Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box review: Transforms your living room into an immersive light show March 5, 2020 The Hue Sync Box synchronises your Hue smart bulbs to your television, changing the colour and intensity of individual lights in the room based on what’s happening on the screen. On paper that might sound like a gimmick, but in practice the effect is unexpectedly mesmerising. The box sits between up to four HDMI-enabled media [...]
Logitech StreamCam review: A smart webcam for content creators and collaborators March 5, 2020 As fears of a global pandemic begin to tighten their grip on the capital, more and more businesses are requesting that their employees work remotely, rather than slither into the office to spread disease with their grubby little paws and miasma-spluttering faces. The outbreak has even prompted Google and Microsoft to temporarily grant free access [...]
Ex-Uber self-driving chief Anthony Levandowski declares bankruptcy March 5, 2020 Uber’s former self-driving unit boss Anthony Levandowski has declared bankruptcy, after being ordered to pay Google $179m. Anthony Levandowski has been engaged in a long-running battle with Google’s parent company, Alphabet, after it was alleged he stole secrets from the company’s autonomous driving unit Waymo. Levandowski had been an engineer for the self-driving project, before [...]
Digital sovereignty: Time for Britain to take back control of our data March 5, 2020 They might not realise it, but the average person uses 36 cloud-based services every day. Chatting on WhatsApp, watching Netflix, sharing your work calendar with colleagues — all these services use the cloud, a network of remote servers accessed over the internet. But the cloud systems used by Europe have long been far from European. [...]
Cathay Pacific fined £500,000 over data protection breach March 4, 2020 Cathay Pacific has been fined £500,000 by the data watchdog for failing to secure its customers’ personal information. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) today said the airline’s computer systems lacked appropriate security measures to protect customers’ personal details. As a result, roughly 9.4m passengers’ data was exposed between 2014 and 2018, 111,578 of whom were [...]
US senators urge MPs to rethink Huawei 5G decision March 4, 2020 A group of senior US senators has written to MPs urging them to rethink the UK’s decision to allow Huawei to help build its 5G networks. Twenty senators, including both Democrats and Republicans, expressed “significant” concern with the decision, citing “significant security, privacy and economic threats”. In January the government gave Huawei the green light [...]
Driverless car startup Five raises $41m investment from Direct Line and Airbnb backer March 4, 2020 London tech firm Five has today closed $41m in funding from a slew of new investors, including Trustbridge Partners, Direct Line and Sistema VC. The series B fundraising was supported by existing backers Lakestar, Amadeus Capital Partners, Kindred Capital and Notion Capital — which between them have backed the likes of Airbnb, Klarna, Graphcore and [...]
Startups clash with watchdog over digital merger regulation March 3, 2020 British startups have been plunged into a bitter war of words with the competition watchdog as the two sides clash over how major tech mergers should be regulated. Industry body the Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) has penned a scathing letter to chancellor Rishi Sunak warning that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) risked [...]
Competition watchdog risks ‘killing’ British tech firms, startups warn March 3, 2020 The UK competition watchdog risks “killing” rising British tech companies by launching lengthy investigations while global rivals are free to pull ahead, startups have warned. In a letter to chancellor Rishi Sunak, seen by City A.M., industry body the Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) said the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) “eleventh-hour interventions” risked [...]
WPP shares rise as it bags bumper Intel account March 3, 2020 Shares in WPP rose more than three per cent this morning after Intel selected one of the ad giant’s companies as its global creative agency of record. VMLY&R is set to take the lion’s share of Intel’s global creative account, which is estimated at $1.4bn (£1.1bn), according to industry sources. The deal, which is thought [...]