Industry news

According to Forbes, tech companies in London have attracted $10.5billion in venture capital over the last year. 

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London believes that “London is the global tech capital of Europe” as the billion dollar venture capital hits records in both the UK and Europe.

Half of the $10.5billion funding arose from non-Europeans and 36% of it from North America. Many companies in Silicon Valley have been expanding their presence in the UK over the last year. 

Read the full article here 

The Financial Times have put together a global survey dedicated to mental health during the pandemic that reflects the results from the GSA’s Wellness Survey.

The majority of the delegates that participated in this survey came from white collar backgrounds saying that the pandemic has negatively affected their mental health. 

After the launch of our Festival of Sourcing with our employee engagement and mental health sessions, the GSA have felt truly inspired by the work that we can do to help our community. Expect a lot more from the GSA on mental health this year!

If you are interested in our Festival of Sourcing mental health webinar please click here, or our employee engagement webinar please click here.

To ready the full article from the Financial Times, please click here.

Limitless, an AI driven gig consumer experience company has announced that they’ve raised $10million in Series B funding. This was led by Redline Capital and features a new investment from Genesys alongside continuing investments from AlbionVC and Unilever Ventures.

This funding will play a crucial role in the companies growth in the US.

For more information, please click here

Atos, a French multinational IT services and consultancy firm has bid $10 billion to acquire DXC, an American that provides B2B IT services. 

This deal will allow Atos to grow there presence in America and give them access to more clients and B2B services like Cloud and analytics. 

Read the full article here

Bitcoin has reached a new record level around $20,000.

The cryptocurrency has gained around 170% this with with increasing demand and large investments. 

As the pandemic has changed lives and business permanently, governments worldwide have responded with a monetary stimulus to try and grow confidence in the economy. However, this has built concerns that the $ currency will lose its purchasing power.

This has lead to an increase in demand for digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

Read the full article here

Twitter have signed a long-term contract with Amazon to use their AWS.

They will be relying on AWS to help them run their core timelines. 

AWS are set to implement new features to improve the app. They are also working to improve Twitters capability, storage, security and the quality of delivery. 

The chief technology offer at Twitter, Parag Agrawal said “The collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people who use Twitter by enabling us to serve Tweets from data centers closer to our customers at the same time as we leverage the Arm-based architecture of AWS Gravition2 instances. In addition to helping us scale our infrastructure, this work with AWS enables us to ship features faster as we apply AWS’s diverse and growing portfolio of services.”

Read the full article here

The Department for Work and Pensions have completed their two year mission to migrate their applications onto hybrid cloud. 

It was set up as an insourcing mission, moving applications from third part data centres to services built through the Crown Commercial service Framework. 

This initiative is set out to gain more control of the business in order to be more efficient in terms of cost and performance. 

Read the full article here 

The CCMA have just completed their latest research project which looked into consumers’ attitudes towards chatbots. The results reveal that there is a trust gap to fill.

Great read, access their research here

Google Cloud has acquired Dataform, a UK startup specialised as an operating system for data warehouses, managing data flows and tools for consumers.

The acquisition is understood to be an ‘acquihire’ which will allow Google to absorb their talent and to help Dataform to continue to grow. 

Dataform will continue to use their own management separate from Google and the Dataform web will now be freely available to all consumers.

Read the full article here

Nokia, a Finnish telecom company has signed a contract with Proximus Luxembourg to provide 5G nationally in Luxembourg for seven years.

Nokia is absorbing a lot of business from Huawei Technology as regulations against Huawei withstand. This has enabled Nokia to sign contracts with Orange and Ecrisson.

Read the full article here