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Startups

The Future of Mobile Advertising in Asia

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Here’s why Asia is where smart mobile marketers are advertising

If you thought western consumers were always on their smartphones, think again: Asia takes mobile-reliance to a whole new level. Mobile advertising in Asia is officially the fastest growing in the world… and understanding the power of it could be key to the future of mobile ads for Western companies.

A global trend report recently found that Asia leads the world in mobile ad requests, with a growth of 44% – almost twice the 23% growth of the Americas and EMEA.

It’s no surprise, given that the continent is quickly becoming a digital-first society: Asia is the world’s fastest-growing internet region, where mobile users on the average watch more weekly online video than they do the US, Canada, or Europe, and China’s multi-purpose “app for everything” WeChat boasts more than a billion monthly users, making it the world’s largest standalone app. That’s before we get to TikTok, the Beijing-based social network that has enraptured teens across the globe. Of course, with an integrated digital society comes huge opportunities for mobile advertisers.

While Korea, Indonesia, and Singapore all lead the surge in mobile engagement in Asian countries, India, in particular, is proving itself a powerful emerging market, with a huge 425% growth in mobile ad requests – far ahead of the USA’s 170% increase. At the same time, eCPM growth is being led by Singapore (154%), Japan (125%), and Australia (111%). Compare that to eCPM growth in the US of 79%, and it’s clear that while the industry is growing everywhere, it’s Asia where it is well and truly exploding.

This exponential growth is set to continue over the next five years. Mobile ad spend in Asia is expected to grow 88% over the next few years – that’s a higher rate than in North America and Europe, with the highest rates of growth within that forecast for China, India, and Indonesia. The digital economy in Asia as a whole, meanwhile, is projected to reach $200 billion by 2025. It’s big. And it’s about to get even bigger.

The unrivaled increase has a number of causes. Low-cost smartphones have made mobile connections more accessible than ever in the region, and the widespread use of smartphones has increased competition in mobile data networks – which has in turn allowed users to access internet data at lower costs. In these emerging markets, with users gaining their first internet access through their smartphone, populations are truly mobile-first, increasing the value of its mobile engagement further. As society becomes more connected, so too do its systems which rely on it, encouraging even more connectivity across the region, and greater engaged audiences all the time. It’s an unstoppable cycle, and we’re all already along for the ride.

Excitingly, the dramatic increase in Asian mobile use presents business opportunities for advertisers in the global marketplace, too – not just in Asia itself.

Companies like Seoul-based digital creative consultancy InterAd help Western companies to harness this growth for their own business, by acting as a marketing partner to increase their digital presence in Asia. Offering specialized digital marketing services, the company uses its local expertise to authentically localize businesses from all over the world for the Asian market.

The secret lies in combining local knowledge with SEO skills to attract organic traffic, as well as with SEM. This is essential in Asia, where search engines tend to prioritize paid-search over organic results. Get the mixture of digital marketing expertise and understanding of Asian consumer’s mobile habits just right, and you have the power to influence the fastest growing digital market on the planet.

In a world where the future feels more unknown than ever before, one thing is certain: companies looking for the next advertising boom should look to the east. It’s already happening – and it’s in the palm of your hand. Literally.

Written by Rebecca April May

Startups

Google to acquire Elastifile

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Image by 377053 from Pixabay

Google said on 9 July that it had entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Elastifile – a provider of scalable, enterprise file storage for the cloud – with the deal expected to close later this year.

The acquisition is expected to be completed later this year and is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals. Upon the close of the acquisition, Elastifile will join Google Cloud.

Elastifile uses a unique software-defined approach to managed Network Attached Storage (NAS) in order to tackle the challenges of file storage for enterprise-grade applications running at scale in the cloud.

This theoretically enables “organizations to scale performance or capacity without cumbersome overhead”. Google said it is “excited” to build on this technology and integrate Elastifile with Google Cloud Filestore.

It expects that the “combination of Elastifile and Google Cloud will support bringing traditional workloads into [Google Cloud Platform] faster and simplify the management and scaling of data and compute intensive workloads”.

The company said it believes the combination will “empower businesses to build industry-specific, high performance applications that need petabyte-scale file storage more quickly and easily” which it claims is “critical” for the media, life sciences and manufacturing industries.

Earlier this year, Google launched Elastifile File Service on Google Cloud Platform, a fully-managed version of Elastifile integrated with Google Cloud, with customers including Appsbroker, eSilicon and Forbes.

“The integrated circuit (IC) design  process can produce a wide spectrum of compute and storage requirements,” Naidu Annamaneni, CIO and VP of Global IT at eSilicon, said in a statement. “This can translate into thousands of cores and petabytes of storage for some portions of the IC design. The combination of Elastifile and Google Cloud provides the scale and performance that we need to successfully deliver these ICs on time and on budget.”  

“Helping our customers solve difficult storage challenges for their most critical workloads has enabled these enterprises to unleash the full benefits of the cloud,” Erwan Menard, CEO at Elastifile, added. “We’re excited to join Google for the next part of our journey, building on the success we’ve had together over the past two and a half years. File storage is essential to enterprise cloud adoption and, together with Google, we are well-positioned to serve those needs.”

“In recent years, we’ve seen enterprises increasingly deploy traditional applications as well as new performance sensitive applications to the cloud,” Deepak Mohan, Research Director at IDC, said. “These applications require on-premises level of performance for latency and consistency alongside of the scalability benefits of the cloud.”

“The acquisition of Elastifile will better enable Google Cloud customers to meet this mix of needs, as they deploy such workloads to the Google Cloud Platform,” he concluded.

Startups

NASA invests in small businesses for space tech development

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Image courtesy of Billy Brown on Flickr, under a Creative Commons 2.0 license

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 18 June that it would invest US$45 million in small businesses and research institutions developing space technologies on the basis that these companies would “help . . . land astronauts on the Moon in five years and establish a sustainable presence there, as part of the agency’s larger Moon to Mars exploration approach”.

NASA has selected 363 proposals from organisations spread across 41 states to “help advance the types of capabilities needed for those future missions, as well as to support the agency in other areas”. These projects form part of NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

Around 100 of the selected companies will be first-time recipients of a NASA SBIR or STTR contract and over 20 percent of the businesses are from underrepresented communities, including minority and women-owned businesses, the agency said.

The projects will support a number of areas – including aeronautics, human space exploration and operations, science and space technology – covering research and development for various applications.

These include an intelligent rover wheel with integrated sensing and perception subsystems to improve mobility, a laser-based mass spectrometer that could be used to search for life on other planets, a light-weight solar panel, long-term auto-pilot technology for unmanned vehicles and  new mapping techniques.

According to the agency, the selected proposals were chosen based on their “technical merit and feasibility” as well as the “experience, qualifications and facilities” of the submitting organisations, the effectiveness of the proposed work plan and commercial potential, among other criteria.

NASA’s SBIR and STTR programs aim to encourage small businesses and research institutions to “develop innovative ideas that meet the specific research and development needs of the federal government” and stimulate technological innovation in the private sector.

They also intend that the programs should “encourage participation of socially and economically disadvantaged persons and women-owned small businesses”, and “increase the commercial application for research results”. Several of the chosen proposals will have applications here on Earth – for example, the rover wheel could also be used on Earth-bound autonomous tractors and other off-road vehicles.

The agency’s SBIT and STTR programs are conducted in three phases starting with the proposal; then the development, demonstration and delivery of the innovation; and then the commercialisation of the resulting products. The 363 selected proposals are all still in phase one; contracts granted during this phase last for either six months (SBIR) or 13 months (STTR) with maximum funding of US$125,000.

Both programs are managed by NASA’s Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley, California, for the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). The STMD is responsible for “developing . . . cross-cutting, pioneering, new technologies and capabilities needed by the agency to achieve its current and future missions”. 

“We are excited about the entrepreneurial, innovative ideas that these small businesses are bringing to the table,” Jim Reuter, associate administrator for the STMD, said in a statement. “The technologies show great promise in helping NASA achieve its objectives across all mission areas, including our efforts to send American astronauts to the Moon, and then on to Mars, while also providing a long-term boost to the American economy.”

Startups

Simple ‘smart’ glass reveals the future of artificial vision

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From left to right, Zongfu Yu, Ang Chen and Efram Khoram developed the concept for a “smart” piece of glass that recognizes images without any external power or circuits. Photograph by Sam Million Weaver and courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have identified a way to create artificially intelligent glass that is capable of recognizing images without the use of sensors, circuits or a power source, the university said on 8 July.

The glass uses “light propagation” and could be used in smartphones as part of Face ID without draining the battery – and potentially without using any power at all.

“We’re using optics to condense the normal setup of cameras, sensors and deep neural networks into a single piece of thin glass,” University of Wisconsin-Madison electrical and computer engineering professor Zongfu Yu explained in a press release. “This is completely different from the typical route to machine vision.”

He envisions pieces of glass that look like translucent squares embedded with tiny strategically placed bubbles and impurities that would bend light in specific ways to differentiate among different images.

For proof of concept, Yu and his team devised a method to make such glass that identified handwritten numbers. Light emanating from an image of a number enters at one end of the glass, and then focuses to one of nine specific spots on the other side, each corresponding to individual digits. The glass was dynamic enough to detect, in real-time, when a handwritten three was altered to become an eight.

“The fact that we were able to get this complex behaviour with such a simple structure was really something,” Erfan Khoram, a graduate student in Yu’s lab, remarked.

The researchers used a technique similar to a machine-learning training process to design the glass to recognise numbers, except they “trained” an analogue material instead of digital codes, placing air bubbles of different shapes and sizes, and small pieces of light-absorbing materials, at specific locations in the glass.

“We’re accustomed to digital computing, but this has broadened our view,” Yu added. “The wave dynamics of light propagation provide a new way to perform analogue artificial neural computing.”

One advantage is that the computation required is “passive” and intrinsic to the material, which means that a single piece of image recognition could be used multiple times, and another is that the process works at the speed of light as the glass distinguishes between images by distorting light waves.

“We could potentially use the glass as a biometric lock, tuned to recognize only one person’s face,” Yu said. “Once built, it would last forever without needing power or internet, meaning it could keep something safe for you even after thousands of years.”

The glass would be inexpensive and easy to make, although the up-front training process could be time consuming and computationally demanding. Looking ahead to the near future, the scientists’ next move is to find out if the method will work for more complex tasks, such as facial recognition.

“The true power of this technology lies in its ability to handle much more complex classification tasks instantly without any energy consumption,” Ming Yuan, a collaborator on the research and professor of statistics at Columbia University, said.

“These tasks are the key to create artificial intelligence: to teach driverless cars to recognize a traffic signal, to enable voice control in consumer devices, among numerous other examples,” he added.

Unlike human vision, which is very general in its capabilities to discern an unknown number of different objects, the smart glass could excel in specific applications like number recognition, identifying letters and faces, and so on.

“We’re always thinking about how we provide vision for machines in the future, and imagining application specific, mission-driven technologies.” Yu concluded. “This changes almost everything about how we design machine vision.” 

University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate students Ang Chen and Dianjing Liu also contributed to the research, with Qiqi Wang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Startups

Researchers are using machine learning to screen for autism in children

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Image by 192635 from Pixabay

Researchers at Duke Engineering and the Duke School of Medicine have created an app to screen young children for signs of autism by scanning their reactions as they watch movies, the university said on 11 July.

The app uses a video coding algorithm which tracks and looks for movements that display the child’s emotions and ability to pay attention, which can indicate autism risk. The initial study was conducted using an app from the Apple Store and based on Apple’s ResearchKit open source development platform.

The first results from the pilot study of this five year project started coming in last year, leading to “new insights about autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and has the potential to transform how children’s development is screened and monitored”.

The app first administers caregiver consent forms and survey questions and then uses the phone’s selfie camera to collect videos of young children’s reactions while they watch movies designed to elicit autism risk behaviours, such as patterns of emotion and attention, on the device’s screen.

The videos of the child’s reactions are sent to the study’s servers, where automatic behavioural coding software tracks the movement of video landmarks on the child’s face and quantifies the child’s emotions and attention. For example, in response to a short movie of bubbles floating across the screen, the video coding algorithm looks for movements of the face that would indicate joy.

“Babies who go on to develop autism typically don’t pay attention to social cues,” Geraldine Dawson, director of the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development, said in an article published on Wired and cited by the university in its announcement. “They’re more interested in non-social things, like toys or objects. They’re also less emotionally expressive. They smile less, particularly in response to positive social events.”

Guillermo Sapiro, professor of electrical and computer engineering, is using Amazon Web Services and tools called TensorFlow and PyTorch to build machine learning algorithms that connect children’s facial expressions and eye movements to potential signs of ASD. His group is also using these cloud computing tools to develop such algorithms for privacy filters for the images and videos they collect.

Through the app, the Duke team was able to collect behavioural data from around 1,700 children, which is far more than the 50 to 100 typically found in an ASD study. With that amount of data in hand, the researchers have so far found the app to be almost 90 percent accurate for some subsets of behaviours.

Startups

Google digital news initiative lands first in Youngstown, Ohio

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Image courtesy of Sollok29 on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Google announced on 18 July that Youngstown, Ohio, will be the first city in its Compass Experiment, a joint venture with newspaper publishing company McClatchy to revive local news. This is a timely announcement as the city’s only daily newspaper is due to close its doors on 31 August this year.

The Compass Experiment, part of the Google News Initiative, is a local digital news lab founded between the two organizations. The Youngstown site is one of three initial digital-only news operations – with the two sites yet to be named – that they intend to launch and operate “ in small to mid-sized US communities that have limited sources of local, independent journalism” over the next three years.

The project’s goal is to not only “support the dissemination of news in these communities, but also make the local operations financially self-sustaining, through experimentation with a variety of revenue models”, and share lessons learned with “with the broader news community” with the intention of replicating the same – or similar – model elsewhere in the country.

Each site will be independently built and “may launch with different platforms and revenue models”. They will also be entirely owned and operated with McClatchy, which the companies said has “sole editorial control over content”.

Compass consulted with Penelope Muse Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina and author of a 2018 study on the loss of local journalism in the United States, when analyzing potential communities for the project’s first local digital news sites. 

In a blog post, Mandy Jenkins, general manager of the Compass Experiment, noted the closure of Youngstown’s daily newspaper, The Vindicator, will leave the city “and a larger region of about 500,000 people, without a daily newspaper”.

“The timing of such a loss couldn’t be worse for Youngstown, which has suffered through a tremendous economic downturn over the last 40 years,” she added. “While the area may be struggling financially, Youngstown has a distinct identity and a strong sense of community, which is why we want to help build a path forward for local news.”

“We at McClatchy are looking forward to continuing our close collaboration with Google as we embark on this next important step. Over the course of the next three years, we will be sharing our successes, failures and what we’ve learned to the media industry at large,” she said.

According to the Pew Research Center, the estimated circulation of daily newspapers in the US fell to 28.6 million in 2018, down from 48.6 million a decade earlier –  and newsroom jobs have dropped by 25 percent since 2008. Facebook also recently admitted it’s struggling to find enough local news.

Startups

Intel acquires networking startup

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Intel Corporation said on 10 June it had signed an agreement to acquire Barefoot Networks, a California-based start-up computer networking company that designs and produces programmable network switch silicon, systems and software.

In an announcement, Intel said that the acquisition of Barefoot Networks – which is backed by Google, Tencent, Alibaba and Goldman Sachs – would support its “focus on end-to-end cloud networking and infrastructure leadership” and allow the company to “continue to deliver on new workloads, experiences and capabilities” for its data center customers.

Intel described Barefoot Networks as “an emerging leader in Ethernet switch silicon and software for use in the data center, specializing in the programmability and flexibility necessary to meet the performance and ever-changing needs of the hyperscale cloud”.

Basically, their networking chips are customizable, allowing users to program them for whatever functionality they need, whereas previously companies were able to customize network architecture down to everything but the chipset.

This lack of programmable chips meant that network architectures weren’t as responsive as a company would usually want because they were working around chipsets that had been designed for specific functions.

Barefoot Networks is led by CEO Dr Craig Barratt – a former Stanford University  professor whose work is considered to have been critical to the development of the networking architectures that allow the big tech companies to operate at the massive scale they now have – and based in Santa Clara, California.

It launched three years ago – seemingly out of nowhere – and was quickly lauded by the media as a company that would transform the way computing giants like Alphabet and Amazon would function, making chip manufacturers like Intel sit up and take notice.

The company is expected to bring “deep expertise in cloud network architectures, P4-programmable high-speed data paths, switch silicon development, P4 compilers, driver software, network telemetry and computational networking” to Intel.

“We look forward to serving Barefoot Networks’ current customers, and to introducing its innovative programmable networking paradigm to more customers around the world,” Intel said.

The purchase of Barefoot Networks was agreed for an undisclosed sum and the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2019. As yet, there has been no word from Barefoot Networks’ investors as to the result for them from this acquisition.

Startups

Study: Usefulness of AR in precision tasks in doubt

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Pisa in Italy has cast doubt on the efficiency of mixed – or augmented – reality (AR) to perform high-precision tasks.

The study, published on 6 May in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, suggests that accomplishing an AR-assisted high-precision task that’s close at hand (i.e. within two meters) may not be feasible with existing technology.

Researchers conducted a small-scale experiment in which 20 Microsoft HoloLens users took a “connect the dots” test four times – with and without the AR headset, and with one or both eyes open – and performed better when using the naked eye.

With this type of AR test, computer-generated content is projected onto a semi-transparent display in front of the user’s eyes, while they are still able to see real-world objects beyond the screen. A sequence of numbered dots were projected onto the HoloLens screen and participants then had to draw the connecting lines using a ruler on real paper in front of them.

Study coordinator Dr Marina Carbone believes the difference in performance may be due to the way that the human eye focuses, and pointed to the fact that users were unaware of the difference in performance during follow-up interviews. They also said the headset made them feel more tired.

Essentially, the study found that human eyes aren’t really quite up to the task of focusing on two separate objects – one real and one not – simultaneously, when they are in close proximity to one another.

This discovery is likely to limit the usefulness of AR, which has been carving out a role in high-precision fields such as medicine and engineering, helping to guide skilled workers who maintain or use complicated machines and other equipment, such as jet engines, by giving visual cues as they work.

“Although there is increasing interest in using commercial optical see-through head-mounted displays [for] manual tasks that require accurate alignment of VR data to the actual target – such as surgical tasks – attention must be paid to the current limitations of available technology,” the study found.

While the study concluded that the HoloLens and other AR devices should not be used for high-precision manual tasks, the Pisa team is planning more research to deepen its understanding of when –  and how – AR in its current state might become useful.

Startups

Survey: Cost biggest hurdle for smart homes

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Source: www.quotecatalog.com via Flickr

Cost is the primary concern for consumers considering turning their house into a smart home, according to a recent survey of 581 US-based adults who are familiar with Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, conducted by Washington DC-based B2B ratings and reviews firm Clutch on 30 May.

Smart home devices – home appliances and devices equipped with IoT technology, such as a smart thermostat or smart security system – allow people to control and monitor their homes remotely.

According to the survey, 53% of people currently own a smart home device and one-third (33%) plan to invest in one within the next three years. Smart home devices are the IoT technology people are most familiar with, ahead of wearable devices (75%) and digital assistants (76%).

According to Clutch, one reason people are familiar with smart home devices is “forced adoption,” which occurs because many home devices and appliances are now built with connected capabilities.

“I’m not sure there’s much of a choice anymore,” said Bob Klein, president of Digital Scientists, describing the prevalence of smart home devices on the market relative to “legacy” home appliances and devices.

Smart home devices allow people intimate access to information about their home from remote locations, which provides them peace-of-mind and a sense of security. Remote control and monitoring (37%) are the biggest benefits of owning a smart home device.

The benefits people experience from smart home devices may impact the smart home devices they purchase. For example, smart security system users benefit most from the remote monitoring benefits of smart home devices. S smart security systems (50%) are the most commonly owned smart home device, ahead of smart thermostats (48%) and smart lights (46%).

Clutch also found that people are concerned about the cost of smart home devices, though most people recognize that some smart home devices can reduce utility costs in their home. Cost (26%) is the primary concern people have with smart home devices over security vulnerability (21%), according to the survey.

However, people also believe that smart home devices have cost benefits. Over half of the people surveyed (53%) claimed that smart home thermostats decrease utility costs. This is double the number who thought a smart home thermostat increases utility costs (24%).

Startups

Virgin Galactic announces summer move to Spaceport America

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Image courtesy of StickerGiant on Flikr, under a Creative Commons 2.0 license

At a press conference on 10 May, Virgin Galactic CEO Sir Richard Branson announced that the company’s development and testing program had “advanced sufficiently to move its spaceline staff and space vehicles” from Mojave, California, to its commercial operations headquarters at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Speaking at the New Mexico State Capitol Building in Santa Fe, at an event hosted by New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, Branson said that the move, which involves over 100 staff would begin immediately and continue through summer to minimize schooling disruption for families.

According to Virgin Galactic, this move signals “the final countdown to a regular commercial spaceflight service for paying passengers and science research” at Spaceport America, and follows recent development of the site, including “the completion of the hanger, offices, fuel farm, warehouse and antenna for telemetry and communications, as well as interior fit-out”.

Over the next few months, the company said it plans to “reposition its space system consisting of carrier aircraft VMS Eve and spaceship VSS Unity” from Mojave to Spaceport America “once cabin interior and other work has been completed by Virgin Galactic’s sister manufacturing organization, The Spaceship Company (TSC)”.

TSC will remain based in Mojave to continue building Virgin Galactic’s planned fleet of SpaceShipTwo and carrier aircraft WhiteKnightTwo vehicles. Virgin Galactic said it plans to complete final test flights from New Mexico in anticipation of commencing a full commercial service for transporting passengers and research payloads into space.

Virgin Galactic partnered with the state of New Mexico in an agreement that saw the construction of Spaceport America, the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport, and the company committing to base its commercial spaceflight activities there once it was ready to commence service.

 “Our Virgin Galactic adventure has been intertwined with New Mexico and Spaceport America right from the start and our stories have unfolded together,” Branson said in a statement. “New Mexico delivered on its promise to build a world-first and world-class spaceport.”

“Today, I could not be more excited to announce, that in return, we are now ready to bring New Mexico a . . . spaceline,” he added. “Virgin Galactic is coming home to New Mexico where together we will open space to change the world for good.”

George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic and TSC, noted that the first photograph of Earth from space was taken over New Mexico in October 1946.

 “How inspiring and appropriate that the state will soon host the first regular commercial spaceflight service, which will enable thousands of people to see Earth from space with their own eyes, “ he said. “We are deeply grateful to the citizens and leadership of New Mexico for having the vision to create a better future for their children and all of humanity.”

 “Going to space and exploring the universe is a team effort,” Dan Hicks, CEO of Spaceport America, added. “It takes strong partnerships that are courageous and also vulnerable. Sir Richard’s visionary leadership to take meaningful risks along with New Mexico leadership’s far-sighted commitment – epitomizes the successful partnerships that are truly needed for the space industry.”

Startups

How the British government could help your start-up get off the ground

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Image by Adam Derewecki from Pixabay

With Brexit (maybe, possibly – at the end of the day, who really knows?) looming on the horizon, this is a frustrating and scary time for UK-based entrepreneurs. No one knows what the future might hold for businesses, especially those just starting out, and economists aren’t much help when the future of the country is terribly unpredictable and stuck in limbo.

However, all is not entirely lost. An analysis of economic data by consumer research firm NimbleFin recently concluded that the United Kingdom is the second-best country in Europe for start-ups and the British government has made great strides in recent years in the support it provides to start-ups.

Funding

There are several government-backed funding routes for start-ups in the UK, such as a range of grants provided by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and the Start Up Loans scheme, which offers loans of up to £25,000 at a fixed interest rate of six percent per annum for new business ideas. A successful applicant will also receive guidance on writing a business plan and up to 12 months of free mentoring.

If you’re feeling lucky, there’s also a range of funding competitions offered by Innovate UK, a government agency that funds and connects UK businesses to develop new products, processes and services.

Setting up in the nation’s capital isn’t necessarily the most cost effective move but being in the thick of it all can provide motivation, access and – perhaps most importantly – better Wi-Fi than elsewhere in the country. London-based start-ups can apply for support from the London Co-Investment Fund.

This program was established by the London Economic Action Partnership (LEAP) – which contributed £25 million – supported by the Mayor of London, and delivered by Funding London and Capital Enterprise. The money is earmarked for investment in seed rounds of between £250,000 to £1 million.

Other possible options include the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), which offers tax relief to individual investors who buy new shares in a company; Research and Development tax credits, which allows companies to claim back some research and development costs; and the EU’s Horizon 2020 funding pot, which UK companies may still be allowed to access post-Brexit.

Connectivity

The UK government hasn’t always had the best reputation when it comes to digital connectivity. It notoriously failed to hit many of its targets for superfast fibre-optic broadband provision and consistently lags behind the internet access available in other European countries.

However, last year, the government unveiled plans to make the UK world leader in digital connectivity in its Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review. It aims to give the majority of the population access to 5G mobile internet, connect 15 million premises to full fibre-optic broadband by 2025 and across all of the UK by 2033.

The government claims that it was providing superfast broadband coverage to 95 percent of premises in the UK by December 2017 and is introducing a broadband Universal Service Obligation that aims to give everyone in the UK a clear, enforceable right to request high-speed broadband by 2020.

Visas

Like many industries, the technology sector has repeatedly warned that access to international workers that they need to bridge the digital skills gap is far too restricted by immigration regulations, an issue that is sure to be compounded by the effects of Brexit, whether or not the country actually leaves the European Union, due to the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric and uncertainty about the future.

In the 2017, the government attempted to allay these concerns, doubling the number of visas available through the Tier 1 (Exceptional Talent) route from 1,000 to 2,000. In March, two further visa routes with no cap on the number of applicants came into effect as replacements for the Tier 1 (Graduate Entrepreneur) visa: these were the Start-up visa and the Innovator visa.

Foreign workers who want to run a business in the UK can apply for an Innovator visa if their idea is endorsed by an approved body, they come from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland and they meet the remaining eligibility requirements. They must also have at least £50,000 in investment funds for a new business, unless their business is already established and has been endorsed for an earlier visa.

Alternatively, they can apply for a Start-up visa if they come from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland, meet the remaining eligibility requirements and are endorsed by an authorised body that is either a UK-based higher education institution or a business organisation with a history of supporting UK-based entrepreneurs.

Other forms of support

The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy maintains a database of schemes offering expertise and advice and the Business is Great website provides information on subjects ranging from how to  intellectual property issues to tax.

Tech.London offers advice on setting up London, including local workspaces, events, mentorship programmes, job boards and funding tips, as part of a collaboration between the Mayor of London, investor portal Gust and lead sponsor IBM. London & Partners also offers support and advice for scale-up companies looking to set up shop in the capital.

Overseas start-ups can seek free guidance from the Department for International Trade’s (DIT) Global Entrepreneur Programme (GEP), while London-based businesses can apply for a place on Techstars London, an accelerator providing access to investment, mentorship and collaboration with top entrepreneurs.

Further guidance is available at Tech Nation, a government-funded body which provides a range of support for technology companies, include schemes like the Future Fifty, which has given successful start-ups access to expertise across both the public and private sectors, and the Digital Business Academy, a free online learning platform for budding tech entrepreneurs to learn digital skills.

Startups

How to watch the final season of Game of Thrones in the right way

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Courtesy of BagoGames on Flickr under a CreativeCommons 2.0 generic license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones has been hit by a number of controversies in recent weeks but not in the way you might expect. Forget gratuitous sex scenes (the awkwardness of that Gendry and Arya scene notwithstanding), unnecessary violence and incestuous relationships that we’ll never be able to erase from our minds, however hard we might try.

This season, the controversies have mostly come in the form of coffee-cup-gate and cinematography so dark that we thought winter might have already come but couldn’t see well enough to know for sure. Viewers eagerly awaited the epic third episode of the season, The Long Night aka The Battle of Winterfell but later complained that the picture was too dark with some saying they struggled to see anything at all. In response, the episode’s cinematographer Fabian Wagner defended the show’s lighting choices, informing fans via an interview with Wired that they just weren’t tuning their televisions properly.

“A lot of the problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly,” he reportedly said. “A lot of people also unfortunately watch it on small iPads, which in no way can do justice to a show like that anyway.”

According to Wagner, some of the darkness viewers experienced was due to the night-time shoot, while the rest was produced through on-set lighting choices. He told Wired that “another look would have been wrong” and asserted that “everything we wanted people to see is there”. The showrunners had “decided this had to be a dark episode” because there had been so many battle scenes over the years that “to make it truly impactful and to care for the characters, you have to find a unique way of portraying the story”.

“With a lot of hype comes a lot of criticism,” he added. “People love to find something to talk about, and so that’s totally fine.”

Visually, Game of Thrones has grown increasingly dark since season five the latest episode was notably hard to discern, a criticism that is often launched at fantasy and science-fiction shows alike, such as Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and the non-cancelled Teen Wolf reboot. The show’s subject matter has always been dark itself but avid viewers have noted that the shift in lighting techniques has accompanied increasingly dark plotlines and themes.

The final episode of the season promises to be almost as dark as episode three and equally as “cinematic”, to borrow Wagner’s description. With that in mind, here are some tips to make sure that your viewing experience is as comfortable as it can possibly be without moving the whole thing into your local cinema. And before we get there, maybe go back and watch The Battle of Winterfell in the way it was intended.

Turn off the lights

There’s a reason why your local cinema or theatre turns off the lights when the action starts. It’s not just about focusing the mind and increasing the likelihood that you’ll drop popcorn in your lap at every single jump scare. Darker pictures like Game of Thrones look best when the room is also dark as any light reflecting off the screen can make it harder to see and even wash out the lighter scenes. Try watching at night or turning off the lights and drawing the curtains. If you must have a light on, make sure that it’s behind the television so that it doesn’t hit the screen directly and turn it down as dim as possible. This one comes with a warning that its not brilliant for your eyes so if you’re going to do this, it’s not suitable for binge watching.

Choose the right viewing mode

The majority of televisions come with a selection of picture modes that effect everything from screen brightness and color to black level and image processing. Most will allow you to adjust each of these aspects separately but if that sounds too complicated and time consuming, it’s likely that they also have some presets, including a cinema or movie mode (aka calibrated on Vizio sets). This will help you to get peak picture quality when you’re watching television in a dark room. Compared to standard or vivid modes, this might appear duller and less impactful to begin with but it’s the best option for color realism and can be tuned for dim rooms. That means lower light output, solid contrast and correct shadow detail.

Roughen things up a bit

One of the least cinematic effects that movie mode will keep intact – for some unfathomable reason – is the so-called “soap opera effect”, which basically introduces smoothing which makes motion… um… smoother and less film-like. Not every television has the video processing that causes this effect but higher end models usually do, alongside plenty of the most popular midrange sets. Unfortunately, finding the setting that controls the soap opera effect is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack as each manufacturer typically buries it deep in the settings menu and calls it something different to every other manufacturer. Check out this helpful guide to finding it and turning if off of you want to preserve the 24-frame cadence that helps Game of Thrones look like a full-on box office movie each week.

Explore your options

If you’re feeling really adventurous, there are tons of other settings to explore. And you will have to explore if you want to change them because they won’t all improve the image to your eye and adjusting them for one scene could make others look even worse. If everything goes wrong, the reset function is your best friend. Trying playing with the backlight – which you’ll want to be lower in a darker room – and local dimming – which most LCD televisions will feature; this works to increase contrast and improve black levels. Just don’t change the contrast manually, that’s something best left to the experts as setting it too high can render bright details completely invisible. Not a good look.