digital technology

Digital Medical Tech Raises £1.2m funding

Digital Medical Tech (DMT), a solution provider for hospital management and asset tracking, recently raised $1.5 million in seed capital.  St. Louis, Mo.-based DMTI Capital Partners provided the funding which will be used to launch a nationwide engagement program for targeting healthcare providers and potential partnerships.

Digital Medical Tech, which enables health systems to proactively track medical equipment and devices via a Bluetooth platform, was founded in 2016 by CEO Matthew Nicholson.  The company’s real-time location system monitors and manages medical assets while requiring less infrastructure and shorter installation time compared to other tracking solutions.

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Report: Consumer Subscription Software Insights

Consumer subscription software (CSS) companies are differentiated from legacy ad-driven or free consumer apps in that CSS companies are providing high quality and useful applications that consumers are willing to pay a monthly or annual subscription for. This revenue model allows CSS leaders to primarily focus on the consumer experience versus optimizing for ad-targeting features.

On the consumer side of the CSS ecosystem, consumers are recognizing the benefits of high-quality paid applications that protect their privacy and provide a more ad-free experience. The initial CSS trailblazers focused on entertainment with huge winners like Netflix and Spotify. Now the CSS model is being adopted by the next generation of consumer applications with a wide variety of use cases such as family communications, health and wellness, religion, dating, and education, among others.

Alec Dafferner, Partner, and Eric Crowley, Vice President at GP Bullhound commented: “We believe that the CSS business model enables companies to rapidly scale with attractive margins while also providing a compelling consumer value proposition. We are excited to help guide CSS companies through the next chapter of their evolution.”

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Venture capital funding hits £4.3bn record high spurred by tech investment

Venture capital funding in the UK lifted to a record high during the first half of this year, bolstered by a hunger for tech investments.

VC funding rose to £4.3bn during the first half of 2019, a 45pc year on year increase, according to Workthere, the serviced-office arm of Savills estate agent.The average deal size for UK VC investment doubled to £5.9m in the first half of the year with 724 deals done – down 37pc in volume from the 1,147 deals recorded in the first six months of 2018.

Investors have been favouring larger, later funding rounds. A recent White Star Capital survey said that UK VC investors were increasingly getting involved of funding rounds of $100m or more.

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Existential risk from artificial general intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are becoming smarter every day, beating world champions in games like Go, identifying tumours in medical scans better than human radiologists, and increasing the efficiency of electricity-hungry data centres. Some economists are comparing the transformative potential of AI with other “general purpose technologies” such as the steam engine, electricity or the transistor.

But current AI systems are far from perfect. They tend to reflect the biases of the data used to train them and to break down when they face unexpected situations. They can be gamed, as we have seen with the controversies surrounding misinformation on social media, violent content posted on YouTube, or the famous case of Tay, the Microsoft chatbot, which was manipulated into making racist and sexist statements within hours.

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