By Mehreen Zahra-Malik | LAHORE, Pakistan LAHORE, Pakistan Pakistani real estate giant Rafi Group made a ten-fold profit last year from its sale of hundreds of acres of land in the remote fishing town of Gwadar, acquired soon after the government announced plans for a deep-sea port there. The windfall came after 12 years of waiting patiently for the Gwadar port to emerge as the centrepiece of […]
Qantas has announced it successfully tested its on-board Wi-Fi system and expects to operate its first commercial service with free Wi-Fi in the next few weeks. Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce told shareholders on Thursday that the airline’s Wi-Fi offering will ultimately be rolled out to around 80 domestic aircraft, and later to Qantas’ international and regional fleets, noting that on-board Wi-Fi is the first item on […]
Abu Dhabi-UAE: 22 February, 2017 At a press conference on day four of the 13th edition of the International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX 2017), His Excellency Staff Brigadier-General Rashid Mohammed Al Shamsi, Official Spokesperson of IDEX 2017, announced 20 new deals worth AED 3,422,120,575. 13 of the deals are with national companies and the remaining 7 with international companies. The press conference, held at Abu Dhabi […]
Yesterday´s Future is Today´s Reality. In the area of Business applications, cloud seems to be all over the place. But it has many facets which all have its right to exist, though it´s a fatal misunderstanding to see cloud simply as an alternative technical deployment option. From the new millennium SaaS models that have been adopted, initially with huge appetite in dedicated Line of Business areas. We […]
While the year continues to be dominated by headlines touting the universal appeal of Alexa, there’s another gives a glimpse of what the big next step in human-computer interaction will be: eye tracking. The concept of measuring and responding to human eye motion isn’t new, but the past year saw a rising interest in the technology. There have been a slew of acquisitions of eye tracking startups by large […]
Part of a poster issued by the British tax authorities to counter offshore tax evasion in 2014. PHOTO: H.M. Revenue & Customs Through the Panama Papers released at the beginning of last year, the offshore tax haven activity of the national elites were seen in the full light of day by citizens. The reverse engineering of the internal database of one of the world’s leading offshore money […]
A new technique using liquid metals to create integrated circuits that are atoms thick could shape the future of electronics, according to research led by RMIT. The technique, which can produce large electronic wafers around 1.5 nanometres in depth, was developed by researchers from RMIT, Monash University, North Carolina State University, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Benjamin Carey, a researcher with RMIT and […]
Europe’s fish lovers are facing higher cod prices because of a prolonged fishing strike in Iceland and increased demand after the rising cost of salmon led shoppers to seek alternatives. Norwegian cod prices have risen almost 30 per cent from a year ago to €2 a kilogramme after a 45 per cent rise in salmon prices over the same period led consumers to look for cheaper substitutes. […]
Sam Kassegne, deputy director for the CSNE at SDSU, and colleagues developed electrodes made out of glassy carbon. Credit: Sam Kassegne When people suffer spinal cord injuries and lose mobility in their limbs, it’s a neural signal processing problem. The brain can still send clear electrical impulses and the limbs can still receive them, but the signal gets lost in the damaged spinal cord. The Center for […]
Containers are great, having to re-invent persistence to use them, not so much. But that is changing. You’re not the only one concerned about container persistence: 82 percent of respondents in a recent survey said they’d deploy containers within two years if storage challenges could be resolved. That is a legitimate concern, as containers can offer great versatility and efficiency compared to virtualization, but being forced to […]
Getty Images/iStockphoto What impact will artificial intelligence (AI) have on the workforce? Will smart machines really replace a large number of people in a variety of jobs? The Internet of Things 10 types of enterprise deployments As businesses continue to experiment with the Internet of Things, interesting use cases are emerging. Here are some of the most common ways IoT is deployed in the enterprise. These questions […]
Over the years, Vigliotti, who is 63, gradually evolved from a hauler of waste to a producer of fine fertilizers. And so he was well positioned when New York City contracted last year with six companies to transform the food waste it currently collects from the curbsides of almost a million residents. Four of those companies will send their scraps to traditional compost facilities. A fifth will […]
By Colin Packham and Aaron Bunch | SYDNEY SYDNEY Officials at an Australian immigration centre in Papua New Guinea are increasing pressure on asylum seekers to return to their home countries voluntarily, including offering large sums of money, amid fears a deal for the United States to take refugees has fallen through. About a dozen Bangladeshi and Nepalese asylum seekers on Manus Island told Reuters they are […]
NopSec Recorded Future has extended the capabilities of the firm’s threat intelligence platform to harvest data from every source on the web, granting the enterprise increased visibility into emerging digital threats. On Monday at the RSA Conference 2017 in San Francisco, the firm said the Recorded Future Web Intelligence Engine has received a substantial upgrade. The platform, designed with corporate security specialists in mind, automatically slurps data […]
By many accounts, Australia has done its best to silence the voices of these migrants and refugees. Housing them on the remote Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru has not only geographically isolated them from the Australian mainland, but also kept them at arm’s length from the country’s journalists and human rights activists. Continue reading the main story I first came across Mr. Boochani’s story on his […]
Paraphrasing Garrison Keillor, it’s been a quiet week in the Apache Spark community – at least compared to last year, where the definitive Spark 2.0 was unveiled. Last week, Spark Summit pulled into Boston, and so did one of those nor’easters that make Boston so alluring in February. And so the Spark project, for now, is engaging in the blocking and tackling chores of cleaning up or […]
A period of consumer spending, retail sales and housing weakness may be imminent, after federal tax refunds tumbled by 78% in the early part of February compared to 2016, the result of a new law which requires the IRS to delay the printing of checks to households claiming specific tax credits. The reason for the slowdown is that in late 2015 Congress passed a law forcing the […]
RAS AL KHAIMAH // Cutting off the water supply to several tenants without warning was the final straw for residents at a gated community, who have been in dispute with the developer for years. About 300 Al Hamra Village residents have engaged a law firm as they plan court action against Al Hamra Real Estate Development over changes to utility providers that will cost the community Dh137 […]
Ingest, data prep, analysis, visualization and export. They’re all part of the Big Data analytics life-cycle. The good news? The market sports multiple product categories that handle each of these. The bad news: there are far fewer products that handle many of these areas together. It’s getting more complex too, as other big data lifecycle categories, like data lake management/data cataloging and Big Data operations/DevOps are emerging. […]
By Tom Westbrook and Jane Wardell | SYDNEY SYDNEY Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull might receive a short-term boost after his infamous phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump but is likely to be the long-term political loser, analysts and rights advocates said on Friday. Languishing in opinion polls and vulnerable to attacks from within his own conservative party, Turnbull at least woke on Friday to domestic […]
By Colin Packham and Aaron Bunch | SYDNEY SYDNEY U.S. immigration officials have postponed interviews with asylum seekers in an Australian camp on the Pacific island of Nauru since President Trump’s executive order on immigration, suggesting Washington is already blocking progress on a controversial refugee resettlement deal. The deal sparked a rare diplomatic spat between the two staunch allies, with Trump berating Australia’s prime minister in an […]
02 February 2017 For years, mid-tier banks have been told they’re potentially heading for extinction The barbell effect dictates that the middle will be significantly challenged by an increasingly tough business environment, with only the very large and the very niche institutions being able to succeed. And indeed the outlook does look challenging, if one adds up the increased cost of regulatory compliance, the pressure on fees […]
INFERNO The fire that hit a Japanese-owned factory in Cavite province is among the worst in the country’s economic zones, according to an official of the Philippine Economic Zone Authority. —RICHARD REYES GENERAL TRIAS, Cavite—At least 126 people, including at least two Japanese, were injured after a fire that raged for more than 18 hours starting Wednesday night hit a three-story factory at the Cavite Export Processing […]
Chocolate industry executives breathed a collective sigh of relief earlier this year after the impact of the bankruptcy of a key cocoa industry player at the end of 2016 remained muted as a result of a weak cocoa market. Expectations of bumper supplies from west Africa, the leading regional producer of cocoa beans, have been weighing on bean prices of the key chocolate ingredient. This has helped […]
