20 August 2014 Last updated at 14:01

Greenland ice loss doubles from late 2000s

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The team has produced elevation models for the ice sheets

A new assessment from Europe’s CryoSat spacecraft shows Greenland to be losing about 375 cu km of ice each year.

Added to the discharges coming from Antarctica, it means Earth’s two big ice sheets are now dumping roughly 500 cu km of ice in the oceans annually.

“The contribution of both ice sheets together to sea level rise has doubled since 2009,” said Angelika Humbert from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute.

“To us, that’s an incredible number,” she told BBC News.

In its report to The Cryosphere journal, the AWI team does not actually calculate a sea-level rise equivalent number, but if this volume is considered to be all ice (a small part will be snow) then the contribution is likely to be on the order of just over a millimetre per year.

This is the latest study to use the precision altimetry data being gathered by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat platform.

Cryosat uses a radar instrument to measure the shape of polar ice surfaces

The satellite was launched in 2010 with a sophisticated radar instrument specifically designed to measure the shape of the polar ice sheets.

The AWI group, led by senior researcher Veit Helm, has taken just over two years’ worth of data centred on 2012/2013 to build what are called digital elevation models (DEMs) of Greenland and Antarctica, and to asses their evolution.

These models incorporate a total of 14 million individual height measurements for Greenland and another 200 million for Antarctica.

When compared with similar data-sets assembled by the US space agency’s IceSat mission between 2003 and 2009, the scientists are able then to calculate changes in ice volume beyond just the CryoSat snapshot.

Negative shifts are the result of surface melting and ice discharge; positive trends are the consequence of precipitation – snowfall.

Greenland is experiencing the biggest reductions in elevation currently, losing about 375 cu km a year (plus or minus 24 cu km per year), with most of the action occurring at the west and south-east coast of the island.

Significant thinning is seen also in the North East Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS).

“This has three outlet glaciers and one of these, the Zachariae Isstrom, has retreated quite a bit and some volume loss has already been reported. But we see now that this volume loss is really propagating to upper areas, much further into the interior of the ice sheet than has been recorded before,” explained Prof Humbert.

The change in height of Greenland’s ice sheet between January 2011 and January 2014

In Antarctica, the annual volume loss is about 128 cu km per year (plus or minus 83 cu km per year).

As other studies have found, this is concentrated in the continent’s western sector, in the area of the Amundsen Sea Embayment.

Big glaciers here, such as Thwaites and Pine Island, are thinning and retreating at a rapid rate.

Some thickening is seen also, such as in Dronning Maud Land, where colossal snowfalls have been reported. But this accumulation does not offset the losses occurring in West Antarctica.

A British-led group recently reported its own Antarctica DEM, using a different algorithm to process the numbers in the CryoSat data.

The AWI outcomes look very similar, and the German team has transferred the exact same approach to Greenland so it can have confidence in comparing the two ice sheets.

The losses also look consistent with the analysis coming out of the American Grace mission, which uses a different type of satellite to monitor gravity changes in the polar regions – to, in essence, weigh the amount of ice being dumped into the sea.

Prof Andy Shepherd, who was part of the British group that reported its findings in May, commented: “This is yet another exciting result from CryoSat, thanks to the team at AWI, charting yet more new ground by providing the first complete survey of ice volume changes in Greenland.

“However, the increased ice losses that have been detected are a worrying reminder that the polar ice sheets are still experiencing dramatic changes, and will inevitably raise concerns about future global sea-level rise,” the Leeds University researcher said.

Have a guess how much space junk is floating around up there? That’s right, too much to count and we put it all there, over the past 40 years by launching more than 10,000 satellites, the majority of which are still in orbit. We’re only now beginning to reap the bounty we’ve sown, so to speak.

Rocket booster casings, dead satellites – you name it and it’s there a cosmic rubble pile posing a problem for astronauts and space tourists for the next 30 years! But, there is hope on the horizon. It may sound like science fiction but an Australian team is working on a project to zap orbital debris with lasers from Earth to reduce the growing amount of space junk that threatens to knock out our satellites.

Scientists believe there are more than 300,000 pieces of debris in space, made up of everything from tiny screws and bolts to large parts of rockets, mostly moving in low orbits around Earth at tremendous speed.Australia now has a contract with NASA to track and map space junk with a telescope equipped with an infrared laser at Mount Stromlo Observatory.

The ultimate aim is to zap pieces of junk so they burn up harmlessly as they fall through the upper atmosphere. There’s no risk of missing and hitting a working satellite, we can target them precisely.Are you starting to get reminders of what you saw depicted in the 2013 Hollywood movie Gravity? Stunning movie though!

Talking about stunning views, check out what’s hanging low in the eastern sky just before dawn. Those two bright ‘stars’ you see are actually the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter close together. Earlier this week they almost seemed to touch and still remain an absolutely spectacular sight this weekend! Jupiter is the one above with Venus below.

To top it off, the crescent Moon joins the group on the mornings of August 23rd and 24th, passing close enough to make it a magic triplet. Photo op! Grab a mug of tea or coffee, rug and head out into the backyard. You won’t be disappointed!

Crazy as it sounds, astronomy can actually save lives when it comes to planetary ‘conjunctions’ like this. A similar pairing of Jupiter and Venus in the dusk sky last year nearly sparked an international incident, when Indian Army sentries along the Himalayan border with China mistook the pair for Chinese spy drones. Luckily, Indian astronomers identified the conjunction before shots were exchanged. Whew!

We are under constant bombardment from space, and the Earth is getting heavier. We accumulate on average 20-40 tons of meteorites and spacey junk per day! In a year, it’s enough cosmic junk to fill a six story office building.

You can demonstrate this for yourself. If you put a big plastic sheet or a white sheet on your grass in the garden on a nice day, leave it for a few hours and then run a magnet over it. You can often find specks have just fallen down from outer space and landed on your magnet.

Hey, have you ever wondered how many people have ever lived on Earth? The ‘Population Reference Bureau’ recently took a stab at an answer and came up with 108 billion. Which means about 6.5% of the people who have ever lived are alive today. Now you know why the supermarket queues are getting longer OK!

Hey, want a really cool free astronomy app for your smart phone? Download one I’ve had on my phone for years called Pocket Universe. It’s got something for everyone from people mildly curious about the night sky to the dedicated amateur astronomer. Visit Dave’s website www.davidreneke.com for a free 323 page e-book ‘The Complete Idiots Guide To Astronomy.’

I’ve wanted to write this piece for a while now, after bootstrapping in Australia for over 5 years we’re finally getting traction. It’s been a long hard slog, we’ve failed at almost 8 ideas & taken absolutely no funding.

Maybe that’s another story – for now though I want to talk about how growing a Startup or idea in Australia is terribly difficult.

This isn’t a rant; instead I’m trying to highlight some of the current challenges I see in the Australian startup scene – which could be a reason why we don’t see more successful startups or investments in our lovely country.

Just to paint some perspective, here’s just some of the recent acquisitions in the Australian online space:

Acquisitions

• Hitwise – $240M by Experian (US)
• Melbourne IT (DBS) – $ 152M by CSC (US)
• Retailmenot – ~$50-100M by WhaleShark Media in 2010 (US)
• Chomp – $ 50M acquistion by Apple (US)
• Ebook Library – $30M by ProQuest (US)
• We Are Hunted – $ undisclosed by Twitter (US)
• Sessions – $ undisclosed by MyFitnessPal (US)
• 5th Finger – $ undisclosed by Merkle (US)
• VOLT Media – $ undisclosed by Alphabird (US)
• Trunk.ly – $ undisclosed by Delicous (US)
• BuyInvite – $ undisclosed by OzSale (US)
• Crowdmass – $ undisclosed by Groupon (US)
• Grabble – $ undisclosed by Walmart (US)
• Skitch – $ undisclosed by Evernote (US)
• Tjoos – $ undisclosed by Internet Brands (US)
• oo.com.au – $ undisclosed by Grays Australia (AU)
• StyleTread – $ undisclosed by Munro Family (AU)
• Vinomofo – $ undisclosed by Catch of the Day (AU)
• MYOB – $ undisclosed by Bain Capital (US)
• Buzz Numbers – $ undisclosed by Sentia Media (US)
• Spreets – $40M by Yahoo7 (AU)

The first thing we notice is that the majority of acquisitions involve a partner that is located outside Australia.
There’s obviously a few potential reasons for this:

• It’s difficult to scale products worldwide from Australia.
• We’ve built a great products but other companies feel they an scale it to a much largeruserbase through an integration.

Just look at what WhaleShark media have done with RetailMeNot in 4 years. They’ve scaled the business to $78.5M in revenue per quarter. To do this they’ve needed to get closer to the clients (who are mostly US based businesses) & also the customers. Something that Bevan & Guy would have struggled to do with a team here in Australia.

What’s also interesting to note is that quite a few of the companies above actually left Australia completely to setup base in the USA.
We hear so often in the media about founders like Josh Reich from BankSimple who was recently acquired for $117M, it’s like our media like to hold onto the fact that someone from this country is doing something great, even though they had to leave Australia to do it in the first place. Even Atlassian left Australia to register itself as a UK business:

Basically, for startups it’s super expensive to do business in Australia compared to other big cities—wages, compliance, tax and even software costs are high, and to make it even more tough, there’s typically less funding available to meet these costs.

An article surfaced recently from 99dresses founder Nikki Durkin who talks at length about braving visa issues to join Y Combinator in the USA at the hope of really making an impact with her Australian born startup.

The Government Does Not Support Online Businesses

There’s almost no benefits given to startup founders in Australia that actually help us accelerate our business.
In fact our government recently announced a new budget designed to reduce our $49.9Bn deficit, which involves big changes to how they support startups (even though Tony Abbott is quite happy to spend $12Bn on 58 F-35 Fighter Jets).

The Government has cut funding to over 8 innovation & research programs. One of the first areas to be completely cut was Commercialisation Australia, an organisation that was there to help startups from early stage right through to acquisition – they had roughly $88M per year to help Australian products & services. They also cut the Innovation Investment Fund & 6 others to give combined budget savings of $845M.

In a recent interview after winning a Pearcy award, Guy King the Co-founder of RetailMeNot mentioned how Commercialisation Australia was instrumental in helping them with the growth of their business.

Singapore is kicking our arse in the battle to become Asia’s tech hub and to secure the initial public offerings that would come with it.

The Government has however pledged $ 484M in a new Entrepreneurs’ Infrastructure Program, which we still have little to no information on.

Nor does it support venture capital

The amount of money invested by Australian VCs was at its lowest level in 2013 with just $111.44M invested, with the average investment around the $1M. Compare that to $1.71Bn in Singapore (which is a 600% increase since 2009).

There’s no sugarcoating the fact that the local VC environment is struggling; investors here are less experienced, they have to be pickier with the startups they back, there’s absolutely no support from the government & we have corporate VC like ANZ, Optus & that are more interested in funding startups that can benefit their own business.

To this end many Australian businesses continue to look for overseas investment:

• Atlassian – $60M from Accel Partners (US)
• The Iconic – $25M from Summit Partners (US)
• LIFX – $12M from Sequoia (US)
• App.io – $1M (Formerly Kickfolio) from Multiple Investors (US)
• Campaign Monitor – $250M from Insight Partners (US)
• QuikFlix – $10M from HBO (US)
• SiteMinder – $30M from TCV (US)
• BigCommerce – $40M from Revolution Growth (US)

It is well known that the Australian VC scene needs a few large homeruns to see money be invested back into the ecosystem, but right now our banks view tech startups as high risk & not many are willing to take the calculated risks we see elsewhere in the world. After all, when you invest money in equipment & infrastructure – if it all goes bellyup you still have some assets to sell right? Australia still has some way to go (as with a lot of things) for this to change.

Foreign investors want you to have a global vision

Even though we are a large country, our population is still relatively small – only 22.68M people. When you compare this to 314M in the USA or 63M in the UK our possible customer penetration is small unless you plan to target your product globally (a pattern that you’ll see ring true in many of the investments above).

There have been plenty of companies that have made an impact locally when you consider industries like Travel or E-Commerce. But to attract the right kind of funding that will drive growth you need to be in an industry or have a concept that you can scale globally.

Australia is struggling to provide enough market competitiveness due to rising costs, just look at the the E-Commerce space – many international companies ( ASOS, Eastbay & Amazon) are cleaning up due to cheaper shipping costs & lower product prices. And even many of our own iconic brands like Myer or David Jones are just being left behind due to lack of innovation or just being too late to the party.

Take our business Gleam for example, our potential customer base increases by 1500% or more just by selling into the USA market alone. We’re lucky that most of our sales & growth don’t require physical sales people.

Employee share systems in Australia are a joke

An effective employee share scheme should help Australian startups attract the right talent (I mean who wouldn’t want to come live in our country?), foster innovation & in the end help us see more success on the global playing field.

The current regulations & treatment of tax towards employee share schemes in Australia makes them downright useless.

In a nutshell start-up employees are liable for the tax charge on shares when they vest (not when sold), even though the value can’t be realised properly yet. This means that employees have additional tax charges without any additional income to cover them – even if the startup is destined to fail 6 months into the future.

I know, total bullshit.

Just so you know, it is possible to get around these tax liabilities – but it’s extremely expensive. Which most startups don’t have the time, money or resources to cover.

Very few tax breaks or grants

Tax breaks are hugely important to help startups get through those tough first few years where cashflow is tight.

Take Singapore for example (again), if you incorporate your Startup there they will allow your first $ 100k of income to be completely tax free for 3 years, there’s even more benefits if you earn up to $300k they cap your tax at just 8.5% – plus it’s even allowed on dividends & foreign income! Not only that, Singapore provides 50% deduction on taxes relating to Angel investing, no wonder Singapore has seen a massive investment & startup boom – the government understands the value.

There’s a few grants in Australia, the first major one is the R&D offset. If you can prove that your startup is conducting research & development you can claim back up to 38.5% of your development costs – however the payment is extremely lagged & can take more than a year after the actual activities for you to be able to claim (which doesn’t really help startups).

Export market development grants can help you reduce the cost of exporting any products overseas, for example advertising your business in other countries, travel, marketing & communications. You can reimburse up to 50% of these costs, again this rebate comes almost a year after the actual activity has taken place. What about incentives to grow my business locally?

Problem I have here is none of these grants do much to help me as a startup scale my business, the grants & tax breaks you see in Singapore actually align with how someone grows a business – those guys have their shit together.

Australia is getting really expensive

Australia is fast becoming one of the most expensive countries in the world to live in, this means that good talent is very expensive, cost of living is expensive & wages are generally in line with that trend. Australia has the 3rd highest average wage in the world (behind Luxembourg & Switzerland).

Consider myself & John. We’re both in our early 30′s, with a family & mortgages. We need roughly a MMR (monthly recurring revenue) of $25k AUD just to cover ourselves in Australia (fully loaded, including 9.5% Superannuation). John is a fairly competent developer who could easily get a lucrative corporate contract paying crazy daily rates.

This hurts two-fold, it makes it expensive to hire & retain good people – as they can command extremely high rates by default. And we all know that startups generally can’t match those rates without some other incentives (*cough* share options *cough*).

Secondly, if your company is currency agnostic (i.e. could potentially exist anywhere in the world) you end up paying much much more to run your business. I could go on about this point forever but you just have the look at the price of a Macbook side by side:

Heck, we can’t even get Game of Thrones in Australia without pirating it, apparently.

GST sucks

If you’re pure play Australian then GST is fine, but when trying to compete globally it just adds pricing complexities (Especially for SaaS). If your business earns more than $75,000 per year you must register for GST. This ends up screwing over people that want to buy your product in Australia.

For example, consider our $39 plan. If someone in the USA wants to purchase it, we charge them $39 AUD, however if someone in Australia wants to buy it we charge them $39 + 10%, or $42.90 – if we were a USA company Australians wouldn’t have to pay an extra.

You either take the GST hit, or hit the customer with it.

To make matters worse, we end up just collecting this 10% for the government & paying it back to them minus credits every quarter which is an admin nightmare (businesses can choose to claim back their GST credits).

Timezones make client communications hard

The majority of our business comes from the USA, which means they are awake mostly whilst we are asleep. This makes having meetings & communicating with customers very difficult – normally giving you at least a 24 lag on anything that crops up.

This lag definitely works against us in Australia in terms of the amount of business & efficiency of business we can do in the rest of the world. I’m guessing this is a big reason many startups move to the USA.

Lack of payment options, until now

Online payment options have been archaic to say the least for many years, here’s a good example of what a startup might have to go through.

We would have to get a merchant account with the bank, then find a payment processor, then do all the integrations.

Finally thanks to Stripe we were able to charge Australians in AUD from launch (as part of the beta), and only now they are rolling out the BETA of allowing Australian companies to charge in USD or GBP. It’s taken a long time, but finally there are solutions for Australian companies to play on a global field – without having to worry about the bureaucracy of banking.

None of this will stop us

Even though all this stuff makes Australia seem bad, there’s still thousands of entrepreneurs out there making it work day in day out – I’ve witnessed a huge explosion of enthusiasm in Australia, we’ve got more incubators than ever before, we got lots of amazing co-working spaces & everyone is really just trying to find their product market fit in the big bad world.

So here’s to all the Australian startups – maybe we’re all waiting for the next big thing to come along, will it be Australian? Who knows, but we’ll bloody well keep trying.

– – –

Stuart McKeown is a co-founder of Gleam, one of the fastest growing startups in Australia. He’s passionate about growing businesses, whether it’s his own or yours – that’s exactly why he built Gleam. Check it out here https://gleam.io

Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) has been recognised in two Helpmann Award wins at a ceremony in Sydney last Monday.

Along with its presenting partners Arts Centre Melbourne, Perth Concert Hall and Sydney Opera House, QPAC was awarded for the presentation of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (RCO), which was awarded Best Symphony Orchestra Concert.

The RCO made its Queensland debut at QPAC with two concerts in November 2013, in the final leg of the orchestra’s 125^th anniversary world tour.

QPAC’s support for local productions also received recognition for When Time Stops, which was co-produced by QPAC and EDC, in association with Brisbane Festival, with its Composer Iain Grandage taking the Helpmann award for Best Original Score.

In 2013, QPAC received two Helpmann Awards for performances within its 2012 Hamburg Season, the first in its International Series presented with the support of Tourism and Events Queensland.