In its ongoing effort to pursue enterprise markets, Apple announced yesterday that it is teaming up with SAP to develop iPhone and iPad apps for business users. As part of that partnership, the companies also plan to release a new software development kit (SDK) and launch a training academy to promote the building of native iOS apps for enterprises. Apple launched a similar partnership with IBM in […]
|By Matein Khalid| After five years of pathetic under-performance, emerging markets are easily the asset class to own in 2016, as Europe is hit by a resurgent Euro/Italian banking woes and Japan by institutional gaijin selling and a stronger yen. A dovish Janet Yellen has talked down the US dollar and deferred the timing of FOMC interest rate hikes. The Chinese Politburo and People’s Bank have managed to […]
DUBAI // “Passing the buck” on fire safety will be halted by the updated Fire and Life Safety Code to be released next month. A new section on responsibility puts the onus on consultants and developers as well as residents – owners and tenants – to keep a building safe from fire. In another key provision, the main consultant, manufacturer or supplier of fire safety material, plus […]
Cloud-based and digital transformation-related services are making strong contributions to Microsoft’s bottom line, while its PC sales have proven to be a drag and Windows Phone revenues are crashing, the company reported yesterday. Microsoft’s financial results for the third quarter of its 2015-2016 fiscal year showed the company with revenues of $20.5 billion, a six-percent decline over earnings in the same quarter last year. Those figures included […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| The proposed new Dubai landmark that will surpass the Burj Khalifa in height will be implemented by a joint venture between Emaar Properties and Dubai Holding. The new project comes as Dubai developers continue to announce new schemes despite a softening real estate sector, with the Emaar-built Burj Khalifa expected to be usurped by a tower currently under construction in Saudi Arabia. While […]
Microsoft Corp. apologized after Twitter users exploited its artificial-intelligence chat bot Tay, teaching it to spew racist, sexist and offensive remarks in what the company called a “coordinated attack” that took advantage of a “critical oversight.” “We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay,” Peter […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| A sudden spurt in the number of new project announcements despite the weakening sentiments and a clear downturn in property prices is stoking fears of a 2008-style default revisiting the Dubai property market. The phase has even seen the revival of some of the grandiose schemes announced during the peak of the boom period, but got abandoned later as the crisis began to […]
|By Matein Khalid| It is no coincidence that the most profitable hotels on the planet are located in Makkah, the holiest city of Islam as the site of the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba. For fifteen centuries, Muslims have traveled to Makkah from all over the world for the Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages, making the city the highest source of inbound foreign visitors in Saudi Arabia. Makkah is […]
|By Matein Khalid| Six data points last week reinforce my conviction that the GCC’s property/credit market stress will only accelerate in 2016. One, Standard and Poors downgraded Saudi Arabia’s sovereign credit rating to A- while Bahrain and Oman are now both below investment grade. The new sovereign credit downgrade cycle in the GCC comes at a time when sukuk/debt new issuance volumes have plummeted by 50%, the […]
|By Matein Khalid| The global credit cycle has an immediate impact on the UAE via oil prices, the US dollar peg, cross border bank credit flows, Federal Reserve monetary policy and world trade. The IMF has cut its 2016 growth forecast to 2.6%, the lowest since 2010. A leading developer just booked a 20 fold rise in penalties from walkaway offplan home buyers. Banks hire “loan rangers” […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Stability in office rents in Dubai’s main markets persisted throughout Q1 2016 as a result of continued high demand from both international and domestic occupiers, according to leading real estate consultancy Cluttons. Showcasing the performance of 22 submarkets across the city in the first quarter of the year with the use of heat maps, Cluttons’ first office market bulletin highlights that, 13 submarkets […]
HSBC Holdings cut its price estimates for Dubai developer Emaar Properties and peers including Damac Properties Dubai Co., predicting falling revenue and declining property prices in the United Arab Emirates. Emaar’s price estimate was slashed 26 percent to 8.5 dirhams, while Damac’s is 8 percent lower at 3.4 dirhams, HSBC said in a note on Thursday. The bank also lowered its target for Aldar Properties to 3.5 […]
The main developer of one of Dubai’s most outlandish real estate projects, the Falcon City of Wonders, says the long-delayed project will gain new life this year with around $2 billion in new developments. The falcon-shaped project has seen only about a tenth of the 5,500 planned homes built since its launch in 2005 and although billed to include outsized replicas of The Pyramids and the Taj […]
|By Matein Khalid| The collapse in Brent crude oil below $30, a 20% fall in the Tadawul share index in January 2016’s global equity bloodbath, the cut in fuel subsidies and geopolitical risk escalation in the Middle East has spawned speculation in financial markets that Saudi Arabia will devalue the kingdom’s riyal, now pegged at 3.75 against the US dollar. Senior princes of the royal family and […]
Thanks to Apple’s introduction of the WKWebView rendering engine beginning with the iOS 8 version of its mobile operating system, Google said it has been able to update its Chrome Web browser so it can perform far better on iPhones and iPads. Rolling out today, version 48 of Google Chrome for iOS is faster, more responsive and far more stable than previous generations of the browser, according […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| UAE real estate developers will have to look for alternative funding mechanisms such as joint ventures, refinancing, public private partnerships (PPPs) and co-investment vehicles as conventional project financing such as bank lending or IPOs will become more difficult in view of the tightening liquidity conditions, real estate investment and advisory firm JLL said in a report. A by-product of the slowing market conditions […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| The decline in investor sentiment driven by lower oil prices and a slowdown in government spending, as well as regional geopolitical unrest have affected the UAE’s residential market, real estate investment and advisory firm JLL said in its annual review for 2015. The gaining strength of the dollar, which is making UAE real estate more expensive for overseas investors, also contributed to the […]
Redmond is reporting that Windows 10 has been activated on more than 200 million devices since the operating system was released five months ago. In a blog post, the company’s corporate vice president of Windows and Devices, Yusuf Mehdi, said that as of today, there are more than 200 million monthly active devices around the world running Microsoft‘s new OS. Mehdi also said Windows 10 adoption is […]
The seemingly troubled life of an open source technology leader came to a sudden, premature end in San Francisco this week. Software engineer Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian Linux and later a senior staffer at Docker, died Monday at age 42 — under circumstances that aren’t yet clear. Born in West Germany, Murdock (pictured) moved to the United States and attended Purdue University. In January 2006, […]
|By Matein Khalid| In retrospect, the last six years were a unique period in global central banking, an epic monetary experiment that averted a Great Depression after Lehman’s failure and interbank/credit contagion plunged the world into recession in 2008-9. Yet the Fed (and later Bank of Japan, ECB and even PBOC) quantitative easing also led to asset bubbles, credit market excesses, currency wars and the mispricing of […]
CENTRE MUST GIVE VIGOROUS PUSH TO SCHEMES
By Deepak Razdan
The Climate Change conference in Paris recognized that the key to combating global warming lay in promoting clean energy. A CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India) Report on the “Renewable Energy Sector in India” placed in Parliament in the current winter session revealed that despite India’s ambitious renewable energy plans, the country’s performance in the clean energy sector has been poor.
The renewable energy potential in India is 8,89,508 Mega Watt. Although the Government of India has been promoting the development of the sector for energy security as well as environmental protection, the exploitation of the two largest components i.e. solar energy and wind energy potential was only 0.35 and 21 per cent, and varied significantly across States.
The Planning Commis
At Microsoft’s annual general meeting yesterday, former CEO Steve Ballmer made his opinions on the company’s current course crystal clear. For one thing, he thinks Microsoft’s universal Windows app strategy is not destined to succeed. For another, the company needs to focus more on whether Windows Phone handsets can run Android apps, he said. Ballmer also said that the company should disclose profit margins and sales for […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| House prices in Dubai will bottom out towards the end of next year, real estate consultancy Cluttons said in its Dubai 2015/16 Winter Residential Property Market Outlook. House prices are expected to fall another 3-5 percent over the next 12 months. The report said values for both apartments (-0.8%) and villas (-0.5%) dipped marginally during the third quarter of this year, marking the […]
Samsung [made] history of a sort by launching the first major consumer-oriented virtual-reality headset. (It comes with an asterisk; prototypes and other not-quite-mass-market versions have been available for a while.) And its Gear VR headset is pretty impressive as first-generation devices go. The biggest surprise after using the new Gear VR for a few days: There’s a lot of stuff to watch and play in the virtual […]
