Airbnb takes in some lessons from WeWork debacle
Last week, I mentioned two startups — Tink Labs and WeWork — that either crashed or suffered major setbacks last year. Let us now take a look at Airbnb, the home-sharing rental startup that plans to go public this year. The firm’s co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told an audience at a New York Times forum recently that there are two lessons learnt from the WeWork debacle, which saw the shared workspace provider pulling a planned IPO.
Hong Kong needs to get smart on smart cities in ASEAN
In recent years, the economy of ASEAN countries has been booming. With an average annual GDP growth of 5% in the past four years, Vietnam, The Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia have become growth drivers, turning ASEAN into the world’s 6th largest economy. However, economic development and urbanisation have also brought many problems to these countries along with huge business opportunities. Many nations around the world have noticed and are actively seeking to help these economies modernise, especially through the development of smart city infrastructure.
New smart city blueprint should bring us revolutionary change
A special feature of The Economist in December pointed out that Hong Kong and the other three Asian tigers (South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan), which had created economic miracles from the 1960s to 1990s, are all facing development bottleneck today, and each of them has to find a way forward.
