Author: admin
As the restaurant industry endured another difficult year, many chains opted to close underperforming locations as they try to turn around their businesses.Inflation-weary consumers have pulled back their restaurant spending, choosing to eat at home or chasing deals when they go out for a meal. While some restaurants have won over reluctant diners, the industry has largely struggled with the sales slump. Traffic to restaurants open at least a year fell every month in 2025, excluding only July, according to Black Box Intelligence. In years past, restaurant closures have been more concentrated across casual-dining chains, which lost customers to fast-casual…
Enterprises have been piloting and testing different AI tools for the past few years to figure out what their adoption strategy will look like. Investors think that period of experimentation is coming to an end. TechCrunch recently surveyed 24 enterprise-focused VCs and an overwhelming majority predicted enterprises will increase their budgets for AI in 2026 — but not for everything. Most investors said this budget increase will be concentrated, and that many enterprises will spend more funds on fewer contracts. Andrew Ferguson, a vice president at Databricks Ventures, predicted 2026 will be the year that enterprises start consolidating their investments…
Mortgage rates are lower, home prices are easing and there is more supply on the market for sale. All of that adds up to improved affordability for today’s homebuyers. Saving for a down payment, however, is still the biggest hurdle for first-time buyers. Prices nationally are basically flat compared with where they were a year ago, according to Parcl Labs, which runs daily studies of U.S. home prices. They dipped into negative territory earlier this month and are now just 0.3% higher year over year. The latest S&P Cotality Case-Shiller home price index, which reflects pricing from October, showed large…
by Sarah Kuta Last updated: 2:40 PM ET, Mon December 29, 2025 In October, an Australian cruise company made headlines after an elderly passenger was found dead after being left behind during a hiking excursion. Now, the same brand is back in the news—this time, because its ship got stuck on a reef.The Coral Adventurer collided with a coral reef off the coast of Papua New Guinea on December 27. After several unsuccessful attempts to free the ship, which is being operated by Coral Expeditions, passengers are now being picked up and flown home on a charter flight. According to…
In some ways, 2025 was when AI dictation apps really took off. Dictation apps have been around for years, but in the past they’ve proved slow and inaccurate — unless you speak with particular accents and enunciate clearly. But advances in large language models (LLMs) and speech-to-text models have helped improve the systems that can decipher speech better while retaining the context to format the text. And developers have built in features to automatically format text, remove filler words, and ignore fumbles to output text that would need fewer edits. But with the soaring popularity of everything AI, there’s dozens…
A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.The 2025 economy wasn’t as robust as anticipated — and that’s shaping the commercial real estate outlook for 2026. The economy has slowed down, unemployment is up and construction has taken a bit of a breather across most sectors. This year saw increases in both tariffs and immigration restrictions. Together,…
TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has been at the center of controversy in the U.S. for four years now due to concerns about user data potentially being accessed by the Chinese government. As a result, U.S. users have often found themselves caught in the middle of this tension. Earlier this year, the app experienced a temporary outage in the U.S. that left millions of users in suspense before it was quickly restored. TikTok returned to the App Store and Google Play Store in February. A number of investors competed to purchase the app, and after Trump extended the…
NEW YORK (AP) — The year’s first supermoon and meteor shower will sync up in January skies, but the light from one may dim the other.The Quadrantid meteor shower peaks Friday night into Saturday morning, according to the American Meteor Society. In dark skies during the peak, skygazers typically see around 25 meteors per hour, but this time they’ll likely glimpse less than 10 per hour due to light from Saturday’s supermoon.“The biggest enemy of enjoying a meteor shower is the full moon,” said Mike Shanahan, planetarium director at Liberty Science Center in New Jersey.Meteor showers happen when speedy space…
The past year was a busy one for air travel, with high demand for international flights and certain domestic routes within the United States.A new report released by aviation analytics firm OAG now shows which routes were the busiest in 2025, both in the U.S. and around the world. The rankings are based on routes with the highest number of seats in 2025, according to OAG’s Global Airline Schedules Data.The busiest domestic route in the U.S. was the popular transcontinental hop from New York JFK to Los Angeles (LAX), which saw a total of 3.43 million seats for 2025, a…
PARIS (AP) — The funeral for Brigitte Bardot will be held next week in Saint-Tropez, the glamorous French Riviera resort she helped make famous and where she lived for more than a half-century, local authorities said.The cinema star and animal rights activist died Sunday at the age of 91 at her home in southern France.A ceremony is scheduled on Jan. 7 at the Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption Catholic Church and will be broadcast on two large screens set up at the port and on the Place des Lices central square, Saint-Tropez town hall said in a statement Monday.The burial will then take place…