DEBATE: Could France overtake Britain for tech investment? March 18, 2019 Could France overtake Britain for tech investment? Kat Borlongan, director of the French Tech Mission, says YES. There are number of misconceptions around doing business in France. A language barrier and extensive bureaucracy have perhaps deterred investors from funding some of the best tech startups, specialising in everything from artificial intelligence to smart cities. But these [...]
The World Wide Web is 30 years old – what will be the future of the internet? March 14, 2019 The World Wide Web turned 30 years old this week: on 12 March 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to the world’s largest physics laboratory, Cern, that outlined a new way to link, share, and manage information over the internet. As the main way that the vast majority of us access the online world, the [...]
House of Lords Committee slams fraud office for slow pace of bribery investigations March 14, 2019 A House of Lords Committee today criticised the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for the slow pace of bribery investigations. In a report on the Bribery Act 2010 published today, the Committee said: “The slow pace of investigations, and in particular the failure to update companies on their progress, is a [...]
How the arrival of the World Wide Web has changed the mortgage market March 12, 2019 In 1989, the Swiss physics laboratory, CERN, was buzzing with information but it had one big problem: ideas, data and knowledge held by the lab was stored across incompatible computers. A young scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, envisioned creating a unifying structure for sharing information across its computer systems. He wrote a proposal for a linked information [...]
30 years since the dawn of the World Wide Web, Britain is still at the heart of tech success March 12, 2019 It has been 30 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee sat down at his desk at Cern and changed the world with a humble sounding document called “Information Management: A Proposal”. The memo, piloting a system to allow computers to share information via an emerging technology called hypertext, did not catch many people’s eyes as it [...]
AI’s success story still has a few missing chapters March 11, 2019 This article is not written by robots – we promise – but apparently the day when they could be is already upon us. We have just finished reading about the GPT-2 text generator which, according to this Spectator piece, “not only does text analysis and augmentation, but generates highly sophisticated content”. “It can effectively write articles,” [...]
14 shares for your ISA March 9, 2019 By Richard Beddard from interactive investor. Richard reveals three rules, codified in his Decision Engine, that reduce the stress of trading. Every five weeks I share my Decision Engine’s ranking table, which orders the shares I follow by the scores I have given them. The scores are a measure of confidence a company will turn [...]
Captain Marvel review: Brie Larson is a revelation in this middling Marvel romp March 7, 2019 It seems almost unbelievable that it’s taken Marvel 20 movies to feature a female lead, especially when Brie Larson makes it all look so effortless. Alongside a digitally de-aged Samuel L Jackson, she brings verve and charisma to what could easily have been a forgettable entry into the Marvel canon. It’s a strange film, showing [...]
‘Tim Apple’: Donald Trump makes latest name gaffe with Apple boss Tim Cook March 7, 2019 US President Donald Trump has referred to Apple chief executive Tim Cook as ‘Tim Apple’ in his latest name-related gaffe. Trump met with the Silicon Valley boss during a White House meeting of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, which was set up to help the country manage the shift to automation and artificial intelligence. [...]
British identity startup Onfido quietly closes £4m funding from Augmentum Fintech March 6, 2019 Digital identity startup Onfido has quietly closed a £4m investment from Augmentum Fintech, City A.M. has learned. Documents published by the London-listed fund yesterday revealed the tie-up, which appears to be a one-off injection made last month ahead of an upcoming funding round for the company. Onfido, which makes technology used to verify customer identities [...]