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Every year, Tennis Australia CEO Craig Tiley issues a challenge to his team that would make most executivesand their teamsbreak into a cold sweat: Reinvent 50% of the Australian Open. Not subtle changes or a few tweaks. Half of everything, so no two tournaments are ever the same. Today, to help satisfy Tiley’s mandate, the event has evolved into a three-pronged innovation machine. There’s an in-house R&D lab that’s been developing analytics, broadcast, and fan engagement advancements for more than 15 years, alongside a startup accelerator that’s piloted 40 companies, and a $40 million VC fund to capitalize those startups. “The 50% innovation challenge creates something most large organizations struggle to cultivate: permission to fail,” says Machar Reid, director of innovation and AO Ventures general partner. It’s working. The 2025 Australian Open set attendance records with 1,218,831 fans through the gates over three weeks, breaking the previous year’s mark by more than 100,000. It attracted 1.9 billion global viewers, drew 2.3 billion social impressions, and generated $565.8 million for host city Melbournes economy. And this year’s tournament, which rolls into its final rounds this weekend, is poised to be another record-setter. Inside Tennis Australia’s tech workshop It all started with AO Labs, Tennis Australia’s research and development arm. This is the internal division that builds the broadcast and fan engagement technologies that have transformed how people watch tennis. Last year’s breakout was AO Animated, which uses skeletal tracking to turn live matches into Nintendo Wii-style cartoons. The technology tracks 29 points on each player’s body at 50 frames per second, creating real-time avatars that move exactly as the players do. The feed went viral in 2025, drawing nearly 1 million viewers in the first four days alone. [Image: AO Animated] The technology is fun. But it also solves a real problem. Tennis Australia took over its own broadcast production in 2015one of only two Grand Slam tournaments to control its own broadcast (the US Open only recently started moving in this direction). Other Grand Slams turn broadcast production over to networks like ESPN or TNT Sports. Tennis Australia maintains creative control, then licenses that production to broadcast partners including ESPN in the U.S. and Channel 9 in Australia. [Image: AO Animated] But those licensing agreements create restrictions. The AO Animated stream functions as a legal work-around. Since it’s generated from tracking biometric data rather than relying on video footage, it doesn’t violate exclusivity agreements. Viewers without broadcast subscriptions could clip highlights and share them. Fans loved it. Players found it hilarious. By week two of last years tournament, Tennis Australia was providing the feed to three broadcast partners, and they’ve brought it back again for 2026. AO Animated is among the latest in a series of experiments. But even AO Labs isn’t enough to satisfy Tiley’s 50% mandate. To achieve that, the team knew it had to tap external resources. Turning Melbourne Park into a tech incubator In 2022, Tennis Australia launched AO Startups. The goal: identify early-stage companies with technology Tennis Australia could eventually implement, giving both sides a chance to test product-market fit at one of the world’s biggest sporting events. “Rather than trying to be really narrow with a problem statement, we stay purposefully broad,” says Reid. “There are occasions where we don’t know what we don’t know.” The 2025 cohort included 12 companiesthe largest since inceptionspanning digital ticketing platforms, AI-powered personalized menus for dietary needs, automated screening checks, production project management software, and wearable resistance suits for athlete training. The selection process is rigorous, but fast. Startups apply through aostartups.ausopen.com, with applications opening periodically throughout the year and Tennis Australia announcing new cohorts in the lead-up to each Australian Open. Applicants are evaluated on team quality, market opportunity, ambition level, and mutual impact potential. Those accepted get access to Tennis Australia executives, pilots across the organization’s summer events, and pathways to becoming official suppliers. Each pilot is customized based on the company’s stage and technology. Some test products still in development. Others run full-scale deployments. Some pilots test across Tennis Australia’s entire three-week summer seriesthe United Cup in Sydney and Perth, Brisbane International, and Adelaide Internationalwith select pilots deployed at the Australian Open itself. The customized trials give funders real-world feedback at scale while giving Tennis Australia confidence that the systems work under pressurewhich is critical, given that they’re not just piloting tools that enhance the broadcast and fan experience, but technology that can impact the matches themselves. Six engineers vs. one monopoly In 2021, four engineers walked away from Hawkeye, the company that had dominated electronic line calling in tennis for two decades. They teamed up with two others and founded Bolt6 specifically to build something bettera cloud-first system that could do things Hawkeye’s legacy architecture couldn’t. Tennis Australia had been a Hawkeye client for 17 years. When Bolt6 approached the team about piloting new technology through AO Startups, Reid saw opportunityand a lot of risk. “[Line calling] is our highest-risk technology,” Reid says. “If that does not work, we’re in trouble, because it’s calling lines for the playing group. It’s not like we have lines people waiting on standby to jump in if the technology goes down.” So Tennis Australia methodically de-risked it, inviting Bolt6 to join AO Startups. At the 2023 Australian Open, Bolt6 ran in stealth mode alongside Hawkeye on the tournament’s center courtside-by-side testing, every call compared. In 2024, Bolt6 handled all Australian Open lead-up events and expanded to testing alongside Hawkeye on three stadium courts during the main tournament. Only after two years of testing did Tennis Australia deploy Bolt6 across all 17 courts for the entire 2025 summer, fully replacing Hawkeye. Risk/reward The gamble paid off. Bolt6’s cloud architecture unlocked capabilities Hawkeye couldn’t deliver. Because the system is cloud-based, Tennis Australia could centralize operationsrunning all courts from one location instead of requiring on-site servers at each venue. The system processes faster and integrates with other platforms more easily, opening new possibilities beyond just calling lines. [Image: Bolt6] In fact, it’s Bolt6’s technology that drives the skeletal tracking and 360-degree camera system that AO Labs integrated to create the Wii-style animations and dynamic broadcast angles. Technology that started as line calling evolved into a dynamic broadcasting tool. [Image: Bolt6] “It is a genuine partnership around how to create stories for the viewer at home,” says James Japhet, Bolt6 cofounder and chief commercial officer. “It’s not just us doing it, this is us working hand in hand with Tennis Australia.” The partnership has turbocharged Bolt6’s growth. The company went from being deployed at three events in 2023 to 40 in 2024, around 90 in 2025, and now a projected 170 events in 2026, expanding beyond tennis into sports like NASCAR and the PGA Tour. “I don’t think we would have had that same trajectory without the partnership and support of Tennis Australia,” Japhet says. A global stage for tech startups Another company, Raven Controls, came through AO Startups in 2023 with a different kind of technology. Founder Ian Kerr, a former police officer in Scotland who specialized in emergency planning, had built an incident management platform after witnessing chaos at major eventssafety decisions that weren’t properly logged, stakeholders who couldn’t communicate, critical information lost in radio chatter. Raven digitizes that coordination. The platform is cloud-based and AI-driven, creating one centralized system where every incident gets logged, every decision gets recorded, and security, medical, and crowd control teams can all see what’s happening in real time. “Before Raven, these systems were all siloed,” Kerr explains. “Security would know about an incident, but medical wouldn’t. Or crowd management would see a problem, but it would take 20 minutes to coordinate a response.” By the time Kerr connected with Tennis Australia in 2023, Raven had already managed UEFA Champions League finals, two Euro soccer championships, and two Ryder Cups. Reid saw the value immediately. The platform could handle the complexity of coordinating security, operations, and emergency response across Melbourne Park’s 17 courts and sprawling grounds. The AO Startups pilot tested Raven across Tennis Australia’s summer events in 2023, giving Kerr’s team real-world feedback at scale while providing global exposure beyond their European base. Completing the innovation loop With the in-house lab and external tech incubators thriving, in January 2025 Tennis Australia completed the innovation loop, launching a $30 million fund called AO Ventures. Backed by 150 investors, including venture capitalist Brad Feld and prominent Australian families, the fund writes checks of around $500,000 for seed rounds and $1 million for Series A, according to Reid. To date, four investments have closed: Bolt6 and Raven, along with two padel propertiesMindspring Padel and Padel Haus. The goal, according to Reid, is to invest in approximately 20 companies, with at least five emerging from the AO Startups pipeline. The key, Reid says, is that Tennis Australia becomes not just the investor, but ideally the customer a well. “Our best way of delivering return is for us to be a client and be able to shout from the rooftops,” he says. After Raven completed its pilot and became a Tennis Australia client, the company competed for a contract with Legends Global, which operates more than 300 stadiums across North America. Legends conducted due diligence with Tennis Australia, and its reference, Kerr sayscombined with Raven’s proven performance across Tennis Australia’s eventsis what helped Raven win the contract. “Having Tennis Australia as a part of our profile has absolutely given us a massive stamp of approval at a very senior level,” Kerr says. “That support was invaluable to us.” A 70% success rate Ten startups are participating in the 2026 tournament, including the National Pickleball League, VueMotion, and Truefuels. Since launching in 2022, 40 companies have piloted their technology through AO Startups. Some 70% have become Tennis Australia suppliers or partnersa conversion rate that significantly outperforms typical corporate accelerator programs, where 40% to 50% is considered strong. Tiley has said he wants to make the Australian Open “the biggest sporting event in the world.” The three-pronged innovation engine turning startups into global players is driving the Open to ever-higher levels of fan engagement. “From a leadership point of view, I tell the team to come and ask for forgiveness, not permission,” Tiley told Boardroom. “The approach is: Just go for it. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we’ll just make some adjustments and give it a go again.”
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Mascots are currently enjoying a renaissance. From McDonalds Grimace to the WNBAs Ellie the Elephant and Pop-Tarts Pop-Tart guy, companies everywhere are leaning on characters to represent their brand values and attract eyes on social media. Now the Trump administration is joining in with its own mascot. Its a literal lump of coal. The coal mascotnamed Coalieappears to be a new character designed to represent the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Coalie officially debuted on January 22, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted him (it?) on his X account. In the post, which has now been viewed more than 37,000 times, Burgum shared an obviously AI-generated illustration of himself kneeling next to a grinning, bug-eyed piece of coal that’s decked out in a yellow coal miners helmet, vest, and boots. The caption, in part, read “Mine, Baby, Mine!” [Image: USDOI] A deeper exploration of OSMREs website shows that Coalie appears to be a genuine effort on the agencys part to explain its goals. And while it may not have been OSMREs intention, a poorly designed lump of coal is actually the perfect metaphor to represent the Trump administrations desperate attempt to revive the coal industry. The perfect mascot for Trumps energy agenda Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has been on a mission to prop up coal, despite both environmental and economic data pointing to a dwindling future for fossil fuels. Coals dominance has been declining for years, and for good reason: Burning coal is linked to air pollution that can cause asthma, brain damage, heart problems, and more. Its one of the worst offenders for greenhouse gas pollution, with environmental experts estimating that the world needs to completely phase out coal power by 2040 in order to meet the goals set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Further, multiple studies have found that coal is among the more expensive technologies for utilities today, making it significantly less competitive than renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and natural gas. Nevertheless, last April Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry, at the same time that his administration suspended a decades-old program to detect lung disease in coal miners. In September, the Department of Energy announced plans to spend more than half a billion dollars to prop up coal. [Image: OSMRE] Now enter Coalie: the mascot tasked with the gargantuan challenge of making Trumps coal bailout seem palatable. In a new post to OSMREs website titled 10 Things to Know About How OSMRE Supports Americas Energy Legacy and Communities, Coalie is pictured smiling and waving in multiple hastily assembled graphics. Hes serving as the cheerful mouthpiece for several dubious claims, including that OSMRE works with Indigenous peoples by consulting with tribal leadership through a government-to-government process (see the federal governments long-standing history of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition), and that OSMRE evaluates the potential environmental impact of federal actions and practices responsible stewardship of public lands and resources (there is no environmentally responsible way to harvest coal). In short, Coalie has been handed an impossible job. Ironically, if any mascot could succinctly su up the Trump administrations asinine insistence on a fossil fuel comeback, it would be a shoddily slapped together illustration of a lump of coal.
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Over the past couple of days, TikTok has been flooded with owl impressionsalbeit ones in which the birds sound like various celebrities, have regional accents, or find themselves in hyper-specific situations. Its a trend better seen with your own eyes than explained. My impression of an owl if the owl was Jennifer Coolidge is one such viral example. If Trump were an owl, impersonated another. An owl but its Keira Knightley, another posted. Or an owl but its Bella Swan, said yet another. The hashtag #owlimpression currently has 13,000 videos of TikTokers hoo-hoo-ing in various likenesses. There are also definitive rankings of the best impressions thus far. Other celebrities who have received the owl treatment include Shakira, Alan Rickman, Barack Obama, and Hugh Jackman. Even Jonas Brothers members Joe and Nick Jonas have joined in to playfully troll one another. Accent-based owl impressions are a big part of the trend, too, with creators demonstrating what owls would sound like if they were from China and Texas or Scotland and Australia. Some are even as specific as an Italian American owl from New York or an owl from the Bronx. The trend has since snowballed into a bit of a competition for the chronically online over just how niche the impressions can get, building on the internet’s shared cultural language. Here, the distinctive voices of Jennifer Coolidge and Keira Knightley, as well as Hugh Jackman in his role as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, are internet references as much as they are real people. Alongside cultural references such as RuPauls Drag Race and Love Island, there are the broader impressions of owls in everyday scenarios: an “owl as a jealous girlfriend or an “owl who only hangs out with the guys. Theres an impression of an owl if it was a dad getting up and an owl that trips over a cobblestone that sticks out a little bit too much. While undeniably silly, this trend offers a welcome reprieve from the brain rot and AI slop that have come to dominate much of the internets shared spaces in recent months. Perhaps that explains why a trend so genius in its simplicity has caught on with such gusto across the social media platform. Sure, ChatGPTs image generator could certainly morph a celebrity into owl form, complete with sound effects. Or unleash deepfakes of SpongeBob SquarePants characters on the internet. With little hesitation, though, the human brain can conjure up what Jennifer Coolidge might sound like as an owl. AI could never come up with an impression like this of an owl that was on the Titanic.
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Apples iOS 26 has been available for nearly six months now, but its still one of the companys least well-received software updates for the iPhone. Primarily, people have criticized the new Liquid Glass user interface design, which Apple now lets you tone down. But iOS 26 also changed the way many apps function on the iPhone, disrupting a users muscle memory and expectations, leading to many to pine for the way the iPhone functioned on iOS 18. Yet while you cant revert to iOS 18 once youve upgraded to iOS 26, you can make some simple tweaks that will make your iOS 26 iPhone function as it did before. Heres how. 1. Give Safari the layout it used to have, before iOS 26 After Liquid Glass, one of the most frequent complaints Ive heard about iOS 26 relates to the Safari app. In iOS 26, Apple changed Safari’s default interface, giving it a new compact design that hides important buttons, including bookmarks and tabs. In iOS 26, you now have to tap a new three-dots button next to the new compact URL bar to reveal the buttons that let you access your bookmarks, tabs, and other functions. This change both disrupts muscle memory and requires you to tap more just to access the browser’s basic features. Thankfully, you can ditch the new iOS 26 Safari layout and revert to the layout Safari had in iOS 18 by doing the following: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Safari. Under the Tabs section, tap Bottom. Doing this again places the important bookmarks and tabs buttons directly on a toolbar at the bottom of Safari. 2. Switch back to the classic Phone interface In iOS 26, Apple also changed the layout of the Phone app, giving it a new unified interface that both merges the Favorites and Recents toolbar buttons into a single Calls button and jettisons the Voicemail button entirely. While this change declutters the Phone interface, it also means you have to tap more just to access basic featureslike your voicemails. Thankfully, as with Safari above, you can revert the Phone app to its old interface: Open the Phone app. Tap the three-bar button in the top right corner. In the pop-up menu, tap the Classic interface button. Your Phone app will now have the same layout it had in iOS 18. 3. Stop Music from auto-mixing your songs iOS 26 not only changed the layout of some of the iPhones most popular apps, but it also changed the way you hear your music in the Music app. In iOS 26, the Music app cross-mixes your songs by default, melding the end of one with the beginning of the next using AI. Needless to say, this annoys the heck out of many music aficionados, who like to hear the entire song as the artist envisioned. But thankfully, you can disable this AI slopification of your songs by doing the following: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Music. Under the Audio header, tap Song Transitions. On the Song Transitions screen, toggle the Song Transitions button to off. Your music will now play as it did in iOS 18. 4. Disable background wallpapers in Messages iOS 26 brought some helpful new features to the Messages app, including polls and the ability to live translate messages not in your native language. But Messages in iOS 26 also added the ability to change a chats background. And while this in itself isn’t bad, the user doesnt have total control over the look of their background by default. The person they are chatting with can change it for everyone in the conversation. When this happens, its a distracting pain for all those who like to see blue bubbles against a clean, white background. The good thing is that you can disable background wallpapers by doing the following, which will make Messages look as it did in iOS 18: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Messages. Tap the Conversation Backgrounds switch to toggle the feature off. Even if the friend youre texting with changes their background, all youll see is the glorious white background you were used to in iOS 18. 5. Get PDFs to open where youre used to In iOS 26, Apple brought the Previews app from the Mac to iPhone. Previews is Apples PDF reader, and its presence on the iPhone isnt a bad thing. But the default way iOS 26 handles PDFs now is to open them in Previews, not the Files app (the iPhone’s file manager where documents are stored), which complicates things. In iOS 18, tapping on a PDF in Files would open it where you expected: inside the Files app. But in iOS 26, tapping on a PDF in the Files app kicks you out of Files and launches the Previews app, where the PDF opens. This is a pain, especially if you just wanted to quickly browse all the PDFs you have in the Files app. Luckily, you can stop this from happening by deleting the Previews app from your iPhone: Tap and hold on the Previews app icon. From the pop-up menu, tap Remove app. Tap Delete App. Tap Delete. Now, when you tap on a PDF in Files, it will open in the Files appjust like it did in iOS 18.
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E-Commerce
Spammers and malicious actors inundate us with a steady stream of text messagesoften purporting to be from legitimate institutions or companies. Stanching this flow isn’t easy. Just as the unwanted emails we receive often tell us that we can simply unsubscribe via the unsubscribe link, these text messages explain that we can opt out of future communication simply by replying STOP. But thats not always a safe way to deal with these unsolicited texts. Here’s whyand what you should do instead. The problem with replying STOP to unsolicited text messages Weve all had it happen. We get a text message pitching us a product or asking for a political donation. At the end of the message, we are politely informed that we can opt out of future text communications either by replying STOP directly to the message itself, or texting STOP to another number they list. That may be tempting. It ostensibly offers a quick solution to a legitimate annoyance. But it’s not always a good idea. Thats because replying to a spammy or malicious text in any way informs the sender that the phone number they used has a real person on the other end who is receiving their messages. Once they get this confirmation, a spammer is likely to send you more messages, not fewer. Thankfully, todays smartphones have powerful features built into them that can help you deal with nuisance texts like this, without needing to rely on the goodwill of the sender to remove you from their blast list. Heres what to do instead It should be noted that sometimes it is safe to reply STOP or otherwise follow the instructions in a text message to instruct the sender to cease future communications. If the text message is from a legitimate institution, such as your doctors office, bank, school, or even political groups, they will often honor opt-out STOP requests. But if the text is from a spammer, replying STOP is pretty much futile. Instead, your best course of action to ensure that you never hear from the sender again is to simply block the number they are texting you from. The way you do this varies slightly depending on whether you have an iPhone or an Android phone. But heres how to block a spam text message sender on both. How to block a text message sender on iPhone The default text message app on iPhone is called Messages. Whenever a spam text message lands in your app, heres what to do: Do not reply to it. Instead, tap the senders phone number or name at the top of the text message thread. On the next screen, tap Block Contact. Tap Block Contact from the pop-up that appears. If youre getting too many spam text messages from multiple senders, iOS 26 users also have the option to enable a feature called Screen Unknown Senders, which filters all texts from unknown senders into their own inbox, segregating the messages from the ones you want to receive. How to block a text message sender on Android Google makes it really easy to block text message senders on Android as well. You can do this through the default messaging app on Android phones, called Messages. Heres how: Do not reply to it. Open the Messages app. Find the thread from the sender you want to block, then tap and hold it. From the pop-up menu that appears, tap Block. Depending on what flavor of Android you are using, you may also need to confirm the block by tapping OK. Be careful who you give your phone number to Youll probably never be able to know for certain how a spammer got your phone number. Maybe they obtained it illegally, scraped it from the web, nabbed it from a data breach, or even bought it legally from a data broker. Many of these things are outside of your control. But you can make your phone number harder to obtain by giving it out more sparingly, especially to questionable websites. Meanwhile, when you get those spam text messages, think twice before replying STOP. Simply blocking the number is often a faster way to end the annoyanceand to protect your number from being flagged as belonging to a real person.
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E-Commerce
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