And Why Bank 78 Is Quietly Becoming the Bank of the Creative Economy Lagos has never lacked talent. Anyone whoread more How Payaza and HATRICKS by Tolani Alli Redefined Lagos
(MENAFN - IANS) Anand, Jan 30 (IANS) Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel on Friday laid foundation stones and inaugurated 49 public welfare development projects worth Rs 234.01 crore in Khambhat, ...
SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 30 January 2026 - Digital transformation has become an increasingly common priority among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs in Singapore), according to observations shared by Adverdize following a series of interviews with local businesses...
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This year, Huawei South Africa is celebrating 25 years of being part of the country’s technology journey. Over the past quarter of a century, Huawei South Africa has grown alongside the digital landscape, supporting how people connect, work, create and live through technology. From building the networks that keep our country connected to designing consumer [...]The post Huawei marks 25 years of innovation, connection and everyday tech in South Africa appeared first on Hypertext.
On today’s edition of Techpoint Digest, we discuss a ₦7.7bn telco hack that landed six suspects in police custody, Atsur’s push for African art to outlive its first buyer, and Moniepoint’s ₦1tn bet on small businesses.
Global Web 3.0 Market Size, Share, Revenue Trends & Segmentation By Type, By Application, By End Use, By Technology, By Region, And Forecast 2026-2033
Berlin's Real Estate Market: Socialism On The Rise Submitted by Thomas KolbeGermany’s debt crisis continues to tighten the political leeway of the Federal Republic. The latest push by Berlin’s SPD for stricter real estate regulation clearly signals the direction ahead: Parties at the brink are choosing state-controlled economics over a market-driven turnaround.The German capital, Berlin, functions as a political testing ground and as ground zero for the united left of the Federal Republic. Like a magnifying glass, Berlin’s state politics reveal the broader response patterns of German politics to current social and economic challenges. The city’s real estate market now demonstrates trends likely to define the political character of the years to come.Faced with dramatic housing shortages, steadily rising rents, and exploding property prices, policymakers respond with even stronger regulation and rent controls. This is a policy of artificial scarcity, as investors systematically retreat from the market due to declining expected returns. The SPD’s recent move confirmed that the course remains steady: increasing regulation and direct control over investors (Apollo News reported).Overview of Regulatory Measures The SPD’s legislative initiative includes: severely restricting short-term tourist rentals to relieve the regular housing market; limiting potential rent surcharges for furnished apartments, preventing landlords from adjusting rents to reflect past investment in quality or amenities; capping index rents; and restricting modernization charges for property upkeep within narrow legal boundaries.Investment incentives and expected returns are thus significantly curtailed. The government is executing a consistent departure from economic fundamentals, addressing a self-created scarcity with measures that further exacerbate it. Without prospects of refinancing, investors are increasingly withdrawing from the market, putting further strain on housing availability.An additional measure is the introduction of a digital rental register—a sort of digital public ledger designed to enforce transparency and regulatory compliance. Larger landlords will be required to allocate a portion of their apartments to households with housing vouchers or the homeless. The state thus dictates down to the contractual level who may enter rental agreements.The SPD initiative marks the next stage of a fundamentally socialist market design. One can easily imagine how such rules impact potential developers, private investors, and larger investment groups. At its core, this policy is likely to further damage an already pressured real estate market, at least in Berlin’s current conditions.One development leads to another. In recent years, the construction sector has increasingly become a pawn of climate policy. Regulations are transposed into rental and building law without regard for economic consequences, inflating costs and freezing the status quo of building stock.Ultimately, tenants bear the brunt, as investors face mounting pressure and withdraw. Lengthy permitting processes, economically unrealistic energy standards, retrofit obligations, and increasingly visible government interventions in rental and contract law make many projects unattractive. The result is a slowdown in new construction and systematically rising housing costs. Climate policy thus directly multiplies the existing housing shortage.Reasons Behind the Property Price Explosion Property prices in Germany have surged for multiple reasons: First, over a decade of massive migration acted as a demand turbo. In urban centers like Berlin, Hamburg, or Frankfurt, the so-called “flow rate”—the part of the housing market ensuring mobility for tenants changing jobs or starting families—is completely blocked by the policy of perpetually open borders. Second, real estate has increasingly served as protection against systematic monetary depreciation, which follows rising public debt. The ECB expands the money supply through bond purchases while keeping interest rates low, steadily pushing property prices and rents higher to maintain profitability.But that’s not all: the next political assault on real estate came through climate regulation, high investment requirements tied to the green transition, insulation mandates, enforced heating technologies, and construction rules. These act as massive barriers to market entry for new capital. In effect, the state artificially restricts housing supply on three levels: regulation, control, and building mandates.Germany’s political refusal, for ideological and intellectual reasons, to rationally address migration and economic necessities has dramatic consequences. Last year, Berlin’s central planners set a nationwide housing target of 400,000 units. Yet massive regulatory interventions led to only around 205,000 completions—a decline of over 20% from the previous year. Similar numbers apply in Berlin, where massive migration requires roughly 20,000 new units annually. With only around 14,000 completed, the capital falls short despite state support and public housing. The market tightens, and the government responds with the same medicine—ultimately, those paying the price are tenants earning their own rent and not yet dependent on the growing social safety net.The question remains how Berlin’s politics will react grosso modo to this massive encroachment on market freedom. The city’s leftist bloc will likely push to further tighten regulations, while Berlin’s CDU, as seen in the inheritance tax debate, quickly falls in line with the SPD. When it comes to increasing the tax burden on the middle class and holding them accountable for the reckless transformation into a green-socialist society, the Merz-CDU stands ready.Strategic decisions in Germany today will economically burden future generations. The bloated debt state engages in a perverse game of wealth redistribution from the private sector to the bureaucracy. Rising taxes and contributions systematically disperse reform pressure on migration, welfare, or economic regulation. Credit is available; the middle class pays. Germany faces social redistribution battles artificially fueled by the SPD’s rental law.* * * About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years, he has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination. Tyler DurdenFri, 01/30/2026 - 02:00
Company Management Explores Public Listing in the U.S. and Highlights Launch of New Biomarker Tech Integration TAIPEI, Jan. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- World Gym Corporation (2762.TW) ("World Gym " or the "Company"), the owner of the iconic World Gym brand with over 280 locations worldwide,...
For decades, we’ve all been paying attention to the attention economy. That economic concept and business model sees online content as an unlimited resource. Its consumption is limited only by people’s mental capacity, implying a global contest for the finite and valuable resource of human attention. The attention economy idea explains why companies like Meta sees itself not only competing with other social sites like TikTok, X or YouTube, but also with books, plays and nature walks — anything that grabs people’s attention. Because attention is limited, the only way to grow is to be better at attracting attention. And that simple model is the reason why social networks are filled with rage bait, AI slop, memes, pornography and hate speech. The social media business isn’t incentivized to prioritize “good” content, only attention-grabbing content. In the attention economy paradigm, human attention is a currency with monetary value that people “spend.” The more a company like Meta can get people to “spend” their attention on Instagram or Facebook, the more successful that company will be. So the algorithms are deliberately designed (and constantly redesigned) to maximize how much time people pay attention to social networks. New features are specifically designed to increase the time users spend on Meta services instead of other things. For example, the average time spent on Instagram grew by 24% after Reels launched, making it a huge success for the company. Meta grabs an average of 18 hours and 44 minutes of attention per month due to its relentless tweaks for capturing attention. But that’s nowhere near the attention economy leader, TikTok, which gets an average of 34 hours and 15 minutes of attention per month. That’s why Meta is so obsessed now with AI on its social platforms. Rise of the attachment economyTristan Harris at the Center for Humane Technology coined the phrase “attachment economy,” which he criticizes as the “next evolution” of the extractive-tech model; that’s where companies use advanced technologies to commodify the human capacity to form attached bonds with other people and pets. In August, the idea began to gain traction in business and academic circles with a London School of Economics and Political Science blog post entitled, “Humans emotionally dependent on AI? Welcome to the attachment economy” by Dr. Aurélie Jean and Dr. Mark Esposito. Meta has introduced fully AI-generated accounts designed to exist alongside the personal accounts created by real people. The company launched “AI Studio” to let influencers clone themselves with AI versions of themselves. (Tellingly, Meta is temporarily pausing access to AI characters for teens on its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, in advance of a trial that will look at the harms and addiction social media sites can cause.)The company’s embrace of AI can be explained by the emerging attachment economy. While social posts, memes, reels and stories attract attention, AI can get users to form emotional attachments. A recent German study found people can develop more emotional closeness with AI than with other people — but only if they don’t know they’re interacting with a chatbot Still, even when people know chatbots aren’t human, they can get unhealthily attached.Late last year, a Virginia man named Jon Ganz went missing in a high-profile case attributed to “AI psychosis,” where his life unraveled after an obsession with a chatbot led to his disappearance. Also in 2025, a 16-year-old California boy’s parents sued OpenAI after he killed himself following conversations with a chatbot about suicide. Some people claim to be in relationships or marriages with AI chatbots. Now, AI chatbot vendors don’t aim to cause “AI psychosis,” suicide, or human-software marriages, but they do aim to cause attachment. That’s why these companies use psychological strategies, technical adjustments, and design choices to make their products feel more “human.” They give chatbots distinct personalities and identities, human-like voices and speech patterns, senses of humor and playfulness, and unlimited capacity for flattery and sycophancy. Starting around 2 million years ago until this millennium, interaction with speech and language was the exclusive province of people. Our brains are optimized for perceiving, understanding, and responding to human speech. So when we converse with appliances or apps, our Paleolithic brains think we’re interacting with another human. And that’s a business model. A category of AI products and services has emerged advertising “relationships” with chatbots, including Replika, Kindroid, Nomi.ai, EVA AI, and Candy AI. Other offerings promise friendship, but not necessarily “romantic” engagement. This list includes Kuki, Character.ai, Anima, and Replika’s “friend” mode. Our survival as a species has always depended on our sociability. This includes our care for others, sharing food, forming of friendships, loving relationships, empathy, and — you guessed it! — attachment.This is the reason why chatbots talk and interact like people: Because the goal is attachment. I believe this is also the unspoken justification for humanoid robots, as I’ve written before in this space. (The spoken justification is that humanoid robots can operate in spaces designed for people.)As in that piece, I detailed how humanoid robot makers deliberately trick people into falsely assuming that these products have human-like cognition. Studies show that eye contact and emotional cues from robots can trigger bonding responses and empathy in humans that are similar to those that come from interacting with people.The core benefit (to the companies selling them) or problem (for humanity) with humanoid robots is their psychological impact on people. They are engineered to “hack” human brains and deceive users into treating machines as sentient beings and forming attachments. The same goes for AI-based pets. Casio’s Moflin robot is an AI companion that develops a unique personality and simulates affection. It offers the gratification of pet ownership without the actual pet.The rise of attachment-forming tech is similar to the rise in subscriptions. While posting an article or YouTube video may get attention, getting people to subscribe to a channel or newsletter is better. It’s “sticky,” assuring not only attention now, but attention in the future as well. Likewise, the attachment economy is the “sticky” version of the attention economy. Unlike content subscription models, the attachment idea causes real harm. It threatens genuine human connection by providing an easier alternative, fostering addictive emotional dependencies on AI, and exploiting the vulnerabilities of people with mental health issues. While the attention economy is still with us, a far more potent and dangerous trend is emerging where companies aim to hijack our humanity so that we’ll keep using their products. AI disclosures: I used Gemini 3 Pro via Kagi Assistant (disclosure: my son works at Kagi) as well as both Kagi Search and Google Search to fact-check this article. I used a word processing product called Lex, which has AI tools, and after writing the column, I used Lex’s grammar checking tools to hunt for typos and errors and suggest word changes.
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With only about 2.5 years left in office, the economic legacy of President Marcos is now taking shape: he’s about to bequeath an economy that’s nearly grinding to a halt, weighed down by large-scale corruption that was allowed to flourish under his watch.