Tag: Ant Bites

Ruslan Kogan, 27-year-old founder and CEO of Kogan Technologies, along with other members of the world's first team of Virgin Galactic space tourists yesterday joined Sir Richard Branson in the Mojave Desert for the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo.

The launch of Commercialisation Australia will coincide with the closure on 1 January 2010 of the Commercialising Emerging Technologies (COMET) program to new applications. Prior applications and ongoing COMET grants will continue to be serviced.

OK, so this isn't even loosely related to business, but some things just need to be seen. Like the moon landing, and 9/11. And Bohemian Rhapsody performed by The Muppets. Enjoy.

Anthillian, Rentoid.com founder and 2009 Cool Company Awards judge Steve Sammartino yesterday had the good fortune to meet Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. He asked Greenfield for his number one tip for entrepreneurs starting up a business. Greenfield, generous guy that he is, offered two. Sammartino videoed it.

Anthillian, Rentoid.com founder and 2009 Cool Company Awards judge Steve Sammartino yesterday had the good fortune to meet Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. He asked Greenfield for his number one tip for entrepreneurs starting up a business. Greenfield, generous guy that he is, offered two. Sammartino videoed it.

Cold calling is tough, humbling, depressing and exhilarating, all in the space of a day. Having just started his own business, John Kelly is learning this the hard way.

Well whaddya know. Two weeks after we wrote about Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis's suggestion that Microsoft and News Corporation should do a search deal that freezes out Google (Murdoch and Calacanis hatch separate plans to shut out Google)... it's been revealed that Microsoft and Murdoch's News Corporation are in talks about just such a deal.

Any time the world witnesses a cultural event such as Thierry Henry using his hand to put the French football side into the World Cup finals, it's never long before someone creates a flash game based on it. Check out the "Thierry Henry: France Quality with the Hands!" game (translation from French). The question is: How many people are still playing the game after they stop laughing?

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.

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.

This funny (and strangely catchy) mashup of television footage from Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Stephen Hawking's Universe series (with the aid of some masterfully applied Auto-Tune singing technology) was created as a musical tribute to honour the two great men of science. It also begs the question, 'Why can't science be cool?' (Or so uncool that it becomes cool... like Sagan's skivvy.)

I only have one other Wave contact, so I haven't exactly been Hanging Ten so far. Nevertheless, I just checked in and discovered this attentive message from my new guardian angel, The Doc. Perhaps Google's Chrome browser crashed Wave, but it's good to know The Doc is in my corner.

As avid magophiles (and Simpsons fans), this artful trigger for publicity prompted the crew at Anthill to take a quick sprint down memory lane and assemble our own Top 10 most memorable magazine covers.

This week Ross Dawson released a list of extraordinary technologies he thinks will be commonplace seven years from now, in 2016.

There is a moment in the very 'lovable' French film Amelie when its main character (of the same name) tries to imagine how many people are making love in Paris at an exact moment in time. It's cute, it's quaint, it's strangely 'loveable' and, now, it's almost possible to get verifying data as to the accuracy of her guess.

Remember the random cut and paste lettering of ransom notes from old movies and cop shows? Well, here's a cool API mashup that takes letters in various styles and fonts from Flickr so that you can spell your name, your company name, your friend's, spouse's, pet's names like any respectable cartoon villain.

Regular Anthill contributor Steve Sammartino published an interesting post on his blog this morning. Steve is in the process of tweaking the pricing model for his company Rentoid and relayed a nugget of advice offered to him by fellow entrepreneur Chris Pearson (founder of Skitch and Comic Life).

New research by Melbourne Business School Professor Karen Jehn has revealed that, in 80 percent of cases, customers who were actually being told the truth thought that they were being lied to.