2016 Olympic medal tally: Academics beat Goldman Sachs to Team GB medal prediction gold medal August 22, 2016 Ahead of this year’s Olympics an assortment of economists, academics, statisticians and pundits used the Games as an opportunity to flex their forecasting muscle by publicly predicting the final medal table. From economic power to historical sporting stats, the various models crunched the numbers to project how the final medal table would appear. An analysis [...]
Predictive power: Black Swan’s Jeff Headley on marketing intelligence, flu prevention and why the internet is the largest real-time focus group in the world July 11, 2016 Marketing is fundamentally about prediction: what does the consumer want, and when do they want it? From New Coke in 1985, the modernisation of the Gap logo in 2010, and BIC’s pink “for her” biros just four years ago, the history of marketing is littered with flops which better consumer testing could have avoided. Since 2011, [...]
Uber just renewed its feud with London’s regulators August 8, 2016 Uber is turning to its customers to help it fight "bureaucratic" new rules imposed by Transport for London, including an English exam "harder than the test for British citizenship", renewing its feud with regulators in the capital. The billion-dollar company said the rules would "threaten the livelihood of thousands of drivers", reducing their numbers and thus increasing the [...]
Start ’em young: City A.M. meets Captify co-founder Adam Ludwin November 7, 2016 By the time he was 21, Adam Ludwin, co-founder of adtech firm Captify, had already been to and quit university, and worked as an estate agent, a city broker and a recruitment consultant. But he still wasn’t content. “For what I wanted to achieve I really didn’t feel that I needed to go down the [...]
Eneko at One Aldwych review: the Ronaldo of chefs’ new restaurant Eneko is a poor relation to its Basque sibling Azurmendi September 13, 2016 Azurmendi, a short drive from the centre of Bilbao, is one of those restaurants food groupies plan holidays around. Eneko Atxa’s three-Michelin star venue is like an epicurean Bond lair, a glass cube squatting in its own lavish herb garden, which guests are obliged to peruse before they begin their multitude of courses. Atxa himself [...]
GLA Conservatives estimates £576m per year tied up in spare London rooms and encourages Londoners to try out AirBnB November 4, 2015 London’s spare rooms could be worth £576m a year, according to Greater London Authority (GLA) Conservatives. Tony Arbour, GLA Conservatives Assembly tourism spokesman, has argued that half a million people in the capital could rent out a spare room to help pay their bills, which would also bolster London’s tourism industry. According to the GLA Conservatives’ [...]
Trump, Thiel and space travel: Three things we learned from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos June 1, 2016 One of the most successful entrepreneurs of the modern world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has spoken candidly on pressing issues such as Donald Trump, Peter Thiel versus Gawker and freedom of speech, as well as his childhood passion for space travel. Here are the three things we learned from his talk at Recode's Code Conference in California… [...]
High street banks plan to help Treasury offload £17bn of Bradford and Bingley loans March 1, 2016 Britain’s largest high street banks are planning to help the Treasury offload £17bn of Bradford and Bingley (B&B) loans. The proposal would see Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland, Nationwide and Santander guarantee around £17bn of financing to the purchasers of the loans. It emerged at the beginning of this year that a sizeable part [...]
Zoopla buys Property Software Holdings for £75m April 19, 2016 Online property portal Zoopla is to buy Property Software Holdings – a B2B service provider used in more than 8,000 estate agency branches in the UK – for £75m. The deal, under which Property Software Group (PSG) will join the likes of uSwitch and PrimeLocation, gives Zoopla access to a number of systems used by the property [...]
London firms back Transport for London’s English tests for private hire drivers November 28, 2017 London businesses are in favour of a controversial planned English test that private hire drivers face, according to a new poll from the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Transport for London plans to bring in a English language test for private hire drivers, and wants all drivers to be able to prove their ability [...]