Australia Plays 2023, a report published by the Interactive Games & Entertainment Association (IGEA) found 81% of Australians play video games. This marks a 14% increase over the past two years. The research done in cooperation with Bond University found 94% of Australian households have at least one device to play video games, 48% of gamers are female, and more older women than men play video games.
Alphabet’s Google, which is spending billions of dollars globally to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud space, is considering plans to build more data centres in the Middle East, a key market and one of fastest growing regions for the company’s business. The company, which is already building data centres in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and has just opened a new cloud region in Israel.
Software as a Service (SaaS) medical management provider BoomerangFX is expanding into Australia in response to big growth in the aesthetic medicine market there. BoomerangFX provides comprehensive clinic practice management solutions for non-insured private pay sectors, including dermatology, cosmetic surgery, vision care and mental health. This move follows the company’s recent announcement of a worldwide partnership with Stripe to offer integrated payment options to clinics.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.