Exoticca Details the Flexibility, Pricing, and Support Built Into Its All-Inclusive Vacation Packages

Michael Jordan’s Steak House, the only location of the U.S. restaurant brand outside the United States, has been named “Korea’s Best Hotel Restaurant 2026” at the World Culinary Awards. INSPIRE Entertainment Resort in Incheon, which houses the restaurant, said Friday that the steakhouse received the award at a ceremony held Wednesday in Jamaica. The awards recognize outstanding restaurants and culinary destinations through votes cast by industry professionals, experts and consumers. The event is a sister event of the World Travel Awards, described as the “Oscars of the travel industry.” The restaurant opened in Incheon in 2023 as the brand’s first and only location outside the U.S., bringing a selection of steaks that had proved popular in its home market. Cornerstone Restaurant Group oversees the brand in partnership with basketball legend Michael Jordan, with two U.S. locations in Chicago and Connecticut. The Incheon restaurant also received a Best of Award of Excellence in June from Wine Spectator, a U.S. wine publication, as part of its annual Restaurant Awards. “This

Electric vehicle (EV) charging operator Chaevi has achieved a rare clean sweep in this year's government EV charging facility subsidy program, securing qualifications across all four categories in both network operation and hardware manufacturing. The company was selected as an operator and manufacturer of fast, medium-speed and slow charging facilities under a program overseen by the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment. The selection marks Chaevi’s ninth consecutive year as a designated charging facility operator and its first selection in newly introduced manufacturer categories, according to the company. The four categories cover operators of fast and medium-speed chargers, operators of slow chargers, manufacturers of fast and medium-speed chargers, and manufacturers of slow chargers, allowing Chaevi to participate in the government’s subsidy program through 2027. The government revised its evaluation system this year to assess operators and manufacturers separately, with manufacturers facing additional scrutiny of technological development, product quality and charging pe

Power transmission equipment manufacturer Hyosung Heavy Industries opened a new factory in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province, Friday, doubling its production capacity for extra-high-voltage circuit breakers rated at 420 kilovolts (kV) and above as it prepares for surging global demand for power infrastructure. The facility, covering about 18,996 square meters, will exclusively manufacture circuit breakers rated at 420 kV, 550 kV and 800 kV for export markets, strengthening the company's ability to fulfill large overseas orders. Hyosung Heavy Industries reorganized its existing circuit breaker operations to focus primarily on domestic models, while the new facility handles export products rated at 420 kV and above. The factory integrates component manufacturing, assembly, testing and shipping under one roof, creating a streamlined production system designed to improve efficiency and delivery times. Production capacity for insulation components, which are critical to circuit breaker performance, has also doubled, according to the company, which said it is the only domestic power equipmen

Samsung Electronics said Friday that three of its products have been named to TIME magazine’s list of The Best Inventions of 2026. The U.S. weekly news magazine announced the list Thursday (local time). It picked the Galaxy S26 Ultra smartphone in the Consumer Electronics category, the Bespoke AI Family Hub refrigerator in Household and the Odyssey G8 gaming monitor in Entertainment & Gaming. TIME compiles the list each year from nominations by its editors and correspondents around the world. It rates new products and ideas on originality, efficacy, ambition and impact. The magazine called the Galaxy S26 Ultra “a privacy-focused smartphone,” citing its Privacy Display. The feature effectively blocks people from viewing the screen from the side. Users can choose when it turns on or apply it only to certain content, such as pop-up notifications. TIME said this makes it more flexible than conventional privacy screen protectors. The phone is the top model in the Galaxy S26 series, which was released in March. It has a 200-megapixel wide-angle camera and artificial intelligence (AI) fea

American Chamber of Commerce in Korea (AMCHAM) Chairman James Kim received an honorary doctorate in business administration from Korea Aerospace University (KAU) on Thursday in recognition of his contributions to Korea-U.S. economic cooperation. The university recognized Kim for bringing businesses and policymakers from the two countries together to promote trade, investment and cooperation in advanced industries. It also cited his efforts to attract foreign investment to Korea and improve the business environment in the country, drawing on his experience leading global companies. A degree ceremony was held at Vision Hall in the university’s Aerospace Center following a commemorative tree-planting event. KAU President Hurr Hee-young delivered welcoming remarks, while Korean Air Executive Vice President Kenneth Chang offered congratulatory remarks. “It is a great honor to receive an honorary doctorate from a university that has been at the forefront of developing Korea’s aerospace and defense talent,” Kim said. Kim also praised KAU’s efforts to develop talent and strengthen ties

Korea’s first homegrown obesity drug could shake up a market dominated by Mounjaro and Wegovy, an industry official said, as more Koreans travel to Japan to obtain cheaper Mounjaro and bring it home illegally, driven by the high cost of obesity treatments in Korea. Chung Sang-won, director of pharmacy innovation at the Korea Pharmaceutical Association, said the launch of Eppe, Korea’s first domestically developed glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1)-based obesity treatment, could intensify price competition, as seen in China. “The price of Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro fell by as much as 66 percent in China earlier this year, from 1,758 yuan ($262) to 599 yuan. Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy also saw a substantial price drop,” Chung said. The price cuts came amid intensifying competition in China, where domestically developed GLP-1-based obesity treatments have entered the market. In 2025, Innovent Biologics’ mazdutide, a dual glucagon and GLP-1 receptor agonist, received approval from Chinese authorities, adding to competition in the country’s obesity drug market. Sciwind Biosciences’ ecnogl

XCENA, a Korean fabless semiconductor company developing memory infrastructure, said Friday it demonstrated new memory solutions based on Compute Express Link (CXL) technology at the 2026 OCP Global Summit in San Jose, showcasing its shared-memory technology in collaboration with SK hynix. CXL is a high-speed connection standard allowing multiple processors to share and expand memory beyond what is physically attached to them by drawing from a shared pool of memory. It is gaining attention as a key technology for optimizing performance as memory demands grow in workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI) inference. During the event, XCENA demonstrated two AI inference use cases built on MX1, its CXL-based memory controller chip. The first demonstration showed multiple AI inference servers sharing key value cache memory (KV cache) through a CXL memory pool. KV cache stores context a model has already processed so it can be reused when generating responses. Keeping it in a shared pool reduces redundant copies and data movement across servers. The second demonstration showed how MX1 can

Speculation is growing that CJ Group could team up with Daou Kiwoom Group to bid for control of JoongAng Ilbo, as the newspaper publisher seeks a buyer amid a liquidity crisis at its parent group. According to industry sources Friday, CJ is reportedly considering forming a consortium with Daou Kiwoom to participate in the final round of bidding for the newspaper. The deadline for final bids is on Oct. 19. CJ holds a 9.24 percent stake in JoongAng Ilbo through its affiliate CJ OliveNetworks, potentially giving the group an existing foothold in the acquisition process. JoongAng Ilbo entered a workout program in July amid liquidity pressures at some affiliates of JoongAng Group. The newspaper publisher is pursuing the sale of its management rights and other restructuring measures to restore its financial health. The company said in a statement on Sept. 29 that it aims to select a preferred bidder by the end of October. Six companies reportedly participated in the preliminary bidding last month: Global Sae-A, Geumbo Development, Daou Technology, Orion, OK Financial Group and eBroadcasting. A w

Alibaba Group Holding’s two major domestic online marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, plan to greatly expand the use of artificial intelligence across merchants’ operations next year, a senior executive said, as the e-commerce giant doubles down on the technology to drive growth amid a challenging consumer landscape. “Starting next year, AI will comprehensively enter the internal enterprise workflows of merchants,” Liu Bo, president of Tmall, said at the company’s Singles’ Day media briefing on...

Dutch semiconductor equipment giant ASML is expanding into next-generation hybrid bonding, a technique that creates dense electrical connections by directly joining chips or silicon wafers, according to a new report. Major Chinese companies are also adopting the technology to improve chip performance. ASML submitted 27 patent families related to hybrid bonding tools between December 2022 and November 2024, according to a report published by semiconductor and AI supply chain research firm...

Four Republican senators have joined their Democratic colleagues in pressing the Trump administration for information about whether Pentagon officials ordered restrictions on Ukraine’s access to the satellite-based Starshield network, which Ukrainian officials said limited their ability to intercept Russian drones. Ukraine needs access to fast Starshield data speeds to operate drones along with fixed-wing and...

For two decades, marketers obsessed over a single question: where do we rank on Google? A growing number now ask a stranger one: what does ChatGPT say about us when we are not in the room? The Wild Ventures, the Swedish-founded company behind home decor brand Wild Palace, is betting that question will turn into […] The post What does ChatGPT say about your brand? Miracly raises US$2M to find out appeared first on e27.