CTC Stays Lets Travelers Book a Family Villa Through ChatGPT and Claude

The Lotte Foundation for Arts, the cultural foundation of Lotte Group, won the grand prize at this year’s Mecenat Awards for its support of classical music and contemporary art, the foundation said Wednesday. The foundation received the award, which comes with a presidential citation, at the 27th Mecenat Awards ceremony held Tuesday at The Westin Josun Seoul hotel. “Mecenat” is a French term for corporate patronage of the arts. The Korea Mecenat Association has hosted the awards since 1999 to honor companies and business leaders who have contributed to the development of culture and the arts in Korea. Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin founded the foundation in 2015. It started with 20 billion won ($14.7 million), half from his personal funds and half from three Lotte affiliates. Lotte says it has invested about 200 billion won in arts support since then. The foundation runs Lotte Concert Hall and Lotte Museum of Art, both in the Lotte World Tower complex in Songpa District, southern Seoul. It is the only foundation set up by a Korean company that operates both a concert hall with

Industrial plant builder Samsung E&A said Wednesday that it won a MEED Projects Award for the 15th consecutive year, this time for its Jafurah gas processing project in Saudi Arabia. The Jafurah Gas Processing Facilities project received the Strategic Energy Infrastructure Award, one of the special awards, at a ceremony held Tuesday in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the company said. MEED, originally known as the Middle East Economic Digest, is a weekly business publication covering the Middle East. Each year, it holds awards that recognize outstanding projects in the Middle East and North Africa. Samsung E&A, a Korean engineering and construction company formerly known as Samsung Engineering, has won an award every year since 2012. The Jafurah project is one of Saudi Arabia’s largest unconventional gas field developments. Unconventional gas, such as shale gas, is trapped in rock formations and is harder to extract than gas from conventional reservoirs. Samsung E&A won the contract from the Saudi state energy giant Aramco and handled the entire engineering, procurement and construction p

Musinsa, Korea’s largest online fashion platform, has launched an online service that lets companies and other organizations design and order custom uniforms in one place, the company said Wednesday. The business-to-business platform, called Musinsa Uniform, went live Tuesday. It is aimed at companies, public institutions and amateur clubs that buy clothing in bulk. Until now, Musinsa handled these orders only through a “bulk purchase inquiry” option on its main online store, Musinsa Store. Customers can choose garments from three brands the company runs: Musinsa Standard, its in-house basics label; Musinsa Standard Sports, its activewear line; and the U.S. sportswear brand Champion, which a Musinsa subsidiary distributes in Korea. The products available include short- and long-sleeve T-shirts, pique polo shirts, hooded zip-up sweatshirts and fleece jackets. Buyers can add an organization’s name or logo by embroidery, screen printing or digital printing. Musinsa said it built the platform so customers no longer have to choose garments, find a separate printing company and compar

For years, the first question in almost every software conversation I had with a Singapore SME owner was the same: “Is it PSG pre-approved?” It was a sensible question. The Productivity Solutions Grant paid a large share of the cost of listed packages, so the list did a lot of the buying. If the vendor […] The post 3 ways the EDGE Grant changes how a sensible SME buys software appeared first on e27.

As anticipated yesterday, Bitcoin fell below US$73,000 and touched a nearly three-month low after the October US CPI report came in hotter than forecast. Headline CPI rose 0.4 per cent month over month against a 0.3 per cent expectation, while core CPI rose 0.3 per cent against a 0.2 per cent expectation. Bitcoin was down […] The post CPI at 0.4% broke Bitcoin’s US$73,000 floor. What happens if the Fed goes bigger? appeared first on e27.

For a freelancer in Manila or a solo consultant in Ho Chi Minh City, the stressful part of cross-border invoicing is not the moment a client clicks “send”. It is the wait that follows, when the money is technically on its way but still missing from the bank account. A new survey from Morph, the […] The post Stablecoins must act like bank money to win APAC businesses, survey suggests appeared first on e27.

There is a version of a Swiss army knife that does everything. It has a blade, a saw, scissors, a bottle opener, a USB drive, a laser pointer. When you reach for it, you are always holding something that can do something. But when you need to tighten a specific screw, the right tool is […] The post AI is a tool. Stop treating it like a strategy appeared first on e27.

AI helped me enter a world I once watched from the outside. Now I worry about what happens if that world pulls the ladder up. I am self-taught. My rise in AI technology began through my work building OnTheRice. I use AI to help research, connect information and build systems. It has expanded what I […] The post It doesn’t matter how we use AI, we are all in trouble appeared first on e27.

App compatibility was one of the early criticisms of Apple’s foldable phone, but developer support is growing rapidly.

Grab started life in Malaysia as a taxi-booking app. Fourteen years on, it is heading back to its birthplace with a far heavier load: AI data centres. SoftBank Group and Grab Holdings have signed joint development agreements with Petroleum Sarawak (PETROS), the Sarawak state oil and gas company, to build AI infrastructure across Sarawak and […] The post SoftBank and Grab put US$1.85B down on a 5GW AI bet in Malaysia appeared first on e27.

Subscription businesses have spent the past two decades making revenue more predictable. Instead of selling a product once and persuading the customer to buy again, they persuade the customer to keep paying every month or every year. That creates an important advantage: once the subscription has started, continuing to pay usually requires no decision at […] The post What happens to the subscription economy when AI agents review every payment? appeared first on e27.

At 500km/h, you’ll cover the length of Singapore in under 6 minutes.