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Optus Wants its Customers Back: 5 Tech Things to Know in Australia Today

Athina Mallis Avatar
Athina Mallis
Optus Wants its Customers Back: 5 Tech Things to Know in Australia Today

Happy Friday!!! TGIF, sadly this is my last day covering 5 things before Zac comes back next week. I’ve had a ball with you all, Ath.

1. Optus has had a ‘stable’ financial year

Optus hasn’t had the best year, we’ve all know that. Yesterday, they posted their financial results for the 2024 full year and they were, stable. For the full year, operating revenue was up 0.1 per cent and operating expense up 0.2 per cent.

The telco said it added 116,000 subscribers to its mobile customer base, including a growth of 108,000 prepaid customers, which it said was underpinned by a strong performance from amaysim.

Optus said Mobile and Home revenue grew by 2 per cent in the full financial year.

Optus said a significant win for the telco was its Multi-Operator Core Network (MOCN) agreement with TPG Telecom. No mention of new CEO, current NBN boss, Stephen Rue.

CEO and CFO Michael Venter said the results demonstrated a solid performance in a difficult environment, as Optus remained focussed on enhancing customer experience.

“Optus is working hard to rebuild the trust of customers after a challenging 18 months and these results demonstrate we are on the right track,” Mr Venter said.

“We’re listening to our customers and in the year ahead we’ll be continuing to prioritise what we know is important to them – a resilient network that delivers seamless connectivity, great value products and services, and simple, efficient customer service.”

2. Canva enters its enterprise era

Aussie design darling Canva held its Create Event in LA overnight and unveiled a slew of new products, the biggest one being a tool for larger businesses. Canva Enterprise is a subscription-based offering that will “meet rapidly growing demand and adoption by large organisations”.

This seems to be the ability for large organisations to use the software at scale and make collaborating easy plus it comes with some extra security features.

“As demand for visual content soars, navigating organisational complexity is more challenging than ever. We democratised the design ecosystem in our first decade and now look forward to unifying the fragmented ecosystems of design, AI, and workflow tools for every organisation in our second decade,” Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva said.

3. Google linking Australia and Africa, via subsea cable

Google announced some new investments in digital infrastructure and security initiatives overnight and one of them is to connect Australia and Africa via a subsea cable.

Umoja, is the first ever fiber optic route to connect Africa with Australia, Google said in a blog post.

“Anchored in Kenya, the Umoja cable route will pass through Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, including the Google Cloud region, before crossing the Indian Ocean to Australia [Perth, WA],” VP, Global Network Infrastructure, Google Cloud, Brian Quigley said.

Umoja will enable African countries to more reliably connect with each other and the rest of the world.

4. 144 million people love Suits

Netflix released what people watched in the second half of 2023 and it seems a whole lotta people are big Suits fans. Buried deep under all the Netflix show bragging, the streaming company dropped stats on how many people watched licensed titles and 144 million people watched Suits over the second half of 2023, I mean I get it, I too am a Harvey Spectre fan. Netflix titles like Leave the World Behind generated 121M views and Leo had 96M views.

5. Meta and Google are heading to Hollywood! (Maybe)

Meta and Google hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream in their smartphones: to partner with Hollywood studios over their AI video content software. Bloomberg reported these meetings were around licensing content for their AI video generation platforms. This also coincidentally happened after OpenAI spoke to a number of Hollywood studios for the same thing. Sorry kid, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there!

BONUS ITEMS: Yes, items, I’ve been gathering funny tweets for you all and for a fun Friday treat, here are funny things I’ve found on the internet this week.

The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

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