Silicon UK Pulse: Your Tech News Update: Episode 14
Welcome to Silicon UK Pulse – your roundup of the latest tech news and developments impacting your business for the week ending 18/08/2023.
Welcome to Silicon UK Pulse
This is your weekly round-up of the top tech news stories.
Every Friday, Silicon UK surveys the week’s tech news.
Stay up-to-date with what’s happening in your industry or sector.
I’m James Marriott with all the big technology news from the last week.
Welcome to Silicon UK Pulse
I’m James Marriott with all the big technology news from the last week.
The UK has launched a major new £1 billion Fintech Fund.
UK FinTech Growth Partners made the announcement on Wednesday.
It’s the first investment fund of its kind focussed on supporting growth-stage FinTechs as they scale.
The FinTech Growth Fund initiative has already secured support from big names such as Barclays, NatWest, Mastercard, London Stock Exchange Group and Peel Hunt.
The idea is that the fund will invest in UK FinTechs, predominantly between Series B and pre-IPO, to enable them to scale into global organisations.
Another UK police force has admitted to a data breach.
Norfolk and Suffolk police admitted that personally identifiable information on crime victims had been compromised.
It describes it as “an issue relating to a very small percentage of responses to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for crime statistics, issued between April 2021 and March 2022.”
That follows the high-profile breach in Northern Ireland.
The police force there admitted last week that a FOI request had accidentally exposed the names and locations of every police officer in Northern Ireland.
It looks like that data has ended up in the hands of dissident Republicans.
The UK and the EU are both mulling over whether to follow America’s lead on fresh restrictions on China.
US President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday to halt investments in sensitive national security technologies and products in “countries of concern.”
The following day, the British government said it was considering tightening rules on investment in China.
We now know who will spearhead the UK’s AI Safety Summit this autumn.
The Government appointed two leading experts to head up the event – which will be its first major international summit on the safe use of artificial intelligence.
One is leading diplomat, Jonathan Black – he’s Heywood Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, as well former UK G7 and G20 Sherpa and Deputy National Security Adviser.
And the other is Matt Clifford, who’s CEO of investment firm Entrepreneur First and Chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency.
UK retail giant John Lewis has signed a huge new deal with Google.
The five-year £100 million deal with Google Cloud will allow the firm to harness the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning or ML technology.
John Lewis said the aim was to ‘provide customers with even more tailored and personalised experiences.’
The two firms have been working together for around a decade already.
YouTube has started taking down videos with false claims about cancer treatment.
It revised its medical misinformation policy this week.
It comes amid allegations that some users on the platform were scamming people, claiming to have terminal cancer but reaping the rewards after ‘making’ a miraculous recovery.
YouTube has beefed up a number of its health policies about videos posted on the platform over the past few years – including those it’s deemed were misleading about COVID vaccines.
Amazon is penalising staff who work from home too often.
The firm launched a new policy earlier this year where the majority of staff had to be in the office for three days a week.
But anyone who hasn’t hit that threshold for five out of the last eight weeks has got an email about it.
Meanwhile – Amazon’s Head of hardware devices is leaving.
David Limp’s the latest in a line of executives to exit since CEO Andy Jassy took over from Jeff Bezos a couple of years ago.
Limp is senior vice president of Devices & Services, the division responsible for the Kindle, Echo hardware line and the Alexa personal assistant business.
Jassy’s memo to staff described the departure as a retirement from Amazon, even though Limp is just 56 years old.
In the memo, Limp suggested he will work somewhere else, but “it won’t be in the consumer electronics space.”
PayPal’s named its new CEO.
Alex Chriss is currently the senior executive who runs the small business group at Intuit
He’ll take over the role and become the new president on 27th September.
That’s the same date that PayPal’s long-serving CEO, Dan Schulman, will step down.
It looks like we’ll be getting a special edition Apple Watch in the next couple of years.
The rumours are that it will be an Apple Watch X – or 10 – to celebrate it being 10 years since the first launch.
The company did the same with the iPhone when it reached the one-decade landmark.
Reports suggest that the new watch model will include tech for monitoring blood pressure, among other new features.
Now do you think you could go without internet for… a day? Maybe a couple of days?
Well, how about this: a village in Wiltshire has been offline for three weeks after a tree fell and damaged a telephone line.
Openreach has apologised for delays to repair work in the hamlet of Little Cheverell.
Just under a hundred people who live there have had to survive without internet or a phone line.
And finally – time for a long-awaited update on the thing we’re all talking about…
The supposed cage fight between Meta founder Mark Zuckerburg and X boss Elon Musk.
Zuck’s spoken out this week – saying his counterpart isn’t serious about it – and he’s moving on from the whole thing.
He had proposed a date of 26th August, but Musk apparently didn’t confirm.
