Sramana Mitra: Who were you dialing? What was the process of targeting and positioning? Isaac Oates: I always think about what I would do differently, I would say that we probably brought on a sales...
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SparkLabs Group started in 2012 with a Seoul-based accelerator dedicated to boosting South Korea’s then-nascent startup ecosystem. Now it’s going back to its roots with the launch of a $50 million fund for early-stage Korean startups that want to expand globally. Read More
Flytrex wants to prove that drones are a realistic option for on-demand logistics with a new delivery program that took off in Iceland’s capital today. While other companies, including Amazon, have tested drone deliveries, Flytrex says this is the first time a fully operational on-demand drone delivery service has launched in an urban area. Drones will take orders from online… Read More
Now is the time for startups to engage in strategic planning so that future liquidity needs will be met. This article discusses market trends and how debt financing and other protective measures can engineer optionality that can help a startup not only survive, but potentially thrive during a period of financial distress. Read More
Swiss startup Dacuda’s 3D scanning division was acquired by Magic Leap in February, but it seems the company’s founder, Michael Born, is just getting started with computer vision. He and three others who didn’t go over to the much-hyped and intensely secretive AR company have formed a new one: PXL Vision AG, focused on real-time image classification and Read More
Uber’s past six months have been tumultuous, with lawsuits and allegations of harassment. The company doesn’t even have a CEO right now, but newly released financials suggest that most users don’t care. First reported by Axios, Uber has confirmed to us that Uber’s $8.7 billion in gross bookings were up 17 percent in the second quarter. Global trips increased 150… Read More
Commuting in a busy city like San Francisco can be annoying — between all the cars, bikes, Boosted Boards and other electric gizmos zipping and weaving through lanes. The Ojo Electric scooter, while it might help with your personal traffic woes, won’t do much to help reduce the overall annoyance commuters experience. Read More
“How much money does it take to get a startup off the ground?” Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are faced with this question all the time, and the only right answer — it depends — is also the least satisfying. For any particular startup to succeed, it might take a lot of outside funding or very little. It’s contingent on the business a team is trying to build. Read More
Day 2 of YC S’17 brought us autonomous store checkout, cannabis genomics and at-home fertility testing. We whittled down the strong day of pitches to just seven hot companies. These are the startups our writers and the investors we spoke with were most excited about. Read More
VIPKID, an online English teaching tool, announced today that it has raised $200 million in financing. That financing round values the company at $1.5 billion, according to a report by Bloomberg. That wouldn’t just give VIPKID unicorn status — it also exposes a huge amount of demand there is in China and other countries as a tool to learn English from English speakers. VIPKID… Read More
At about 9pm on Tuesday, August 22 a hacker swapped his or her own SIM card with mine, presumably by calling T-Mobile. This, in turn, shut off network services to my phone and, moments later, allowed the hacker to change most of my Gmail passwords, my Facebook password, and text on my behalf. All of the two-factor notifications went, by default, to my phone number so I received none of them and… Read More
There is no shortage of AI and machine learning startups being born today. But one of the biggest opportunities remains in turning AI into some kind of platform that others can leverage, especially businesses. In recent years a new area has been developed in relation what’s know in the tech industry as knowledge graphs, a concept which been around for quite some time, especially in… Read More
As companies get bigger and bigger, their needs are going to change — including, probably most importantly, their options for health care as their employee base expands and the costs of those plans start to balloon. But the end result is that employees could be presented with a confusing set of plans to pick from without a whole lot of guidance. There’s where Lumity comes in.… Read More
John Price: In order to solve a problem that is worth solving with machine learning, the biggest problem is the amount of data you have to aggregate, normalize, and get in shape. Once again, it’s not...
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Zopa CEO Jaidev Janardana. Zopa
LONDON â Peer-to-peer lender Zopa saw revenues leap 60% higher last year as losses narrowed.
The online lender's revenue rose from £20.6 million in 2015 to £33.2 million last year, accounts filed with Companies House this week show. At the same time, losses narrowed from £8.8 million to £5.8 million.
While Zopa still booked a loss for the year, the accounts confirm that the company became profitable on an operating basis in the fourth quarter of 2016, as previously announced by CEO Jaidev Janardana.
Peer-to-peer lenders, also known as marketplace lenders, are online platforms that let people invest in individuals or companies by lending money to them directly.
Zopa, founded in 2005, lets people lend to consumers and is credited with inventing the peer-to-peer concept. Loan origination rose by 30% to £689 million in 2016, accounts show.
Headcount rose by 69% to 188 due to investment in tech, operations, risk, legal, and compliance. Staffing costs rose from £7.4 million to £11.8 million.
Zopa says in its accounts that this investment in staff is necessary to "ensure the company is both viable and sustainable as it moves towards its next stage of growth." The company announced plans to launch a retail bank alongside its peer-to-peer lending operation last November.
Zopa raised £32 million to finance this expansion in June of this year.
Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two biggest cryptocurrencies by market value, are slipping on Tuesday, while Bitcoin Cash recovers after Monday's fall.
Bitcoin is down 4.7% against the dollar to $3,810.39 at 7.20 a.m. BST (2.20 a.m. ET), a one-week low. Bitcoin has been pulling back after a rapid rally last week that saw it pass $4,000 and $4,400 per coin for the first time ever in a matter of days.
Meanwhile, Ethereum is down 3.4% against the dollar to $309.17, extending a run of range-bound trading for the digital currency that has seen it struggle to break above $350.
Bitcoin Cash, the cryptocurrency split out from Bitcoin at the start of the month, has been on a tear. The new digital currency rose as high as $1,000 over the weekend but fell sharply on Monday as some traders viewed the rally as overdone. After falling back to earth, some are now seeing value and Bitcoin Cash is up 3.7% to $626.62.
Get the latest Bitcoin price here.
A new video from Intel's official YouTube channel showed what seems to be an all-black version of Microsoft's Surface Book.
Microsoft only offers the Book in a silver coloration, so this could either be just a rendering or a first look at an updated model.
Intel's video is about its latest-generation chips, after all, which may well be featured inside a refreshed Surface Book.
Microsoft first launched the device in 2015, and then updated it last autumn, so a new model is expected for 2017.
The new processors from Intel are still built on the architecture of the 7th-gen Kaby Lake, but feature a claimed 40% speed improvements over their predecessors.
The Core i7, Intel's highest-end chip, has been included in the update, and considering that the Surface Book is Microsoft's most powerful computer it would make sense to release a new model with the most recent, top-of-the-line chip.
There is no indication on a precise date as of yet, but you can expect Microsoft to refresh its hardware lineup some time at a dedicated event in the coming months.
You can also watch Intel's full video down below.
Get the latest Intel stock price here.
The Samsung Galaxy S8. Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider
The long wait is over: Samsung's virtual assistant Bixby is finally launching in more than 200 countries, including the UK.
As previously reported by The Verge, the South Korean electronics company's answer to Siri and Google Assistant is becoming available in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and hundreds of other countries â following its July launch in the US and South Korea.
Samsung managed to totally botch the launch of Bixby. It was announced ahead of the Galaxy S8, the company's flagship smartphone, and the plan was to launch it alongside the device when it went on sale in April 2017. It was advertised as an innovative new way to control your smartphone using your voice. The S8 even had a dedicated hardware button for activating Bixby!
But shortly before the phone went on sale, Samsung announced Bixby would not be available at launch â only "later this spring." Then it was delayed again, amid reports that Samsung was struggling to get it to understand English.
In July, it belatedly arrived on handsets in the US. But even then, it had issues. As Business Insider's Steve Kovach reported at the time, it was "pretty dumb," "half-baked," and not particularly helpful for answering questions â a key function of modern AI assistants on smartphones.
Bixby is now becoming available around the globe â albeit still only with US English and Korean. So if you've got a strong regional accent, you might still be out of luck.
"The expansion of Bixbyâs voice capabilities is an initial step in the continued rollout of Bixby functionality," executive vice president at Samsung Electronics Injong Rhee said in a statement. "In the future, Bixby will have the learning power to offer more intelligent and personalized interactions and seamless connections across more devices."
The expansion comes ahead of another big event for Samsung. It is launching the Galaxy Note 8, its next flagship smartphone, on Wednesday. It comes after the catastrophic Note 7 in 2016, which was recalled (twice!) and then permanently discontinued over its exploding batteries.
That's one angry Drogon. HBO
In a world full of spoilers, it's unwise to deprive "Game of Thrones" fans of their favourite show for long.
But that's what happened on Monday night, when fans who use Sky's Now TV streaming service to catch up with the show were forced to install an update before watching the latest episode.
The update left them unable to see anything on-screen, but able to hear the audio. The player simply showed a blank screen. According to complaints on Twitter and Now TV's forums, it's affected people who watch Now TV through its standalone player on laptops or PCs.
When Business Insider checked at 11pm on Monday night, the issue still hadn't been fixed, with more than a hundred users complaining about it online. According to users posting this morning, the issue still hasn't been fixed, meaning there are lots of outraged fans who haven't caught up with the latest episode.
@NOWTV updated app now only get sound no picture so useless. That's called RADIO.
To rub salt into the wound, those who checked Now TV's official Twitter page for help found that the account was posting spoilers.
I had to follow you @NOWTV to ask for help. & you are now posting spoilers!!!! Really??? Â
I had to follow you @NOWTV to ask for help. & you are now posting spoilers!!!! Really??? Â
Sky has not responded to a request for comment, but a customer representative told Business Insider on Twitter that the company was aware of the issue.
And posting on Now TV's forum, a staffer wrote: "We're aware of an issue that is causing frustration for a lot of customers. We have been looking into this as a matter of urgency and hope to have a fix ready soon.
"To clarify, this mostly affects users with a certain graphics card: Intel HD Graphics 3000."
The update seems to have been causing issues for several days, but has led to more complaints in the last day as people log into Now TV to get their weekly "Game of Thrones" fix. Judging by forum posts, the issue has mostly affected Mac owners.
A number of angry users threatened to cancel their Now TV subscriptions if Sky didn't fix the problem.
Shona Ghosh/Business Insider
This isn't the first time the Now TV player has had technical hiccups. It stopped working on Chrome in 2015 when Google halted support for Microsoft's Silverlight streaming software.
Sky doesn't break out how many subscribers watch "Game of Thrones" on the Now TV player. According to a press release in July, around 4.7 million people watched the first episode across Sky Atlantic and Now TV, and there were 11.3 million downloads of previous episodes via Now TV alone.
Google is planning to release a new version of its own Pixel-branded Chromebook, according to a report from Android Police.
The device would be a successor to 2015's Chromebook Pixel 2, whose sales were discontinued last year.
No new Chromebooks were announced at Google's hardware event last Autumn, so this would be Google's first laptop in two years.
Back in 2016, there were rumours that Google was working on a device codenamed "Bison," which supposedly had the form factor of a slim laptop (under 10mm), but run on a heavily modified version of Android internally known as "Andromeda."
It was positioned as a probable competitor to Apple's MacBook and iPad Pro, as well as Microsoft's Surface Pro: It would start at about $799 (£620), have a 12.3-inch high-resolution display, a stylus, either 32GB or 128GB of storage, and 8GB or 16GB of RAM, and even a dedicated "tablet mode."
Back then, Android Police reported that Bison would launch some time in Q3 2017. The timing is coincidental, but it's possible the upcoming Chromebook Pixel might be a completely different device to the one originally rumoured.
One major difference is that the new Chromebook Pixel will apparently run on Chrome OS, whereas Google has never announced Andromeda.
And while the rumoured launch windows for Bison and the new Chromebook Pixel match up, Google is actually following the Pixel's own release schedule. The first Chromebook Pixel was released in 2013, and then its successor followed two years later.
In addition to that, several things have changed at Google over the past year, which might have morphed what was once envisioned as Bison into a simpler, more streamlined successor to an existing lineup of devices.
The company launched the first Pixel-branded phones, which proved rather successful, and most importantly it brought Android apps to Chrome OS, bridging the gap between the two platforms and fulfilling what apparently was Andromeda's original goal.
We also heard that a high-end device codenamed "Eve" was in the works, and that it could be the third Chromebook Pixel, but we don't know if and how that is in any way related to Bison, whose status remains uncertain.
There is no information about the new device's specs, but if the previous models are anything to go by, it will be a top-of-the-line machine. You can expect it to be unveiled some time this autumn.
Get the latest Google stock price here.
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