With a name like GRAVITYMASTER the Casio GPW-2000-1A had better make you fly. Sadly, it doesn’t. However, it can help you while you jet from spot to spot. The $800 GPW-2000-1A is specifically designed for pilots and travelers. It connects to your phone or the local GPS positioning satellites to set the time at your current location and a second timezone. Further, it has a clever Flight… Read More
A day after payments company Worldpay confirmed that it had been approached by Vantiv and JPMorgan for a possible acquisition, today the company confirmed that it has agreed to the terms of an offer from one of them, Vantiv. The US payments company is offering £3.85 per share, working out to around £7.7 billion (or just under $10 billion) for the company, which competes with Verifone,… Read More
Volvo is done with entirely traditional engines and exclusively gas-powered vehicles, the company announced. By 2019, Volvo group intends to offer only either fully electric or hybrid engines on all new models, making it the first automaker to commit to using only alternative drive trains.
The end of the solely combustion engine-powered car did seem like an eventual inevitability, given the… Read More
Baidu now claims one of the largest partner ecosystems for an autonomous driving platform in the world: Its Apollo autonomous driving program now counts over 50 partners, including FAW Group, one of the major Chinese carmakers that will work with Baidu on commercialization of the tech. Other partners include Chinese auto companies Chery, Changan and Great Wall Motors, as well as Bosch… Read More
French startup Qonto has raised another $11.3 million (€10 million) from existing investors Valar Ventures and Alven Capital. The company is now also open for business. You can now create a French business bank account on the company’s website. Qonto wants to become the N26 of business accounts. While retail banking hasn’t changed quickly enough over the past few years, it feels… Read More
The U.S. government has lifted the controversial laptop ban for flights to the U.S. for three major airlines. Effective immediately, Etihad Airways, Emirates Airline and Turkish Airlines have all been cleared to allow customers to bring electronic devices, including laptops, tablets and e-readers, on flights from the Middle East into the U.S.. That still leaves another six airlines, each of… Read More
Office closures don’t just mean unemployment and uncertainty, they can lead to new opportunities. That’s the case for Mighty Bear Games, a Singapore-based games studio that grew out of the closure of King.com’s local office. As part of streamlining following its $5.9 billion acquisition by Activision, King.com shut down the Singapore office it picked up when it bought Non… Read More
Push Doctor, a U.K.-based startup that lets you book a video consultation with a doctor and manage other aspects of your health digitally, has raised $26.1 million in Series B funding. Read More
A year after buying 1,500 patents from Microsoft, Xiaomi is digging into the global intellectual property pool once again. Nokia has announced that it has entered into a wide-ranging patent licensing and purchase deal with Xiaomi, the Chinese maker of smartphones, wearables and other hardware, which will also become a customer of Nokia’s for networking equipment. The deal covers three… Read More
Ohpen, a Netherlands-based company that has built cloud-based core banking software, has raised €15 million in Series B funding, which I understand gives it a valuation of €100 million. Private equity firm Amerborgh has led the round, with the new financing pegged for accelerated growth, including expansion to the U.K. where it recently opened an office in London. Read More
China’s search giant Baidu has made another acquisition to continue its push into artificial intelligence, and specifically to help it carve out a place for itself as a platform for developers who want to create chatbots and other services based on natural language technology. Baidu has acquired Kitt.ai, a profitable startup based out of Seattle that has developed a framework to build… Read More
This deal is a bit convoluted, but the bottom line is that you’ll be able to watch the season 7 of Game of Thrones live or on demand on TV streaming app Molotov. The French startup just signed a deal with OCS, a premium TV package focused on movies and TV shows. Starting today, Molotov users can subscribe for €12 per month and access both live channels and on-demand content.… Read More
Cooking kit delivery company Blue Apron traded up 3.5% on the stock market Monday, erasing some of the losses from its first two days as a public company. Shares closed at $9.67, which was still beneath last week’s $10 IPO price. This is in contrast to a lot of public debuts, where companies are typically in the green for the first day “pop.” It’s the subsequent days… Read More
The acceptance of virtual currencies by both the Chinese and Japanese governments are driving cryptocurrency growth, with China on the cusp of establishing its own currency, and Japan regulating bitcoin as true legal payment. Read More
What if we treated them as the boon of billions of years of evolution? They allow us to detect patterns from few instances, to imagine things we’ve never seen, and to function robustly in a changing environment. Can we design decision-making processes that capture the benefits of human bias without the drawbacks? Read More
Samsung is reportedly working on its own smart speaker device to compete with Amazon’s Echo and others, the WSJ reports. Appropriately, the timing of the device is far from ironed out. Samsung has had quite a few problems getting the voice-powered element of its Bixby smart assistant ready for Galaxy S8 consumers in the US after launching the device months ago. The report also states… Read More
According to freshly-minted rumors posted by Bloomberg, Apple is looking to do away with the iPhone’s tried-and-true fingerprint reader altogether, in favor of face-unlocking technology. The move would mark a major shift away from Touch ID, a mainstay in Apple phones since the introduction of the 5S, back in late-2013. The combination Touch ID/home button has been the source of a lot… Read More
With as much as half of all current jobs going away in the next 10-12 years, let’s adopt the following mission: making learning accessible and feasible for every single employee. Read More
If you’ve been following the headlines in the world of AI, you might be fooled into thinking that corporations are doubling down, rather than withdrawing, from pure research. But on the ground, things are considerably more complicated — tech companies are spending more on the development part of R&D while relying more on cash strapped universities to move the needle on… Read More
While the world waits for Instagram to launch a location-sharing feature à la Snapchat, it’s worth wondering about the potential arrival of something far more simple and obvious: user-preset filters.
Instagram now allows you to prioritize your favorite filters at the beginning of the list and leave the ones that you don’t use often at the end. However, each user has their own… Read More
