Alternative investments

The correct price of a diamond for investment is the result of specific elements.

Cities are growing worldwide and traffic as we know it will only get worse. Airbus Group’s urban air mobility division predicts that by 2030, 60% of the population will live in cities, up from 50% today.

The company hopes to have a working prototype of a self-driving flying car by the year’s end, CEO Tom Enders said at the DLD conference in Munich on Monday, reports Reuters.

In 2015, Swiss companies spent 15.7 billion francs in research and development (R & D), corresponding to an increase of 10% compared to 2012, the last year of data collection.
Switzerland is one of the countries where companies are most active in R & D, indicates today the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) in a statement.

Physical investments is the safest option right now

The UBS trading floor in Stamford, Connecticut, US, once the world’s largest, had more than 5,000 traders slamming phones and kicking trash cans and now it is up for sale, according to a person with knowledge of the offering, as Bloomberg reported.

UBS, which had owned the building, is responsible for its maintenance until its lease expires at the end of next year, the person said.

Fast forward to today and the near-vacant building, larger than a football field (approximately 720,000-square-foot), has been put on the sale block, since the Swiss bank hasn’t been able to restock its trader ranks after the 2008 financial crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The start-ups of the EPF Lausanne have already raised CHF 397 million and the counters of the year 2016 are still running. This is 50% better than in 2014 when they had raked 242 million, according to an EPFL statement.

The funds were raised by spin-offs created as a result of technology developed in an EPFL lab or created by a campus researcher, as well as companies located within EPFL’s Innovation Park, a tech community on the EPFL campus that hosts over 120 start-ups and 23 large companies including Intel, Logitech and Siemens.

Google is setting up its self-driving car unit as its own separate entity called Waymo under the Alphabet umbrella, the company announced today. The name is derived from its mission of finding “a new way forward in mobility.”

"We’ll continue to have access of infrastructure and resources Alphabet provides, but we also have this feeling of being a venture-backed startup," said John Krafcik, formerly CEO of Google Cars and now leader of Waymo, said at an event here Tuesday.

There were no details provided on Waymo’s business plan, although the mission is to bring the company’s technology to market and monetize it via a partnership with an automotive company.

On November 7, one of Israel’s leading diamond corporations, the Dalumi Group, announced that it had purchased a company called Zoara.com, an online luxury jewelry retailer that is active in more than 40 countries, selling loose diamonds, diamond engagement rings and diamond jewelry. Founded in 2008, Zoara.com is an e-commerce platform devoted to the exclusive sale of loose diamonds, luxury jewelry and precious gemstones. Operating on a multilingual and multi-currency digital platform, local versions of its website are available the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Valenzuela, Peru, Mexico, Spain, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. According to the announcement put out by the two companies, Zoara.com will now enjoy direct access to wholesale suppliers within the diamond industry, enabling it to present an updated online product catalog of luxury jewelry and more than 200,000 loose diamonds, which the companies said is unprecedented in terms of its volume and variety in the market.