Ocado has invested £10 million into Oxford-based self-driving car startup Oxbotica that includes a partnership to develop autonomous vehicles for curbside deliveries.

The investment came as part of a funding round for Oxbotica and forms the basis of a multi-year collaboration that ultimately aims to reduce costs for Ocado.

The deal is an extension of an existing partnership between the two companies and will focus specifically on developing new hardware and software interfaces for autonomous vehicles that will be used in and around Ocado’s Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC). This includes a range of logistical drones for use across its factories and loading areas.

Both firms are also interested in “last mile” delivery drones that take goods from vans to front doors.

Data sharing agreements have also been signed as part of the deal, which includes the fitting of “data capture capabilities” inside Ocado delivery vans that will be used by Oxbotica to train and test its technologies. The idea is that the data will highlight which Oxbotica technologies will suit Ocado’s needs.

“We are excited about the opportunity to work with Oxbotica to develop a wide range of autonomous solutions that truly have the potential to transform both our and our partners CFC and service delivery operations, while also giving all end customers the widest range of options and flexibility,” Ocado’s chief of advanced technology, Alex Harvey said.

The partnership could also lead to new jobs with Ocado, which is creating new engineering teams to work specifically with Oxbotica. While no figures have been provided, we do know these roles will be within Ocado’s Advanced Technology division, which is already separate from the team that develops the Ocado Smart Platform.

Logistical costs make up a large part of Ocado’s overall expenditure, the firm said. Approximately 1.5% of sales in the UK are lost due to the cost of moving finished orders from the fulfilment centre to delivery vans, while 10% of sales are lost when delivering goods from the van to the door. Labour also represents 50% of these costs, according to Ocado.

Ocado expects to see the first prototypes of some early use cases for autonomous vehicles within two years.

Salesforce will begin welcoming employees back into its US offices, starting with vaccinated members of staff in the middle of May. 

The tech giant’s San Francisco headquarters, Salesforce Tower, along with its Palo Alto and Irvine offices will allow cohorts of 100 people or fewer, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.   

UK ministers are being urged to include a ‘right to disconnect’ policy in the forthcoming Employment Bill to address the boundaries between work and home life.

Tech workers union Prospect wants a legal requirement put in place to force companies to discuss when they can contact their employees while working from home. 

Around two-thirds of UK workers want to see a ‘right to disconnect’ policy put in place, according to a Prospect poll commissioned by Opinium. The organisations interviewed 4,005 UK nationals over the first week of April and found that 66% would support the policy if it was brought in. This was a strong stance across all age groups and political affiliations, according to Prospect, with 53% of Conservative voters in favour. 

Including a right to disconnect in the Employment Bill would a big step in redefining blurred boundaries and would show that the government is serious about tackling the “dark side” of remote working, according to Prospect’s research director Andrew Pakes. 

“People’s experience of working from home during the pandemic has varied wildly depending on their jobs, their home circumstances, and crucially the behaviour of their employers,” Pakes said.  

“It is clear that for millions of us, working from home has felt more like sleeping in the office, with remote technology meaning it is harder to fully switch off, contributing to poor mental health. Remote working is here to stay, but it can be much better than it has been in recent months.”  

Mental health problems featured in the survey with 35% of participants suggesting their ‘work-related mental health’ had gotten worse during the pandemic. 42% said it was partly due to the inability to switch off from the jobs with 30% stating that they were working more unpaid hours than before the pandemic – 18% suggesting this was at least four hours of additional work.

A number of other countries, such as France and Ireland, have some form of the right to disconnect enshrined in law which is also supported by the European Parliament. 

Microsoft is reportedly set to acquire artificial intelligence (AI) speech recognition firm Nuance Communications for an estimated $16 billion (£11.6 billion)

The two companies are currently in “advanced talks”, according to Bloomberg sources, and Nuance could be valued at around $56 per share if current negotiations hold.

Microsoft is yet to comment on the matter but reports suggest that an official announcement will be made sometime this week, possibly late on Monday. 

Nuance is an American AI firm based just outside of Boston that sells audio recognition and transcription tools. The company was founded in 1992, has over 7,000 employees and reported $346 million in fourth-quarter revenues. It’s thought that Microsoft is attempting to expand via acquisitions, with an interest in Nuance’s work in healthcare, customer services and voicemail. 

Microsoft and Nuance already have a professional relationship, collaborating on technologies that allow doctors to capture voice conversations and enter them into electronic medical records. AI and voice software is an area Microsoft has extensive expertise in already, with developer tools to enable transcription and functions to incorporate speech recognition into its products. Both Teams and the Bing search engine have some forms of speech recognition and audio transcription, for example.

The tech giant is seemingly in takeover mode with a $7.5 billion deal for video game maker Zenimax completed last month and wide reports that it recently considered buying social media app TikTok. The firm was also said to be chasing an acquisition of gaming chat app Discord, for around $10 billion. 

Both Discord and TikTok deals were thought to be more about the large volumes of users data that Microsoft would have access to if the acquisitions were successful. If the details around Nuance are correct, it would be Microsoft’s biggest acquisition since buying LinkedIn in 2016. The firm used data from the recruitment site to power other functions on platforms like Outlook and Teams. 

The UK government has awarded contracts to 25 tech firms as part of a deal to design and implement software services across the public sector, estimated to be worth up to £1.5 billion.

The framework, established by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), a procurement body that works for the Cabinet Office, has ordered the creation of software services that will be eventually used by central government departments and other public sector bodies, such as local authorities and UK emergency services.

A handful of major software and services vendors are part of the framework deal, including Deloitte, Hitachi, Fujitsu, HCL, and Accenture, alongside some smaller SMEs.

The government wants the services to cover strategy, architecture, design, software selection, impact assessment, implementation, integration services, data migration, change management, training, onboarding and business process automation.

The deal has been valued at £1.5 billion, however, and the CCS has said it “cannot guarantee any business through the framework agreement”, which will be open for 30 months with an option to extend for a further 18 if needed.

It comes during a period of digital transformation for central and local government, with plans to move from on-premise and cloud-hosted systems to software as a service-based applications. It also follows reports that surfaced in February of a growing divide within the Conservative Party over contracts given to Amazon Web Services. Around £75 million worth of contracts were said to have been awarded to the tech giant last year, almost double the amount the next biggest cloud provider received. This has allegedly caused concerns within the government that it is too dependent on one service.

A full list of the companies associated with the deal can be found here.

Nokia has announced a new deployment of its cloud-based convergent charging system on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The announcement is an expansion of an existing partnership between the two firms that aims to accelerate the migration of high-frequency charging applications to the public cloud for communications service providers (CSPs).

A convergent charging system is a telecommunications innovation that enables the ‘convergence’ of payment methods. This has emerged due launch of new multimedia services and the increasing prevalence of multi-play service offerings on mobile networks.

The idea is to extract more benefits with cloud-based 5G applications with CSPs tapping into new revenue streams from 5G-enabled technologies, such as IoT.

Nokia claims its Converged Charging (NCC) provides “true” continuous availability as its supports high frequency, low latency demands for an “always-on” charging system that a 5G economy would need. It offers CSPs the chance to run workloads on AWS and develop new ways to monetise projects as a part of their journey to the public cloud.

“The technological barriers of deploying charging systems on the public cloud, such as network latency, are decreasing rapidly due to faster-dedicated connections and far edge CNF deployments; while the advantages, such as having the ability to grow capacity for one-off short-range events, are increasing,” said Udi Israel, Nokia’s head of digital business product line, cloud and network services.

According to global consultation and research firm, Analysys Mason, SaaS and public cloud will make inroads into the market for monetisation platforms by growing more than six times its size by 2025.

Nokia suggests its NCC’s architecture can support CSPs at every step of their public cloud journey, from the deployment of greenfield sub-brands as a first step towards hosting testing environments to full production workloads of the main brand on the public cloud.

“As the world becomes increasingly cloud-centric, it’s important that our customers can leverage cloud-native solutions to unleash the potential benefits of the cloud and 5G,” said Fabio Cerone, EMEA telco managing director at AWS.

Microsoft has finally called time on its Cortana mobile app, with users in the US no longer able to access reminders and lists created in it as of today.

The company originally revealed plans to retire the app in November 2019 and it ceased to operate in the UK and other non-US territories on 31 January 2020.

US users were initially given a reprieve, but in July last year Microsoft announced it would retire all third-party support of the AI tool after 31 March 2021.

This isn’t the end of Cortana, at least not for now. According to Microsoft, the virtual assistant, which was launched in 2014, will continue “its evolution as a productivity assistant”.

The move was fueled by the product proving to be less successful among consumers compared to rivals such as Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa. At the same time, Microsoft also acknowledged the popularity of competitors’ tools by allowing them to become more accessible on Windows 10. Since September 2019, users have been able to open their laptops as well as Amazon Echo devices by calling out ‘Alexa’, while Cortana had been moved into a separate app in the Microsoft store and away from the built-in search experience in the operating system.

Sunsetting the Cortana mobile app is in line with Microsoft’s ambitions to transform Cortana into an enterprise-focused tool. In 2019, CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft envisions Cortana as an assistant to Office 365, which is also primarily a desktop-focused product, rather than a mobile one.

Last year, Microsoft announced the decision to improve Cortana’s integration with Office 365 by allowing users to manage their calendars and email using voice commands. The tech giant also combined Cortana functionalities with Microsoft Teams, making it possible to join meetings, make a call, share files with colleagues, and even send chat messages using the virtual assistant.

Space agencies from both the UK and Europe have challenged British tech companies to develop new services that could support high-tech hospitals of the future.

The UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency (ESA) have made £5 million of funding available through the Hampshire Together programme, a digital transformation project across the North and mid-Hampshire areas.

The funding is part of the UK government’s Health Infrastructure plan, which includes provisions to build 40 new hospitals across England by 2030.

Tech firms have been asked to submit proposals for technologies and services that are inspired by space missions to a panel made up of experts from the UK Space Agency, ESA, and Hampshire Together. The panel wants to see not only ideas for the design and development of services to support new hospitals, but also the communities that surround them.

The initiative could potentially lead to new diagnostic tools, drones to track and deliver supplies, and also improvements to ‘telemedicine’ devices – technology used to support the care of patients remotely.

A new facility in Hampshire will be the first to use any services developed through the initiative and the ESA suggests this could even incorporate technologies pioneered on missions to the International Space Station.

“In the past but also more recently throughout the COVID crisis, the use of space technologies and satellite data has proven to be an essential driver for innovation in the healthcare sector to address existing and new challenges,” said Arnaud Runge, a medical engineer at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre.

Throughout the pandemic, the UK Space Agency has funded projects to help the NHS deal with the pandemic. This has included satellite-enabled drones that carry COVID-19 samples, test kits, and PPE to speed up delivery times and reduce traffic.

Technologies supporting bowel cancer care, compact 3D X-ray machines, and apps that target people at risk of social isolation and mental health issues have also taken inspiration from technologies developed via the space agencies.

Google has built an AI-powered app that lets users scan physical documents and automatically organise them into Google Drive.

“Stacks” can analyse bills, receipts and any paper documents you have laying around the house and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan and categorise before turning them into a PDF. 

Users only have to take a photo of their document as the programme can automate the rest. It identifies important information within the document, such as a “due date” or “total amount due”, and these bits of information can then be used to help store and search for the documents, with the app auto-generating names based on its content. 

The idea comes from Christopher Pedregal, whose ed-tech startup Socratic was acquired by Google back in 2018. Socratic used Google’s computer vision and language understanding to make learning tools for high school students. The project was developed by Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, and pulled in members of the tech giant’s DocAI team – which has AI programmes for analysing documents. 

The app is currently available on Android – free and without in-app purchases – and Google will wait to assess user feedback before launching a version on other platforms, such as iOS. Currently, the Android version can scan a range of different sized documents, such as utility bills, shopping receipts and even identification papers. 

Stacks was not the only new AI-based tool Google is showed off on Wednesday as Google Maps has also added a slew of new features. The first is ‘Live View’, which uses augmented reality to help users navigate indoor spaces such as airports or shopping centres. It uses ‘billions’ of Street View images to provide live information for a user as they walk through a building, and graphics will mark out where toilets are or the path to the check-in desk. 

When Boris Johnson uses WhatsApp for official government business, he may be in violation of UK laws due to the platform’s support for “self-destructing” messages. 

That’s according to non-profit groups Foxglove and Citizen, which are threatening legal action over Freedom of Information (FOI) requests that the government is yet to acquiesce.

Citizen said it has sent “several” FOI requests to the government regarding messages on “topics that are in the public interest”, but, so far, these have not been acknowledged. As a result, Foxglove and Citizen have sent a legal letter with the threat of a judicial review if it receives an “unsatisfactory” response from the government. 
 
Ministerial use of WhatsApp and Signal is well documented, with various reports of the prime minister using the app to discuss official business with special advisors and other MPs. Foxglove said the capability to instantly delete messages means that legal analysis can never be fully performed and that for a democratically elected government, it presents a lack of accountability. 

A spokesperson for Citizen said that the government’s use of digital messaging apps could render “one giant black hole” in British history.  

“Government business is being conducted under a cloak of secrecy enabled by the tech platforms,” the spokesperson said. “The only way we can have any hope of holding power to account or even simply maintaining the historic record is through transparency. We desperately need to challenge what we believe is a clear breach of the law on behalf of both Britain’s investigative journalists and its future historians.”
 
In response, a spokesperson for the Cabinet Office told IT Pro that “records of official communications are retained in accordance with the relevant publicly published guidance”. It also pointed out that instant messages are subject to section 3 of the Public Records Act 1958 which requires them to be permanently preserved so they can be made available for appraisal, selection, sensitivity review and transfer to The National Archive at the appropriate time.
 
The director of Foxglove, Cori Crider, said it was “deeply concerned” by the government’s approach to data, suggesting it involved collecting more and more information on the general public while offering less information on itself. 
 
“This turns democracy on its head,” Crider said. “Privacy is for the people – transparency is for the government. And if we have to sue to tip the scales back in favour of the citizen, so be it.”