Tech & Innovation

Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, today officially launched a new research supercomputer facility, located at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

Georgina Rinehart, Chairman of Hancock Prospecting, was named the 2009 Telstra Australian Business Woman of the Year at an awards ceremony held in Melbourne on Thursday night.

These three amusing sketches are courtesy of the BAFTA-award-winning comedy sketch program Harry and Paul, featuring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. While clearly lampooning the regular UK Dragons, who won't be familiar to most Australians, there's also much mirth to be found in their portrayal of the shows endless line of absurdly optimistic entrepreneur-pitchers.

These three amusing sketches are courtesy of the BAFTA-award-winning comedy sketch program Harry and Paul, featuring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. While clearly lampooning the regular UK Dragons, who won't be familiar to most Australians, there's also much mirth to be found in their portrayal of the shows endless line of absurdly optimistic entrepreneur-pitchers.

Sure they might see just three hours of sunlight a day during the winter months and need to take out a mortgage in order to purchase a pint of beer at the local pub, but those Scandinavians have it all figured out when it comes to the World Wide Web.

Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, has announced the latest round of COMET funding, with 14 projects sharing $985,600.

It was the fastest car in its class in the 3,000-kilometre Global Green Challenge, but the engineering students who threw their time and talents into Sunswift IV to win their race to Adelaide face future uncertainty in our fragile renewable-energy sector.

Sydney University’s Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering is on the hunt again for Australia’s greatest innovators. Nominations are being sort for the Innovation Heroes Award, which the Warren Centre bestows each year on innovators who have created successful products or services from brilliant engineering ideas or inventions.

Sydney University’s Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering is on the hunt again for Australia’s greatest innovators. Nominations are being sort for the Innovation Heroes Award, which the Warren Centre bestows each year on innovators who have created successful products or services from brilliant engineering ideas or inventions.

At the FOOMA Japan 2009 conference, these sushi and patisserie robotic arms were a standout. They could soon replace humans on production lines where soft touch is critical, but the imagination boggles.

Did you feel like your creativity was really nurtured at school? Chances are, it wasn't. In this great talk from the 2006 TED conference, British creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson argues that current education systems are geared to producing obedient worker drones rather than creative innovators. In contrast, he believes that educators should consider creativity as important as literacy when preparing young minds for a rapidly evolving future.

Designer reality TV shows might be a hit in 2009, but sartorially creative visionaries had their own views on the kind of threads we'd be wearing in the year 2000. Still waiting on those glass wedding gowns, people...

With all the chatter about the wave of soon-to-be-released tablet computers, and with the newspaper industry foraging around for a viable digital replacement for paper, it's good to remind ourselves that this is just the beginning. Pretty soon we could be rolling up our laptop and tucking it under our arm like a yoga mat. Check out this conceptual "Rolltop" from www.orkin-design.de.

Firstly, let's clear up some confusion. Commercialisation Australia is not going to pay for your marketing campaign, help you with advertising or fund you to break into your desired market. CA will help you up to the point that you are ready to go commercial. That is, it will help with pre-commercialisation.

Here's a new "projection" technology that is sure to turn heads. These hypnotic 3D video mapping projections are the work of Dutch creative agency NuFormer Digital Media, which employs a battery of powerful projectors to render the effect on buildings of any size. Awesome.

The Prosperity Index, dubbed the world’s only global assessment of wealth and wellbeing, ranked Australia in the top 10 for categories including economic fundamentals, democratic institutions, education, health, safety and security, personal freedom, governance and social. However, Australia fell to 15th place for entrepreneurship and innovation (page 26 of the report). Despite recent economic woes, the US and UK took the top two spots in that category.

A couple of weeks ago Pollenizer's Mick Liubinskas put in a video call to Rentoid's Steve Sammartino to pick his brain about the concept of startup momentum. Fortunately, Mick recorded it for the benefit of us all. Watch Steve discuss his views on the important role iteration plays in emerging businesses.

Every company should be able to tell its own story in a compelling way. Of course, it helps if that story is compelling to begin with. Check out this slick animated history of Google... according to Google.

As one of this year's 30under30 winners, Clint Walker was instrumental in building, running and selling the enormously successful Rising Sun Research (RSR), which was also named the Coolest of the Cool at Anthill's 2007 Cool Company Awards. He's now in startup round two with his second company, Run with Robots.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Here at Anthill, we've taken a particular interest in the evolving concept of crowdsourcing, and specifically the growing practice of companies sourcing creative ideas and designs from the crowd online. Crowdsourcing is a bone of contention in the Anthill community. For yet another view, here we publish the thoughts of Paul Cornwell, Partner at creative agency BCM Partnership, on Unilever's recent use of crowdsourcing website Idea Bounty to source creative ideas for its Peperami brand.