Another busy week on the ol’ tech front! – but let’s not hang around and dive straight into my Top Two Tech Stories of the week!
- First up – starting and selling companies!
British entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio, who sold the mobile app Summly to Yahoo for $30m (£21.73m) at the age of 17, has sold his latest company to Twitter.
The Sphere group chat app was founded by Mr D’Aloisio and Tomas Halgas.
Sphere, which connects strangers interested in common topics, has been sold for an undisclosed amount and will close in November.
Its 20 or so staff will join Twitter to integrate their community features into the social network.
The company started as a question and answer app that allowed users to instantly chat to paid experts. At the end of 2018, almost 500,000 people were using that version of the platform.
However, Mr D’Aloisio said he found himself drawn to the community aspect of the app which brought strangers interested in the same topics together.
“What was interesting was that people were talking so often throughout the day, and it wasn’t just talking to their friend on Facebook, but someone they had not met before about something they were interested in,” he told the BBC.
As a result, the app slowly pivoted toward a focus on group chats.
Sphere’s features include the ability to:
- create multiple chats for a single group
- send highlighted announcements so no-one in a group misses anything
- send notifications to individuals or just those yet to read a message
“A lot of the messenger apps that exist are catered toward groups that already know each other, but with Sphere, the aim was to unlock new dynamics and bring together people around the world with shared interests.”
Mr D’Aloisio said he was struck by the toxicity on platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Twitch and Twitter, which has been widely criticised about its handling of harassment and trolling.
2. Most shops going till-less!
The Tesco Express on High Holborn looks identical to thousands of others across the country. But inside there are no tills and no self-checkout machines. Instead you scan a QR code on your phone to gain entry, and a complex system of cameras and weighted shelves figures out what you have picked up. Once you’re done you just walk out and your phone (eventually) buzzes to tell you how much you’ve spent.
Yes – we’ve been here before – with the Amazon shop that was opened, but looks like Tesco are using the new technology and many more will be doing so too!
“It creates like an exoskeleton image of you and follows you around and knows what products you have bought,” Bilal explains – the store assistant. “But don’t worry, it’s not recording you and we don’t know who you are.”
Big retailers around the world reckon the technology in use at this Tesco GetGo store on High Holborn will revolutionise shopping and could account for $400bn (£290bn) of transactions within five years, according to analysts at Juniper Research.
The Holborn shop is new but Tesco has been trialling the technology at an Express outlet at its headquarters in Welwyn Garden City since 2019. That was two years before Amazon launched the first of its similar “till-less” stores in the UK.
Aldi is preparing to open its first checkout-free store in Greenwich. Morrisons is testing its own vision of the technology, codenamed Project Sarah, at its Bradford headquarters and has plans to quickly roll out dozens of small stores at busy locations.
So get ready to see no tills, just walk in – get what you want and walk out. This is the future.
So there you go… from an alternative to the usual social media platforms to till-less shopping!
