

Australians have been planting grapevines since the 18th century. Today, grape growing is the largest fruit industry in Australia, with wine grape production the most predominant of the three viticulture industries, producing 1.7 million tonnes of grapes in 2014. Although traditional industries are diverging rapidly into a digital world, Australian grape producers are still plagued with the inefficiencies that come with doing things the old way. Even today, many grape growers are estimating their yield by recording bunch counts on paper while out in the vineyard, followed by doing some basic mathematics. For years, this has meant that predictions of annual grape production are out by up to 30 percent. However, with grape producers exiting the industry due to economic instability and wineries feeling the pinch, innovators are racing against the clock to revive the industry.
One startup looking to eliminate inefficiencies in the industry is GrapeBrain, a ‘viticultural intelligence system’ which leverages Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning to significantly improve grape production forecasts. By feeding large data sets into Azure Machine Learning, GrapeBrain identifies patterns and insights from current and historical data, and uses what’s happened in the past to make predictions of what might occur in the future. Over time, yield estimates become more and more accurate. Added to that, the technology can be applied to other agricultural industries, which could mean significant improvements in global food supply.
GrapeBrain, a product of parent company Seer Insights, was founded by three students from the University of Adelaide. Harry Lucas, 20, is currently studying Mechatronic Engineering, while Liam Ellul, 23 is completing a combined degree in Commerce and Law. Petros Bakopoulos, 21, who joined the company later, is studying Mechanical Engineering and Finance.
The idea for GrapeBrain came about through Ellul and Lucas’s participation in the Tech eChallenge program, run by Adelaide University’s Entrepreneurship, Commercialisation and Innovation Centre and the School of Computer Science, in partnership with Microsoft. This was mid-2014. However, they wanted to take their concept outside the university environment and throw themselves into the world of real business.
Lucas said the original idea was to create drones for broadacre farming; the drones would have been designed to help grape producers identify problems with crops. But through market research, they learned that the most underserved problem for wineries and grape growers was the inability to accurately predict yield - that is, the number of grapes that will come off a vineyard at the end of the season.
“The unanimous feedback we received was that wineries don’t need drones, they need results. They’ve been gathering data for years and lost a lot of money due to problems surrounding a process called Yield Estimation,” said Lucas.
“We started looking into this interesting problem and we just got more and more engaged. It turns out that the logistical implications of not knowing how many grapes you'll have at the end of the season are massive, some wineries lose over $200,000 per year here in the Barossa. We think its crazy that it’s not possible to do this in this day and age, so we set out to solve the problem.
The problem is costing Australia around 100 times this amount, not taking into account the challenges faced in other agricultural sectors. Lucas said the platform is applicable to other crops as well, and that the company has already been approached by bodies who administer these other crops.
“[We’re] excited to discuss our future potential collaboration with them,” said Lucas.
It may be difficult to comprehend how technology can predict grape production when there are various environmental factors that come into play, however Lucas insisted they adopt many different techniques to improve accuracy. As mentioned earlier, one major contributor is GrapeBrain’s use of the Azure Machine Learning system, which Lucas admitted has “opened up the whole field of data science to us”. GrapeBrain collects all available data that contributes to yield prediction, like weather and soil chemistry, and subjects that data to a predictive analytics process, which is part of the Azure Machine Learning system.
“The thing about modelling natural processes is that there’s many different factors which affect them. If we’re talking specifically about grape yields, there are a myriad of factors which impact a solid yield estimate, [such as] weather, soil chemistry and even the type of pruning used. That's only three factors, and it certainly gets a lot more complex in the field,” Lucas explained.
“Our system certainly takes this data into account, but it goes far beyond this. The accuracy of our predictions depends on all of these factors as well as human input. With poor data comes poor results, as you can imagine.”
What’s powerful about Seer Insights’ first solution is not only that it can make sense of data, but enables grape producers to act upon that knowledge. They can manage their soil and water better and make other informed decisions to ensure the best outcome.
GrapeBrain is currently web-based and also available as a smartphone application. The smartphone application enables grape producers to do mandatory bunch counts when out in the vineyard, eliminating the need to use a pen and paper. The data is processed and sent to the cloud.
Ellul said GrapeBrain’s ideal customer is a corporate scale winery that has an international presence - this is strategic for the startup, as it allows GrapeBrain to scale through organisations. Ellul also admitted that they’re in the process of securing deals with some large organisations so they can start testing the platform this growing season.
“The organisations we're testing with are actually our future customers and have been specifically selected due to their large overseas presences, allowing us to scale THROUGH organisations, rather than opening up entirely new sales channels overseas,” said Ellul.
GrapeBrain does not yet have a monetisation strategy set in stone. The startup will doing extensive testing before executing a business model.
“We're still taking feedback on this, but we're currently intending to charge in a fashion that scales with organisation size. It's very important to us to make this software as accessible to smaller, independent customers as it is to corporate wineries,” said Bakopoulos.
The startup had been self-funded up until recently when it secured a grant from the Bank of South Australia - a much needed capital injection. Bakopoulos admitted that the last few months have been tough for the startup both development-wise and financially.
“We've been feeling the pressure trying to get our software into shape for roll out this year, and before we received the support from BankSA we were struggling to support the financial implications of running a startup. We've passed through that hurdle now and we're excited to see our platform in use at the end of this year,” Bakopoulos said.
The co-founders are no longer actively looking for investment, however are open to the prospect of raising funds at a later stage depending on circumstances.
Lucas, Ellul and Bakopoulos have a lot to be proud of. Prior to being named as South Australia’s Young Innovators of the Year, they were personally invited by South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill to present to Cabinet. They were also invited to Seattle by Microsoft. However, what the co-founders are most proud of is the progress they’ve made with the product and the global implications of their solution.
“I'm very proud of the fact that we're solving a problem which has some incredible future applications. Our software has the ability to be adopted to other crops, and I feel like this has some incredible applications in third world countries and feeding the world. I'm most proud of the fact that we have the ability to help people,” said Bakopoulos.
Lucas communicated a similar sentiment: “I'm most proud of the software that we've built. There's nothing more satisfying than taking our platform out to a grower or winery and seeing how excited these people get to try our system out. I don't think I've ever felt anything quite like it.”
Over the upcoming months, the co-founders will be finalising their initial product offering, testing the software and executing a sales strategy. They’re also eager to test their software in California’s Napa Valley before the end of next year.This data, like any, has its limitations. The four web surveys – offered in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and English – were propagated across various local interest groups, but were predominantly accessed via CoinDesk's main site and social media platforms. For this reason, responses are largely linked to our North American and European readership and do not necessarily reflect the profile of bitcoin users outside these regions. For example, our Chinese language survey received comparatively few responses, though there are known to be many cryptocurrency users in the region.However, the general consensus is, as Fred Wilson of Union Ventures points out, "the bitcoin community is a fairly homogenous group, mainly white and mainly male". Huffington Post even described the bitcoin community as "a rich, white male disaster" in a headline. With this issue in mind, the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Intitiative and CoinDesk will work with local groups, such as CODE2040, Girls Who Code, Microsoft-sponsored TEALS programme and National Center for Women & Information Technology, to select Consensus Scholars. Consensus Scholars will get the opportunity to attend Consensus 2015 for free - the standard ticket price to the event is $1,199, while the full ticket price is $1,499. The scholars will also gain to mentorship during the event to develop a deeper understanding of the digital currency economy. Mentors include executives from Citi, the title sponsor of the conference, and other speakers at the event. “Our hope is to expose more young people, from a diverse set of backgrounds to the powerful potential of digital currency. The Consensus Scholarships will allow young people to ask questions, gain unique insights and meet with leaders in the digital currency movement,” said Brian Forde, director of the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative. Those interested in becoming a Consensus Scholar can apply here.
Featured image: Max Valente, Founder, Thought Studio. Source: Provided.
Featured image: Stefan Korn, CEO, Creative HQ. Source: Provided.
One of the ways to think about product evolution, the evolution of marketing and communications, or perhaps more accurately, the evolution of the overall customer experience is through “push and pull” strategy. This is explained, specifically in a marketing context, very well here.
In 2007, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote “In a great market - a market with lots of real potential customers - the market pulls product out of the startup.”
Much has been written about the failures of pushing whole products and product messages to unsuspecting, potentially uninviting markets, with the expectation that “meaning” and “value” to the customer were things you could define through a set of assumptions and effectively deliver through a solid plan.
In fact, this is the very premise through which The Lean Startup and similar methodologies were conceptualised. Most products still find their beginnings through vision or insight, but rather than building the entire product, we build the minimal thing (i.e. the minimum viable product or MVP) that will enable us to validate the accuracy or inaccuracy of our assumptions. We then use this learning to drive our next assumption and set of tests.
As Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup (2011), writes, “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.”
The key thing here is learning, not dictating. We now actively engage in constant learning; learning about behaviours, about needs and about beliefs. Our ability to learn what we need to about the customers we aim to serve is driving the change or evolution I refer to.
This evolution of products and experiences, at least in chronological terms, started with us - the people building and marketing products - pushing whole products to markets. Think Don Draper. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t. We then began building products for people, people that existed within markets, and those people proceeded to pull the products they genuinely wanted directly from us.
The result of this, at least for many large enterprises, was a shocking revelation or “turn of the tide” as it were, where the customer or user became the boss. This turn of the tide, for some organisations, resulted in flipped org charts with the customer on top and the CEO at the bottom, challenging the assumptions about not only what products we should or shouldn’t build, but how we should interact with our customers throughout the entire customer journey.
At this moment, we are on the cusp of a move right back to push, where we once again take parts of the burden of choice away for the user. This may sound contrarian, however, the key difference is that this time the push from us to the individual people we aim to serve, within the market we intend (or may not intend) to serve, comes with context.
Context is of course, king.
In the future, the products we build and consume will be made for a market of one. What I mean by this is each and every product will be optimised for one individual person; constantly learning and constantly evolving. Pushing us what we need when we need it.
An early incarnation of this can be seen through Meeco.me, a product that helps everyday consumers define their intent, and build context rich relationships with the brands and products that are meaningful to them. Users of Meeco are part of the early movement towards “market of one” experiences.
My understanding is Meeco users currently do this by defining their intent, however, I believe products like Meeco will begin to predict and push.
Coming back to context, you and I clearly care about different things and we are therefore willing to pay different amounts of money, at different times, for the things that we believe deliver us value. As an example of a current use case, two people may order the exact same product from Amazon, but one of the people has a serious sense of urgency, because they need to use it tomorrow for a specific purpose, and is therefore willing to pay almost whatever it takes to get that product ASAP.
Our context is what sets us apart, drives our behaviour and controls our propensity to pay.
Taking this further, consider the progression of the Quantified Self movement, the Internet-of-Things and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This divergence of market forces and technological capabilities can help us deliver context rich, predictive customer experiences with the user as the primary beneficiary.
What’s really interesting about the journey to this future “state” is that, at times, it feels to be taking forever. But when you think about it, the iPhone was only released in 2007, wearables are only now becoming valuable, and AI (depending on what side of the fence you sit) finally seems to be progressing.
In the words of Chris Dixon, “exponential growth curves seem gradual and then sudden.”
Singularity University frames it slightly differently, stating our perception of seemingly gradual progression is mostly deception. This deception, likely due to time our short-term inflated expectation, often results in disappointment.
This can perhaps be explained more simply using the below image:
[caption id="attachment_44376" align="alignnone" width="865"]Amara’s Law explains this deception perfectly: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
My prediction is that the somewhat linear growth we have experienced is coming to its end, and that exponential growth, as described above, is the phase in which “products for a market of one” can become a technical and commercial reality.
Imagine an interface, with a suite of “things” or capabilities that understand you? I mean really understand you. This “thing” knows what you care about, it understands your intentions, your desires and your goals, and, it helps you figure out the optimal way, each and every day, to achieve the things that mean the most to you.
What’s the market for such a thing? Does it help us achieve our daily jobs, both in work and in life? Does it eliminate fundamental pains or create new potentials for gain? What secrets are waiting to be uncovered? Who are the customers? Is it everyone who currently has a smartphone? How do you interact with it? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What’s the experience and how does the experience differ from you to I? What’s the minimum thing we can build to validate the key assumptions we have about how this changes our experiences, our interactions or our behaviors? When might this become real? Are we way too early to even start thinking this way? Who are the early adopters? Which platforms will it integrate with, or will it create something entirely new?
What do these questions mean? Opportunity. Opportunity to find a secret truth, to ride or even drive this evolution, and create context rich products and experiences that genuinely delight people all around the world.
This is why people like you and I will have work in the future.
Featured image: www.commerce.gov.
Image: Accodex founders Chris Hooper and Markus Cirillo.
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Kingston does make a good point about the issues Australian startups experience when it comes to raising capital. There have been many times when individuals and startups that have participated in well-known accelerator and incubator programmes, have attempted to raise money in the US and heard nothing but crickets. If American investors do not have skin in the game, we are going to have trouble getting them to take the Australian ecosystem seriously.
"All of our investors are from these markets so when I bring them in, they have a vested interest in introducing the startups to everyone in New York or Silicon Valley or LA, because that's how they make money - by getting these companies funded," says Kingston. "It's about aligning the domestic knowledge with a commercial incentive."
Kingston did tell Startup Daily that he has a problem with some of the 'support structures' currently in place in Australia's startup ecosystem - particularly programmes that are not entrepreneur-friendly and are set up to make money from entrepreneurs by charging them for services or forcing them to work with associated companies. He believes that the approach of certain Australian incubators has been absolutely devastating for the startup community and some entrepreneurs.
"I have had entrepreneurs literally crying in my arms about how they've been loaded up with debt from these incubators, and forced to buy stuff they don't want," says Kingston.
"The equity deals that have been made are meaningless; the incubators got equity on the basis of false pretences like 'we'll get you over to the US for additional funding'. I don't caution entrepreneurs against that, I just say, 'make sure you're very clear on what you want. Very, very clear and then make sure they're the best partner to have'. If founders want US investors, this isn't the best way to get them. I think a lot of people do these type of deals because they're not sure what to do next."
This suggests that there's a pre-education phase that is missing in the startup ecosystem. As startups have become more 'sexy' in the last few years, it has resulted in more people running into the market - some of them are perhaps not the best ones to be teaching or guiding entrepreneurs.
Kingston wants Trimantium to play a role in the whole ecology of Australian entrepreneurship. For him, this is not about getting 'all the deals'. He says that the firm believes and loves co-investing and doing deals with other investors.
Kingston certainly has strong opinions on incubators and accelerators, opinions that could be seen as contrarian to a large portion of the players in the Australian ecosystem.
"Compared to the average Australian fund we're contrarians," says Kingston.“There’s three major things that are contrarian about us. First, we believe impact investing is more robust over the longer-term; second, we have a very different view on valuation than most people; and third, we believe very heavily against a lot of things like incubators and accelerators.”
Until there is data that actually supports claims that incubators and accelerators actually produce global companies that make a difference, Kingston stands firm on the belief that they are not great for the ecosystem.
"We don't believe in incubators and I don't think that accelerators work at all. Entrepreneurs need to be able to fail quickly. The problem with incubators is that they keep them alive. Just die. That's what you need to do and incubators do not create that outcome and that is very unfortunate."
Featured image: Philip Kingston. Source: Provided.
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Image: Airinum Team, Source: Supplied
Telstra-backed startup accelerator program muru-D announced its latest intake of startups last night after an intense three-day bootcamp that saw 10 companies selected out of 40 that were on the shortlist when it began on Saturday. These 10 companies will make up muru-D Class 3, through which they will receive up to $60,000 in seed funding and have the opportunity to receive further funding of up to $120,000 via the muru-D follow on fund announced in October.
The new program will kick-off on February 1st 2016 and startups will immediately benefit from the growing community of muru-D mentors and industry professionals. Class 3 also sees perhaps the most diverse intake of companies from muru-D in regards to industries, as well as a solid mix of software and hardware plays.
From aquatic drones that inspect underwater assets to a ride-sharing service to space aboard nano-satellites, it is undoubtedly the most ambitious I have personally seen muru-D be in terms of taking a risk on companies that are literally creating new industries, not just revolutionising existing ones.
Cofounder at muru-D Annie Parker said that it was encouraging to see so many applications for this current intake and that it was a reminder of how the sentiment and support of the wider community can make entrepreneurship and innovative concepts really flourish.
“We accepted 390 registrations and 171 completed applications and were blown away by some of the creative ideas we received this year," says Parker. "Between the drones, the nano-satellites, apps and internet of things platforms, this intake has raised the bar again and reminded us what an incredibly exciting time it is to be part of today’s technology landscape. I’m also thrilled to say that this year 60 percent of the startups have a female founder or team member, which almost double the industry average."
The fact that five of the ten teams have female founders or cofounders is not just great for muru-D, but it is also an important milestone for the Australian startup ecosystem; in fact I believe to my knowledge muru-D is the first major local accelerator program to achieve this.
The ten successful companies for muru-D #SYD3 class are:
Founders: Nasir Ahsan, Hina Ahsan, Abraham Kazzaz and Masood Naqshbandi
The company provides automated (robotic) asset inspections with a specific focus on underwater assets, i.e. waterways and reservoirs.
Founders: Steve Fanale and Johnny Timbs
The company provides a service ensuring the efficient and reliable delivery of food by allowing food service businesses to search, book, manage, pay, train and monitor their delivery drivers.
Founders: Atul Pandey, Matthew Esterman and Wai Yat Wong
It stands for Educators Lifelong Learning App and the company is like a “fitbit” for teacher’s professional growth.
Founders: Giorgio Doueihi and Edward Colyer
The company has created a web and mobile app for schools, combining homework management, learning resources, student reporting, and communication into a single, unified experience.
Founders: Brendan Myers, Luke Taylor and Rory Gleeson
The company has created a software infrastructure for Internet of Things that connects the sensors to existing business applications.
Founders: Phoebe Adams, Luis Lequerica, Donna Armstrong and Ryan Cross
The company has created a craft and activity box subscription service for kids aged three to 10 years old.
Founders: Kyrylo Medvediev, Olga Oleinikova, Yaroslav Prisiazhnuk and Stanislav Prisiazhnuk
The company has created a tool that makes selling online, making donations or trading services quick and easy by using a simple URL.
Founders: Sebastian Chaoui and Solange Cunin
The company allows experiments by students to be conducted in space using a technology ride sharing service to space aboard nano-satellites.
Founders: Sean King and Bede Overend
The company allows web developers to build better websites, web apps, and tools much faster by enabling edits to be made live on a page.
Founders: Jay Spence, Paul Korzhyk and Phoebe Lau
The company has created a mobile app that provides preventative mental health support to employees and improves their productivity.
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It is also important to note that as part of the new partnership between Seven West Media and muru-D, which will see the company supporting startups in the media industry, Simpla has been chosen to receive specialist digital media mentoring and support by the organisation.
Chief Digital Officer of Seven West Media Clive Dickens addressed the audience at last night's intake presentation, telling everyone that Seven was committed to supporting great startup ideas.
He said, “Seven West Media is embracing disruption as an enabler and we are committed to supporting entrepreneurs and startups with great ideas. Our new partnership with muru-D allows us to do both.“
Image: Amy Potter and Jordan Lilley, Source: Supplied