Good morning, hope the Budget hangover isn’t leaving you feeling too seedy today. Let’s jump in to Wednesday.
1. Tech and the Budget
The 2023-24 Budget “Lays the foundations for growth by embracing clean energy, and investing in value‑adding industries, people, skills, technology, and small business”. It’s a Budget that’s peppered with a handful of tech investments, but many that have already been promised. Notably, it’s a Budget that doesn’t have an exact direction for what it wants to do with technology as a whole, rather a handful of initiatives that it’s choosing to prioritise. We found all the bits of tech peppered throughout the 230-page document, and summarised them here.
2. Hey Google, set my alarm for 3 am
Tomorrow is Google I/O, the search giant’s developer conference, the place where it’ll unveil its folding Pixel, and (maybe) some more goodies. We’re bound to see at least some Android 14 updates, updates to WearOS, and a whole lot of AI. We’ll be waking up at 3 am for the event, but if you’d rather join us later in the morning, this link will take you to our summary of the event.
3. Spotify vs the bots
Spotify recently purged tens of thousands of AI-generated songs from its vast digital music library. The problem doesn’t appear to have been the songs themselves. Instead, Spotify was concerned about the listeners — who, as it turns out, were also generated by AI. The Financial Times reports that Spotify temporarily cut off new uploads from the AI music startup Boomy last week and took down thousands of its songs due to suspected automated streams of Boomy’s music. Read more about it here.
4. Telstra customers back online after 11-hour outage
Yesterday morning we brought you news that Telstra was experiencing an outage, one plaguing its mobile customers. Per the AFR, we learn the telco restored service to its mobile customers across after the 11-hour outage prevented customers from making or receiving calls.
📣 6:05PM UPDATE All calls should now be back to normal, so there’s no need to add area codes when calling landlines from mobiles. Sorry for any hassle caused today and thanks for sticking with us
— Telstra (@Telstra) May 9, 2023
5. Canva founder crowned Australia’s 2nd richest woman
Canva founder, Melanie Perkins, has been crowned Australia’s second-richest woman, with a net worth of $5.27 billion. This ridiculous figure contributed to Australia placing fifth globally for producing the highest number of female billionaires. The data comes by way of City Index, which scraped Forbes’ live billionaire tracker to find the country producing the most female billionaires, the richest woman according to the tracker, and also the overall net worth of female billionaires in the country. Alice Walton (Walmart heiress) topped the list, at $906.44 billion. That’s just too much money.
BONUS ITEM: We’re back to the Budget for our bonus item, this time, the stuff that’ll actually impact you.
See you bright and early tomorrow morning.