Region
- Australia & New Zealand: Techstars x Founder Institute Startup Weekend Online is set for February 17-19 – 54 hours from idea to startup
- Australia: New South Wales firms and research organisations now eligible for up to $4M to commercialise quantum computing hardware and software
- Australia: Accenture to detail engineering phase of battery gigafactory in Victoria, initially producing 2GWh by 2024 and with sights on 30GWh for energy storage systems and electric mobility
- Australia: Dept of Home Affairs awards Au$37M contract to Fujitsu to manage tech behind current Identity Matching Services system, with addition of national facial recognition database under possible consideration
- Australia and the Indo-Pacific – Understanding our strategic connections to Asia’, an 8-week, fully online course from Perth USAsia Centre, is running an info session tomorrow, January 24th
Australia: “About 2,500 current staff and a number of former staff at [Queensland’s] second-largest university have had personal data stolen, which could be used in identity theft.”
- Australia’s Rumin8 backed by Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures, focusing on anti-methanogenic cattle feed to limit methane emissions from agriculture
- National Australia Bank eyes ‘green stablecoin’ with recent moves into blockchain, tokenized deposits and green assets and AUDN stablecoin launch
- National Australia Bank minted AUDN bank-backed stablecoin on Ethereum blockchain in December, aiming for solution roll-out mid-2023 for trading carbon credits and overseas payments
- Australia: Consumer watchdog to investigate beauty, lifestyle, parenting and fashion influencers who reportedly failed to disclose affiliations with products, misleading consumers
- Australia: Hackers breach at least 12 firms, compromising an online education provider and impersonating it to gain access to other firms’ systems
- Singapore’s Seventh Sense to establish artificial intelligence R&D hub in Melbourne, Australia, focusing on AI-based computer vision and cryptography for defense, security, fintech and retail
Tending Australia’s tech ecosystem: Who should be regulator(s)?
More of Asia’s tech news headlines
The monthly collections listed by country, above, are drawn from our daily Asia tech news updates, which go out on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and via mobile app.
We also deliver weekly updates in newsletter formats, via LinkedIn and Substack; and each of those also provides our tech newsletters in web format, for reading online.
Beyond these, we also produce quarterly collections, gathering a jurisdiction’s technology news into 3-monthly digests each year.
Accenture: Digital Assets – Unclaimed Territory in Asia
