CES 2016: The weirdest new gadgets from the CES consumer tech conference January 7, 2016 An activity tracker for your dog £39.99 – pitpatpet.com “What has your dog done today?” is the faintly accusatory tagline for this pooch-centric activity tracker. The PitPat attaches to your dog’s collar and sends live information about your canine friend’s movements to your phone. A built-in accelerometer monitors how often he’s running, walking, playing or [...]
The Ehang 184 Jetsons-style drone can carry people in ambtious plans for driverless flying cars January 7, 2016 We've already had a batmobile-style car, now CES has delivered a drone that can carry people, turning the famous flying car from cartoon The Jetsons into reality. The futuristic, if slightly terrifying sounding vehicle, has been unveiled by Chinese tech company Ehang and manages to combine the top two trends predicted to dominate this year's biggest tech show – drones and [...]
Good-looking women get better grades (but for men, looks don’t matter) January 6, 2016 In an ideal world, brains and hard work would be all that influenced your grades, but it turns out that for women there’s an unexpected factor at play: their looks. Researchers have found that unattractive women were given significantly lower grades than their more good-looking counterparts. Male students’ results, however, were unaffected by their looks. [...]
Oculus Rift: March shipping date and price for UK and 20 countries revealed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg January 6, 2016 Mark Zuckerberg has revealed Facebook's Oculus will ship its first virtual reality device on 28 March after becoming available for pre-order today. Tech fans will be able to get their hands on the headset in these 20 countries initially: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States. Shops will also stock Oculus from April and the company said it had [...]
Interest rates, a Fintech revolution and more investment in the UK: what former Lord Mayor Roger Gifford predicts for Canada January 6, 2016 Sir Roger Gifford, member of Multrees Investor Services Board and former Lord Mayor of London, tells Morning Wire what he expects for Canada in 2016. The Fintech revolution The importance of Fintech to London can perhaps be seen most clearly through the 44,000 plus people who are employed in the sector – [...]
Appy Christmas: $1.1bn sales record breaker for Apple’s App Store January 6, 2016 Apple is celebrating a record-breaking Christmas after people spent $1.1bn (£753m) through the App Store over the festive season. $140m was spent on New Year's Day alone, Apple's biggest single day of sales after Christmas day. That includes apps themselves, in-app purchases (think buying lives on Candy Crush), across iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watch and Apple [...]
Companies, watch out: One in five disgruntled consumers turn to social media like Facebook and Twitter to complain January 6, 2016 Companies, watch out: in the 21st century, if you displease your customers there is every chance the world is hearing about it. Forget keeping arguments behind closed doors. Our fights with brands are increasingly going public, as new research has found that nearly one in five disgruntled consumers now turn to social media as their [...]
Twitter limit: This is what 10,000 characters looks like in the opening chapters of War and Peace, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, the Bible and other familiar books January 6, 2016
UK attracts record £2.46bn of venture capital investment into tech and London secures more than 60 per cent of the funding January 6, 2016 Venture capitalists invested a record $3.6bn (£2.46bn) in the UK's tech scene in 2015, up 70 per cent from the year before, according to data from London and Partners, the Mayor’s promotional company. London-based crowdfunding company, Funding Circle secured the largest single deal of the year with a $150m funding round led by DST Global in April [...]
Driverless car bump in the road? Our three biggest fears about autonomous vehicles, revealed January 6, 2016 It's the year of the driverless car, as everyone from big tech companies to traditional car brands, ambitious startups to academics, make inroads in the burgeoning technology which could soon change the way we travel. There may be one bump in the road to mass adoption, however, and that's consumers. Half of us would refuse to [...]