Every parent’s worst nightmare is a student spending more time playing video games and surfing the web than studying for school. But the team over at OpenAI believes that a “fun parent” approach could actually bring us all one step closer to the elusive generalized intelligence. Its new tool, Universe, was created to train and measure AI frameworks with video games… Read More
There’s no shortage of entrepreneurs in Africa, but their ambitions are often hampered by the lack in many countries of reliable and affordable digital payment systems. Moneywave wants to empower individuals and small merchants to take part in the thriving digital economy by letting them accept payment however it’s offered, and receive it instantly in whatever form they choose. Read More
Disrupt London Day 1 was a massive success. DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman taught us about the future of AI. Autonomy founder Dr. Michael Lynch mocked HP’s $5 billion lawsuit against him. And Boston Dynamics’ Marc Raibert showed off his four-legged robotic friend, SpotMini. But the heart of Disrupt has always been the Startup Battlefield, and this year’s London crew was… Read More
Imagine a computing platform that would have no single point of failure and would be resilient to the cyberattacks that are making the headlines these days. This is the promise behind blockchain, the distributed ledger that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum and challenges the traditional server/client paradigm. Read More
Tyson Foods Inc., one of the world’s largest makers and marketers of meat products, has announced the formation of a $150 million venture capital fund to back food and agriculture startups.
According to Tyson’s Executive Vice President of Strategy and New Ventures, Monica McGurk, the fund will seek to invest in startups solving problems around food production, distribution… Read More
Netflix is making headway on its ambitions to fill half its library with original content. According to Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, the company is planning to release about 20 unscripted series next year, bringing it closer to its goal of having 1,000 annual hours of original programming available on its service in 2017.
That’s more than the amount of original… Read More
How could Dr Michael Lynch raise a $1 billion venture capital fund while being sued for $5 billion over alleged fraud in the $11 billion sale of his company Autonomy to HP? “The reality is, that doesn’t take much time” since he has a team of lawyers on the case, Lynch said on stage during TechCrunch Disrupt London.
HP originally paid Lynch $730 million for his stake in Autonomy. Read More
Former JP Morgan financial advisor Randy Fernando got the idea for his fintech startup Vault — selected as audience choice for the startup battlefield here at Disrupt London — after his mum asked him whether there were any retirement plan benefits she could offer staff as a hiring incentive at her small business pre-school. Read More
Cloud computing has made collaboration across coworkers easier than ever, but that doesn’t mean that workers are as productive as possible when they’re on the go. Open As App aims to change all that. Launching today in the Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt London, Open As App offers a platform that lets businesses instantly create apps from their data. Businesses can simply… Read More
Meet Oxehealth, a startup that plans to turn any regular security camera into a health monitor. The British company wants to make it easier to monitor patients in a hospital, police station, psychiatric hospital or an assisted living residence. It’s a non-intrusive way to make sure that everybody is doing well. The startup is launching onstage at Disrupt London. Finger pulse oximeters… Read More
While the IPO window might be quite a little more narrow these days and there’s plenty of uncertainty, it doesn’t necessary mean the end of the venture capital world — at least, not yet. Instead, it would seem that a lot of the VC world is in a holding pattern while they wait for everything to shake out — whether that’s for additional private capital to return,… Read More
What is Boston Dynamics? The easy answer for that: a company that makes crazy advanced robots that can walk — be it on two feet or four — better than just about any other robot in the world. We’ve seen this in countless YouTube videos of the company’s robots stomping its way across countrysides, opening doors, and traversing up and down stairways. But what is the… Read More
Section 32, the new healthcare-focused venture fund reportedly being launched by Bill Maris, was apparently named in homage to Section 31, an intelligence agency from the Star Trek universe. If that’s not a bit of pre-emptive nerd cred, I don’t know what is.
According to a report from Recode, the GV (nee Google Ventures) founder/former-CEO is raising $230 million for the project… Read More
Station F (formerly known as la Halle Freyssinet) is quite an ambitious project and is bound to change the face of the tech ecosystem in Paris. Financed by Xavier Niel and directed by Roxanne Varza, Station F is going be the world’s biggest startup campus with companies like Facebook and TechShop opening offices there. “We’re talking about a startup campus because… Read More
When companies are looking to secure the information they have in their databases, it’s a pretty big challenge no matter how you slice it. Unless you have a large security budget that can manage permissions and figure out who is doing what, you are probably cobbling together whatever technology you can from open source locations, strongDM CEO Elizabeth Zalman says. So there needs to be a… Read More
If you’ve played games designed by Fumito Ueda before, then you’ll feel right at home in The Last Guardian, the new release published by Sony for PS4, and developed by genDESIGN and SIE Japan Studio. The world feels like a natural extension of the worlds created for both 2001’s Ico and 2005’s Shadow of the Colossus, and the most interesting question it brings up is… Read More
Let’s say you want to know where one of your digital marketing campaigns is getting the most traction: Twitter or Facebook. You might need to check several dashboards across your social accounts and Google analytics to compile the data — and even if you conclude that one platform is outperforming the other, that might change next week as users shift their attention to… Read More
Photo-editing app Infltr is best known for giving Instagram a run for its money with an app that lets you choose from an infinite number of photo filters – well, technically, it’s just over 7 million. The idea is that you can use color combinations to give your photo a unique look, instead of relying on built-in filter presets. Now, Infltr is bringing its photo editor to the… Read More
Accompany, an app that Amy Chang bets will be able to replace the chief-of-staff or personal assistant of an executive, launched just a few months ago. The app had been in the works for a while, and now that it’s finally out the door, it’s time to step on the gas — so it’s launching in the U.K. in a beta. Chang’s bet is that there’s a slot for an app that… Read More
E-commerce company Shopify is doubling down on its mobile product ambitions with today’s acquisition of digital product studio Tiny Hearts. The studio has released a number of mobile apps, games and bots over the past several years, including popular consumer-facing apps like Quick Fit, Next Keyboard, InstaMatch, and Wake Alarm. Prior to the deal, the team had also worked with… Read More
