Mentioned in today’s edition: Atlassian, Jensen Huang, Google Chrome, Meta, Elon Musk, Polymarket, the Olaf robot and the small web. Plus, deals on Amazon Kindles, AMD processors and Sony BRAVIA TVs.

We can fix Australia’s failure to develop and commercialise new tech by increasing R&D funding, giving money earlier to VC-backed startups and removing the government's ability to take R&D offsets back if they're not spent on R&D, says a panel led by Tesla chair Robyn Denholm (SmartCompany). To address sinking R&D investment, the government's independent review of Australia's R&D system has delivered its report (Industry). The report, titled "Ambitious Australia", wants to give more money earlier to startups backed by VC funds/unis and to unis for training in so-called high-demand fields, to create "national strategic initiatives" and to let superannuation funds invest in startups (Information Age).

The Sizzle: This report has been given the thumbs up by just about everyone: Business Council of Australia, Tech Council, Science and Technology Australia, Australian Academy of Science, Cooperative Research Australia, etc. And why wouldn't it? This plan is mostly about giving more money to industry, start-ups and universities. Naturally, pretty much everyone is happy with this. The only tough decisions in the doc are plans to increase the minimum amount you have to spend on R&D from $20,000 to $150,000 to get the exemption. A cynical man would point out that this is a particularly friendly plan for venture capital, given Denholm sits on the board of Australia's biggest VC fund Blackbird. But that's picking nits. 

The underlying issue here: Australia's economy is dependent on what we dig out of the ground, what we grow out of it, and what we build on it. We're not exactly a world leader in inventing new technologies, and we're spending less and less on trying to do that. Part of it is because it’s safer at the moment to dig/grow/build houses. So can we fix this just by throwing more government money at this? I mean, at some point, at some amount of money, probably. But is the government willing to open the wallet to that extent and is that really the best solution? We'll see. 

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It's Nvidia's annual conference this week and the theme is "we can build things other than GPUs -- but don't worry, we're building heaps of those too." (Bloomberg, $). CEO Jensen Huang promised that the company's insane sales growth would continue its stratospheric trajectory and may hit AU$1.4 TRILLION in sales in 2027 thanks to AI (Reuters). It launched a "language processing unit" (LPU), a type of chip better suited to AI inference. Also, Nvidia joined in on other trends by saying it's developing a type of chip for use in space (sure) and launching its own version of Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw. I mean, when you're printing this much money, you can say whatever you want and people will smile and nod. Like, this: 

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A US labour board has heard that the company fired one of its staff because they called Mike Cannon-Brookes — and I'm paraphrasing — a rich jerk (AFR, $). Denise Unterwurzacher claims she was unfairly dismissed in 2023 after she mocked Cannon-Brookes on Slack. Atlassian's attorney has defended the move by saying that company employees were not allowed to be abusive or insulting. Not a great week for Atlassian's "Open Company, No Bullshit" philosophy? 

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Australia:

Rest of World:

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Earlier this month, I came across a blog from longtime programmer Kevin Boone about the "small web". 

It's a term that goes back quite a long way (here's a 2021 post about it). The easiest way to understand it is that the small web is less about the size of a webpage and more about being a type of web with simple designs and without commercial motivations. Boone reckons there's about 9,000-ish active sites on the small web at the moment -- not a huge number but enough to spend a lot of time of exploring if you choose. Kagi has helpfully put together a list of small web sites to start you off.

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Electronics

Computing

Mobile

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