Ires Reit versus Vision Capital endgame, Tesco job clinics and Facebook at 20

The head of the dissident shareholder group that is pushing for the break-up of Ires Reit, the country’s largest private landlord, has said Vision Capital would not seek to launch an offer for the Irish-listed company if it is unsuccessful next week in its boardroom coup at an extraordinary general meeting (egm) in Dublin, Ciarán Hancock has the details.

Facebook’s first generation of users is gliding into middle age along with Mark Zuckerberg, its hoodied founder, chair and chief executive. In those two decades, a parade of internet and social media hopefuls has come and gone, or been bought and consolidated, Borg-like, into companies like, well, Facebook. But Facebook abides. Karlin Lillington on what keeps it at the top of the food chain.

Tesco Ireland plans to host job clinics for residents of direct provision centres, including CV and interview training, as part of efforts by the company to help more refugees secure employment. Ellen O’Regan reports.

The Irish economy is expected to grow solidly this year, outperforming most peer economies, as “inflation tracks lower and the interest rate cycle turns”, according to consultancy EY’s latest economic outlook. Eoin Burke-Kennedy reports.

Extend EV grant to second-hand purchases, says PwC

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Wave of innovation aims to make desalination sustainable

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Smart heater gives greater control over comfort and cost

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Helping stressed-out GPs manage staffing issues in the workplace

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An unfortunate truth of road improvement schemes is the resulting increased efficiency merely accelerates traffic into the next bottleneck. The internet is rather similar, writes Chris Horn. You might have a very nice 25 Mbps broadband service to your home, or a healthy 5G connection to your smart device. However, there are usually numerous bottlenecks on the journey data undertakes between you and the far side of the internet for whatever the remote website, streaming service or other cloud software you are using.

Vision Capital vs IRES REIT: trouble brewing at Ireland’s largest private landlord

Listen | 33:13

Resident sage Cantillon wonders who would want to serve on the board of RTÉ and recounts how Michael Burke was just 23 when he set up a veterinarian practice in his local town, Loughrea and then went on to build a pharma powerhouse.

Have a cat, but worried about it going outside? Enter the Weenect XS tracker, which claims to be the smallest on the market. Strap this GPS collar on to your cat, writes Ciara O’Brien, and you can let them roam with peace of mind that you might actually be able to find them should they go AWOL for any length of time, via a mobile app.

Pharmacies are busy places, and filling prescriptions and answering patient queries take up a lot of a pharmacist’s time. Technology has been slow to offer solutions that could help, and it was this gap, writes Olive Keogh, that prompted Cormac McKenna and Marijus Planciunas to develop PharmacyConnect, a SaaS platform that creates own-brand apps for pharmacies to improve the efficiency of their prescription flow and save time for patients and pharmacists alike.

I recently spent a week offline. The occasion was a retreat of sorts, wherein overscheduled, overwhelmed people repaired to comfortable accommodations in the woods to reset, writes Melissa Kirsch. I expected to be anxious, to be thinking constantly about the unreceived, unacted-upon information still flowing into my dark devices. Instead, the disconnection was surprisingly easy. I was a dog walker with an empty leash, braced for the yank of an insistent beast and surprised, over and over, to look down and find there was nothing there.

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