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Good news: We’re back with a new series of events for australiabusinessblog.com, and we have early-bird tickets available for our Early Stage event in Boston in April. Woohoo!

We also really enjoyed today ConnieSam Altman’s view of the future as seen. — Christine and Hey

The australiabusinessblog.com Top 3

• An apple a day…: Get ready to take a big bite out of Apple. Kyle and Brian remove the cover to reveal the consumer tech giant’s M2 Pro and M2 Max chips that pack some punch. The chips will be available in the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, and if you’re in the market for a new computer, the M2 Mac Mini arrives January 24, starting at $599.
• Cloudy with a chance of embedded analytics: Nothing but blue skies so far for Cumul.io, a low-code embedded analytics platform for SaaS companies. The company raised $10.8 million to further develop its business intelligence platform that quickly “connects virtually any data source, drags and drops specific functions to customize their dashboards, and then copies and pastes a snippet of code into their application to run thousands of end users,” Paul writes.
• The headline says it all: We couldn’t help but steal from the TC+ section because Tim‘s headline is just so good: “Nest co-founder Matt Rogers’ new startup sucks.” We won’t ruin it for you anymore.

Startups and VC

ChatGPT, the AI ​​that can write poems, emails, spreadsheet formulas and more, has been getting a lot of negative publicity lately, Kyle writes. That may be why AI21 Labs, an Israeli startup developing text-generating AI systems along the lines of ChatGPT, tried to take a different tack with its recently released writing tool, Wordune Spices. Wordune Spices, part of AI21’s growing suite of generative AI, doesn’t compile emails and essays like ChatGPT. Instead, it suggests options that change the voice and style of sentences already written, and also provides statistics from web-based sources to “amplify arguments.”

Apropos robots writing… On the heels of picking up a $1 billion valuation last week, DeepL is taking the wraps off a new language product, the first extension for a startup named after its popular AI-based translation tools, Ingriduh, writes. Write is a new tool that corrects your writing — spotting grammar and punctuation errors, suggesting clarity and more creative phrasing, and (soon) giving you the ability to change your tone.

There’s been a lot of fun startup news on the site over the past few days, so it was hard to pick just five to load into our little recommendation engine, but here’s what we came up with:

7 space technology predictions for 2023

Image Credits: Orlando Sentinel (Opens in a new window) /Getty Images

At the time of writing, Wikipedia notes that there have been eight successful spaceflight launches so far this year.

New spaceports are being commissioned, mobile phone users will soon be connected from space, and the Artemis program, supported by NASA, is one of many ventures that will take robots (and eventually human crews) to the moon.

“Despite the economic uncertainty, we believe new records will be set in space technology as massive commercial projects are funded,” said Mark Boggett, CEO and co-founder of Seraphim Space Manager LLP.

Three more from the TC+ team:

australiabusinessblog.com+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams lead the way. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Extra, extra, read all about how the Royal Mail confirmed a cyber-attack that disrupted the postal service in the UK. Carly writes that the confirmation comes a week after the Royal Mail said it was hit by an unspecified “cyber incident” that prevented it from sending items overseas. CEO Simon Thompson said he didn’t believe customer data had been compromised, but would notify authorities in case that changed. Some reports say that the LockBit ransomware group is behind this, and Carly is working to confirm that.

And we have five more for you: