Sage has published its SMB Tracker highlighting the latest sentiment from the UK’s small and medium sized businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Many startups know what building a culture means in their startup, and most founders will - smartly - work to prioritise that closely to ensure their company culture is warm, positive, and creative. But few know what building a digital culture means. Without a digital culture, your business will struggle to scale, and will struggle to expand internationally. It’s often ignored and that means you can make it a real positive difference between you and your competitors.

ÜberEnergy develops artificial intelligence algorithms that predict energy requirements for residential and commercial buildings. The artificial intelligence engine uses information such as weather patterns and forecasts, current indoor and outside temperature, human building occupancy, electrical usage patterns, along with a myriad of other data points collected by the system to produce predictions of future energy consumption requirements.

For many businesses, cash in the bank is often a concern especially during periods of uncertainty. Making sure you know exactly what’s going in and out and when has never been so important.

The government’s £500m Future Fund is now open for applications with innovative and high growth British businesses able to secure investment to help them through the COVID-19 outbreak. UK-based startups can now apply for a convertible loan of between £125,000 and £5m, to support continued growth and innovation in sectors as diverse as technology, life sciences and the creative industries.

Space Forge, the organisation leading the space manufacturing revolution, has secured a £600k of funding package from the Development Bank of Wales, alongside Bristol Private Equity Club and Innovate UK. This funding will help the company continue developing their reusable manufacturing satellite, ramp up their capability in Newport, Wales and Bristol and build upon UK and European partnership schemes.

There is nothing better than being able to walk out of the house to exercise in the park, the countryside or even to stroll by the sea. Just the ability to go outside gives us a new sense of perspective, and enables us to maintain our health and wellbeing.

A new smart employee app, called Blink has officially launched. Over the past 15 months, Blink has been developed and deployed in partnership with organisations including Stagecoach, Domino’s and the NHS to empower and protect frontline and key workers inside their organisations.

Having worked as a solution architect and designed multiple SaaS applications over the years, I could see most startups struggling to choose the right SaaS architecture for their product offering. In this article, I’ve compiled all my learnings into a cheat sheet to help startup founders, who’re looking to build SaaS applications, make a pragmatic decision backed by proven facts and data.  

The concept of co-working has become synonymous with tech ecosystems across the globe. It came to prominence around the same time as the birth of some of the biggest tech companies you’ve heard of, as well as those you haven’t. 

LuggageHero is bucking the trend by showing that investing in travel startups is not over during these uncertain times surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the biggest trends right now is IoT, especially Industrial IoT (IIoT) and the security around data. Having taken off massively in the past few years, in the tech startup industry if you were going to create a business, these areas would be two of hottest in the current climate. Innovative startups or scaleups with cutting edge IoT hardware technologies capable of securely retrofitting industrial facilities for predictive maintenance, are extremely sought after and very desirable to investors and businesses. Also we have seen a rise in the number of startups working within data security at sensor level to avoid data breaches.

As part of its ‘back to work’ strategy, the UK government is allowing businesses to return to their premises when they cannot work from home. It will be essential that all returning employees are kept safe at all times on the return to their workplaces.

SharkNinja although known for producing vacuums, have been doing some very different work during the COVID-19 crisis, as they had some more time on their hands, and wanted to help. We spoke to Mohammad Hatia, SharkNinja Prototype Lead Workshop Manager and asked him a few questions as to what SharkNinja have been up to.