WeWork Still Needs Cash After Pulling IPO

For years, WeWork’s parent company was defined by big spending as it relentlessly pursued rapid growth. Now, in the aftermath of a botched initial public offering attempt and the ouster of co-founder and chief executive Adam Neumann, it is facing a different reality: It needs to stop bleeding cash. On Monday, We Co. said it would file a request with the Securities and Exchange Commission to withdraw its IPO proposal. The company said it is postponing the offering to focus on its core bus…

CoStar Agrees to Buy Hotel Data Firm STR

CoStar Group Inc., which has built a multibillion-dollar business out of selling commercial real estate data, is making its biggest push so far into the hotel business by agreeing to pay $450 million in cash for STR, one of the world’s largest hotel data firms, the companies said Tuesday. Founded in 1985 as Smith Travel Research, STR gathers confidential data on such metrics as revenue and occupancy from over 65,000 hotels world-wide in over 180 countries. Lodging owners and hotel companies l…

Speaker Spotlight: Vanessa Anderson, Vice President of Operations, Truss

Attending the CREtech New York Conference on October 16-17, 2019? Don’t miss Vanessa Anderson, Vice President of Operations at Truss on the Innovation Stage at CREtech New York for her session, “What Do Tenants Really Want? A Lot.” Learn insights seen from the 15,000 actual tenants using the Truss platform. What trends and amenities will really attract your next tenants. Our team at CREtech recently caught up with Anderson to learn more about her role and her vision for the commercial real…

IBM’s AI generates high-quality voices from 5 minutes of talking

Training powerful text to speech models requires sufficiently powerful hardware. A recent study published by OpenAI drives the point home — it found that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest runs grew by more than 300,000 times. In pursuit of less demanding models, researchers at IBM developed a new lightweight and modular method for speech synthesis. They say it’s able to synthesize high-quality speech in real time by learning different aspects of a speaker’s voice, making it p…

SoftBank Plans to Name Former Sprint Boss to Help Fix WeWork

SoftBank Group Corp. is tapping Marcelo Claure to help turn around WeWork, after ousting co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Adam Neumann from the corner office earlier this week. Masayoshi Son, the head of SoftBank, WeWork’s largest investor, has asked the former chief executive officer of Sprint Corp. to take a more hands-on role helping oversee a cleanup of the office-rental company from his position at SoftBank, said people familiar with the matter, who asked to not be identified becau…

How WeWork spiraled from a $47 billion valuation to talk of bankruptcy in just 6 weeks

At 7:12 on a mild late-summer morning in New York City, WeWork’s registration papers hit the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website. The filing, called an S-1, was expected. It was a crucial step in what up to that point had been an exquisitely choreographed march toward an initial public offering for the tech world’s most highly valued startup.

Smart Buildings Tech Launched by Global Coworking Provider rent24

BERLIN, Sept. 27, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Global coworking operator rent24 has launched its proprietary smart buildings technology service ‘r24 solutions’. The PropTech service is available for landlords and operators who are looking to make efficiencies in their building operations as well as to provide an enhanced experience to its occupants. “We have integrated our technology in over 60 locations worldwide and are constantly developing it further,” says founder and CEO of rent24, Robert Bukvić….

Badass millennial women are supercharging startup investments

Across the political, social and economic stage, women’s issues are finally receiving heightened attention and priority. There are more women than ever seeking political office; funding for female-founded startups is reaching record levels (even if they still have a long way to go to reach gender parity); a sizable cohort of female-founded and led companies have achieved billion-dollar unicorn valuations; and several women-led companies, including PagerDuty, The RealReal, and Eventbrite, have…

WeWork I.P.O. Is Withdrawn as Investors Grow Wary

WeWork shelved its plans for an initial public offering on Monday, a startling retreat for a company that expanded rapidly in recent years as it sought to transform commercial real estate in the world’s biggest cities.

The move is the clearest sign yet that investors are increasingly wary of ambitious young companies that have run up huge losses and might not become profitable for years.

New JLL Technologies Group to Be Led by Mihir Shah and Yishai Lerner

CHICAGO, Sept. 30, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — JLL (NYSE:JLL) today announced the formation of JLL Technologies, a new business division that will align and expand its technology and digital initiatives, and accelerate innovation in commercial real estate for its investor and occupier clients. Longtime Silicon Valley veterans Mihir Shah and Yishai Lerner, who have led JLL Spark since 2017, have been named to oversee JLL Technologies and will join the company’s Global Executive Board….