After seeing success supplying telematics boxes to its car insurance customers, RSA Insurance Group is applying similar technology to its home and pet products. Andrew Hobbs spoke to Global Telematics Partnering Director Paul Middle about how these innovative data streams are enabling new customer value propositions, and how emerging technologies are creating opportunities and challenges…
Two of India’s most prominent VCs are backing a motorbike on-demand service after Sequoia India and Accel led a $12.2 million investment in Metro Bikes. Sequoia India and Accel were joined in the round by Raghunandan G, who founded TaxiForSure which sold to Ola, among other investors. Metro Bikes started out as a luxury bike rental service…
In August 2017, Icelandic online retailer Aha partnered with Israeli startup Flytrex to ferry packages from one side of Reykjavik to the other as part of a drone delivery trial. One year on, Aha and Flytrex have announced their intention to expand the service from a single flight route to 13, offering regular deliveries to…
Fossil’s Q watch line is an interesting foray by a traditional fashion watchmaker into the wearable world. Their latest additions to the line, the Fossil Q Venture HR and Fossil Q Explorist HR, add a great deal of Android Wear functionality to a watch that is reminiscent of Fossil’s earlier, simpler watches. In other words,…
UK rail and tech companies are to work more closely, with greater amounts of real-time information enabling more capable travel apps. Under new plans announced today by the UK’s transport minister Jo Johnson, and Paul Plummer, the CEO of the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), the UK should see more seamless, hassle-free journeys, and better information…
MessageBird, the Amsterdam-based cloud communications platform backed by Accel in the U.S. and Europe’s Atomico, is unveiling a new product today that aims to make it easier for enterprises to communicate with customers across various channels of their choosing. Dubbed “Programmable Conversations” (yes, really!), the product takes the form of a single API that unifies…
Siemens execs hope to attract more users to the company’s Mindsphere industrial IoT (IIoT) platform with the acquisition of low-code, rapid application development platform Mendix, as Jessica Twentyman reports. Last week, German industrial group Siemens announced it was to acquire Mendix, a developer of a ‘low-code’ application development platform, designed to help business users build…
Ed Byrne is an entrepreneur, investor and co-founder of Scaleworks. Do you worry about the so-called “kill zones” of big tech companies? The Economist thinks you should. The theory basically suggests that if your product or service is anyway threatening or accretive to one of these incumbents, they will either force-buy your company or clone it…
Siemens execs hope to attract more users to the company’s Mindsphere industrial IoT (IIoT) platform with the acquisition of low-code, rapid application development platform Mendix, as Jessica Twentyman reports. Last week, German industrial group Siemens announced it was to acquire Mendix, a developer of a ‘low-code’ application development platform, designed to help business users build…
Japan-based accounting software company Freee, one of the country’s most-prominent startups, has raised a $60 million Series E funding round as it bids to expand its services into other areas of management for its customers. Freee was founded six years ago — we wrote about the startup when it raised a Series A in 2013 —…
