“I’m incredibly proud to be Tasmanian. It’s a special place and community that has always punched above its weight and forged its own path. Over the last 20 years, seeing the growing confidence in Tassie’s ability to do its own authentic, unique, world-class thing is genuinely one of the great joys of my life. Good people doing incredible things.”
That’s a quote from a recent LinkedIn post by Zac Duff, the co-founder and CEO of JigSpace, quite the extremely good technology company. You just gotta love the passion.
I especially loved the passion, as I happened to be in beautiful lutruwita right at that moment too, taking in all the specialness of Hobart and reminding myself that there’s a lot more going on in the Australian tech ecosystem than what you absorb from a diabolical, algorithm-defined social media feed doom-scroll.
Zac name-dropped a number of world-leading companies, extremely talented individuals, initiatives worth giving a damn about, and naturally, Mona, the renowned Museum of Old and New Art, which never fails to blow away new visitors from all over the world (and spark some very interesting conversations!)
Included within those mentions, and the subsequent comments that lit up with enthusiasm and advocacy, were scores of other directions to point your eyes, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a full knowledge share exchange happening people.
It was quite the moment for me, being on the ground there amongst it, understanding it contextually just a bit more.
I was in downtown Hobart to speak at the annual Enterprize Tasmania Elevate Demo Day, featuring nine founders pitching their future vision to a full room at the Crowne Plaza.
Based in North Hobart (and soon to set up a new HQ), Procreate is a complete art studio, tailor made for iPad, allowing artists everywhere to create sketches, paintings and illustrations to their hearts desire. Just a few months ago it won the Apple Design Award for Innovation, and it is used by everyone and anyone, to the tune of 40 million plus globally. In my experience and observation, that has included a fine artist friend, a graphic designer colleague, my tattoo artist, and my nine-year-old daughter!
This amazing company is undoubtedly one of the success stories of the Australian technology world, and it’s a shining beacon of independence playing by its own rules.
And I have a quick funny story about that. A few months ago, I sent the signal out that when I arrived in Hobart, I was going to arrive at Procreate HQ to see if I could get in front of founder James Cuda and conduct a mini-interview.
Amy Fogarty, Casey Farrell and the Enterprise Tasmania team invited me to be at Demo Day, I suddenly had an excuse, so “Off we go to Procreate HQ” I said to myself.
Thankfully Procreate does not see the merit in employing a security guard at its front gates, because I was allowed to just sit at the front, drinking my coffee, manifesting James to head into my orbit.
And. He. Did.
He was on foot, heading to their new HQ.
“Hi, I’m Gaz, I flew from Melbourne to see Procreate HQ, nice to meet you, James.”
The elusive Cuda and I then walked through Hobart CBD for the next 20 minutes or so. And now, just how Zac expressed, I have a very good sense from a world-class founder of why it just has to be Tasmania. Cool story, that one (for me especially!).
The accumulation of great stories didn’t stop there.
After Rob Vernon, the CEO of Indicium Dynamics, took part in the pre-Demo Day Investor Pitch (the lions den, to get them game ready) with myself and others, we got to talking about his incredible company.
Indicium is inspired by the Latin word for ‘information’ and the team delivers cutting-edge IoT data management solutions globally, to collect, integrate and display data for a range of industries such as forestry, agriculture, and embedded throughout councils and resource management enterprises.
I had taken note of Indicium for a long time, so a meeting was set at Hobart Real Tennis Club, one of the oldest sporting clubs in the Southern Hemisphere (established in 1875!).
Gaz: Rob, let’s go over Indicium’s recent traction. Where has the focus been for the team lately?
Rob: About 12 months ago, we entered this space of using cameras, artificial intelligence and other technologies, to detect a fire from space in under 10 minutes and autonomously go put it out. We’re the only semi-finalists in the global XPRIZE Awards from the Southern Hemisphere as well, mind you, and that’s a pretty big deal for us in our global expansion focus.
G: How does one put out fires autonomously, out of curiosity?
R: We can do a lot of that terrestrially via a combination of soil moisture, fuel moisture, smoke detection sensors, and also computer vision and the cameras we access. So that’s our part of the jigsaw puzzle. Indicium’s piece is also that data aggregation orchestration play, so being the glue in terms of being able to distribute this in lockstep. We work with a company in Texas called Little Place Labs, who focus on Earth observation, and so we have created a virtual constellation of satellites to help us detect a fire from space.
G: And you mentioned another side of the equation?
R: Yep, the other side is the autonomous response piece — we work with a custom drone manufacturer here in Tasmania called Taz Drone Solutions. To bring this all together from our perspective: a fire is an anomaly. So we can think about this as anomaly detection: “Could we autonomously task a drone to go have a look at an anomaly, then in the future, deliver payloads to resolve?”
So we work with our partners in forestry, to start a contained fire, let the AI automatically detect it, then orchestrate the autonomous response to put a drone over the top of that fire. That’s what we’re working on with this XPRIZE competition, which has two years to run still. That’s our challenge: how are you going to assemble a ton of water filled autonomous vehicles to put out a fire, 20 meters by meters? No one is carrying enough payload to effectively do anything about these fires autonomously. Yet.
G: So where’s the expansion efforts for Indicium directed?
R: We’ll investigate more work on the Eastern Seaboard, and opportunities in SA, NT & WA, whilst verbalising our future capital strategies. We’ve come out of forestry, but any large asset owner is a potential customer: wind farms, solar farms, battery farms, transmission lines, mines, coal seam gas providers…those that are trying to manage a risk in the environment, and a threat to their asset. And a very important part to what we do, is community buy-in to ensure that community protection.
Quite the moment for me then to head straight from the Indicium Dynamics discussion, thinking about environment protection and fire relief, to then enter the Crowne Plaza showcase space to see nine emerging teams pitch their ideas to a full room (prepared for the moment, of course, by the lions den the night before)
I’d hate to pick a favorite, as that’s not what it’s about. But one of my favourite pitchers and one of my favourite founders of one of my favourite Australian companies joined me on stage to speak about our perspectives on funding options, growth and scale and, naturally, why Tasmania matters as a burgeoning technology ecosystem globally.
Fiona Turner leads Bitwise Agronomy, a company bringing farming together with modern leading technologies to create the smart farms of the future and ultimately grow better quality crops more efficiently.
She’s one of the country’s very best leaders, one who just happens to be on the board of Enterprize Tasmania helping to grow the capabilities of many more local founders in the process.
And joining me on stage also was Jessica Scott, who pitched Casalyf on stage to a lot of people. Jessica took part in the Enterprize program from all the way over in WA, and has also embedded herself in programs such as Blackbirds’ Giants program, to scale Casalyf — focused on helping homeowners manage their homes, more simply.
My many thanks again, to Brian Collins of fin.amp for hosting the conversation, to Amy Fogarty, Casey Farrell, Maddison Lee and Teresa O’Rourke for their tireless efforts in doing the engagement piece such as this, and to the teams who got themselves pitch ready and involved, in thinking about how to grow something incredibly meaningful from Tasmania, as those who have come before them have done.
That’s it, a little peek into my time in Tassie. Thanks for indulging me.
I got asked onstage what I thought would have to have happened in a year’s time, to see progress in investment into the Tasmanian tech ecosystem.
“Well, Procreate will have talked more about their home base in Tasmania, and put it on the map more so. That is important in any technology ecosystem — that we know these companies that can grow and expand globally, and especially when working from one of the most remote parts of the world.
“And Dark Mofo time seems like a very ideal time to run some technology focused activations. The government should pay for that, then get out of the way and let the people who know how to execute that, execute that.”
Hail Tasmania!
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Garry Williams is the founder of GROUP GROUP, a communications and advisory service for challenger brands. He was previously director of engagement for Tractor Ventures, and was lead organiser for FuckUp Nights Melbourne & Sydney.
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