Bloomberg As forest fires shrouded Singapore in a blanket haze last year, CBRE Group Inc.’s Lloyd Jenkins, sat down with a group of high-level property investors at the city state’s five-star Fullerton Hotel and showed them pictures of white beaches and clear, blue skies. This is Perth, he said, and there’s a lot of opportunity. Jenkins, managing director at CBRE ...

Bloomberg It has become an article of faith among education reformers that throwing more money at public education doesn’t improve student performance. But a steady drumbeat of careful research studies is calling this into question. What if more money really does work? The case against spending more on schools comes in two basic forms. One is to look at various ...

Bloomberg According to an employment report, 59.8 percent of Americans aged 16 and older had jobs in February. That’s the highest employment-to-population ratio in years, and the rate of increase is clearly on the rise. Look back some more years, though, and the story is different. The recent gains are real, but by the standards of the past few decades, ...

Washington / AFP Google has announced that it would implement changes in how it applies the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ for online searches made in Europe. The changes, to be implemented next week, would close a loophole that allowed Europeans to find deleted entries by using Google.com instead of the search page for their local country. “Starting next week, ...

SAN FRANCISCO / AP Amazon.com is introducing two devices designed to amplify the role its voice-controlled assistant Alexa plays in people’s homes and lives. The products are echoes of Amazon’s Echo, a cylinder-shaped speaker with Internet-connected microphones that became Alexa’s first major showcase when it debuted in late 2014. Set these gadgets up and they’ll listen for your voice and ...

Relaxnews According to ABI Research, this year’s Mobile World Congress proved the perfect springboard for showcasing virtual reality, so much so that the company is now predicting that 50 million headsets will be shipped globally every year by the end of the decade, including devices that work with a smartphone. The most basic virtual reality design, Google’s Cardboard, has already ...

Relaxnews Mobile messaging service WhatsApp is now rolling out a document sharing feature on iOS and Android devices reports Tech Crunch. The new feature has begun to appear on users’ phones, enabling them to share PDF documents. The document sharing joins existing sharing features for photos, videos, contacts, and locations, however, although it is now available for iOS and Android ...

Bloomberg Xiaomi Corp. Chief Executive Officer Lei Jun has reportedly said that Chinese handset maker, valued at US$45 billion by a 2014 funding round, wasn’t planning a public listing “at the moment.” Lei, speaking to reporters at the opening of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, said he wants Xiaomi’s initial public offering to be a natural process and noted ...

Relaxnews As Google gears up to launch its digital wallet service, Android Pay in the UK, many experts are still less than convinced that the idea of replacing a credit card with a smartphone is really going to gain mainstream consumer appeal. According to Juniper Research, by the end of 2016, 148 million people around the world will be reaching ...

Bloomberg Every March 17 brings thousands of small, missed fashion opportunities. Yes, a shamrock shirt is fun—as is everyone in the office dressing in the same colour for a holiday. But in America, St. Patrick’s Day is too frequently the only time each year that men dig their single green sweater (or tie) out of the closet and then, grudgingly, ...