CuriouTech

Smacc , which uses AI to automate accounting, has secured a 3.5 million Series A round from Cherry Ventures, Rocket Internet, Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures, Grazia Equity and business angels. Smacc offers small and medium-sized enterprises a platform to digitize and automate accounting and financial processes. The founding trio Uli Erxleben, Janosch Novak and Stefan Korsch came up with the idea after find accounting to be the most painful part of their own startup. Erxleben managed Rocket Internet’s US ventures in New York and San Francisco, and is also the founder of Berliner Berg , a craft beer startup. Customers submit their receipts to Smacc, which are turned into a machine-readable format, encrypted, then allocated to an account. The platform gradually also self-learns, tracking invoices, sales and costs, as well as their liquidity. The system checks against some 64 data points, verifies the invoice, checking, for example, that the math adds up, and even if the VAT...

Last year saw record worldwide investment and implementation of clean energy such as wind, solar and hydropower. Some 147 Gigawatts of renewable electricity came online in 2015 - the largest annual increase ever and as much as Africa’s entire power generating capacity. Clean energy investment increased to $286bn (£198bn), with solar energy accounting for 56% of the total and wind power for 38%. Overall, more than twice as much money was spent on renewables than on coal and gas-fired power generation ($130bn in 2015), the REN21 global status reportfound. Christine Lins, REN21’s chief, said: “What is truly remarkable about these results is that they were achieved at a time when fossil fuel prices were at historic lows, and renewables remained at a significant disadvantage in terms of government subsidies. For every dollar spent boosting renewables, nearly four dollars were spent to maintain our dependence on fossil fuels.” For the first time, emerging economies outs...

SpaceX chief Elon Musk shed light on his new plan to send an unmanned spaceship to Mars as early as 2018, as part of his quest to some day colonize the Red Planet. He appeared to be referring to an upgraded version of the California-based company's Dragon cargo capsule, which is currently used as an unmanned spacecraft to shuttle food and supplies to and from the International Space Station. In a new exclusive this week with The Washington Post, the entrepeneur drew parallels between people crossing the oceans in centuries past to unknown worlds. The months-long journey is sure to be "hard, risky, dangerous, difficult," Musk told the Post, but he was confident people would sign up to go because "just as with the establishment of the English colonies, there are people who love that. They want to be the pioneers." Before that can happen, however, unmanned travel and a supply chain must be developed successfully. "Essentially what we're saying is we...

Elon Musk claims that humans are at risk of becoming the dumb "house pets" of artificial intelligence, unless we implant technology into our brains to help us compete with machine learning of the future. Musk announced that a 'neural lace' - which is basically a brain implant that can augment natural intelligence by hooking us up to computers - will be the key to maintaining our authority as a species. Musk is one of the biggest supporters of AI, but he hasn't been shy in the past about his concerns over the future of machine learning, with the tech entrepreneur last year penning an open letter - along with Stephen Hawking and dozens of other researchers - on the need to investigate the societal impacts of AI. His biggest worry is that AI will one day become smarter than humans - which could be a good thing when it comes to using them to help us cure diseases and solve global problems - but it also means that machines could one day come to think of us as lit...

On Wednesday night, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and announced that the speediest way to terraform Mars and allow humans to live outside of an airlock dome would be to nuke it. "The fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles," Musk told Colbert, prompting the host to call him a super villain. But is the idea that crazy? The basis of the bomb plot is that the nukes would melt the frozen CO2 on the Red Planet's poles, releasing it as gas into the atmosphere. This would help to thicken up the Red Planet's thin atmosphere, which could be enough to heat the planet and allow water to exist in a liquid form. Essentially, the bombs would kick-start something similar to the global warming that's happening here on Earth, and hopefully trigger a cascade effect - so the more ice that melts, the more CO2 that's released, which warms the planet and melts more ice, and so on. However, there are some...

NASA scientists  have reported  that they've successfully tested an engine called the electromagnetic propulsion drive, or the EM Drive, in a vacuum that replicates space. The EM Drive experimental system could take humans to Mars in just 70 days without the need for rocket fuel, and it's no exaggeration to say that this could change everything. But before we get too excited (who are we kidding, we're already freaking out), it's important to note that these results haven't been replicated or verified by peer review, so there's a chance there's been some kind of error. But so far, despite a thorough attempt to poke holes in the results, the engine seems to hold up. The engine is controversial because it seems to violate one of the fundamental concepts of physics - the conservation of momentum, which states that for something to be propelled forward, it needs some kind of propellant to be pushed out in the opposite direction. But the EM Drive doesn't...

German car manufacturer Audi has reportedly invented a carbon-neutral diesel fuel, made solely from water, carbon dioxide and renewable energy sources. And the crystal clear 'e-diesel' is already being used to power the Audi A8 owned by the country’s Federal Minister of Education and Research, Johanna Wanka. The creation of the fuel is a huge step forward for sustainable transport, but the fact that it’s being backed by an automotive giant is even more exciting. Audi has now set up a pilot plant in Dresden, Germany, operated by clean tech company Sunfire, which will pump out 160 litres of the synthetic diesel every day in the coming months. Their base product, which they’re calling 'blue crude' is created using a three-step process. The first step involves harvesting renewable energy from sources such as wind, solar and hydropower. They then use this energy to split water into oxygen and pure hydrogen, using a process known as reversible electrolysis. This hyd...