Balancing Incumbents and Innovators - the Role of Insuretech.
Our discussions with Insurtech experts across the Asia Pacific region have revealed a diversity of business models, with some striking commonalities.
A common and striking insight is the talent gap at large insureCos – making it surprisingly difficult to deploy internal teams to build digital products. That in turn has consistently left a gap for savvy entrepreneurs to set up, and importantly, to work hand-in-hand with traditional insurers on distribution to a new audience.
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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.
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Our Verdict on SXSW Sydney
SXSW in Texas is billed as the world’s most influential – and biggest – innovation and creativity expo, drawing the leading lights from the worlds of technology, film, music, and increasingly gaming. We test drove the Sydney event.
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October Tech Round-up: Travel, Updated
This month we bring out the crystal ball and ask, ‘where are travel and travel tech going within the Asia Pacific region?’ Covid may have presented an existential threat, but travel is back. Big time. Read about it in this month’s Tech Round-up.
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Travel is Unbreakable
The Asia Pacific travel/tech ecosystem is large and diverse. If you’re a player, your prospects depend on what you’re selling, who your customers are, the access you have to technology and capital, and potentially where you are located. We interviewed a dozen C-suite travel/tech executives from Mumbai to Melbourne (and many places in between) to understand what’s new in the post-Covid world.
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Follow the Money
Our first article showed how irrepressible and unbreakable travel is in – even the face of even the most intractable circumstances. But what of the money that flows into travel investments – how much has gone in, how much has come out, and what happens next?
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September Tech Round-up: APAC’s Regulators are Ramping Up Tech Scrutiny.
After two decades of light touch regulation during the formative years of the digital revolution, regulators and policy makers are once again starting to bare their teeth. Europe’s GDPR is one of the most high-profile examples and the results are mixed. It has certainly brought some of the digital giants to heel in terms of their treatment of consumer privacy and data, but it’s come at the cost of user experience. And competitors to Facebook and Google say it has strengthened the hand of the walled gardens, due to their control of first party data. This month we run the search engine over digital regulation, revealing how approaches are different in the APAC region.
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Across the region, governments are pushing back hard against digital platforms, and cracking down on how data can be used. Here’s what is happening in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and New Zealand.
Across the region, governments are pushing back hard against digital platforms, and cracking down on how data can be used. Here’s what is happening in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and New Zealand
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Australian regulators are in the middle of a decade long investigation into digital platforms and data practices, with far reaching implications for competition, privacy and media reform.
Australian regulators are in the middle of a decade long investigation into digital platforms and data practices, with far reaching implications for competition, privacy and media reform.
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August Tech Round-up: GP Bullhound Partnership
Global alliance! Hot on the heels of John Moore transferring to Singapore to run our Southeast Asia practise, we’re proud to announce an exclusive alliance with global tech investment bank GP Bullhound.
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Technology Investment and Advisory Leaders GP Bullhound and North Ridge Partners Announce Exclusive Collaboration
GP Bullhound and North Ridge Partners (NRP) have today announced an exclusive collaboration which will see NRP support GP Bullhound’s clients across APAC and GP Bullhound support NRP’s clients across Europe, the UK, and North America.
The partnership represents a formalisation of the firms’ multi-year relationship, adding to their mutual strength and depth in global coverage of Technology investors and strategic consolidators. This will help unlock growth in key geographies, supporting founders and investors to access a thriving interconnected technology ecosystem.
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July Tech Round-Up: Remember the Metaverse?
Barely two years ago we were flooded with hype announcing the dawn of the Web3 metaverse economy, worth billions of dollars. And then it all seemed to dissolve.
However even if the consumer version of the metaverse – a kind of three-dimensional Facebook – is in sharp retreat, the foundations of the next generation of immersive and augmented digital experiences are still being built. With the attention of the hype cycle now firmly switched to generative AI, this month we have another look at the metaverse.
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The Metaverse is Becoming the Way We Will Live and Work Online
Has the metaverse dissolved? The answer depends on your preferred flavour of virtual world.
Certainly, the idea of a consumer metaverse as an actual destination (the social media model) - rather than a way of digitally interacting (the AR/VR model) - is on the nose.
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Maturing Technologies Like AR/VR, Digital Twins and Automation Convergence Will Fuel The Industrial Metaverse
The cartoonish 3-dimensional consumer metaverse may have retreated, but the industrial metaverse - where businesses invest in digital twins and build solid use cases around AR/VR and IOT interconnectivity - continues to develop strongly and attract investor interest.
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June Tech Round-Up: The Generative AI Battleground, Six Months In
Here we are, six months into the global generative AI battleground. The AI hype cycle is running red hot as the titans of the technology world duke it out for supremacy, sinking billions of dollars into new platforms.
Read about the biggest deals beyond Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, learn about where experts think generative AI will have the biggest impact — and with the striking interest in Nvidia this month following its exceptionally strong quarter — discover how hardware providers, chip manufacturers and hyperscalers are fast becoming the pick and shovel salesmen of the AI gold rush.
Enjoy, from all of us at North Ridge Partners.
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The AI Hype Cycle is Running Red Hot
Barely six months have passed since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT onto the savanna and with that release brought the world of generative AI into the heart of business, and increasingly, public consciousness.
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Hardware and Hyperscalers are the Picks and Shovels of the AI Gold Rush
Nvidia’s share price has been trending north all year, and then on May 24th it went vertical, creating the kind of mythical hockey stick curve so beloved by gimlet-eyed start-up pitch-writers. Not bad for a 30-year-old business that was already worth more than half a trillion dollars a day earlier.
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May Tech Round-Up: Tell us what you think!
This month we’re still bringing you all the news, but we are taking a break from our usual original content. Instead, we’d like to understand what you like and what you don’t like about Tech Round-Up. Please answer our quick questionnaire – it’ll take less than 3 minutes.
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April Tech Round-Up: Crashes, Contagion and Innovation
As the Tech Meltdown of 2022 rolled into 2023, contagion spread to the banking sector. With new dominos still likely to fall, markets are nervous. This month we dive into past crashes and provide some clues on what to expect - including the wave of innovation spawned when things go awry
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And so the Latest Tech Wreck Continues
Economic upheavals are more akin to droughts than meteorite strikes; they tend to be regular occurrences common across decades and reflect a cycle rather than random catastrophic events (although if we lived long enough, meteorite strikes might feel much the same!)
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