SoftBank Group Corp. has reported a record profit in its Vision Fund as a surging stock market lifted the value of its portfolio companies, but founder Masayoshi Son wiped out a significant chunk of those gains with his controversial trading in derivatives. The Vision Fund on Monday reported a ¥844.1 billion ($8 billion) profit in the December quarter, surpassing record numbers set just a quarter earlier. A global rally in technology shares has boosted the value of SoftBank's stakes in publicly traded firms like Uber Technologies Inc. and paved the way for initial public offerings from the likes of DoorDash Inc. Those gains, which had been widely expected, were offset by fallout from Son's decision last year to start dabbling in trading stocks and options. SoftBank posted a ¥285.3 billion derivatives loss in the period.

Elon Musk hosted Tesla's quarterly earnings call Wednesday where he revealed progress of the highly-anticipated Cybertruck and updates to the Full-Driving System (FDS). The CEO says the design of the futuristic vehicle has been finalized and a few are set to be delivered to customers this year – but volume production is set for 2022. Musk also made an ambitious claim that the FDS will have Level 5 autonomy capabilities by the end of 2021. However, FSD was only released as a beta version in November and Tesla's website states'the currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.' Elon Musk hosted Tesla's quarterly earnings call Wednesday where he revealed progress of the highly-anticipated Cybertruck and an updates to the Full-Driving System (FDS) Musk has been tirelessly working to perfect both Tesla's Cybertruck and FDS, but both ventures have had their own obstacles over the years. Musk unveiled the Cybertruck in November 2019 during a live demo that ended with embarrassment – and some profanity. It has been more than a year since Elon Musk unveiled Tesla's Cybertruck that ended with embarrassment when the'shatterproof' window did not hold up to its name.

It's 2021 and nearly 7 percent of the US workforce is currently idle on account of the pandemic but heck if Tesla CEO Elon Musk isn't still making money hand over fist. He's surpassed Jeff Bezos as the richest person on the planet over the past year, all while his company has delivered a record number of electric vehicles to Tesla customers worldwide. The company reportedly handed off 499,550 vehicles in 2020 -- just a hair shy of its 500k delivery target and a 36 percent increase over 2019's delivery figures. The company credits strong sales of the Model Y in the Chinese market for helping reach that high water mark. "Given Tesla's stock doubling again since November, we believe... bulls are betting on Tesla leading commercialization of autonomous vehicles technology," Oppenheimer analyst Colin Rusch told Yahoo! Finance in a note last week.

In the latest quarter, revenue fell 6.5% to $20.37 billion, missing analysts' projections, according to FactSet. Shares fell 6.8% in after-hours trading. IBM's stock closed at $131.65 on Thursday, down 5.4% over the past year. IBM, which had suspended financial projections last year over uncertainty about the pandemic's business impact, said Thursday that it expects revenue to grow this year and anticipates $11 billion to $12 billion in adjusted free cash flow for the year and $12 billion to $13 billion in 2022. "The actions we are taking to focus on hybrid cloud and [artificial intelligence] will take hold, giving us confidence we can achieve revenue growth in 2021," Mr. Krishna.

A driverless-vehicle startup has become the first company approved to make deliveries in in California using an autonomous vehicle. Mountain View, California-based Nuro says it plans to begin commercial service as early as next year. Nuro started testing its fleet on California roads in 2017 and, during the pandemic, has shuttled medical goods to a Sacramento field hospital. The permit, however, will allow the company to charge for its service. Founded by two former Google engineers, Nuro will first launch a fleet of autonomous Toyota Priuses, then introduce its own low-speed R2 vehicle.

Binary "YES-NO" notions of process compliance are not very helpful to managers for assessing the operational performance of their company because a large number of cases fall in the grey area of partial compliance. Hence, it is necessary to have ways to quantify partial compliance in terms of metrics and be able to classify actual cases by assigning a numeric value of compliance to them. In this paper, we formulate an evaluation framework to quantify the level of compliance of business processes across different levels of abstraction (such as task, trace and process level) and across multiple dimensions of each task(such as temporal, monetary, role-, data-, and quality-related) to provide managers more useful information about their operations and to help them improve their decision making processes. Our approach can also add social value by making social services provided by local, state and federal governments more flexible and improving the lives of citizens.

These Visionary companies have a big idea and are well on their way to achieving it, although it isn't always an easy road for any really innovative technology. In the case of Cruise, that meant testing self driving vehicles on the streets of San Francisco, one of the hardest driving environments in the world. Some of our Visionary Awards go to companies who are opening up new market applications for robotics, such as Built Robotics in construction, Dishcraft in food services, Embark in self-driving trucks, Iron Ox in urban agriculture and Zipline in drone delivery. Some are building tools or platforms that the entire robotics industry can benefit from, such as Agility Robotics, Covariant, Formant, RobustAI and Zoox. The companies in our Good Robot Awards also show that'technologies built for us, have to be built by us'.

The fourth-annual Midas List Europe, produced by Forbes in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, has arrived, and we're excited to share the top companies that drove the portfolios of this year's top European venture capitalists. The outlook for the European venture market may have been cloudy at the beginning of the global pandemic as recessionary cutbacks loomed and the IPO window narrowed, but European startups and investors have since bounced back. A wide variety of tech-based startups have been able to ride the tailwinds of the crisis, with new areas of everyday life benefitting from the transition to a technology-driven environment. Evidentially, investors remain clear-eyed and eager to invest in growth and innovation on either side of the pond with European VC deal value – and potentially fundraising – on pace to set new annual records. Here are the top ten companies that acted as key drivers behind this year's Midas List Europe: It's been a boom year for Stockholm-based Spotify, which is making its third consecutive appearance as the #1 driver on the Midas List Europe and fourth appearance overall.

While Canadian capital markets slowed this week after a very busy previous week, in the week ahead, we're looking forward to the trading debut of Sophic client, Luckbox (LUCK-TSXV). Emerge Ecommerce (ECOM-TSXV) is also expected to start trading this coming week. Meanwhile, in the USA, AirBnB, DoorDash and C3.AI, all had very strong trading debuts as expected by most. At the same time, IPOs of Roblox and Affirm seem delayed to 2021, with speculation that these companies may try a different approach than the traditional IPO in order to avoid massive IPO pops, which do not benefit companies issuing new stock. Some alternatives could include direct listing, auction IPOs or going public via a SPAC. At the same time, there seems to be increasing chatter about unsustainable valuations.

Update Friday 11 December: As per an official Hyundai press release, the South Korean company and SoftBank Group agreed today on the main terms of the transaction. Hyundai Motor "will acquire a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics in a deal that values the mobile robot firm at $1.1 billion," read the statement. The exact financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal will bring Hyundai Motor's mobility expertise into the world of robotics technologies. This move brings Hyundai Motors one step closer to its vision of transforming into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider. "We are delighted to have Boston Dynamics, a world leader in mobile robots, join the Hyundai team. This transaction will unite capabilities of Hyundai Motor Group and Boston Dynamics to spearhead innovation in future mobility," stated Euisun Chung, Chairman of Hyundai Motor.