Tech World: Ford's $1bn for driverless cars, Klarna buys BillPay for £60m and more
Channel: UKTN
Date: 2017-02-22

Welcome to Tech World, your quick round up of the top technology news from across the globe. This month, we have Ford's $1bn investment in driverless cars, Klarna's £60m acquisition of BillPay, the arrest of Samsung's vice chairman and more.

For this episode’s hot topic interview, we spoke with Adrian Baschnonga from EY about smart home tech. First though, here are your top international stories.

Ford investment in AI

Ford is to invest $1bn in Pittsburgh-based Argo AI to create driverless cars. The investment will be spread over five years and will enable Argo to expand to around 200 employees by the end of this year.

Facebook job search

Facebook launched a new feature that enables users in the US and Canada to search and apply for jobs directly from the social network's website and mobile app.

Companies can publish a job advert on their page as they would any other post and users can click an 'apply now' button to fill in their details.

Klarna buys BillPay for £60m

Swedish FinTech unicorn Klarna bought German startup BillPay from UK payday lender Wonga for £60m. Klarna is one of Europe's most valuable private businesses, valued at $2.25bn in its most recent funding round in 2014.

Samsung arrest

Samsung vice chairman Jay Y Lee was arrested in Korea on charges of corruption. He is accused of paying bribes to an adviser of President Park Geun-hye in exchange for political favours.

Reports allege Lee gave a total of $36 million to Park’s secret adviser in order to win government support for a merger between two Samsung subsidiaries.

Bill Gates vs robots

Bill Gates has come up with a way of putting the brakes on robots taking our jobs. The Microsoft co-founder thinks governments should tax companies’ use of robots, as a way of slowing the spread of automation.

He said the tax money should be used to fund other types of employment that are well suited to humans, such as care for the elderly.

Hot topic: Smart home tech

In this episode, we also sit down with Adrian Baschnonga from EY to talk about the rise of smart home tech. We discussed public perceptions of smart home tech, what's preventing mass adoption and which devices are proving most popular.

Baschnonga also talked about the players that are innovating in the space, from startups and telecoms to tech giants.

That’s all for this episode. To get more top tech news straight to your inbox subscribe to our updates and follow us on Twitter.