The relentless growth of social media platforms has driven fundamental change. This year, a Rubicon will be crossed as, for the first time, digital media advertising revenues are expected to outstrip the advertising spend in traditional media. This will usher in change far, far beyond anything imagined in a narrow commercial context.

The ongoing, possibly escalating, housing crisis is a symptom of failed government policies, particularly the decision to stop building social housing and to rely instead on the whims of the market, developers, and financiers.

WHEN Capitol Records releases a new remix of the classic Beach Boys hit ‘Good Vibrations’ in the coming months, AudioSourceRE will be credited with the software that brought the original mono tracks into stereo.

SOMETIMES, it’s wise to forget or at least to pretend to forget so that age-old divisions might be resolved.

HUMANITY passed a milestone in recent decades. For the first time, more of us live in cities than in rural settings. 

ANY link between the Grenfell inferno — at least 58 dead — and a black plastic bag made by a company that has not existed since 1956 being unearthed, in pristine condition, on a beach may seem tenuous. 

Innovative CIT student Vincent Forde has won two leading business awards within a week — CIT Entrepreneur of the Year 2016 and Accenture Leader of Tomorrow 2016.

CIT-based business incuation hub The Rubicon Centre has secured a €2m contract with Enterprise Ireland to continue delivering its entrepreneur development programme New Frontiers for the next five years.

Early results from a technical examination of a suspected mass grave in Co Clare have revealed “significant” evidence of underground disturbances, consistent with the presence of human remains.

A Cork business has found a novel way to help couples secure a wedding venue, writes Trish Dromey.

Irn-Bru maker AG Barr said today its sales had fallen flat amid a competitive and volatile market.

An East Cork community is to lobby the Government for special heritage status for sites of interest in the area, which hosts a bomb factory dating from the War of Independence.

Funding on the up at CIT’s Rubicon

The Rubicon Centre is Ireland’s leading business incubation hub and home to some of the country’s top business start up specialists.

Tomorrow the people of Scotland will vote on those most powerful and seductive ideas — the freedom to manage their own affairs and the intoxicating prospect of ending a relationship with a once-brutal and dominant neighbour that Scottish nationalists have, for centuries, described as exploitative, limiting, outdated, unwelcome, and a tarnished relic of a kind of Rudyard Kipling imperialism no longer acceptable, in Europe at least.

Tánaiste Joan Burton has warned it would be foolish to let the country’s savings fritter away and strongly indicated any reward for people who struggled through the recession will be on a small scale, year by year.

I remember when August 15 was the turning point in summer. A last festival, both holiday and holy day. It was the end of the builders’ holidays (and for lots of other businesses that closed for the first two weeks in August, too).

Archaeological experts believe human remains of at least four people found during digging for a new Luas line in Dublin could date back to the Vikings.

The remains of at least five people have been found by archeologists under the ground at College Green.

It is only a matter of a few years since more people lived in rural communities rather than in cities. That this Rubicon has been crossed has all sorts of implications and will probably mean that we will have to live in ever more compact homes and forego the pleasures of gardens and private green spaces in urban settings.

The pounding inflicted on Labour by an angry electorate was of such shock and awe proportions it even forced senior figures out of the bunker of victimhood they have locked themselves in for the past two years.

Cork-based luxury soap producer Hajni Kele of Mianra Artisan Soaps aims to capitalise on recent demand for her products and is keeping her eyes open for potential export opportunities in the long term, writes Trish Dromey.

For those with money to invest, and there are still many of those out there in the Irish economy, these are interesting, uncertain times.

Drinks brands Lucozade and Ribena were today reported to be a £1bn takeover target for the owner of Irn-Bru.

The consensus view is that the ECB will keep the main interest rate on hold today, but its president Mario Draghi may signal the he is looking at unconventional ways of boosting lending to the wider economy.

As Dragons’ Den returns, Sue Leonard meets three women who shunned the recession to go it alone in business

I FIRST heard of Páidí Ó Sé from John Long, who played with me on the 1970 Kerry minor team. John often referred to a young emerging star who he felt would be a future football phenomenon.

Drinks brands Robinsons squash and Irn-Bru are to be poured into the same company after their makers unveiled a £1.4bn (€1.75bn) merger deal today.

A cluster of emerging Cork-based firms have been succeeding against the economic odds in recent years.

The cuts to home-help and home-care services may be a foretaste of December’s budget but that does not make them in any way palatable.

THE western end of Cork City suburb Sunday’s Well once hosted a prison, a Good Shepherd Convent Magdalen Asylum, and two pubs.

SO thorough and so well thought out is, Árd Stiúrthóir, Páraic Duffy’s discussion paper on GAA amateur status and payment to managers, finally released this week, that it seems all that is left for today’s gathering in Croke Park to do is firstly to decide upon which of the three proposed intervention options is least likely to leave the Association open to charges of double standards and secondly to assign figures to any putative payments to inter-county managers.

HEADLAND Archaeology (Ireland) Ltd in Cork is rebranding as Rubicon Heritage Services and opening new offices in England and Scotland as part of ambitious growth plans, following a management buyout.

IN a world more characterised by change than ever before, farming, and the tens of thousands of jobs that flow from it, remains a cornerstone of this society and this economy.

EUROCRATS and politicians still conspire to ensure that the truth is obscured about our future debt destiny.

JUST as we seem to be coming to terms with our new and grim normality, and what we must do to survive it, the possibility of a whole raft of price increases for motorists loom. Once again, the goal posts are about to be moved.

THE British government has published a consultation paper that may allow the North’s power-sharing executive to reduce the region’s corporation tax rate to 12.5% — the same as Ireland’s.

A BUSINESS incubation hub, which opened a major extension yesterday, was hailed by the Taoiseach as one of the most successful of its kind in Europe.

TAOISEACH Brian Cowen will open a new €85 million cardiac and renal centre at Cork University Hospital (CUH) tomorrow.