Fergus O'Sullivan

That said, the flying variety was still the star of the show, with multiple companies showing off what they had come up with. These ranged from tiny drones used for reconnaissance, to ones loaded with explosives and used to hunt down enemy infantry or infiltrate bunkers and tanks. Drones’ effectiveness on the battlefield can’t be overestimated, and many of the startups I spoke to in Ukraine were focused on a specific aspect to increase it further. Some of this is simply building better drones: f...

The end result, after a few more adventures in startups, was that he realized he wanted something else for a change: “ I’ve enjoyed it, but at the end of the day. I clearly am very motivated by purpose, so why not focus a couple years of my peak productive life on being impact driven and not commerce driven. Because even at startups, many people from corporations tend to think like, ‘oh, in the startup you can do whatever.’ Miltner emphasizes, though that they can actually be even more cutthroat...

First, the tech: the idea to build handsets didn’t come out of nowhere. Rudominski and his now co-founders first had a startup that suffered from bad timing. “It was  a connectivity solution for digital nomads who need to connect to the internet from any country. It would remove the need for getting local SIM cards. Exactly when we were launching that, COVID hit and the entire business model didn’t really work anymore.”Still, when two years later Moscow launched its full-scale invasion, experien...

Doležal’s love of the internet started early: he was an exchange student in Las Vegas in 1994, where he was allowed to play around with the nascent internet in his school’s library instead of attending Pascal classes. “ It was just text and a terminal and I fell in love.”On his return, Doležal shared his enthusiasm for this new-fangled network and in 1999 joined a small internet studio, which did well and grew into a minor regional player. He then started a small mobile internet company soon aft...

Reading time: 12 minutesThe Siege of Malta in the Second World War, which lasted from June 1940 until November 1942, was a linchpin of the war. Had Malta fallen to the Axis, the war may have concluded very differently. Australian soldiers, sailors, and airmen played a crucial part in defending the island, in this article we explore how they experienced it.By Fergus O’SullivanLike many of our article about Australians in the Mediterranean in World War Two, this article draws heavily on the Austra...

Reading time: 7 minutesVideo games love historical settings: from adventure games like the Assassin’s Creed series, to action games like Call of Duty and its sequels, to strategic sagas like Europa Universalis; there’s no shortage of examples. Can computer games be more than entertainment, though, and can they actually teach their audience about what happened in the past?By Fergus O’SullivanThat can be pretty difficult to pin down, says Pieter Van den Heede, a lecturer at the Erasmus University...

Reading time: 13 minutesThere are plenty of video games that use historical backdrops for their narrative, or even entice you to recreate history in some way. As we discuss with historian Pieter van den Heede in our article on whether games can teach history, the question remains of how much you actually learn while playing these games. Thankfully, some do a much better job than others, and in this article, I will explore four of them.By Fergus O’SullivanFor this article, I’m going to focus on t...

What do you do when a building important to your city’s history is inaccessible? When you can see it, but simply cannot get anywhere near it? This is the question facing the Ledra Palace Hotel in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus and one of the last few divided cities in the world. One group of researchers seems to have found a solution, using cutting edge tech.By Fergus O’SullivanUp until the Turkish invasion in 1974, the Ledra Palace Hotel served as a social hub for the elite of Nicosia. It hoste...