200 years ago
Industrial revolution – similar to today
Skyscanner has increased revenues in 2014 by 42% to £93 million, with EBITDA of £20 million.
The financial results were underlined by record visitor numbers to Skyscanner, with over 35 million people around the world planning their travel each month on Skyscanner and a 77% global increase in visitors on mobile devices alone. Mobile growth continues to be key to Skyscanner’s strategy. In 2014, Skyscanner’s first hotel and car hire apps were launched globally, while Skyscanner also acquired leading Budapest-based app developer Distinction to accelerate the growth of its in-house mobile development team.
Skyscanner has also further diversified its business in the past 12 months away from flights to travel, with the launch of hotel and car hire apps as well as the establishment of Skyscanner for Business to deliver data-led tools to the travel industry. As a result, the non-flights contribution to overall revenues increased by 47% in 2014.
The personal financial data of millions of taxpayers could be sold to private firms under laws being drawn up by HM Revenue & Customs in a move branded "dangerous" by tax professionals and "borderline insane" by a senior Conservative MP.
following vehement assurances that it would be illegal for NHS England to sell patient medical records to insurance companies through the controversial Care.data initiative, it transpires that the health service has already handed over data to a trade body for actuaries, which help to set pricing for insurance premiums.
Details relating to hospital admissions from 1989 to 2010 were given (for an extraction fee) to the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. The 13 years of data covering 47 million patients were given to the profesional body to help them "improve accuracy in pricing" of insurance.
The episode was detailed in a report -- from December 2013 -- which showed how it used NHS data to track the medical histories of patients including age, the area in which the patients lived, but not names -- this is precisely the "pseudonymised" amber data that the NHS has said would be extremely tightly controlled under Care.data.
Who here received a Facebook Year in Review
Some people were not happy
This guy had a photo of his flat burning down
When you delegate decisions to algorithms - you end up with unintended consequences
Caleb Larsen
A group of London based Swiss artists created a gallery exhibition
The Random Darknet Shopper
They created a bot to randomly buy something from the darknet each week of value of $100 and displayed it in the gallery in St Gallen Switzerland
They bot randomly bought lots of fake sneakers and branded goods
It also bought esctacy tablets
Have you noticed any of your colleagues receiving DVDs in the post recently?
Those are DVDs
My guess is they are buying drugs from the darkweb
A question was raised – who is breaking the laws – the programmers or the bot
Ok – this is a clear case of the programmers – but in the future will it be quite so clear cut?