Amazon’s £49 virtual assistant launches in the UK today: The Amazon Echo Dot October 20, 2016 Amazon has announced that the all-new Echo Dot launches in the UK today. Whereas the larger Echo device has its own speaker, the puck-sized Dot must be connected to external speakers to allow you to control your home entertainment system using your voice. It also works alone if you'd just like to chat to Alexa, the Echo's artificial intelligence, using a [...]
Bank of England head of future technologies: Technology can be cure, not cause, of risk October 20, 2016 Technology shouldn't be feared as being the bringer of risk to financial institutions, a key member of Bank of England staff has said today. "We recognise that new technologies can actually reduce risk," said Will Lovell, head of the future technologies division at the Bank of England, while participating in a panel at a British [...]
Rhythm Paradise Megamix is worth dusting off your 3DS for October 20, 2016 Videogames excel at wish fulfilment. For example: we’ve all dreamed of being a little rabbit travelling across an ocean by rhythmically jumping off the backs of a line of giant turtles, or being a floating bow and arrow shooting at ghosts, or a set of tweezers plucking hairs out of onions with faces drawn on [...]
Watch: Tesla’s self-driving cars revealed in video shared by Elon Musk October 20, 2016 All Tesla cars will have the capacity to drive themselves, company boss Elon Musk has revealed in a highly anticipated announcement which the entrepreneur had teased in tweets. All models, including the Model 3 and and Model X, will now be fitted with hardware that will make it possible to drive without human control. However, that [...]
Robots, AI and digital disruption are coming to the hedge fund industry October 20, 2016 The robots are coming. And the hedge fund industry appears to be accepting it. “There’s a very strong business case for replacing humans with algorithms in a lot of areas of the business,” said one respondent in a survey of more than 100 hedge fund leaders and executives. Some 58 per cent of those interviewed [...]
Stephen Hawking: Artificial intelligence research crucial to the human race October 20, 2016 The UK is about to further boost its status as a world leading centre for artificial intelligence (AI) with the launch of a new centre in Cambridge which is set to explore the implications the technology holds for humans. Officially opened by Professor Stephen Hawking on Wednesday, the £10m Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence [...]
Twitter fires its new head of VR… in the same week it hired him October 19, 2016 Twitter is ploughing on into the world of virtual reality, though it faced a small setback today after announcing it had fired its new head of VR (roughly 48 hours after he started his new job). A Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, Gregory Gopman, had joined the struggling social network to work on a nascent team charged with [...]
Google Pixel review: Quite comfortably the greatest Android phone ever made October 19, 2016 Every Android phone has come with some compromise built in. Whereas the iPhone owes much of its popularity to Apple’s ability to control every last design detail – creating software and hardware that works in perfect harmony – Google has always had to rely on third-party manufacturers to build its phones. Imperfection’s gnarled fingers tended [...]
Shares in this Apple supplier just fell off a cliff after a profit warning October 19, 2016 UK tech firm Laird, which supplies components to Apple among others, has warned on profits sending shares tumbling to a five year low. Increasing pressure on margins and a shift in the production cycles of mobile devices has caused the firm to lower full-year forecasts to £50m. That's down from the previous outlook of £75m after [...]
Britain’s tech stars rally against Brexit immigration curbs in open letter October 18, 2016 Britain's top entrepreneurs leading the country's hottest startups have called on the government to ensure they can hang on to their access to talent and skills from abroad so they can remain competitive after Brexit. Zoopla boss Alex Chesterman and founder of fintech unicorn Funding Circle, Samir Desai, are among nearly 50 leaders of the UK’s most promising and successful [...]