Bloomberg China United Network Communications and Baidu Inc. agreed to collaborate on areas ranging from mobile internet to artificial intelligence amid government plans for ownership reform of state-owned enterprises. China United Network, the state-owned parent of Hong Kong-listed China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd., said on Wednesday it will cooperate with Baidu including on big data and basic telecommunication services. ...

  Bloomberg Marriott International Inc., the world’s biggest hotel operator, is betting its future in Asia on the growth of leisure tourism, particularly from China. “We look at the long term and we feel very bullish,” Craig Smith, Marriott’s Asia-Pacific president and managing director, said in an interview in Sydney. The company plans to more than double its number of ...

  Bloomberg Tata Sons Ltd., reversing course after ousting Chairman Cyrus Mistry, plans to seek Indian approval to pay $1.17 billion to estranged partner NTT Docomo Inc. as it looks for an amicable solution to their legal tussle, people with knowledge of the matter said. Ratan Tata, who suddenly returned to the helm of India’s largest conglomerate last week, has ...

  Bloomberg South Korea’s government said it will take steps to ease overheating property markets in Seoul, Sejong, and some areas in Gyeonggi and Busan. Finance Minister Yoo Il-ho said the government will limit resale of rights to buy new apartments and strengthen bidding requirements for new apartments in the regions, while monitoring markets and designating anti-speculation property zones if ...

  Reuters Egypt’s blue chip equities index jumped on Thursday after the central bank floated the currency, a step which could eventually resolve its hard currency shortage, while Saudi Arabia gained for a second straight week. The Egyptian EGX30 index soared as much as 8.4 percent in the first hour of trade after the central bank devalued the pound by ...

  FRANKFURT/ AP Global stock markets were mixed on Thursday, bogged down by concerns over the outcome of next week’s US presidential election. The British pound jumped after a court ruled that parliament must vote before the government can trigger a two-year countdown to Britain’s exit from the European Union. KEEPING SCORE: In Europe, Germany’s DAX rose 0.1 percent to ...

  Bloomberg Microsoft Corp. unveiled a corporate team-chat service that works with its cloud-based Office and Skype products, aiming to take on Slack Technologies Inc. and Atlassian Corp.’s HipChat in a growing market. The new product is “designed to facilitate real-time conversations and collaboration while maintaining and building up that institutional knowledge of a team,” said Chief Executive Officer Satya ...

  WASHINGTON / AFP Donald Trump blames Mexico and China for stealing millions of jobs from the United States. He might want to bash the robots instead. Despite the Republican presidential nominee’s charge that “we don’t make anything anymore,” manufacturing is still flourishing in America. Problem is, factories don’t need as many people as they used to because machines now ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business Intel® Security has released its McAfee Labs Health Warning report, which assesses the marketplace for stolen medical records; compares it with the marketplace for stolen financial services data; identifies health care focused cybercrime-as-a-service trends; and profiles cybercrime targeting intellectual property in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The Intel Security research asserts that the development of ...

  Bloomberg Some of the world’s largest technology companies are banking on a future where people will send text messages to airlines, banks, restaurants or stores and receive automated responses. Facebook Inc., Microsoft Corp., IBM and Tencent each held events this year centered around promoting their bot-related initiatives to software makers. Twitter Inc. introduced chatbot-like functions with Pizza Hut and ...