November Tech Round-Up: We Test Drive SXSW Sydney
SXSW 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.
Enjoy, from all of us at North Ridge Partners.
What We’ve Been Up To
Hot on the heels of Fleet Space’s highly successful Series C raise, our aerospace tech vertical is busy raising capital for Alauda and Hypersonix.
Original Thinking from North Ridge Partners
SXSW has built a global brand as the hub of innovation in the creative sectors. While its first foray outside the US lacked energy, there were still plenty of sold-out sessions. We pounded the pavements to test the vibe. Read our match report here.
Big Tech News
The LLM crowd has been busy. OpenAI led with its developer event. Then came news of Elon Musk – not to be outdone - gatecrashing the party with Grok, which Wired described as “a Rebellious AI with few guardrails”. Meanwhile, Amazon has Olympian plans to rival Microsoft and Google in the LLM world, with a model built on two trillion parameters, double that of ChatGPT.
The old world isn’t taking all of this lying down, however - with publishers alleging IP infringements by LLMs of news, book and music content.
Coming of age. Netflix (founded in 1997) reported Q3 profits of $1.6 billion (up 20% from a year earlier, adding 9m new subscribers). Alphabet (a 1998 baby) reported its Q3 results to a restless market - YouTube outperformed but Google Cloud disappointed. Over at Meta (2004), revenue increased 24% and costs declined 7%, doubling profits. Uber (2009) reported $905m in free cash flow.
Ageing gracefully? Apple (a 1976 baby) posted its fourth successive quarter of revenue decline but won the great game of expectations since the market was expecting $89.3bn and it actually delivered $89.5bn.
Asia Pacific Tech News
Hot off the press - was last Saturday’s Singles Day the largest shopping day ever? China's tech titans are being discrete, so we may never know.
Like a lot of other tech companies, India’s Tata Technologies and Singapore’s insurance unicorn Bolttech are considering IPOs. Conditions remain tough - although Goldman do see glimmers of hope for 2024.
From left field (South Australia, no less) comes Energy Exemplar with arguably Aussie’s software exit of the year.
Meanwhile, Chinese firms currently dominate in cybersecurity patents as China looks to further scale local capabilities. Huawei and Tencent lead the charge.
Stuff We Found Interesting
Here’s one for early adopters! Humane aims to replace your phone with its AI-powered pin-whatsit.
WeDon’tWork. Here’s what happens when a property company masquerades as a tech business.
GenAI extravaganza. The good folks at Sonder Studio have this to say about ChatGPT on its first birthday. Meanwhile, Biden’s executive order on AI looked to address mounting concerns over its societal impact. But AI pioneer Louis Rosenberg said it ignores the biggest problem of all.
Fair dinkum. The Aussies want to make their country the world’s quantum capital. And now they’re in the market for a quantum computer.
Tech Investment Banking Across Asia Pacific
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