Victorian auditor finds dodgy dealings in government co-owned fibre optic bridge sensor startup

VicTrack and Xerox came up with a nifty system called FiBridge that uses "fibre optic sensing" to check if bridges are safe. It was so promising that the state government and Xerox set up a joint partnership in 2021 called Eloque to sell it to governments around the world. Sounds cool, but there's one problem - it didn't fucken work. The Victorian Auditor-General's Office found that the department of transport "did not conduct sufficient due diligence before investing. It also did not specify its requirements before Eloque started to install FiBridge on state-owned assets". The CEO of Eloque was also the CEO of VicTrack (who own the bridges these sensors would be installed on), creating a "lack of transparency around his governance and management responsibilities and led to conflicts of interest".