News
Airtime Rewards, a Manchester-based company that offers phone bill discounts for shopping with their retail partners, has raised £1m in Seed round. The majority of the investment - £750,000 - came from the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.
The company has currently partnered with Waitrose, Missguided, Groupon, Jack Wills & Byron. It also has agreements in place with all of the UK’s major mobile network operators.
This latest investment will be used to expand the business and create 12 new jobs in the next year as well as developing the company’s sales and marketing functions.
To read more, click here.
Ocado, the online-only grocer, is on the verge of being promoted into the FTSE 100 for the first time thanks to a successful year that saw its share price treble.
Shares in Ocado rose 44% on the day its tie-up with US grocery giant Kroger was announced, adding £1.6bn to its stock market value. Other deals have been struck with grocery chains in France, Sweden and Canada to license out its market-leading online delivery technology.
This hike has led to Ocado now being worth more than retailer Marks & Spencer, which had been valued at £4.8bn prior to its full-year report that included poor results and an announcement on store closures.
To read more, click here.
MedicSpot, an online GP service, has managed to raise a total of £1m in funding from Henley Business Angels.
The company's main aim is to use tech, such as their MedicCam, to provide a CQC approved private GP service, which is offered via telehealth connection. This will allow people to have more appointment options in terms of time and place, making it easier to fit into a busy schedule.
MedicSpot will use the funds to help boost its expansion to 300 pharmacies in major cities across the UK as well as increase patient numbers ten-fold in the next 12 months.
To read more, click here.
Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has offered up his annual summer reading list:
1. Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson
Top Takeaway: Follow your sense of wonder, but don't go overboard.
2. Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved, by Kate Bowler
Top Takeaway: Don't get stuck on finding a reason - bad things do happen to good people.
3. Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders
Top Takeaway: Look carefully at the human consequences of decisions.
4. Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, by David Christian
Top Takeaway: Our world is interconnected, and its not too late to learn about it.
5. Factfulness, by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund
Top Takeaway: Don't panic! At least not until you've broken down why you're scared.
To read more, click here.
Ultromics, a UK-based startup which uses AI to diagnose coronary heart disease, has raised £10 million in a Series A round. The investment was led by Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), with participation from Neptune, RT Ventures, GT Healthcare, Tanarra, Fushia, and angel investors Andre Crawford-Brunt and Dieter Spälti.
With heart disease affecting almost 50% of people over the age of 40 and the biggest cause of death globally Ultromics aims to significantly increase accuracy in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease using its AI technology.
The investment will be used to bring the technology to market in the USA and make it available in the UK early 2019.
To read more, click here.
Paypal, the online payments company, is buying iZettle, Europe’s answer to the mobile payments company Square, for about $2.2 billion.
iZettle, which was founded 8 years ago and is based in Stockholm, began as a maker of products like credit card readers. It has since expanded its offerings to include analytics software and small business loans, giving it a strong foothold among such companies in Europe and Latin America.
The purchase would enable PayPal to increase its international expansion, and help it compete with Square, which has focused on processing payments for small businesses. Both companies are trying to capitalize on the growing volume of purchases being made on mobile phones and the internet.
To read more, click here.
According to a new report by One Click Retail, a marketing and analysis firm, high-end beauty sales at Amazon are on the rise.
As well as this Amazon are planning to open an Indie Beauty Shop in the US in June. For brands to qualify to be sold in store they will need to be at least 50% independently owned and not be sold at Ulta, Target or Walmart.
Although Amazon still face issues from counterfeit products, fake reviews and the fact customers can not test the product before purchase.
To read more, click here.
The NHS is trialling the use of AI to try and improve the service it offers. Under a new partnership between University College London Hospitals (UCLH) and the Alan Turing Institute, doctors will be replaced by AI in some instances, in an attempt to build efficiency.
AI could be responsible for diagnosing cancer on CT scans and deciding which A&E patients get prioritised, among other things, at one of the UK’s largest hospitals.
Of course caution is needed, especially to avoid a repeat of the Royal Free Hospital where the personal data of over 1.6million patients was shared with AI developer DeepMind.
To read more, click here.
Samsung, the global tech giant, is opening a new research centre in Cambridge in order to boost its AI capabilities and explore the technology’s user-centric potential.
Samsung has also said that it is looking to expand its R&D workforce in the UK, by increasing the number of employees from the current 250 to 400, sometime in the near future.
To read more, click here.
Facial recognition is becoming a more prevalent form for companies to recognise their customers.
Live Nation Entertainment, the company behind the Ticketmaster brand, is developing a facial recognition system that they hope will replace gig tickets. The company has teamed up with Blink Identity, a company that builds face and iris biometric appliances, to develop tech which, it claims, can identify someone in less than a second as they walk past, by taking an image of their face and comparing it to a database.
HSBC tried to modernise its password access by creating voice ID recognition in 2017 in an attempt to counteract fraud. However a BBC investigation discovered the system could be tricked by twins. More recently HSBC have rolled out Face ID to 24 countries.
Main concerns with facial recognition are to do with privacy and security. The question of who can access the databases that biometric companies create is an important one. Another is whether such recognition can be tricked, either by family members or people with similar facial features or even with photos.
The best answer would perhaps be to create multi layered authentication, but then this would defy the point of simplifying the whole process.
To read more, click here.