Welcome to your Week in Tech – a roundup of the week’s top technology news.
In this episode, we bring you the acquisition of Scotland-based Skyscanner by Ctrip.com, an £80m space tech venture fund and Philip Hammond’s Autumn Statement.
Watch the video, or read on, for all this and more.
Investments
HealthTech startup Cera raised £1.3m from investors including David Buttress, the CEO of JustEat. Cera seeks to match patients with carers, providing over 65s with care in their own homes.
Pushfor, a content sharing platform, raised £1.2m from investors including NT Asset and C12 Ventures. The firm hopes to use the funds to take its business global.
Scotland-based travel tech firm Skyscanner has been bought by China’s Ctrip.com in a £1.4bn deal. Skyscanner was valued at $1.6bn in a funding round back in January.
Best of British
UK-based VC Seraphim Capital announced the launch of an early-stage space tech venture fund. It’s already secured £50m to invest in tech with potential space applications, including AI and robotics.
Philip Hammond delivered the Autumn Statement, revealing an extra £2bn will be put into R&D per year by 2021. Hammond said this was to “ensure the next generation of discoveries is made, developed and produced in Britain.”
International story
Overseas, the South Korean authorities raided Samsung’s offices.
They’re allegedly investigating whether South Korea’s president pressured the National Pension Fund to support a Samsung merger, in exchange for financial favours.
Download
Our download of the week is Brickshots. With the app, you can convert your photographs into buildable Lego models.
Upload a photo, pick your colour scheme and the app will tell you which bricks to put where in order to recreate your image in Lego.
And finally…
And finally, we all know how difficult it is to navigate the pavements while texting, but the National University of Singapore thinks it has the solution. It’s created self-driving scooters, which have sensors to help people avoid bumping into things as they gawp at their handsets.
That’s all for this week’s episode of The Week in Tech. For more technology news, visit our homepage and follow us on Twitter.