Tech & Innovation

DetailsbySven is curating about 100 gift items. Besides the popular men’s line of wallets, belts et al, there are some exotic goods too –sunglasses made from used skateboard decks and rare coffee beans. And a mix of Australian and Scandinavian products.

For those who do not know Jeremy, he is the founder of trendhunter.com, which has just clocked up 1 billion impressions and is the no.1 crowdsourcing vehicle for trend spotting. Interestingly, he says not only you cannot predict the future, but that if you do, you will extrapolate the present and end up in the same place as your competitors.

I don't mean a Dr Evil Mini Me sort of clone, either. I've just felt that sometimes, it would be better if I could be in two places at once. Like, at home and at work. Or, better yet, diving and at home, I mean work.

In 1964 Professor Harold Edgerton took this now-famous photo of a bullet piercing an apple. He was a pioneer in stop-action photography. This photo was taken in one millionth of a second. Now, photos can be taken in one trillionth of a second. And it may revolutionise everything.

The Business Monitor, which surveyed 1,004 SME operators, found online business activity such as online transactions, email marketing and social media to be in decline. Less than a quarter (24%) used search engines to promote their business, down from nearly one-third (31%) in March. Social media activity on Facebook, YouTube and Google+ fell three percentage points to 15% and professional networking on LinkedIn fell six percentage points to 13%

A strong focus of the app platform is the ability to engage and reward users. That has come from Al-Attas’ belief that “an app is useless if it doesn’t add value to the life of the user.” He also held the view that current apps “weren’t offering fans anything more than what they could find online.”

Crowdsourcing – or involving multitudes of people in a project – is not as new as many might think. For decades, much before the Internet came into being, The Oxford English Dictionary was driven by thousands of people writing in with word suggestions, etymology, usage and more. In more recent times, the human genome project used crowdsourcing, and leveraged the computing power of thousands.

Israeli designer, Izhar Gafni cycles as a hobby. While buying parts for his bike, he heard about someone who had built a canoe out of cardboard. At that was it. The idea was in his head. He wanted to build a bike out of cardboard. So, he did.

Call our SMEs old-fashioned but they would rather pursue the traditional channels. Email was the most-favoured with 47% backing, face-to-face networking scored 30% and 25% preferred direct mail.

This is one of those things that, when you see it in action, you wonder why someone didn't think of it before. It took the designers seven years to gather data, stage bicycle crashes, examine accident data and obtain feedback from a head trauma specialist. They raised $10 million in venture capital to test, design and perfect their design. But they did the impossible.

A Commonwealth Bank survey came up with an interesting number – 2.2 hours. This is the average time each Australian spent in searching for receipts and supporting documentation for their tax returns. The number adds up to a huge 1,800 “lost” years for the nation.

Google’s latest algorithm changes have highlighted the effect linking can have on your website. Links come in varying quality, some get an two enthusiastic thumbs up from the search giant, and others, not so much.

Jecks is launching Naked Wines with $1.5 million to cut sweet deals with winemakers, and choice words for the supermarkets that he alleges have undermined both consumers and winemakers.

For some time now, Germany has been on 99design’s horizon. Even though it had only an English-language site, European small businesses and startups accounted for about 15% of the 155,000 graphic design contests, reflecting strong potential. Today, 99designs considers Germany its top non-English language market, its fifth largest overall and one of its fastest growing.

When James Cameron set about making a documentary film at Earth’s deepest point in the ocean, the Marianna Trench, rather than sending in an Avatar, the legendary Canadian filmmaker sent himself. The project was filmed for broadcast on the National Geographic channel in the form of a documentary called DeepSea Challenge. Now, the team has been awarded the top prize at the 2012 Australian International Design Awards.

The Smart 100 Shin-Dig gives you the opportunity to meet equally passionate and like-minded business builders. Plus, you can network with investors and other innovation industry influencers! Come along and ask burning questions, engage with with the panel and have your say.

Roy Morgan Research has found that companies that went online earlier benefited the most – not just in online growth, but also offline, reflecting the synergies with traditional brick-and-mortar business. Over the past year, businesses that already had online sales grew 5% but those that didn’t – or didn’t for at least 12 months – saw revenues decline 4%. Also, nearly one out of two (49%) businesses that sold online for at least a year saw higher revenues whereas that was true for only one out of three (36%) businesses that didn’t engage in e-commerce.

We’ve all been there. Out-and-about the city with no charge left on our mobile. It’s a sinking feeling, really. It's like living in 1996 all over again. A new company in Sydney called Chargebar is setting up their charging stations at locations across the city, and looking to expand nationally.

“We recognised that Blue Chilli could take our value proposition, extend it to other vertical sectors and cement it as a loyalty and marketing platform through the team’s technology expertise,” said Vividways founder Paul Williams, who will continue to work with Blue Chilli. “We look forward to the journey ahead.”

The Founder Institute - a four-month executive training program for technology entrepreneurs - recently announced graduate Tom Frazier as the new Sydney director.