The software can detect tone and emotion in both customers and agents, then offer motivational suggestions.
Source: Wired
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation takes effect May 25, requiring that people know, understand, and consent to the data collected about them.
Source: Wired
Back in 2016 a startup called SearchInk, launched out of Berlin with the aim of combining machine learning with handwriting recognition. The upshot would be the ability to semantically label handwritten documents. Pretty nifty. It went on to raise €4.2 million in seed funding, but after developing this AI to read hard-written documents, it went in search of a market and business model. Not an easy thing to do. After all, what industry needs hand-written documents read at scale, when so many documents today are born digital in the first place? It turns out there was one after-all: the insurance industry.
In that sector, claims forms, emails and invoices are currently processed manually. But CEO and co-founder Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss realised that her company’s technology could significantly reduce the time and cost spent on administrative tasks, as well as the risk of human error.
So today, SearchInk rebrands as omni:us, a next generation AI service with two main products aimed squarely at the insurance industry: omni:us Claim and omni:us Policy. The idea is to be able to process digital documents, some of which contain handwriting, by classifying them and extracting the valuable data.
Omni:us is launching these products first in the DACH region, and claims to be working with over half of the top 10 insurance providers. It also says it can deploy its claims management and policy extraction products into an organisation within a matter of weeks. It’s now raise a total of $6.5 million from individual angels and VC, including Anthemis.
Quidenus-Wahlforss said: “Industry predictions show that insurance data will grow by 94% in 2018, 84% of which will be in highly variable documentation. However, in the future, there is also huge potential to apply omni:us technology to many other diverse industries such as finance, manufacturing, transportation and healthcare.”
She added that “We see customers improving their claims turn around time by 80% and all of that at 75% of the original costs. Why is this the case? Fundamentally, because with omni:us manual interventions can be reduced to a minimum, due to the supervised machine learning approach. One of our clients could speed up the comparison by an average 90% at only 80% of the costs.”
Furthermore, the AI could analyze policies with an annual value of only 250 Euro, which normally be a waste of a human being’s time and effort.
Omni:us is now in the process of raising a further funding round this year, opening an office in the US and growing its team.
Source: TechCrunch
We’re finally shaking off winter and heading into a new season. Now’s the time to do some much-needed cleaning up of your tech life.
Source: CNET
VentureFriends, the Athens-based VC that has backed the likes of Homie and Weengs, is announcing its new fund, with a first closing of €45 million.
‘VentureFriends II’ sees the VC firm pick up where its original €20 million fund left off, with a remit to do seed investments in Greek startups and beyond that have global ambitions.
Specifically, the VC fund, which counts LPs as the European Investment Fund, the Greek ESIF FoF, Equifund and several individuals and family offices, is on the look out for seed-stage tech startups in its sweet spot of e-marketplaces, e-commerce, and SaaS.
I’m told it plans to write a company’s first cheque of up to €1 million. There’s also the option to add another €5 million to the fund, with a final closing target of €50 million, although this may not come to fruition.
Notably, VentureFriends’ second fund has already disclosed a first investment, participating in Stasher’s recent funding round. The startup (formerly known as CityStasher) is billed as an ‘Airbnb for luggage’ and offers a network of brick and mortar businesses across Europe that will store your luggage for a few hours in between commutes.
Meanwhile, the two year-old ‘VentureFriends I’ made 21 investments during its lifetime, which feels like a pretty rapid deployment of capital. These have mostly been in Greece-based startups with an international outlook, including Blueground, a company offering high-quality mid-term accommodation for business executives ad expats. The company manages over 700 properties in New York, Dubai, Athens and Istanbul.
Another example cited by VentureFriends is Welcomepickups, which two years into existence is now present in 20 cities in Europe and Asia. The startup can be thought of as a travel concierge, spanning transfer services, essential products, pre-ordered tickets to top attractions, tips and tailor-made experiences led by locals.
The two Partners of VentureFriends are Apostolos Apostolakis and George Dimopoulos. Apostolakis previously co-founded e-shop.gr, the first e-tailer in Greece, and in 2011 he co-founded e-food, a food delivery marketplace acquired in 2015 by Delivery Hero, providing a major exit for the Greek startup ecosystem. He and Dimopoulos were also among the first angel investors in Taxibeat, the taxi app that sold to Daimler in February 2017.
Source: TechCrunch
Facebook says the suspension is due to reports Christopher Wylie’s former employer allegedly held onto 50 million Facebook profiles’ worth of information.
Source: CNET
Alibaba is increasing its control of Lazada, its e-commerce marketplace in Southeast Asia it acquired control of in 2016, after it injected another $2 billion into the business and replaced its CEO with a long-standing Alibaba executive.
Alibaba’s first investment came in April 2016 when it bought 51 percent of Lazada for $1 billion, and it added another $1 billion last summer to increase its equity to around 83 percent. With today’s news, Alibaba has invested $4 billion to date which it said will “accelerate the growth plans” and help further tie the Lazada business into Alibaba’s core e-commerce service.
There’s already been plenty of evidence of increased ties between Alibaba and Lazada. The latter began offering products from Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace across Southeast Asia last year, and Alibaba has replaced Lazada’s tech team leadership with executives of its own. The latest shakeup is the appointment of Lucy Peng as Lazada’s new CEO to replace Max Bittner, who was installed by former owner Rocket Internet back in 2012.
Peng, who is one of Alibaba’s original 12 founders, has been Chairwoman of Lazada and is executive chairman of Ant Financial, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate company. Bittner will remain involved as “senior advisor to Alibaba Group” and apparently involved in future strategy, including further international expansion opportunities.
Lazada has progressed significantly since Alibaba’s first investment — which came at a time when the business had been close to running out of money — but the reality in Southeast Asia is that e-commerce in the region is a loss-making industry with plenty of competition.
Amazon entered the foray last year, but it remains only in Singapore, while Shopee is a two-year-old entrant bankrolled by Sea, formerly Garena, which raised over $1 billion in a U.S. IPO last year.
Alibaba hasn’t just limited its Southeast Asia approach to backing Lazada. The firm also invested $1.1 billion in Tokopedia which competes with Lazada in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth most populous country.
Source: TechCrunch
The second season of the HBO series starts on April 22. Until then, here’s every image released and some ridiculous theories and speculation.
Source: CNET
In the first episode of the new “Interesting People in Interesting Times” podcast, recorded at the March 5th Andrew Yang, tech entrepreneur, founder of Venture for America, and author of The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future, discusses his latest endeavor — vying for the Democratic party nomination to run for President of the United States.
Yang outlines his radical policy agenda, which focuses on Universal Basic Income and includes a “freedom dividend.” He talks about the very real and immediate threat of artificial intelligence, how new technologies are erasing millions of jobs before our eyes, and why we need to put humanity first. He also addresses “the big four” and what he plans to do about Amazon.
During the interview, Yang called out governments inability to address large scale problems and the challenges that technology is creating in modern American society.
“I believe that we need to start owning these realities [of automation and artificial intelligence taking away jobs] and these challenges as a people, as a country, and as a society, and start being honest. I’m running for president to solve the big problems and to show that these things are not beyond us,” Yang says.
Yang’s own plan to address the increasing power tech companies are wielding in the world involves something called a “freedom dividend”, which would paid for by a value-added tax. The revenue from that tax (levied on “gains from the big four”) would be redistributed via the “freedom dividend” to citizens, Yang says.
Yang also discusses his idea for incentivizing social contributions in his vision of a new American society.
Listen to the podcast here:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/interesting-people-in-interesting-times/id1357410414?mt=2
Source: TechCrunch
Commentary: You want to see March Madness, click on the “translate tweet” button of this wonderful University of Nevada tweet.
Source: CNET