Corporate innovation weekly: robot brains, robot eyes, shapeshifting cars | Sifted
Minute Media, the media startup with a focus on user-generated sports content, raised a $40m funding round. The long list of investors includes ProSieben of Germany. Techcrunch estimates the company, which owns titles such as 90min.com, FanSided and Mental Floss, is worth between $400m and $500m.
French electric scooter startup Cityscoot raised $25.6m from investors including Allianz France, Groupe RATP and Banque des Territoires. The scooter rental company, which currently operates in Paris, Nice, Milan and Rome, plans to expand to two new European cities this year, including Barcelona.
Electric scooter startups are an uncertain business, though. Cityscoot’s main competitor Coup — backed by Bosch — shut down a few months ago saying the business was economically unviable.
Expanding car
I’ve often wished for a way to expand my car after an over-enthusiastic shopping trip, and now Renault has brought out a concept vehicle — the Morphoz — where you can do exactly this, adding extra space to the boot or the back seat at the touch of a button. The actual chassis of the vehicle gets longer. Concept cars rarely, if ever, actually get built but I’d like to personally lobby Renault to get this one on the road.
Good reads
Should robots have faces?
It started with an employee at one of Ahold Delhaize’s US stores jokingly sticking big googly eyes on a robot that trundled through the store detecting spills and debris. But company bosses liked the idea — making robots look friendly, might make supermarket staff more likely to accept them. So googly eyes are now standard on the machines across all the stores, and many other companies are cottoning onto the trend of making robots look cute and accessible (eyes are good but never put a mouth on, it makes robots look sinister). To misquote Mary Poppins, “a spoonful of sugar makes the robots go down” better (although we are wondering how much comfort “cute” will be if you really are made redundant because of automation). The full New York Times story is here.
Innovation as a verb
We talk a lot about innovation these days but often as a ‘thing’, a destination rather than the journey. The risk is that ‘innovation’, thus limited and made static, becomes the property of just one group — the innovation team, “our creative people” — and not a process than anyone can take part in. Bill Fischer’s piece in Forbes has six tips for how to keep innovation accessible to everyone.
Will self-driving cars ever arrive?
Scepticism about autonomous driving is growing. After the rosy optimism of the last decade, most self-driving car projects seem barely out of first gear and the chief executive of Volkswagen recently said that fully autonomous vehicles may never arrive. This Vox article looks at all the reasons why progress has been much slower than expected, and how many of the promises of self-driving (that it would be greener and safer) look a bit shaky now.
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