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Twitter Will Allow Employees To Work At Home Forever

BuzzFeed News
5/14/2020

Some Twitter employees will never return to their office. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey emailed employees on Tuesday telling them that they’d be allowed to work from home permanently, even after the coronavirus pandemic lockdown passes. Some jobs that require physical presence, such as maintaining servers, will still require employees to come in. “We’ve been very thoughtful in how we’ve approached this from the time we were one of the first companies to move to a work-from-home model,” a Twitter spoke…

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Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm

The New York Times
5/14/2020

Before the coronavirus crisis, three of New York City’s largest commercial tenants — Barclays, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — had tens of thousands of workers in towers across Manhattan. Now, as the city wrestles with when and how to reopen, executives at all three firms have decided that it is highly unlikely that all their workers will ever return to those buildings. …

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CBRE Slashes Growth Plans For In-House Coworking Platform

Bisnow
5/14/2020

CBRE is pulling back on the rollout of its in-house coworking brand as the coronavirus pandemic clouds the immediate future of office usage. After spending $40M last year on expanding Hana, CBRE plans to operate 10 Hana units this year, CEO Bob Sulentic said on the company’s quarterly earnings call last week. The firm planned on operating 20 units this year originally, Sulentic said.

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CoStar Acquires Ten-X in $190 Million Deal

Wall Street Journal
5/13/2020

Data giant CoStar Group Inc. CSGP -3.42% is buying the commercial real estate division of Ten-X LLC for $190 million in a deal designed to increase CoStar’s role in the huge distressed commercial-property market that the coronavirus pandemic is expected to fuel, CoStar announced Wednesday evening. “We believe that the volume of distressed properties coming to market will surge,” said Andrew Florance, CoStar’s chief executive….

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CompStak Enters Affinity Agreement With Appraisal Institute to Provide Industry-Leading CRE Comparable Data to AI Professionals

Appraisal Buzz
5/13/2020

CompStak, the leading provider of commercial real estate comparable data and analysis, has joined with the Appraisal Institute (AI), the nation’s largest professional association of real estate appraisers, to provide AI members and affiliates (“AI Professionals”) with benefits and discounts across its proprietary data platforms.

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Waymo Adds $750 Million to War Chest as Driverless Cars Prove Tough to Deploy

Wall Street Journal
5/13/2020

Waymo LLC has raised a further $750 million, pushing the total outside investment the company has announced in the past two months to $3 billion and bolstering its financial war chest at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has created new uncertainty in the race to develop self-driving vehicles.

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Virtual and augmented reality investment at 2013 levels in first quarter

Venture Beat
5/13/2020

While Digi-Capital’s AR/VR Analytics Platform tracked over $4 billion AR/VR investment last year, virtual and augmented reality investment dropped in Q4 2019 and Q1 2020 in terms of both deal volume (i.e. number of deals) and deal value (i.e. dollars invested). The first quarter of this year saw AR/VR investment volume (again, number of deals) at a quarterly level last seen back in 2013. In the context of COVID-19’s impact on all startup investment (not just AR/VR), this looks like it might be t…

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James Fallows: Flying Will Never Be the Same

The Atlantic
5/13/2020

I last took a “normal” commercial-airline flight back in February. It was normal in that most people did not seem to be having a good time. Before the flight, passengers lumbered out of their Ubers and taxis, or stepped off the shuttles from the rental-car offices and remote parking, and trudged through the familiar series of lines.

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Virtual AEC/RE Pitchathon to Assist Innovative Startups in Wake of COVID-19

PR Newswire
5/13/2020

Venture capital investment firm Shadow Ventures announced today a virtual AEC/RE Pitchathon that will connect a global community of investors, architects, engineers, contractors, and real estate professionals with 60-plus pre-seed to Series B startups offering groundbreaking innovation in their market segments. The first-ever, all-online event within the AEC/RE space will take place June 2-3 and will focus on five technology areas: DesignTech, ConTech, EnviroTech, PropTech, and InfraTech….

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Increased adoption of IoT solutions likely to continue after pandemic

Business Insider
5/13/2020

Internet of things (IoT) providers have reported an uptick in demand due to the coronavirus pandemic, with new use cases arising in accordance with social distancing guidelines and shifts in healthcare operations….

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