Top business leaders back UK-based P2P property lending site in £10m financing round December 17, 2018 Publicis Group boss Maurice Lévy and Citigroup Global Markets chairman Cyrus Ardalan are among the investors who have contributed to a £10m funding round for a peer-to-peer property lending platform. The UK-based BLEND Network also drew investment from Jean-Phillipe Blochet, co-founder of macro hedge fund Brevan Howard, during a late-seed financing round last week. Each [...]
Elon Musk used Monty Python to test the sound in Tesla’s Model 3 December 14, 2018 Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has said he stopped meetings to watch clips from British favourite Monty Python, in order to explain how he wanted the sound to work in the Model 3. During the second half of 2017 as Tesla worked at full capacity to ramp up production of the Model 3 sedan, Wired first [...]
Apple updates iPhone software in attempt to dodge China ban December 14, 2018 Tech giant Apple has said it will be pushing out a software update to its iPhone smartphone in China next week, as it attempts to work around an upcoming sales ban on several models. The Californian company is currently embroiled in an ongoing global dispute with chipmaker Qualcomm, which believes Apple has infringed a number [...]
Apple to spend billions on new tech centres across the US December 13, 2018 Apple has said it will invest billions of dollars in spreading its physical presence across the US over the next five years, and aims to create 20,000 jobs in the process. The iPhone creator today said it will spend $1bn (£792m) on building a new tech campus in Texas, expanding its existing operations in the [...]
Huawei Matebook X Pro review: The Chinese tech giant’s laptop is a true MacBook Pro rival December 13, 2018 Huawei has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons lately. The news comes at a time when the Chinese phone giant is only just beginning to drum up some real brand recognition in Western markets. In a few short years critics have stopped making jokes about how difficult it is to pronounce the company’s name [...]
Hamleys pulls slime toy as kids craze gets hit by EU safety warnings December 13, 2018 Hamleys has pulled a toy slime product off its shelves, after a wider test by consumer group Which found several products had failed safety tests for containing high levels of boron. Frootiputti slime, made by Goobands and sold by Hamleys, contained more than four times the EU limit for boron levels. The group said exposure to [...]
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic tourist spaceship successfully touches the edge of the world in today’s test flight December 13, 2018 Rocket man and Virgin billionaire Richard Branson's commercial space programme successfully reached the edge of the world's atmosphere for the first time in its fourth test flight across the US today. The Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two rocket, which was carried up to a height of above 12,000 metres by a specially-designed plane before igniting its motors, reached [...]
Confronting the Robots December 13, 2018 | City Talk Professor Peter Fleming, formerly of Cass Business School, wrote an article for Demos Quarterly which argued that the age of automation is unlikely to lead to a utopian world of play, but doesn't necessarily mean a proliferation of rubbish jobs. You can read the article in full here. Dr Simone Stumpf, Senior Lecturer in the Department of [...]
‘Non-sexy’ is the new cool: UK fintech predictions for 2019 December 13, 2018 Despite the continued uncertainties of Brexit, 2018 was another year for the UK’s fintech sector. Record levels of investment poured into the community, with $16bn secured in the first six months of 2018, exceeding the value of investment in US fintech by almost $2bn. In addition, progressive regulation and a thriving financial services sector attracted [...]
Tech supermarket Ocado reveals solid sales growth amid physical retail downturn December 13, 2018 Once dubbed the "Microsoft of retail", online supermarket Ocado has shaken off the sector's blues to post strong sales growth in its final quarter of the year. In a trading update for the three months to the start of December, Ocado said it had seen "consistent strong" growth in sales in the region of 12 [...]