Welcome to your Week in Tech – a roundup of the week’s top technology news.
In this episode, we bring you Graphcore’s impressive $30m Series A round, the employment tribunal win by Uber drivers, Apple’s partnership with Australian startup Sonder and a music video making app.
Watch the video, or read on, for all this and more.
Investments
In investment news, Bristol-based Graphcore closed an impressive $30m dollar Series A round. The computer chip startup seeks to make machine learning faster, easier and more intelligent.
Resolver, a customer complaints platform, secured £2.8m from Draper Esprit and Imperial Innovations. Resolver plans to use the funds to grow its team and invest in technologies like machine learning.
Encore, a musician booking platform, raised just over £560,000 in Seed funding. Entrepreneur First and a series of angel investors participated in the round.
Best of British
Dominating British headlines this week has been the employment tribunal win by Uber drivers.
Uber previously argued its drivers were self-employed contractors, but the new ruling means the drivers will be classed as workers. This entitles them to paid holiday and sick pay.
International story
Apple has joined forces with Australian startup Sonder to redesign the qwerty keyboard. It has also been reported that Apple is in talks to acquire the Sydney-based tech company.
Sonder’s technology enables a keyboard to display any alphabet, special commands and emojis, and will feature on MacBook laptops.
Download
Our download of the week is Riffjam, a new app that turns your speech into music videos.
You record a video selfie and Riffjam turns it into a looping music video. Swipe through different audio filters to choose the style of music, and share the finished video with your friends or followers.
And Finally…
And finally, here’s one for Harry Potter fans. Google’s voice assistant will now let Android users control their phones using Harry Potter spells.
‘Lumos’, a command used to light up wands in the wizarding world, will turn on your device’s light, and ‘silencio’, a silencing charm, will switch your phone to silent mode.
That’s all for this episode. Remember to subscribe for our magazine and follow us on Twitter.