Sport's Cutting Edge

Amy Crosland is the Operations Boss of ASTN, and she has just released a ‘Women in Sports Innovation’ report, showing less than 10% of Aussie sport start-ups are female-founded. The study also shows female-founded start-ups give a 63% greater return on capital investment than male start-ups. 20-year-old sports journalist Ava Stone also joined the discussion, and said true equality will be reached...

The simplification of betting mechanisms could be the future of sports gambling. Founder of Statstrade, Chris Zheng has adapted an existing software to take up residency in the betting and sport statistics world. Predicting the wager for sporting matches is becoming mainstream, with anyone able to view the odds right from their phone. Zheng took the technology, and created tools companies can use...

Over time, the presence and persona of community-level sporting clubs continues to adapt. Steve Pallas, founder of Sports Community, is aiming to help nurture inclusivity and support clubs around Australia. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, clubs have struggled to stay afloat- so understanding continued and strategic growth is more important now than ever before. Pallas’ platform, now part of the B...

Swimming in Australia is adapting to change with the times, benefitting from all that technology has to offer.  The traditional, most common timing process can lead to varied outcomes, and a lack of consistency across competitions within Australia and beyond.  Multiple staff or volunteers are required to manually record the results of a swimming race, with human error, an ever-present risk. Ben Ra...

The proliferation of digital and social media has furnished the rapid rise of misinformation across all corners of life. Health, exercise and body image being no exception. Elena Von Rosenberg and Andrew Schox are fighting back against the wave of superficiality with a healthy dose of science. Elena is a musculoskeletal physiotherapist, who has worked in public and private health in Europe and Aus...

Iggy Jovanovic is the founder of Gerford AI- a real-time in play AI data acquisition and distribution platform that gives athletes that elusive 1% edge. In May 2023, Iggy inked the deal of a lifetime, becoming the AI partner of the United States’ Olympic Swim Team. Iggy’s Gerford AI has already helped deliver Winter Olympic Gold, Commonwealth Games Gold, and he’s working with David Beckham’s Espor...

Dene Menzel is a singer-songwriter who’s gone to Number 1 on the iTunes charts. She’s also an author who has topped Amazon best seller lists in the USA. And Dene is the founder of Branthem. Branthem work hand-in-hand with clients to create the right sound to engage their target audience through the power of music. Dene joins us to today to speak about her passion for sportstech, and how music bran...

Scott Goldman is Performance Psychologist at the Golden State Warriors. Prior to that he was at the Detroit Lions, after being the head of Performance Psychology at the Miami Dolphins.  Through his own shop, Athletic Intelligence Quotient (AIQ), Scott and his team consult with a wide array of pro teams in the USA (NBA, MLB, NFL), Europe and now Australia. Scott is renowned for his humility and sin...

Graham Dudley comes into sportstech companies like a specialist coach, to help them make sense of data, and turn artificial intelligence into actual intelligence. He founded Global Performance Testing in 2011, and works with companies in North America, Europe, Australasia and now India.   Graham and his team assess products, provide evaluation and validation, tech support, training, analytics and...

Aussie media executive Craig Green was the International Marketing Director & Advertising Boss during his 20-year career with Sony Entertainment. He then did the same thing at EA Games & EA Sport. Craig now has his own shop, SprtsHQ, creating an all-encompassing digital collectible business model, amplifying leagues, engaging fans, and integrating commercial partners. SprtsHQ won the world...

Aaron Eisman is renowned in America as a social media savant. He’s run socials for the NFL Network, Bleacher Report and Turner Sports. Aaron now has his own shop, Eisman Digital, and he works hand-in-hand with brands throughout North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific to “cut through the clutter” and “stop the scroll”. Today, Aaron opens up with key lessons on his 15 years in the sports entertainmen...

Clubfunders’ co-founder Blake Lawrence grew up as one of five boys with a single Mum. He saw first-hand how money can be a major hurdle to jump for kids to play sport.  Fellow co-founder Stuart Jacobs grew up in South Africa, and was a gun young golf talent. But golf is a sport that requires significant financial investment to make it all the way to the top. Stuart eventually reached a financial t...

The sport of fencing is a throw-back to medieval sword fighting, with its modern incarnation drawing from the Italian Renaissance. Fencing was an original Olympic sport in 1896, and has captivated people with its grace, daring and precision ever since. Callum Laurenson, an electrical engineer and avid fencer, began a journey in 2012 to solve a perennial problem for the sport- electrical wires. Lau...

PrezentBox is a platform to enable and facilitate activity-based gifting for kids. Parents can create a profile that allows family members and friends to contribute money towards their kids’ participation in a sport or activity, rather than just buying another toy to sit on the shelf. Sport and activity providers can also use the platform to help connect with parents and communities. PrezentBox wa...

GeoSnapShot is a tech platform creating a centralised place to upload and download photos- with cutting edge AI recognition technology allowing for an instantaneous user experience. GeoSnapShot also broadens the opportunity to commercialise image content, provide brand integrations, and deeper fan engagement and connection. Tech maverick Andy Edwards founded this company, which has just been inves...

Michelle Walshe is a film & TV director who has worked with Warner Bros., the BBC, and her own Augusto Group, based in New York City. Leigh Kenyon is a former soccer star, who played with New Zealand’s Football Kingz in Australia’s National Soccer League. Together they founded CoachMate, drawing upon their individual expertise, to make engaging, easy-to-digest content designed to educate and e...

No longer do you need to fly to Arizona for high altitude, because Arizona comes right your bedroom, or lounge room, or anywhere you want to set up Box Altitude. Founder Rico Rogers is a former international pro cyclist, who used to benefits of high altitude training to try to bridge the gap he and other clean riders faced during the drug-riddled racing days of the early 2000s. Now he is allowing...

Craig Horobin has spent the past 25 years at the tech cutting edge of sports broadcasting. His first big gig came as the Olympic Broadcast Manager for Telstra at Sydney 2000. Craig spent the next two decades working on FIFA World Cups, Olympics Games, Commonwealth Games, and major international diplomatic events like APEC. In 2015 he started his own shop- Aircast. Aircast provide ultra-low latency...

Australian rugby union legend Stirling Mortlock, and much-vaunted sports mentor James Godfrey, are dynamically opening-up capital flow into sportstech start-ups, through their firm XV Capital. XV are investing capital, acumen and energy to help start-ups reach their full potential. They are behind the hottest sportstech property in the world, the Smart Ball, from UK company Sportable. Their Smart...

Steph Bofinger is the founder of Fempro Armour. In 2019, Steph and 12 other ladies completed the first all-female motorbike run of the Simpson Desert- four days of gruelling off-road riding, in the unforgiving, and at times fatal, Australian Outback. For Steph, that ride was part of her healing process, having just escaped and survived domestic violence. While the Desert allowed one dark chapter t...

Amy Crosland is one of Australian sport’s leading figures turbo-charging the women’s sportstech sector. Born and raised in iconic Tamworth, Amy has built an epic career, working with United Nations, the UK Ministry of Justice, and recently was Australian boss of global tech firm, Orion. She is now ASTN’s Women in Sportstech Boss, with a mission to empower and promote women and girls to become fron...

Will Wright was at the vanguard of e-commerce 20 years ago, and he now leads ECAL’s European expansion. ECAL are the world’s leading calendar marketing solution, and service the English Premier League, Liverpool FC, FC Barcelona, the International Cricket Council, Formula One and many other of the world’s biggest brands.  ECAL are an Australian business that have blitzed the international field, a...

Kronos Enterprise use cutting edge tech to deliver key information to their clients across sport, event management, timing solutions, sustainable energy and cyber defence. Lachlan King is a Master of Business Information Technology from RMIT, and is a Global Senior Business Analyst for Kronos. Lachy and his team delivered the sportstech that powered the Special Olympics in Berlin this year. Today...

Anya Lee is regarded as one of the sharpest young minds in Australian architecture. She works with Smartform Architecture, who have just completed the $250 million rebirth of Marvel Stadium in Melbourne. Smartform have made a name for their algorithmic and computational design processes- creating the cutting edge of new world architecture. And they take a holistic, human centred approach. Anya’s p...

Australian Ben Turner is Head of Sports Content and Partnerships APAC & Head of Global Basketball at Sportradar. Ben was an early architect of our industry, first with SportingPulse, before co-founding Atrium and Synergy Sports.  His reputation for landing the biggest clients in the world saw Ben head-hunted by Sportradar, where he now helps them set the global agenda. Ben says Aussies must se...