Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic faces first investor vote of confidence on stock market listing September 8, 2019 Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism venture Virgin Galactic faces its first test of investor confidence in a proposed stock market float tomorrow. Would-be shareholders will vote on whether to back the entry via investment vehicle Social Capital Hedosophia (SCH), or whether to withdraw their cash entirely. Read more: Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic plots public listing [...]
Apple rewrote Siri to ‘deflect’ feminism and #MeToo questions September 6, 2019 Apple tweaked the software behind Siri to change how its voice assistant responds to “sensitive topics” including feminism and the #MeToo movement. The project saw Siri’s responses rewritten so it would say it was in favour of “equality”, without ever saying the word feminism, according to leaked documents seen by The Guardian. Read more: Apple [...]
New York attorney general launches antitrust probe at Facebook September 6, 2019 New York’s attorney general has launched an investigation into Facebook for potential antitrust violations. Letitia James’s probe will span several states as she focuses on “Facebook’s dominance in the industry and the potential anticompetitive conduct stemming from that dominance”. Read more: Can Facebook Dating convert Likes into love? “Even the largest social media platform in [...]
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accuses China of using ‘arbitrary detention’ for political gain September 6, 2019 Justin Trudeau has hit out at China for using “pressure tactics” in trying to secure the release of Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou. The Canadian Prime Minister has said that Beijing is “using arbitrary detention as a tool to achieve political goals” after they detained Canadian nationals Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Read more: [...]
Robot rollout: Number of businesses using automation doubles in 2019 September 6, 2019 The number of businesses adopting automation at scale has doubled in the last year, though most say they have yet to assess how this could impact their employees. Roughly eight per cent of companies have deployed over 50 cases of automation this year, twice as many as in 2018, according to a report by Deloitte [...]
Facebook Dating app looks to convert Likes into love September 5, 2019 Has a Facebook Like ever led to love? Almost certainly, but the social network doesn’t want to leave it to chance. Mark Zuckerberg’s tech giant today launched a dating app that will allow its billions of users to Like somebody’s profile if they’re interested – Facebook’s own take on Tinder’s swipe right. Read more: Huge [...]
Tech giants are winning the war for talent, Glassdoor finds September 5, 2019 Tech giants dominate the rankings of the UK’s most popular employers as finance firms fall behind in the race to win top talent, according to a report published today. Read more: Tech founders warn UK at risk of losing global fintech crown Amazon topped the list of the 15 most sought-after companies over the last [...]
You haven’t got mail: Yahoo Mail down around the world September 5, 2019 Yahoo’s email servers have suffered a fault that has blocked users around the world from using the service, with many complaining they cannot work. The problem has also hit the email services of UK companies Sky, BT, and Talktalk, which piggyback off Yahoo’s network. Read more: Natwest and RBS website outages hit online banking customers [...]
Huge Facebook data leak exposes phone numbers of 419m users September 5, 2019 Phone numbers linked to the accounts of more than 419m Facebook users have been exposed in the tech giant’s latest data breach. Databases relating to 133m US Facebook accounts, 50m accounts in Vietnam and 18m UK accounts were found on a server that was not secured by a password, Techcrunch reported. Read more: Facebook’s Libra [...]
Meet the 23 fintech startups on Tech Nation’s latest growth programme September 5, 2019 London startups dominate the list of 23 fintechs that have joined government-backed Tech Nation’s 2019 growth programme. Sixty per cent of the new cohort of financial technology firms hail from the capital, while 40 per cent boast at least one female co-founder, Tech Nation revealed today. Read more: Fintech is all the rage, but is [...]