Dr George Beaton is a partner in beaton and a senior fellow in Melbourne Law School, Australia. His published works include NewLaw New Rules – A Conversation About the Future of the Legal Services Industry (2013) and Remaking Law Firms: Why & How (2016). You have been a pioneer in research into NewLaw, what place does technology have in NewLaw? Is it central to its development? Just 18 months ago when I wrote Fresh thinking on the evolving BigLaw–NewLaw taxonomy little mention was made of the role of technology in NewLaw or BigLaw business model firms.

In just over a week, the smartphone game "Pokemon Go" has become a giant hit, turning millions of people around the world into monster hunters. Given the game's promising start, investors are taking another look at Nintendo Co., whose value has shot up by about 1.5 trillion since "Pokemon Go" was released on July 6 in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Nintendo had been struggling in recent years as people shifted to playing games on smartphones rather than home or hand-held consoles, and the Kyoto-based game innovator was reluctant to enter the field. But last year, Nintendo finally announced it would jump into the smartphone fray. In that sense, some may wonder whether the early success of "Pokemon Go" is a prelude to Nintendo's return to the top of the video game heap.

Connected baggage, robots, virtual reality, big data, and drones will be part of your travels soon. Just how will they, along with other technology trends, create a better experience for travelers? Robotics combined with artificial intelligence You can already experiment with robots that deliver room service, guide passengers to departure gates, or provide translation assistance. But would they be able to understand informal language such as slang, idioms, local dialects or irony? Combining their capabilities with Artificial Intelligence (AI) so they are able to recognize emotions, group behaviors, and proactively respond to unexpected situations, give them the potential to provide the next generation of customer service.

Enter SwagBot, a robot developed by the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney. Created for the sole purpose of herding cattle, it can scuttle its way even across not-so-ideal terrain like farmland and even pull trailers across said terrain. It's the hope that SwagBot will eventually be able to manage the livestock across Australia's various regions. The robot is as efficient as it is rugged, proving it can get around ditches, swamps and a host of other obstacles that mean to keep it from doing its job. The next phase is to help SwagBot recognize whether an animal is sick or ailing.

Chat bots have ballooned in popularity in recent months, and now we're seeing some interesting examples of how that technology, where computers interact and respond to human requests, is being used to solve other problems. Today, Zendesk is taking the wraps off "Automatic Answers", a service for businesses to reply to emails from customers without ever having a human employee get involved. Automatic Answers is not your average, run-of-the mill email autoresponder. The service was built using a machine learning platform that Zendesk's in-house teams of data scientists and engineers, which are based out of Melbourne, Australia, have been developing on for a while now. That machine learning platform was first announced last year and it also powers a service Zendesk announced last October, Satisfaction Prediction, which is able to monitor customer-company interactions to -- as its name implies -- determine whether the customer is getting what she or he needs. The machine learning/AI element means that the responses in Automatic Answers are not only reading and responding specifically to what you the customer is asking, but it is technically getting smarter with each response (and presumably using a bit of Satisfaction Prediction to figure out if it's getting it right).

Australia, we hear, is a big place. All that space is nice to have if you're raising cattle, except for the fact that you've got to keep track of them all somehow. For ranchers, this is a lot of work, and for cattle, it means that they don't get checked on very regularly. This would be a good opportunity for robots to step in and offer some assistance, but the problem is most robots would be crazy to try getting themselves around the kind of terrain that Australia is made of. In order to tackle the hills, dales, fields, cliffs, rivers, swamps, crocodiles, platypuses, echidnas, koalas, quolls, emus, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and dingoes (to name just a few common obstacles in Australia), researchers from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney led by Dr. Salah Sukkarieh have designed and tested an all-terrain robot called SwagBot that's designed to be able to drive over almost anything while helping humans manage their ranchland.

Chat bots have ballooned in popularity in recent months, and now we're seeing some interesting examples of how that technology, where computers interact and respond to human requests, is being used to solve other problems. Today, Zendesk is taking the wraps off "Automatic Answers", a service for businesses to reply to emails from customers without ever having a human employee get involved. Automatic Answers is not your average, run-of-the mill email autoresponder. The service was built using a machine learning platform that Zendesk's in-house teams of data scientists and engineers, which are based out of Melbourne, Australia, have been developing on for a while now. That machine learning platform was first announced last year and it also powers a service Zendesk announced last October, Satisfaction Prediction, which is able to monitor customer-company interactions to -- as its name implies -- determine whether the customer is getting what she or he needs. The machine learning/AI element means that the responses in Automatic Answers are not only reading and responding specifically to what you the customer is asking, but it is technically getting smarter with each response (and presumably using a bit of Satisfaction Prediction to figure out if it's getting it right).

Eye in the Sky Superbly acted, this nail-biter starring Helen Mirren, the late Alan Rickman and Aaron Paul is a fully involving war drama about the new rules of engagement. Hunt for the Wilderpeople This wonderful New Zealand film has a gently absurdist quality, a simultaneously sweet and subversive sensibility all its own, mixing warmth, adventure and comedy in ways that consistently surprise. The Innocents Anne Fontaine's post-World War II drama involving a Polish convent and a French female doctor proves yet again that though moral and spiritual questions may not sound spellbinding, they often provide the most absorbing movie experiences. The Jungle Book By turns sweetly amusing and scarily unnerving, crammed with story, song and computer-generated visual splendors, this revisiting of the old Rudyard Kipling tales aims to be a model of modern crowd-pleasing entertainment. Life, Animated A remarkable documentary about how Disney animated features changed the life of a young autistic boy in a deep and profound way.

Your days as a farmer's best friend may be numbered. Salah Sukkarieh, a professor of robotics at Sydney University, is the project lead for agricultural robotics at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR). The ACFR, which hosts around 130 researchers and engineers, builds robots for mining and aviation, but it's also looking at how automated systems could assist graziers and farmers. On June 30, ACFR did its first test of the SwagBot at a farm near Newcastle, Australia. While having little actual swag, the robot could prove extraordinarily useful on cattle farms by potentially herding and monitoring animals, among other tasks.

With a pocketful of savings, Melbourne entrepreenur Michelle Mannering and three fellow founders are busy building a platform utilising artificial intelligence to make the world a smarter and better place. As a hacker-in-residence at Carlton Connect and a participant in the Melbourne Accelerator Program, Mannering and her team are one of the first residents in Melbourne's new "melting pot" for innovation. "My co-founders and I all met at a bunch of different hackathons," Mannering tells StartupSmart. Just a year after meeting, the team has launched Black AI, a startup offering a platform that is developing machine learning computer vision. "Basically, we just teach computers how to understand and interpret the world," Mannering says.