Bloomberg Canada plans to tax overseas investors buying homes in Vancouver, one of North America’s hottest property markets, as it seeks to tamp down price gains in an area that absorbed more than C$1 billion ($760 million) of foreign money in five weeks alone. An additional property-transfer tax of 15 percent will apply to foreign nationals and overseas corporations ...
Read More »Blackstone selling $550mn Dutch offices
Bloomberg Blackstone Group LP plans to sell office properties in the Netherlands as the world’s largest manager of alternative assets seeks to profit from rising real estate prices in the country, according to two people with knowledge of the process. CBRE Group Inc. has been hired to market the properties in cities including Amsterdam and Utrecht for more than ...
Read More »Building affordable housing is not really ‘affordable’
Bloomberg A real estate developer wanted to increase affordable housing in Denver, trying to make fiscal sense out of a plan to build rental apartments for people making only 30 percent of the area’s median income—the kind of housing America desperately needs. He discovered that, no matter what lever he moved or compromise he made, he was going to ...
Read More »Dovetailing design thinking with IT
Bloomberg A few months ago, senior executives at Vodafone’s Irish division sat down with a 16-year-old boy to ask him about his daily routine and, specifically, how he uses his smartphone. The kid told them that the first thing he does in the morning is check Snapchat. On the way to school, Snapchat. On the way home, Snapchat. Sometimes ...
Read More »Consumers covet ‘connected’ cars
Relaxnews Consumers in the US, UK, China and Germany will be actively seeking active safety systems and connected technology when they come to buy their next car. The results of the fourth annual IHS Markit study show that Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as autonomous emergency braking, traffic jam assist and blind spot monitoring now top car buyers’ ...
Read More »Smartwatch market slips on Apple decline
Relaxnews The global smartwatch market took a sharp downward turn in the second quarter on falling sales of the industry-leading Apple Watch, a survey showed. Research firm IDC said global sales of smartwatches tumbled 32 percent from a year ago to 3.5 million units. Apple remained the market leader with an estimated 47 percent market share, but sales fell by ...
Read More »FB drones deliver high speed internet via lasers
Relaxnews Facebook is working on a means of delivering high-speed internet to remote areas via laser beams. The project has now taken a step forward, after a first test delivered connection speeds over 2Gbps, according to an article penned by four members of the social network’s “Connectivity Lab,” published in the scientific journal Optica. The social network plans to ...
Read More »India’s ‘clean’ life saver
Bloomberg Kamleshkunwar, a mother of three living in a village in central India, first used cooking gas to prepare a meal about a month ago. Her family struggled for years with the ash and smoke that comes from burning wood, until they received a free gas connection from the government as it tries to change how India’s poor cook. ...
Read More »Museum paints a bright future for art in Indonesia
AFP From Jakarta to Bali and Yogyakarta, the Indonesian art world is flourishing. Buoyed by a growing, affluent middle class at home as well as interest from international buyers, numerous boutique galleries and artists’ communities have sprung up, while events such as the Jakarta Biennale, the annual ArtJog fair, and Bazaar Art Jakarta have fuelled interest. But critics warn ...
Read More »IFSB, AMF deal to boost Islamic finance in Arab region
KUALA LUMPUR / WAM The Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) and the Arab Monetary Fund (AMF) signed on Monday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for an initial period of three years, to establish and implement a non-exclusive framework for the cooperation and collaboration to promote programmes and initiatives that foster the development of the Islamic ...
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