Articles about Money

The UK government has revealed ambitious plans for boosting the Britain's artificial intelligence (AI) technology industry.

A new independent review, published on behalf of the AI sector, has claimed that AI could provide up to £630 billion for the UK economy over the next few years.

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Dell Technologies has unveiled plans of a major new IoT push, including a new division specifically targeting new connected technologies.

At an event in New York, the company revealed that it is set to invest over $1 billion in research and development of Internet of Things technology over the next three years.

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Since the beginning of the year, Bitcoin has taken numerous hits from so-called "experts" and gone through a couple of major crashes. And, despite all that, the price of the most-valuable cryptocurrency has set a new record, going over $5,200 for the first time today. Bitcoin is up over 500 percent since January 1.

Bitcoin's influence in the cryptocurrency market still looms large. Its market cap, $86 billion, represents over 50 percent of the whole market, which is currently valued at around $162 billion. Bitcoin's daily value is around $2 billion, far more than any of the other players.

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Recently, the leader of the Labor Party in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn, suggested that a "tax on robots" should be put in place. He believes automation is a "threat" to workers and wants to use the tax income to build a fund for retraining staff that lose their jobs. He thinks "we should all get the benefits" from "greedy" global corporations which have "made a great deal of money out of incredibly advanced technology."

While mass receipt of global commercial wealth is most appreciated, Corbyn's suggestions are a reaction to the Hollywood version of the technology. A suggestion that could stop innovation.

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Seven of the world's top banking groups, including HSBC, ING and BNY Mellon are joining forces to create a platform for syndicated loans based on blockchain technology.

The blockchain service will be provided by R3 (a popular blockchain consortium) and Finastra (a UK financial software company). The service starts with Fusion LenderComm, an online marketplace that will use blockchain’s distributed ledger technology to reduce cost and improve on the efficiency and transparency of loans with multiple lenders. So far, the work in the syndicated loans was done manually.

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Global spending on IT is expected to grow 4.3 percent next year, according to new estimates from market analyst Gartner.

Gartner says spending is expected to hit $3.7 trillion next year, up from $3.5 trillion. The growth will be fueled mostly by communications services, followed by software spending which will see an increase of 9.4 percent next year, to a total of $387 billion.

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Rumors of BlackBerry's death may have been somewhat premature. The company just revealed its latest financial results, showing significant profits.

The former smartphone giant posted a stronger-than-expected second quarter, after, according to BlackBerry, its "complete transformation to a software company."

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There is a boom in initial coin offerings (ICOs) in 2017, where firms are mainly offering in-app tokens for investors. These arrangements only work in a given ecosystem and represent companies that are trying hard to not offer "securities" due to the SEC, regulations, etc.

Many firms have taken in funds through ICOs that are far more than their true value and with such a supply of offerings, the quality of the typical ICO event has dropped precipitously. ICOs work as a crowdfunding tool where a percentage of the newly issued currency is provided to new investors in exchange for traditional money or a different cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. In response to this unregulated and seemingly out of control market, the Chinese authorities recently banned ICOs to slow down the market while regulations can be enacted.

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Google Cloud Platform has introduced per-second billing for App Engine, Cloud Dataproc, Compute Engine and Container Engine users, following a similar announcement made by rival AWS last week.

However, while Amazon's cloud arm announced that the new pricing scheme, which involves a one-minute minimum, will apply to EC2 customers starting October 2, the per-second billing on Google Cloud Platform's aforementioned cloud services is live now. Previously, customers were billed by the minute.

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PC prices in UK have increased by 30 percent since the Brexit announcement this year, according to distributor data.

Channel analyst Context has revealed that the average sale prices for computers including desktops, notebooks and workstations reached £480 in July and August, which is up by a third when compared to the same time last year.

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The importance of artificial intelligence has been one of the biggest trends in the technology industry in recent years, with many large companies throwing their weight behind the system.

This includes Intel, which has today revealed it has invested more than $1 billion into AI startups to date through its Intel Capital center arm.

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Stack Overflow has introduced a salary calculator to help developers get a better idea of how much money they should earn. The tool takes into account important information such as job location, years of experience and technologies used to reveal what it considers to be typical salaries.

Stack Overflow says that the results are based on the data collected in its yearly developer survey. The salary calculator currently supports five markets -- Canada, France, Germany, US and UK -- and seven major cities -- Toronto, Paris, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and London.

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UK SMBs are shelling out huge amounts of money on upgrading their technology every year, potentially hindering investment elsewhere, new figures have claimed.

A report from American Express and the Center for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) found that on average, SMBs spend roughly £200,000 each year on new technologies.

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The cryptocurrency market is recovering well after shedding over $75 billion last week in what was a major post-rally correction. News that China banned ICOs and a rumored ban on Bitcoin exchanges in the country have not brought the market to its knees, as its capitalization is now up by around $40 billion since the low reached only a few days ago.

Many "experts" have linked the correction to the bad news from China, claiming that it will be very hard for the major coins to recover. Ethereum was expected to be hit the most, as the ICO ban means its appeal in China would be severely limited, but it posts the second-largest growth post-correction of the top 10 coins.

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In an alarming but long-feared move, Chinese authorities announced on September 4, 2017, that from then on fundraising Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) will not be allowed to take place on the domestic market. ICO technology can be used as a tool to collect funds from backers to launch new blockchain projects.

The Chinese regulators instructed companies that have already completed their fundraising ICOs to refund the payments to their backers, and the public and financial institutions are asked to report to the authorities all suspicious fundraising activities involving ICOs and cryptocurrencies. Naturally, this development threw the Chinese blockchain community into disarray.

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