Technology is driving an alternative financing boom, particularly in the UK. Small businesses are starting to look at embracing alternative financing instruments like crowdsourcing, peer-to-peer lending, asset finance, bonds and invoice based credit. There’s been so much noise around it that the banks have started to speculate it could spark an interest rate rise.
Walking into a meeting these days, it isn’t unusual to see Apple Watches bound around people’s wrists or the latest fitness tracker strapped onto another person’s arm. Wearables are infiltrating our lives, changing the way we work, exercise and interact with the hundreds of apps that run in the background of our devices. ZDNet this week recognized just how much wearables and the internet of things is altering our world.
Automation and machine learning are developments that can really help small business owners grow their business by giving them back more time to work on their operations, rather than in them. This week Google revealed it is “re-thinking” all its products to include machine learning and artificial intelligence. It’s how Google CEO Sundar Pichai believes the company will advance. More here.
Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, this week announced he’d donate a third of his stake in the company – worth about $200 million – back to its employee compensation fund to “reinvest directly in our people”. The move comes after Twitter laid off 8% of its workforce.
YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki, has a two-part plan to boost the number of women in tech. Speaking at the Grace Hopper Celebration this week, Fortune reported Wojcicki – who was Google employee number 16 – recounted a story of her daughter telling her it was “super lame” to like computers. It was a statement that shocked her and got her thinking about how to overcome the unconscious bias which is inherent in the tech sector. Her plan: Make computer science compulsory in schools and introduce paid family leave.“Unless we make computer science a priority, we risk making gender and class issues worse. And, as opportunity flows to those with a computer science backgrounds, as a nation, we risk our future competitiveness,” Wojcicki said.
