In the loop: the new Coca-Cola invention that won’t be on Ed Miliband’s Christmas list

In our roundup this week, we’ve looked into faltering fintech investments, Twitter’s quest to crack down on trolls and Deliveroo’s boozy new partnership

In the loop: the new Coca-Cola invention that won’t be on Ed Miliband’s Christmas list

Deliveroo and Heineken join forces

Given that Deliveroo has spent the last few months dealing with employee pay rows and fighting of the competition from both Just Eat and UberEats, you wouldn’t be surprised if the food delivery app’s leadership were craving a stiff drink or two. And considering they aren’t the only ones craving a cold brew around the holidays, Deliveroo’s new partnership with Heineken couldn’t have come at a better time.

The app has given the new Heineken brand Brew House access to Deliveroo’s drivers, enabling customers to have booze brought to their doors within 20 minutes. The joint initiative will initially be active across 15 sites in London, Bath and Cardiff and will be getting an extended roll out across more UK cities by the end of 2017.

In the meantime, we can think of a few startups that will be using the service to quench their employees’ thirst come Christmas time.

VCs backing fintech startups lose their mojo

While the smoke from the presidential election and the Brexit vote is now clearing, business leaders across the globe still seem to be facing a period of market uncertainty. Keeping that in mind, it’s hardly surprising that a report this week revealed that VC investors have decreased their investment in fintech startups across the globe for the second consecutive quarter.

CB Insight, the capital and angel investment database, and KPMG, the auditing firm, have released a new report demonstrating that VC-backed fintech companies across the world raised $2.4bn in the third quarter of this year. This represents a 17% drop from the second quarter in 2016 and a 52% tumble compared to the third quarter in 2015. Given this dramatic drop, we can only hope that next week’s autumn statement will provide some clarity for the foreseeable future for fintech startups.

Are Coca-Cola’s selfie cameras something to smile about?

Ask Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Barack Obama about what they think of having their photos taken while they eat and you’re sure to notice the temperature of the room dip a few degrees. So, keeping that in mind, you have to ask yourself what Coca-Cola was thinking with its latest innovation.

The soft drink giant has released a selfie bottle that, much as the name implies, takes a photo along the bottle when it reaches a 70-degree tilt, snapping a selfie of the drinker mid-gulp. Clearly the fizzy-drink firm’s bid to take the world of social media by storm, the quirky gadget incorporates a dedicated share function for users to effortlessly share their selfies on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

While the holidays are coming, we’re fairly certain that this gadget won’t make it onto most politicians’ wish lists.

Twitter goes troll hunting 

While the trolls of fairy tales skulked around in forests and underneath the occasional bridge, the real-life ones tend to hang out on social-media platforms. For instance, actor Leslie Jones was famously chased from Twitter when internet trolls attacked her after her appearance in the new Ghostbusters movie. That incident and many like it resulted in Twitter being criticised for its slow – or often non-existent – efforts to tackle abuse. However, it seems as if the social-media platform is finally taking the fight to those mistreating or harassing others on its platform.

This week the social network introduced two key new functions to tackle the issue of online trolls and hate speech: muting entire conversation threads and specifying reported tweets as hate speech. At the same time, Twitter banned several members of the American alt-right movement who have been identified as some of the more prolific hate-speech spreaders.

Here’s hoping Twitter’s efforts will bring on a friendlier internet.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Johansson
Eric Johansson
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