Sports Impact Technologies, an Irish startup which has developed a compact, behind-the-ear sports wearable that detects head impacts in real-time to enhance player safety and performance by eliminating undetected concussions, today announced that it has secured €650,000 in pre-seed funding.

The young company was founded in 2022 by Eóin Tuohy, is headquartered at NovaUCD in Dublin. This pre-seed investment round, led by private investors with the support of Enterprise Ireland High-Potential Startup (HPSU) funding, will be used by Sports Impact Technologies to accelerate the roll-out of the company’s beta product.

The wearable sensor, which is sport and player agnostic and sits comfortably and discreetly behind the ear, monitors head impacts during a game by recording head accelerations. Data and alerts are transmitted in real-time via an app to coaches, medical staff, or safety officials who can then make an informed decision to take a player off the pitch to be assessed for concussion, reducing the risk of further injury and ensuring player safety on the field.

Eóin Tuohy, CEO and founder, Sports Impact Technologies said: “It is estimated that between 5% and 10% of players experience a concussion in any given sports season, with 5 in 10 concussions going unreported or undetected leading to players experiencing long-term health implications. Using our smart sensor technology to monitor head impacts in real-time, our goal is to make unrecognised concussions a thing of the past protecting athletes, optimising their performance, and enabling participation.”

He added, “We’re thrilled to have closed this funding round with the backing of both private investors and Enterprise Ireland. The investment will support the final stages of product development and help us bring our beta wearable to market. We are launching beta-testing programmes with pilot customers in sports ranging from American football to rugby to soccer, hockey and GAA football this September, which will provide valuable real-world data and position us for a full product launch early next year.”

Sports Impact Technologies previously completed the Enterprise Ireland funded New Frontiers Programme at TU Dublin and secured €100k in Enterprise Ireland PSSF funding. The company, also an ESA BIC client company, was named the winner of the ‘Best New Start’ Award in the Connacht and Leinster regional final of 2024 InterTradeIreland Seedcorn Investor Readiness Competition.

By STAN CHOE, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Most stocks fell on Wall Street Thursday after a disappointing report said inflation was worse last month at the U.S. wholesale level than economists expected. But gains for Amazon and some other influential Big Tech companies helped mask the losses.

Seven out of every 10 stocks within the S&P 500 fell, though the index edged up by less than 0.1% to set another all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 11 points, or less than 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite dipped by less than 0.1% from its record set the day before.

The inflation report said that prices jumped 3.3% last month at the U.S. wholesale level from a year earlier. That was well above the 2.5% rate that economists had forecast, and it could hint at higher inflation ahead for U.S. shoppers as it makes its way through the system.

The data forced traders to second guess their widespread consensus that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at its next meeting in September. Lower rates can boost investment prices and the economy by making it cheaper for U.S. households and businesses to borrow to buy houses, cars or equipment, but they also risk worsening inflation.

“This doesn’t slam the door on a September rate cut,” but it may raise some doubt, according to Chris Larkin, managing director, trading and investing, at E-Trade from Morgan Stanley.

Traders now see a 7.4% chance that the Fed may hold rates steady in September, according to data from CME Group. A day earlier, they were betting on a 100% certainty that the Fed would cut its main rate for the first time this year.

Higher interest rates drag on all kinds of companies by keeping the cost to borrow high. They can hurt smaller companies in particular because they often need to borrow to grow. The Russell 2000 index of smaller U.S. stocks tumbled a market-leading 1.2%.

Thursday’s disappointing data followed an encouraging update earlier in the week on prices at the consumer level. A separate report on Thursday, meanwhile, said fewer U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits last week. That’s a good sign for workers, indicating that layoffs remain relatively low at a time when job openings have become more difficult to find.

But a solid job market could also give the Fed less reason to cut interest rates in the short term.

The data helped send Treasury yields higher in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 4.28% from 4.20% just before the data reports’ release and from 4.24% late Wednesday.

On Wall Street, Tapestry tumbled after the company behind the Coach and Kate Spade New York brands showed it’s feeling the pressure of tariffs.

It detailed how much profit it could lose in its upcoming fiscal year because of tariffs and duties, and its forecast for profit fell short of analysts’ expectations even though its forecast for revenue came in above. Its stock fell 15.7%, despite it also reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

Deere fell 6.8% even though the machinery maker likewise delivered a better profit than expected. There, too, the focus was on where profits are heading. It cut the top end of its forecasted range for profit this fiscal year and said its customers “remain cautious amid ongoing uncertainty.”

On the winning side of Wall Street was Fossil Group, which jumped 29.8% after the seller of watches and other accessories reported better profit than expected. It also announced a plan to strengthen its finances, while trimming its forecast for how much it expects worldwide net sales to fall this year.

Big Tech stocks also helped mask Wall Street’s losses. Amazon rose 2.9% to add to its gains from the prior day when it announced same-day delivery of fresh groceries in more than 1,000 cities and towns.

Because Amazon is so huge, with a market value of $2.45 trillion, the movements for its stock carry much more weight on the S&P 500 than the typical company’s.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 1.96 to 6,468.54 points. The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged down 11.01 to 44,911.26, and the Nasdaq composite dipped 2.47 to 21.710.67.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed across Asia and Europe ahead of a key meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.

AP Writers Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott contributed.

Originally Published: August 14, 2025 at 10:01 AM EDT

NEW YORK — Most stocks fell on Wall Street Thursday after a disappointing report said inflation was worse last month at the U.S. wholesale level than economists expected. But gains for Amazon and some other influential Big Tech companies helped mask the losses.

Seven out of every 10 stocks within the S&P 500 fell, though the index edged up by less than 0.1% to set another all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 11 points, or less than 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite dipped by less than 0.1% from its record set the day before.

The inflation report said that prices jumped 3.3% last month at the U.S. wholesale level from a year earlier. That was well above the 2.5% rate that economists had forecast, and it could hint at higher inflation ahead for U.S. shoppers as it makes its way through the system.

The data forced traders to second guess their widespread consensus that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at its next meeting in September. Lower rates can boost investment prices and the economy by making it cheaper for U.S. households and businesses to borrow to buy houses, cars or equipment, but they also risk worsening inflation.

“This doesn’t slam the door on a September rate cut,” but it may raise some doubt, according to Chris Larkin, managing director, trading and investing, at E-Trade from Morgan Stanley.

Traders now see a 7.4% chance that the Fed may hold rates steady in September, according to data from CME Group. A day earlier, they were betting on a 100% certainty that the Fed would cut its main rate for the first time this year.

Higher interest rates drag on all kinds of companies by keeping the cost to borrow high. They can hurt smaller companies in particular because they often need to borrow to grow. The Russell 2000 index of smaller U.S. stocks tumbled a market-leading 1.2%.

Thursday’s disappointing data followed an encouraging update earlier in the week on prices at the consumer level. A separate report on Thursday, meanwhile, said fewer U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits last week. That’s a good sign for workers, indicating that layoffs remain relatively low at a time when job openings have become more difficult to find.

But a solid job market could also give the Fed less reason to cut interest rates in the short term.

The data helped send Treasury yields higher in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 4.28% from 4.20% just before the data reports’ release and from 4.24% late Wednesday.

On Wall Street, Tapestry tumbled after the company behind the Coach and Kate Spade New York brands showed it’s feeling the pressure of tariffs.

It detailed how much profit it could lose in its upcoming fiscal year because of tariffs and duties, and its forecast for profit fell short of analysts’ expectations even though its forecast for revenue came in above. Its stock fell 15.7%, despite it also reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

Deere fell 6.8% even though the machinery maker likewise delivered a better profit than expected. There, too, the focus was on where profits are heading. It cut the top end of its forecasted range for profit this fiscal year and said its customers “remain cautious amid ongoing uncertainty.”

On the winning side of Wall Street was Fossil Group, which jumped 29.8% after the seller of watches and other accessories reported better profit than expected. It also announced a plan to strengthen its finances, while trimming its forecast for how much it expects worldwide net sales to fall this year.

Big Tech stocks also helped mask Wall Street’s losses. Amazon rose 2.9% to add to its gains from the prior day when it announced same-day delivery of fresh groceries in more than 1,000 cities and towns.

Because Amazon is so huge, with a market value of $2.45 trillion, the movements for its stock carry much more weight on the S&P 500 than the typical company’s.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 1.96 to 6,468.54 points. The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged down 11.01 to 44,911.26, and the Nasdaq composite dipped 2.47 to 21.710.67.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. has largely stayed on the sidelines of the streaming wars.

That ends next week.

Fox, which owns the most-watched cable news channel Fox News and has TV rights to major sporting events such as the NFL and MLB post-season baseball, has remained committed to the declining pay TV business.

But with 65 million households no longer hooked up to cable or satellite services, the company making its channels available to non-pay TV customers for the first time with Fox One, a new streaming platform that will launch Aug. 21.

“There is a growing audience outside of cable,” said Pete Distad, chief executive of direct-to-consumer for Fox Corp., who previewed the service Thursday at a press briefing at the company’s New York headquarters. “We need to give to give those cord-cutters and cord-nevers access to our content.”

For $19.99 a month, Fox One will provide subscribers with their local Fox TV affiliate that carries a package of NFL games, plus two Fox Sports cable channels. A full year subscription will cost $199.

Fox One will also carry Fox News Media’s channels, which include Fox News, Fox Weather and Fox Business. It will provide replays of Fox programming on demand, with access to current seasons of entertainment programs and DVR capabilities with unlimited storage.

But the main selling point of Fox One will be the company’s array of live events, which include next year’s FIFA World Cup. The service will be promoted with the marketing tag line, “We Live For Live.”

Fox Sports’ Kevin Burkhardt talks with NFL broadcast partner Tom Brady before a 2024 preseason game at So-Fi Stadium.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Sports is the driver for the service. Fox Corp. and Walt Disney Co. have already agreed to offer a package deal for Fox One and the upcoming ESPN direct-to-consumer service also launching next week, for $39.99 a month, a savings of $10. ESPN will charge subscribers $29.99 on its own.

Distad said his company will look at more opportunities to bundle Fox One with other streaming services.

Until now, Fox’s biggest investment in streaming was the acquisition of Tubi, an ad-supported free streaming service that has grown to capture 1% of all U.S. TV viewing according to Nielsen.

Fox Corp. sold its TV and movie studio assets to Disney in 2019, partly because the company did not believe it could compete with deep-pocketed tech firms such as Amazon and Apple, which have spent freely on producing content for their streaming platforms.

But Amazon and Netflix — which acquired NFL rights in recent years — have shown that they can draw large audiences for live sports events, an area where Fox Corp. is already deeply entrenched.

The real test for the new streaming product will be the appetite for Fox News. The conservative-leaning news channel dominates its competitors in the TV ratings. Whether consumers who have cut the cable cord will be willing to pay to stream the channel’s live feed is an open question.

“Nobody knows how many news fans are outside of the pay TV universe,” Distad said.

Distad is encouraged by the reach of Fox News content online after it airs live on the TV network. Fox News scored 1.5 billion views on YouTube and 3.7 billion views on social media platforms in the last quarter.

Fox News Media’s existing streaming channel, Fox Nation, will be offered as a $5 add-on for Fox One for a total of $24.99 a month. The service has documentaries, true crime shows and movies that appeal to the Fox News audience.

Bret Baier, anchor of “Special Report” on Fox News.

(Fox News)

Fox Corp. executives are keeping their expectations low. It’s priced high enough so that the consumer who is currently happy with their current cable TV subscription is not likely to cancel.

But Distad said profit projections are “aggressive” as the platform will not spend money to create original programming. All of the content is being provided from its existing networks.

Investment in original programming has been the main obstacle to profitability for the streaming services that have proliferated in recent years.

Distad said the company is considering putting podcasts on the Fox One platform. Fox Corp. company recently acquired Red Seat Ventures, a media company that specializes in providing business support and technical services for right-leaning podcasts.

B2B brands partnering with sports teams is not a new thing – but it’s not often you see a scale-up brand in a position to partner with a football giant like Manchester United.

Despite being founded in 2019, UK fintech brand Sokin has done just that, announcing a multiyear agreement today (14 August) with the Premier League club to become its official global payments partner, with similar deals struck with the British & Irish Lions and Nottingham Forest earlier in the year.

For its chief growth officer James Hannaford, the decision to involve the brand in sports is a simple one, coming down to building “credibility” in the market. He points out that if you’re a CFO considering moving £100m in payment volume from Barclays to Sokin, for example, that irrespective of the savings on the bottom line and the strength of the deal, if just “one person” in that room doesn’t know who the brand is then there’s immediately a “seed of doubt” on the decision.

B2B brands partnering with sports teams is not a new thing – but it’s not often you see a scale-up brand in a position to partner with a football giant like Manchester United.

Despite being founded in 2019, UK fintech brand Sokin has done just that, announcing a multiyear agreement yesterday (15 August) with the Premier League club to become its official global payments partner, with similar deals struck with the British & Irish Lions and Nottingham Forest earlier in the year.

For its chief growth officer James Hannaford, the decision to involve the brand in sports is a simple one, coming down to building “credibility” in the market. He points out that if you’re a CFO considering moving £100m in payment volume from Barclays to Sokin, for example, that irrespective of the savings on the bottom line and the strength of the deal, if just “one person” in that room doesn’t know who the brand is then there’s immediately a “seed of doubt” on the decision.

“Credibility is crucial for our ability to secure the clients that we need to win,” he tells Marketing Week. “And the reason we use sports is because, ultimately, the quickest way to garner credibility is to align yourself with a credible brand.”

Hannaford is quick to stress, however, that these deals are not “sponsorships” or a mere badging exercise for the brand. All of the clubs are using the Sokin platform as part of the deal, which Hannaford says provides the credibility of a major brand using its platform as well as some useful case studies to take back to potential clients.

“We also get a huge brand awareness piece, which is affiliated with the credibility of that incumbent brand,” he adds.

‘It drives credibility’: Elf Beauty, Adidas and Xero on achieving effective sports partnershipsOf course, none of this is cheap, Hannaford accepts that this is a big outlay for the brand and that while recent funding runs – which has seen the likes of Morgan Stanley and BlackRock invest in the business – has given it increased spending power in the market, it is still not at the same level of the big banks. Proving a return, then, is critical despite it not necessarily being an easy thing to measure.

“We measure it by our ability to convert deals, general awareness metrics, too, of course, but the big thing for us is the conversion rates,” he says.

“And if we look at the Lions tour, for example, that was a really well-timed deal for us because we’re launching in Australia. The number of people who have heard or seen us because of that is huge. Without that tour, we wouldn’t have had the awareness or credibility piece in play, and our conversion rate definitely wouldn’t have been as strong as it is.”

Brand in B2B

The deal with Manchester United comes just a few days after it launched its latest brand campaign, which sees a finance leader speeding through the streets on the back of a cheetah. It is a striking campaign that was intended to cut through the noise in the crowded B2B market – but also build a more human connection with its intended audience.

“It’s so easy, not just in the world of fintech but in any B2B marketing, to fall into this trap of just talking to the business you’re trying to sell to rather than taking a step back and thinking about who in that organisation you are selling to as a person,” he explains. “That’s the really important pivot we’ve made at Sokin. Not selling to the business, selling to the person.”

The modern day CFO, he says, is doing far more than “moving numbers across a spreadsheet” and is instead making strategic decisions that matter to all areas of the business that needs to be “empowered” by tech solutions. Its use of a cheetah, then, is not just a nod to its logo but the creation of a brand character that embodies what it sees its clients and also its product to be.

“The cheetah was around from the very first days of Sokin,” says Hannaford. “We realised there are more assets to the cheetah that we could use beyond a logo. Agility, decision making at speed, the ability to move and change direction when required, which is where we play with our ability to roam. Ultimately, we can empower business leaders with the ability to roam into new markets with far greater ease.”

He is keen, too, that the cheetah doesn’t just become a one-off for a single campaign. Sokin is set to see the cheetah follow through in “all of its positioning” and the business has also looked to embed the character internally as well – departments have been renamed coalitions, for example, and meeting rooms have been named after different elements of a cheetah’s environment. More importantly than these superficial changes, however, is how he wants the team to approach product innovation.

‘The war for attention’: B2B brands on why the role of creativity is ‘much clearer’“The speed of moving a product into market, learning, adapting fast if something doesn’t work, being agile if a product is being well received or not,” he says. “That’s everything that has to come through and follow through internally too. This works inside the four walls we have as well.”

Speed was very much a key element of this campaign, helped by the use of generative AI in the process. Hannaford explains that while half of the advert was shot with traditional methods – the lead actor, for example, was still shot in a studio – the cheetah and the cityscape around him were all developed with generative AI. All told, it helped the brand go from concept to finalisation in around 10 weeks and “probably halved” the amount of time it would have taken without it.

“Being able to early concept in AI is hugely instrumental in allowing you to visualise something to see if you can carry on and go forward with it in terms of the final output and execution,” says Hannaford.

Partnerships and campaigns aside, Sokin is a brand moving quickly in the right direction. Already growing fast – it was ranked Britain’s ninth fastest-growing private tech company by The Sunday Times – Hannaford is confident that the brand still has much more to give.

“We believe that patience is overrated and we’re going at an absolute speed of knots here,” he stresses. “We’re serious about the importance of marketing, certainly in our space, certainly in our stage of business, and what we’re doing now I genuinely believe will be nothing compared to what we’re doing this time next year.”

MADERA, Calif. (KFSN) — When a child undergoes an operation of any sort, it can be a traumatic experience for the entire family.

A new piece of medical technology at Valley Children’s Hospital is helping young patients avoid open-heart surgery and speed up recovery time.

“Instead of an open heart surgery, ICU stay, typical multiple-day hospital stay, they’re usually up and walking around within a few hours in the same day,” says Dr. Teresa Evabs,

Through the Medtronic Harmony Transcatheter Pulmonary Valve, doctors can help pediatric patients who need a large pulmonary valve replacement through a less invasive procedure.

“Going up through the abdomen and through the heart, across to the valve, where it should be,” Dr. Evans said. “Then, we’re able to deliver a valve through a small tube.”

Dr. Evans successfully used the equipment earlier this year.

She says the operation will help older pediatric patients.

“These are valves that are meant for patients who have very large outflows from their heart,” she said. “We’ve had valves for smaller outflow tracks for a long time, but these are for much larger outflows.”

The valve would go inside a fabric-covered stent, which is then mounted onto the top part of the catheter.

The plastic funnel helps push the valve inside the tube.

Dr. Evans walked us through the process.

“This is collapsing the stent that holds the valve down into the tube that would then go into the patient,” she said. “This little capsule here contains the stent and the valve. The nose cone helps guide it up, and the valve is inside this little capsule.”

Previously, kids and their families would need to travel to the Bay Area or LA to get this type of treatment.

Now, thanks to this technology, it keeps care closer to home and allows Central California doctors to save more lives.

For news updates, follow Ana Torrea on Facebook, X and Instagram.