ACN Newswire

A hydrant in Chengdu has a SIM card By: Robert Sterling – SeaPRwire – Somewhere in Chengdu there is a fire hydrant that reports for duty every morning. It sends a short packet through a carrier’s network, several times a day, saying in effect that it is still a hydrant, still upright, still where the map says it is. The electricity meter in the same stairwell does something similar. So does the lift, the shared bicycle locked to the rack outside, and the parcel locker by the gate that has started charging tenants for the fourth hour of storage. None of these objects has a voice plan. None of them streams video. Each of them holds a SIM card and each of them counts, in the regulator’s arithmetic, as a connection. By the end of 2025 the three carriers in China (Mainland) — China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom — reported 2.888 billion cellular IoT terminal users , a net increase of 232 million over the year. That figure now exceeds the 1.061 billion mob...

Robert Sterling – AsiaPresswire – Indonesia banned the export of unprocessed nickel ore in January 2020, pulling forward a deadline that had originally been set for 2022. Five years on, it is the most consequential industrial policy experiment in Southeast Asia, and the clearest test anywhere of whether a commodity-producing country can force its way up the value chain by legislating against its own exports. The answer is genuinely mixed, and the mix is more instructive than either the celebratory or the dismissive version of the story. Indonesia did build a processing industry that did not exist. It also created chronic global oversupply, locked itself into a technology and capital structure it does not control, and discovered that banning an export is much easier than capturing the margin that sits at the end of the chain. This piece is about what the policy actually built, what it cost, where the money actually goes, and what a company deciding whether to commit capit...

Robert Sterling – SeaPRwire – A hotel in Cebu lost a booking last March because of a QR code. Not a broken one — a missing one. A guest from Singapore stood at the front desk with her banking app open, ready to pay, and there was nothing to scan. She paid in cash from an ATM down the road, complained in a review the same evening, and the property’s operations manager spent the next two weeks explaining to ownership why a “cashless” property needed a cash float again. That is the shape of the problem most Southeast Asian businesses actually have with payments in 2026. It is not fraud, and it is not interchange. It is that the person standing in front of you has already decided how they want to pay, and your checkout was built for a card. This is a practical guide to the rails that matter, what they cost, how long money takes to arrive, where it gets stuck, and which countries quietly make it hard to take your own money out. Cards are not the default her...

By: James Vance – SeaPRwire – Marketing teams still spend more time wrestling software than closing deals. Dashboards multiply. CRMs demand constant feeding. Email tools sit in separate tabs. Campaign data lives somewhere else entirely. People become the glue holding fractured systems together. That friction is the real cost of modern sales operations. Payani AI just launched a system that flips the model. Users speak or type what they want done. The platform handles the rest using the company’s own data. The launch centers on a conversational execution layer called Ask Payani. It sits across CRM records, email threads, campaign metrics, and pipeline stages. A user can say: find everyone who replied to last week’s campaign, draft a personal follow-up for each, and book a call with those who asked about pricing. The system identifies the relevant contacts, pulls prior communications, prepares the messages, and coordinates next steps. No separate logins. No manual list bui...

Marking a historic milestone for foreign property ownership in Makkah, Thakher Development completes the SAR 2 billion sale of the 1,461-room Novotel Thakher Makkah and 14 development plots to Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund. MAKKAH, Saudi Arabia – SeaPRwire –  Thakher Development, the master developer of the Thakher Makkah megaproject, has officially completed the handover of property ownership certificates to Danantara Indonesia, Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund. The milestone marks one of the first major real estate acquisitions by an international sovereign investor in Makkah, completing Danantara’s SAR 2 billion (approx. US$ 533 million) purchase of the Novotel Thakher Makkah hotel towers and 14 adjoining development plots. The transaction was made possible by Thakher Makkah’s position as an established, integrated destination 1.2 kilometres north of the Grand Mosque. Spanning 320,000 square metres, with a total investment value of more t...

By: TechVanguard – SeaPRwire – Hank Robotics just joined the 2026 U.S. Chamber of Commerce CO-100 list. The Miami firm is one of one hundred recognized American businesses. It sits among the ten Tech Innovators honorees. Founded in 2024, the company uses drones and robotics for commercial exterior work that once needed heavy gear and long setup times. The service list is concrete. High-rise window cleaning. Commercial roof washing. Façade cleaning. Pressure washing. Soft washing. Solar panel cleaning. Water tower and elevated tank maintenance. Thermal drone inspections. The company pairs drone-assisted methods with conventional techniques. It targets surfaces that are hard to reach. Clients include hotels, office towers, warehouses, shopping centers, industrial sites and property managers. The goal is efficient exterior maintenance with less disruption. Project numbers appear in the release. Approximately 570,000 square feet of warehouse roof and façade cleaning for H...

By: TechVanguard – SeaPRwire – Sixty-one percent of leaders expect most AI agents to run largely on their own within four years. Only twenty-one percent say their organizations can redesign the processes that will surround them. The gap sits right there in the Deloitte numbers from August 2026. Five hundred one senior managers and executives in the United States answered the survey. The ambition is clear. The readiness is not. Seventy-four percent expect nearly half of their business processes to be rebuilt around AI agents in the same four-year window. Just five percent call their current processes highly prepared for autonomous AI. Only fifteen percent have scaled coordinated agents across multiple functions. An AI agent can already push multi-step workflows toward a goal. It can talk to external software without waiting for human approval on every step. That shifts the employee’s role. Policies must therefore spell out access privileges, escalation points for human re...

By: James Vance – SeaPRwire – Field changes walk away unrecorded and the next bid pays for it. Estimating Edge just put out a guide that treats as-built plans as the fix. The company builds The EDGE estimating software and sits under Foundation Software. The new piece is titled “The Contractor’s Guide to As-Built Plans (and Why Estimators Need Them).” It shows what those final drawings actually capture and how estimators can turn them into sharper prices. Official points stay tight. Construction almost never matches the blueprint exactly. When field changes stay off the record, contractors pay twice. Closeout and final payment stall first. The next bid then repeats the same misses. As-built plans are the final drawings that show the project exactly as it stands. Every change sits on them. That record gives a true account of what the job actually took. Each finished project then makes the following bid tighter. The guide walks through clear distinctions. As-built drawings...

By: Gavin Thorne – SeaPRwire – The livestream is off. President Trump on October 15 canceled the online broadcast of the firing-squad execution of former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The decision reversed Defense Secretary Hegseth. Opposition from Republicans, religious leaders and the public had already stacked high. Hasan still faces the squad on December 3 at Fort Hood. He will be the first U.S. military prisoner executed by firing squad since 1945. No cameras will roll for the wider audience. Hasan killed thirteen people at the Fort Hood base in 2009. He was a major and a psychiatric medical officer. The Pentagon announced on October 8 that it would stream the execution to the public online. No platform was named. Trump said on October 10 he had not yet decided. An anonymous White House official told Reuters that Trump and his advisers had not known about the livestream plan beforehand. Families of the victims may still watch in person if they choose. That option re...

By: Logan Pierce – SeaPRwire – The release calls it Player of the Week. Strip the polish and the core is simple. A senior safety from Corinth, Texas, turned one play into the weekly award. Peyton Bowen of Oklahoma intercepted a pass and ran it back forty-two yards for a touchdown. He added seven tackles, six of them solo. The Sooners beat number one Texas twenty-seven to twenty-four in the Red River rivalry. That interception was the third of his career. The vote process sits plain in the announcement. Former players, coaches and Lott IMPACT Trophy board members cast an internal ballot. Fans add a social media vote. Bowen cleared both. Last season the league coaches put him on the All-SEC second team. The SEC Fall Academic Honor Roll listed him each of the past two seasons. Those lines match the award’s own checklist. IMPACT stands for Integrity, Maturity, Performance, Academics, Community and Tenacity. The academic honor rolls cover the A. The pick-six and the tackle co...

By: TechVanguard – SeaPRwire – Most software updates promise the moon and deliver a checkbox. Maxon’s Fall 2026 release, shipping the 2027.0 versions of Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Redshift, Red Giant and Autograph, feels different. It targets the exact friction points artists complain about in daily production. Bigger environments. Faster feedback. Fewer app switches. That is the real pitch. Look at the official list first. Cinema 4D 2027.0 adds a full Scatter System. The new Scatter Generator and Scatter Tag handle distribution, filtering, clustering and transforms. They plug straight into MoGraph Fields and Effectors so artists can shape and animate the scatter without leaving the familiar toolset. Liquid FX joins the unified simulation system. Foam, spray and bubbles generate automatically from the liquid and respond to its motion. The release also tightens the Cinema 4D–Redshift link, improves ACES 2.0 alignment and adds everyday quality-of-life fixes. ZBrush gets a native U...

By: Alex Mercer – SeaPRwire – Publishers on Fastly just got a third option. They can identify the AI crawler, publish machine-readable licensing terms, and decide per company whether to allow, block or charge. No CDN swap. No new origin infrastructure. Bots already exceed 49 percent of traffic. Most of that traffic pays nothing. That is the pressure point. Official release facts are clean. Supertab announced on 12 October 2026 from New York that Supertab Connect is live on Fastly Compute. Publishers can classify AI bot traffic, publish RSL licensing terms, and allow, block or charge individual crawlers at the edge. Fastly already serves a large share of media companies, publishers and content platforms. Activation runs through Fastly Compute. The same product stays compatible with other major CDNs, the WordPress plugin and the SDK. Fastly’s Threat Insights 2026 report states bots now make up more than 49 percent of all traffic. Most of that volume generates no revenue fo...