ACN Newswire

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...

By: Logan Pierce – SeaPRwire – Two new Tidal Wave sites open in the same week. One in Claremore, Oklahoma. One in El Paso, Texas. Free premium washes run for twelve days. A $10 Founders Club deal locks new members into thirteen months of savings. Local schools and disability programs get the cash. That is the play. Official announcement facts are precise. The release is dated 9 October 2026 from Thomaston, Georgia. Tidal Wave Auto Spa opens locations this week in Claremore, Oklahoma and El Paso, Texas. The Claremore site is the company’s sixth in Oklahoma. The El Paso site is its twenty-third in Texas. The full network now stands at 335 locations across thirty states. Both sites offer twelve days of free premium washes from 7 October to 18 October. The free option is Graph-X4® + Super Shammy. Standard features include mat cleaning stations, complimentary tire air, spot-free rinse, undercarriage wash, foam and wax treatments, and tire shine. The Founders Club offer is ext...

By: Robert Sterling – SeaPRwire – Consumers want less sugar. They still demand the same taste. Governments keep tightening the rules. Food makers sit in the middle. Straight sweetness swaps rarely hold the product together. That is the real pressure point. Official release facts lay out the full case. The piece is dated 7 October 2026 from Northampton, Massachusetts. Global efforts to cut sugar intake keep expanding. Population health stays a priority for governments and public-health bodies. Consumers seek lower-sugar products that still taste good. Governments push reformulation through nutrition policies, front-of-pack labeling, nutrient profiling and, in some markets, fiscal measures. Sugar does more than sweeten. It shapes flavor, texture, structure, processing and shelf life. Cutting it requires a balanced approach that keeps product quality while meeting nutrition goals and consumer expectations. WHO recommends free sugars below 10 percent of total daily energy. M...

By: Gavin Thorne – SeaPRwire – Trump says Ukraine needs a new president who will strike a deal. Zelenskyy answers that only Ukrainians choose their leader. He offers a concrete condition: sixty days of full ceasefire, then elections. The oil-price blame is rejected as easier talk than stopping Putin. That exchange is the current pressure point. Official statements fix the sequence. On 10 October Trump stated that Zelenskyy had many chances to reach an agreement to end the war but repeatedly refused. On 11 October Zelenskyy told ABC that Ukrainian leaders are decided by Ukrainian society and people. He said, with due respect to President Trump, the final decision rests with our society and our people, who will choose which leader. Ukraine is at war, making elections difficult. Secure infrastructure is required so people can vote. Timing, method and choice belong to Ukrainians. He added: tell Putin to give us two months, sixty days of full ceasefire, and we will organize e...

By: Alex Mercer – SeaPRwire – A closed-loop RFID system for hospital workwear and linen just claimed 97 percent traceability. One delivery worker now covers morning restock and afternoon collection at a 3000-staff site. Staffing for that task dropped 80 percent. That is the number that matters. Manual counts and single-barcode scans cannot match it. Official release facts list the full stack. ZHILAI MED announced an RFID-powered smart textile management solution on 10 October 2026 from Shenzhen. It targets healthcare facilities and industrial laundries. The goal is better traceability, efficiency and digital control of workwear, uniforms, linens and other reusable textiles. The system combines RFID identification, automated workwear dispensers, return units, laundry inventory tools and cloud software. Together they form a closed loop. Every textile item receives a unique RFID identity. It is tracked from registration through distribution, use, return, washing, inventory ...