UK workplace rights reform doesn’t look disruptive to gig economy giants

The UK government has set out a labor market reform package it bills as a major upgrade to workplace rights in the era of disruptive gig economy platforms. The reforms, which include new legislation, are intended to take account of changes in working practices including those flowing from tech platforms. But despite some gig economy platforms standing […]

December 17th, 2018 06:57 AM

Google is spending $1 billion to build a massive, new campus in New York

Days after Apple announced a major expansion to its operations in the U.S. — including a new $1 billion campus in Austin — fellow tech giant Google has announced that it too will invest $1 billion as it sets up a new campus at Hudson Square in New York. Google already has 7,000 staff located in New […]

December 17th, 2018 06:43 AM

Starling’s Chief Platform Officer Megan Caywood has been recruited by Barclays

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but in the increasingly competitive world of banking, perhaps poaching your best people also counts. In a move that is bound to raise eyebrows in London’s fintech ecosystem and beyond, Megan Caywood, who up until this week was Starling Bank’s Chief Platform Officer, is joining banking […]

December 17th, 2018 06:34 AM

Byju’s targets global expansion for its digital education service after raising $540M

India-based educational startup Byju’s was widely reported to have raised a massive $400 million round and now the company is making things official. The ten-year-old company revealed today it has pulled in a total of $540 million from investors to go after international opportunities. The round is led by Naspers, the investment firm famous for […]

December 17th, 2018 04:20 AM

Meeshkan raises €370K for its ‘ChatOps’ bot for training machine learning models

Meeshkan, a Finnish startup that made quite a splash at the recent Slush conference, has quietly raised €370,000 in pre-seed funding to continue developing its “ChatOps” product for machine learning developers. Deployed on Slack, the bot allows developers to “rapidly stop, restart, fork, tweak, monitor, deploy and test machine learning models” without interrupting the collaborative […]

December 17th, 2018 04:00 AM

BMW’s premium ride-hailing service is now live in China

BMW has joined a handful of automakers to compete with transportation upstart Didi Chuxing, which bought Uber’s Chinese business in 2016. Last Friday, the German luxury carmaker launched a premium ride-hailing service in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province with over 14 million people. The new offer is part of BMW’s ReachNow carsharing brand that kicked […]

December 17th, 2018 02:44 AM

Virtual reality gaming and the pursuit of “flow state”

Maggie Lane Contributor Share on Twitter Maggie Lane is a writer and producer of virtual reality experiences and covers the industry for various publications. More posts by this contributor Inside Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles VR Interview Experience Does Ready Player One reveal the future of VR? You need to stop procrastinating. Maybe it’s time […]

December 16th, 2018 06:30 PM

Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘Mowgli’ offers a darker take on Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’

At first, “Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle” might seem like an afterthought — or maybe a failed exercise in franchise-building. This new take on the story of Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book” comes just two years after Disney’s version made nearly a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. Plus, it seemed a little strange for director […]

December 16th, 2018 05:01 PM