Interior design marketplace Eporta lands $8m funding from venture capital and angel investors including Guy Hands | City A.M. April 10, 2018 Interior design startup Eporta has nabbed $8m (£5.7m) in funding from an impressive list of venture capital firms and angel investors. London-based Eporta, which acts as a business-to-business marketplace where interior designers and offices can buy furniture from manufacturers directly, pulled in the cash in a series A round led by US firm Canvas Ventures. [...]
Shutterstock CEO Jon Oringer on putting profit first and selling his billionth image | City A.M. April 9, 2018 Many moons ago, there was a game called GoogleWhack. The objective was to return only one hit from a Google search query consisting of just two words. Naturally, with billions of pages indexed, it’s quite tough, and today, probably impossible. I propose a new, but similar, game using Shutterstock. Type in any two words, and [...]
Is Sadiq Khan letting London down as mayor? April 9, 2018 Is Sadiq Khan letting London down as mayor? Shaun Bailey, a Conservative London Assembly member who sits on the Environment Committee, says YES. All too often over recent weeks, the public have woken up to tragic headlines. News of yet another stabbing victim is an almost daily occurrence, and it is reported that, on some [...]
Back to school: We must teach AI to have a moral compass April 6, 2018 In the UK, it’s mandated that 13 of the first 18 years of a young person’s life are spent in some sort of education. We invest very heavily in teaching children what they need to know to be functioning and productive members of society: our doctors, our teachers, our data scientists of the future. Artificial [...]
Artificial intelligence fintech investment firm Arkera grabs £4m from investors including Brevan Howard’s Alan Howard April 5, 2018 Arkera, a new fintech app which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to aid personal investing, has raised £4m from investors including the co-founder of hedge fund Brevan Howard. Alan Howard led the funding round along with electronic trading firm XTX Markets, with additional input from payment services firm Docomo Digital, ex-Deutsche Bank chief operating officer Henry [...]
Blockchain firm targets “failing” online retailers April 3, 2018 Online retailers, often blamed for Britain’s high street funk, are set to face their own disruption from an artificial intelligence-driven platform. Blockchain firm Eligma is planning to raise £17m from the sale of tokens later this month. The digital currency can be used across a range of online stores. The firm has created a platform [...]
Emmanuel Macron faces down the unions in bid to modernise French economy April 2, 2018 Emmanuel Macron is trying to forge a new path for France, but his efforts reveal a fundamental tension between his ambition and the reality of the French condition. Last year, Macron’s government announced plans to liberalise the economy, starting with employment reform – an area that left his predecessors scarred. Changes to employment law, making [...]
AI research company is making a plan for how Mayor of London Sadiq Khan can promote AI in London March 22, 2018 Mayor of London Sadiq Khan hired London-based artificial intelligence research group CognitionX to plan how the city can best harness AI. Khan said he believes that London is already in a strong position in the data economy, so he wants CognitionX to produce a report that outlines how AI can positively progress the city’s policies [...]
A sensible way to play the robotics megatrend March 21, 2018 In the next few decades, chief executives of major global corporations could all become redundant. They will be replaced by robots with highly-developed artificial intelligence, because machines are quicker, more rational and do not get bogged down with silly human emotions. That’s according to Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese internet behemoth Alibaba. Of course, [...]
How artificial intelligence is re-coding the way we manage our money March 14, 2018 It was 1950 when Alan Turing developed a test which looked at a machine’s ability to generate responses that were so human-like that you wouldn’t be able to tell it was a computer. Fast forward almost seven decades, and we are now at a tipping point in tech, as artificial intelligence (AI) nudges us [...]