Eva Chin writes for RECATOOLS on business and commerce in Southeast Asia: the commercial decisions small businesses actually face, and the markets and regulation around them. She also covers Chinese naming and cultural practice, education and qualifications across the region, and the arithmetic of a tropical home. Coverage of cultural practice is educational — it explains what a tradition holds and where it came from, and does not make predictive claims.

194
Articles
Business
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~1230 min
Total reading

Articles Showing 11–20 of 194

A city skyline lit up at night beside the water
Business

Red Hat Opens Singapore AI Centre of Excellence With EDB Backing and Defence Agency DSTA as First Partner

The open source firm says its new Asia-Pacific centre will move AI from pilots into production. It gives no headcount, spending figure or timeline.

26 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
A delivery rider on a scooter with a box on the back
Business

Taiwan Blocks Grab's US$600 Million Foodpanda Deal Over Uber's Stake in Grab

The Fair Trade Commission said Uber's 13.1% holding in Grab would blunt competition with Uber Eats, ending Grab's first move outside Southeast Asia for now.

24 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
A city skyline lit up at night across the water
Business

Kimi Maker Moonshot AI Is Hiring in Singapore to Turn Its Models Into Revenue

A LinkedIn listing posted on 20 October and a local company once registered as Moonshot AI point to a commercial push from Singapore. The company has said nothing yet.

23 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
Container cranes and stacked shipping containers at a port
Business

Malaysia's Exports Top RM200 Billion for the First Time, Growing at Fastest Pace Since 2021

September shipments rose 54.5% to RM215.1 billion, with electronics supplying most of the gain and the US and Taiwan the biggest buyers, official data show.

20 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Hiragana characters brushed in black ink on white paper
Home & Living

How many kana there are depends on which list is counted

Japanese is written partly in hiragana and katakana, and a learner's chart shows 46 kana, but the official kana list in force since 1986 runs to 108 entries by our count. Unicode encodes far more, including 285 historic hiragana variants.

19 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
A padlock icon over a teal circuit-style background
Business

Proofpoint Agrees to Buy Varonis for US$6.3 Billion in Cash, Taking the Data Security Firm Private

Thoma Bravo-owned Proofpoint will pay US$49.75 a share, a 52% premium to the pre-rumour price. Shareholders and regulators must still approve, with closing expected in the first half of 2027.

19 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
A brass sundial standing on an old printed map
Chinese Culture

How Chinese almanacs decide which hours are yellow and which are black

Chinese almanacs split the day into twelve two-hour blocks and label each one yellow path or black path by the spirit on duty in it. The rule is one line in a Qing imperial manual, and we checked it against an open-source almanac library and two almanac websites.

18 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Colleagues talking around a meeting table with a laptop
Business

Accenture Disputes Reports of a $29 Monthly Claude Cap. The Change Is Who Pays Above It

The firm funds US$29 per employee centrally and sends heavier use to project budgets. Some staff had been spending up to US$1,000 a month.

17 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
Rows of Chinese characters carved into a weathered stone column
Chinese Culture

Most Chinese characters share their four-corner code with other characters

The four-corner code turns the stroke shapes at a Chinese character's corners into digits, a lookup method Wang Yunwu made public in 1926. In Unicode's table of 16,916 coded characters, only 6.7% have a four-digit code to themselves, and even the fifth digit leaves most sharing.

16 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
A wooden pyramid metronome with its pendulum swinging, on a table
Home & Living

Tempo charts disagree on how many beats a minute Andante means

Six published sources give Andante anywhere from 56 to 108 beats a minute, and by our count only 76 and 77 fall inside all of their ranges. Adagio and Moderato have no tempo that every one of those sources shares.

15 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
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