Troubled Makers - State of Play for Hardware Startups in Sydney

When we think of a tech startup, most of us imagine the latest app to do x, y, z. But what about the physical, hardware startups that are ACTUALLY IN the xyz? IoT sensing devices, 2nd gen WiFi, medical wearables, autonomous vehicles, 3D printed body parts and much more.

What are the issues in this little known sector? Maker spaces, robotic STEM and custom/ small run manufacturing ... and are there innovation skill sets being lost in this sub culture of innovation?

Moderated by

BRUCE TULLOCH
Managing Director - BitScope Designs

Bruce has more than 3 decades experience as a professional engineer and entrepreneur building solutions in industrial, education and commercial markets. His experience has covered high performance audio systems for the US film and television industry, sonar systems for the AU Navy, diagnostic systems for nuclear fusion, monitoring solutions for CAT/MRI systems and a 3000 core HPC research cluster for Los Alamos National Laboratories.

BitScope Designs, manufactures and sells products globally in partnership with Premier Farnell and Embest Technologies and collaborates with Raspberry Pi Trading and others to build IoT, edge, cluster and cloud computing solutions.Bruce is also a founding board member of The Studio, a start-up incubator in the media, entertainment and gaming & creative industries.

OUR AMAZING SPEAKERS:

PAUL SCHLUSSER
Founder and CEO — EdgeGroup Incubator

Paul has founded, managed and run several internationally successful business in areas of wireless communications, public safety, real-time financial data, print and online media publishing and personal wireless communications. Paul broke out to start his first business more than twenty-five years ago. Initially a one-man software and electronics engineering consultancy, the business quickly grew to an organisation employing 65 staff operating in over two dozen countries worldwide including offices in Singapore and London.

He is a passionate technologist and inventor and is listed as inventor on patents in electronic music composition and wireless communication systems. He has also won multiple international design awards for software, electronic and industrial design.

KATIE GREEN
Operations Manager - CSIRO Lindfield Collaboration Hub

Katie is an experienced team leader and project leader, with a background in precision optics, thin films and surface analysis. She is currently the team leader for the Graphene and 2D materials team at CSIRO Lindfield and operations manager for the Lindfield Collaboration Hub.

Katie is passionate about developing strong internal and external collaborations to build on CSIRO capabilities and exploring opportunities for commercialization of new technology.

ANDREA WATSON
CEO and Founder of Sparrows.io.

Sparrows was founded in June 2018 as part of the BlueChilli Xcelerate Program. Sparrows track high value, time-sensitive goods giving businesses transparency to manage their supply chain.

Before this venture, Andrea was in Finance at Air New Zealand and a Director at CBRE London.

IAN SCRIVENER
Founder/CTO cleverHeart, Catalysr Entrepreneur in Residence

Ian Scrivener has been making stuff, sailing and seeing better ways for as long as he can remember. Ever the troublemaker, in the mid 80s he almost got expelled from a prestigious north shore high school for his first tech startup in the Computer Club Room. Starting out as a coder/founder he quickly scaled his ’straight odds’ blackjack variant computer game to meet the booming customer demand. All empires fail eventually... Not deterred, Scrivener took on board the early lessons of risk management, the default narrow and reflex thinking of too many public servants with tiny power… and the importance of businesses trading in non-perishable currencies!

THE VENUE

Work inc ( http://workinc.com.au/ ) is an awesome heritage space now coworking community. They are sponsoring our event so please take time to say thanks to someone from their crew.