Podcasts

The greatest sports team of all time is the US Olympic Team, and Team USA has been epically dominant in the pool. In the land of NASA, the Pentagon, and an America-first mentality, one of the biggest revelations of the Paris Olympics was that Team USA would hire an Australian business to run the sports performance tech in the pool. Iggy Jovanovic’s Gerford AI powered the Americans to another supreme performance, where they topped the medal tally. Off the back of Paris, Gerford is now being head-hunted by big finance and big medicine to incorporate their tech into those critical fields. Gerford also worked hand-in-hand with David Beckham’s esports company Guild in 2024, and helped them rocket up the global rankings. Today we celebrate Aussie sportstech’s global prowess, and the might of Iggy and his team!

Esports is a multi-billion-dollar industry that continues its rate of knots growth every year. Sam Ward sees esport as a pathway to equality in sport, where people with neurodivergence, special needs, physical disability, along with people from all backgrounds, can play together as one. Valor Esports is the ultimate training platform for esports- it’s like going to fun school, for both gamers, novices, teachers and coaches. Valor’s two major markets are Australia and the United States, where they partner with Generation Esports, the largest provider of built curriculums for schools. Ward aims to allow this new-found world to flourish, helping to give all people a place to belong in sport.

Forbes magazine crowned Victoria Zorin as one of Asia’s top 30 business people under 30 in 2023. Victoria created Nola, a crowd analytics platform to amplify and ease the experiences of attendees at sporting events, music festivals, shopping centres and other large spaces. With A.I, Nola is able to capture real-time information during events to allow venues to make decisions to ease the burden of crowd control & wait times. Nola takes advantage of the monitoring systems venues already have, and can diagnose issues to prevent traffic during peak times. The MCG and Dreamworld are among her top tier clients in Australia, as Victoria now starts her US pursuit.

Maria Baker founded Nobody’s Princess to make snow and ski gear specific for girls and women. Maria came up against the chronic issue of women being paid scant regard in sports apparel, with the “pink it, and shrink it” mentality falling well short of the mark. She wants women of all shapes and sizes to feel completely at home in her gear, and to encourage people to head to the slopes, who may never have given it a go before. Maria shares with us the difficulty of winning Government support, after a female-specific funding program ended, and with her business both too new and too advanced to fit into current funding categories

The recent inclusion of risk management into sports and recreation clubs can be challenging for organisations to manage. Founder of Safeguarding You, Adam Wood, created a platform where what once was daunting, is now made much easier. The program provides users with a simple assessment to understand their risks, then actionable advice is delivered to lower the risk percentage. Wood has been heavily involved with his own children’s sporting clubs, and understands the difficulty in navigating the need to report and adapt to issues that arise. An area of great interest currently is concussion within the AFL, particularly exploring the trend of under-reporting, and the risks associated with trying to get back on the field. Safeguarding You is constantly evolving, creating new technology to allow teams and groups to monitor what they’ve done in the past, and prepare for their future.

Ryan Talbot has spent the past two decades as one of Australia’s leading figures in IT security, working with our biggest bank- the Commonwealth, and our biggest state- New South Wales. Ryan is the one who first introduced biometric security for the Commonwealth Bank, and was a gun-for-hire with international casinos to protect their security systems. He’s also an athletics coach, and that experience led him to start VueMotion- friction free computer vision performance analysis. VueMotion are now working with the biggest pro leagues in North America and Europe, having already cornered the domestic Australian market. Ryan takes us inside an epic career and company story today on the pod!

Emma Thomson worked for two decades as a medical scientist, and in that time, also became a ‘Cricket Mum’. That latter title led Emma to become a sportstech entrepreneur. After endless afternoons bowling balls at her young son for batting practice, Emma realised there was a gap in the market. Bowling machines are commonplace for adult cricketers, and so Emma tailor-made a bowling machine to suit kids as young as Grade 3. Pitch It Up was born, and her e-commerce business is now also flourishing with major cricket and sporting goods retailers around the country. Emma has just created a new iteration for visually impaired cricketers, and Pitch It Up has been working closely with the special needs and para sports people. Today, Emma tells us the origin story, the tech, the growth, and the future of Pitch It Up.

Andrew Lemon has spent the past 15 years working on the front line of healthcare as an osteopath, he is also a business and tech entrepreneur. Eight years ago he co-founded Strength by Numbers, to finally fill a gap in the market he had been combatting for years, namely, the lack of specific strength measurements in healthcare. Heart rate, blood pressure, weight, BMI are all measured as a matter of course. Andrew Lemon says for too long, strength has been the missing component. Strength by Numbers has revolutionised the domestic Aussie market with their AxIT technology, and they’re about to attack the US market. Andrew takes us behind the scenes of the science, the tech and the forward strategy.

Lining up for food, drinks and merchandise at events can cause the spectator to miss out on the action, spending time standing in a queue rather than enjoying the experience. Tech entrepreneur David Jakic and e-business specialist Norbert Herrmann have created Liively- technology that allows the user to scan a QR code and order straight from their phone, and have their order brought directly to them. The company has already captured the attention of big name clients, notably the NBA and Etihad Arena in the UAE. Choosing to take Liively internationally was the move for the company, signing global clients and gaining exposure with every connection. The company focuses on simplicity and need, onlyproducing what is required to bypass the issues that might arise with an online service. Both Javik and Herrmann plan on expanding www.liive.ly to new ventures, creating something that's integrated and elastic within the technological landscape.

WSC Sport is the world-leading AI-generated short form sports video creator. They create the video content distributed by the NBA, LaLiga, NASCAR, and the AFL, NRL & Cricket Australia. Guy Port is WSC’s Asia Pacific Boss, and he describes the company's development of sports technology, and how it will continue to innovate new ways for the viewer to enjoy a personalised entertainment experience. The company has trained their tech to more than 50 different sports, implementing the data and information available, constantly soaking up new knowledge to become more advanced. Port, with his expertise in sports marketing, focuses on the visibility of sport to the audience in today's society, and how WSC is taking major league sport to people’s screens.

Craig O’Shannessy is the architect of the Italian Renaissance of tennis- with Jannik Sinner’s AO 2024 win the first of many. Before leading Team Italy climb back up the mountain, O’Shannessy was head-hunted by the most successful player of all time, Novak Djokovic in 2017. O’Shannesy worked with Novak when during the most contested time in tennis history, with Federer, Nadal and Djokovic competing for the crown. Craig O’Shannessy is an Aussie who dared to think differently, question the status quo of tennis and use tech and innovation to take an Edwardian sport and make it Web-4. Craig’s agent Elia Hill, from Connecting In, also joined our discussion, to share how we can all benefit from greater connection and collaboration.

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 when we no longer need to discuss gender at all. Amy and Ava gave insight into how we can increase female participation, and how women and men can both appreciate their unique value.

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 to grow their business, furthering benefits for the user. The future of Statstrade could potentially allow people to create markets, as well as bet on existing sporting match-ups. Creating a product of interest in the ever evolving market is the hand that every business wishes to be dealt.

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 Belgravia business family, supports clubs in reaching these goals. There has been a noticeable difference over the last 20 years, with more local cricket and football clubs supporting female teams in competition, providing that opportunity to broaden their reach. sportscommunity.com.au works alongside clubs to help them reach their full potential for the community in its entirety.

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 Ramsden, and his company Olly Timing, have founded AI timing to solve this problem. Ben is also the first to introduce the Hawkeye technology into swimming, and bridge the gap between technology and the historic sport.

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 Australia, with community, pro and Olympic athletes. Andrew Schox is one of Western Australia’s leading health industry figures- a podiatrist, software developer, and also a futurist Elena and Andrew have founded Pibbot- an online platform creating a scientific path to a healthy lifestyle. The app tailor-makes health and wellbeing ‘prescriptions’ to each individual participant, with one-on-one mentoring and support, and community inclusion.

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 Esports company, Guild. Today, Iggy takes us inside the tech, inside the road to Paris with Team USA, and into his amazing broader life story.

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 branding can help Aussie start ups to cut through the clutter.

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 sincerity, in an approach where he builds organically with an individual, rather than dictates from on high. Today we hear the role data, analytics and intuition plays in helping to build the mindset of world class athletes.

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 cyber security. In today’s show, Graham says overselling and underdelivering is a major modern problem in sportstech.