Shazam joins billion dollar startup club after $30m funding round January 21, 2015 Music recognition service Shazam has closed a $30m (£19.8m) round of investment valuing the London-based firm at over $1bn (£659m). It makes Shazam one of just a handful of tech startups to emerge from the UK with a $1bn price tag attached. The new investment will be used to expand the service into new markets [...]
Brands without borders: OMD’s Nikki Mendonca on the digital single market November 22, 2015 Sharing data across jurisdictions remains a headache for brands that operate within a number of different markets. The situation may be about to become a lot easier in Europe, however, due to the European Commission’s digital single market strategy. “I’m optimistic about what these changes would mean for brands,” says Nikki Mendonça, president of OMD [...]
Open House London 2015 dates: Guide to the best places to visit on 18, 19 and 20 September including the Gherkin, Crossrail, 10 Downing Street and Culture Crawl September 18, 2015 Good news Londoners: the weekend's weather is looking distinctly drier than it has been during the week, just in time for people hoping to take advantage of the annual Open House Weekend. Running from Friday 18 September to Sunday 20 September, Open House London gives people who live and work in the capital a rare [...]
Public Health England warns “neglected” over-40s to get more sleep, stop smoking and reduce alcohol comsumption August 10, 2015 The UK's public health body will launch a new campaign warning those between the ages of 40 and 60 to live more healthily after it found those in middle ages are "neglected". In a document published last month, Public Health England said because most health campaigns target the very young and the very old, the [...]
Why your chief executive should wear a hoodie: Those with the technical know-how are increasingly in demand for the top jobs September 2, 2015 In the early days of a startup, once your company achieved scale, the technical founder would step back to be replaced with a “professional chief executive”. This used to be commonplace; everyone from Cisco to eBay went through the management team merry-go-round. But the tide is turning and there is a growing acceptance [...]
Bank of England’s Andy Haldane raises the stakes for UK companies as new speech challenges “shareholder-centric model” July 28, 2015 Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane has stepped up his case for an overhaul of UK corporate governance with the publication of a surprising new speech. In the previously unpublished speech, first delivered at the University of Edinburgh in May, Haldane argues for a “fundamental re-rooting of company law” to challenge the “shareholder-centric company [...]
48 hours in… Malaga June 28, 2015 WHERE TO STAY The fourstar Hotel Molina Lario is discreetly located on a quiet street near the revamped marina and it’s popular with locals for Piscina Lounge, a large rooftop terrace with a swimming pool and grill restaurant that’s open all summer. From £116 per night, hotelmolinalario.com WHERE TO GO The Pompidou Centre has chosen [...]
Finsbury Food buys Just Desserts June 16, 2015 FINSBURY Food Group, which supplies baked goods to leading national coffee shop chains, has completed its acquisition of Just Desserts, saving the group from administration. Tom MacLennan and Geoff Rowley, partners at restructuring firm FRP Advisory, sold Johnstone’s Just Desserts, known for its caramel shortcake, to Finsbury, after the East Kilbride-based company went into administration [...]
Bottom Line: Just-Eat.com whets the LSE’s appetite January 20, 2014 THE HIRING of advisers by Just-Eat sounds like good news for Joanna Shields. In a surprise announcement at the end of last week, the former Facebook exec said she is becoming a non-executive director at London Stock Exchange Group, which is hungry for tech listings. She is stepping down as the chief executive of Tech [...]
What future for forecasts? It’s time economists grappled with the flaws in their models August 12, 2015 Macroeconomic forces influence truly vast sums of money, but the process of analysing them is notoriously unreliable. Economic forecasting is often very wide of the mark and seriously inaccurate just one year ahead. Traditional economic forecasting has conspicuously failed to identify turning points in the economic cycle, while the highly sophisticated DSGE (dynamic stochastic general [...]