Matulji threw another banger food event where Portuguese chef Inês Beja teamed up with local guy Vinko Frlan at Stancija Kovačići restaurant. The six-course collab mixed Kvarner specialties with authentic Portuguese dishes, and sommelier Antonio Ramos paired everything with Portuguese wines. Beja runs a Michelin-starred spot in Viseu and brought recipes from her 94-year-old grandma, who's been cooking for the family forever.
Tickets sold out within three days, which is pretty wild. County prefect Ivica Lukanović showed up and talked about how these dinners put the whole Kvarner region on the map globally. Mayor Ingrid DeBeuc was hyped about local producers working together, and Beja admitted she didn't expect this level of...
The EU just greenlit co-financing for Hrvatski Telekom to build private 5G networks at three Croatian airports, and the whole thing costs 5.6 million euros. Brussels is covering 3.09 million euros through its CEF Digital program, beating out 28 other projects across Europe. Zagreb, Zadar, and Pula are getting the smart-airport treatment with dedicated networks that'll boost security, operational efficiency, and passenger experience.
Hrvatski Telekom is handling full network management, which means airports can digitalize faster without dealing with the usual connectivity headaches. The private setup lets each airport customize the infrastructure to match its specific requirements, and the flexibility should future-proof operations...
Croatia's about to flood its railways with 70 brand-new trains by the end of next year, and the whole package costs 360 million euros. State Secretary Tomislav Mihotić dropped this info at the Via Vita congress in Rovinj, where 400 transport nerds gathered to talk infrastructure. He hyped up a massive six-billion-euro railway upgrade over the next ten years, calling it the biggest investment wave the country has seen in decades.
On the roadside, contractors just got introduced to a 160-million-euro expressway project linking Požega to the motorway. Construction is already rolling on the Podravina Y and a Varaždin-to-Krapina expressway section. The Istrian Y motorway should wrap up in 2027, when electronic tolling goes live nationwide.
Brits and Germans keep spamming Skyscanner with Croatia searches, hitting 13.4 million and 12.4 million queries respectively over the past year. Poland, Finland, Belgium, Greece, and the Czech Republic showed the biggest jumps in interest, while Split, Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Zadar, and Pula dominated the most-searched cities globally. Rijeka and Pula are blowing up as travelers hunt for less-hyped spots.
The platform reps think Croatia could brand itself as a premium Mediterranean vibe compared to Turkey, Portugal, Greece, Spain, and Italy. Trends for next year point toward beauty tourism, multi-generational family getaways, summer mountain trips, and book-inspired destinations. Travelers are apparently hitting up local grocery stores to...
Vodacom Tanzania teamed up with VISA, Alipay, Network International, Magnati, and MTN Uganda to let M-Pesa users tap their phones for worldwide payments through a tokenized card system. The setup lets Tanzanian traders pay Chinese merchants via Alipay connections powered by Thunes, hit up Dubai shops through TerraPay networks, and send money straight into MTN MoMo wallets across the border in Uganda.
Epimack Mbeteni from Vodacom said the partnerships create seamless cross-border transactions that feel as easy as local payments while cutting costs for small businesses trying to operate internationally. Victor Makere at VISA mentioned the tokenization tech keeps card details hidden during contactless payments anywhere their network runs...
EasyWill just dropped in the UAE as the country's first completely online system for writing and registering legally binding wills without ever touching a lawyer's office. The platform runs on AI trained specifically on UAE federal inheritance laws and handles everything from drafting to translation to court submission through the Abu Dhabi Civil Court. Alessandro Console says the whole thing cuts out consultation fees and courthouse visits while spitting out documents that meet Abu Dhabi Judicial Department standards automatically.
The timing lines up with DIFC Courts seeing a 14 percent jump in will registrations during early 2025 as more people grab property across the Emirates and want control over how their assets get distributed...
Milestone Systems is dropping a generative AI plugin for its XProtect video software that was built with NVIDIA to help security operators deal with alarm spam. The tech automatically writes incident summaries and validates events to cut down false positives, which could slash operator fatigue by around 30 percent, according to the company. Louise Bou Rached from Milestone said the system supports UAE goals to hit top-tier smart city status while handling traffic management and public safety ops.
The plugin runs on their Hafnia Vision Language Model that got trained on 75,000 hours of ethically sourced footage and uses NVIDIA Cosmos tools for data prep and processing. Cities like Genoa and Dubuque are already testing it out for traffic...
Kingston Technology is pushing Gen 5 NVMe SSDs into the Middle East as cloud platforms and AI workloads keep hammering infrastructure across the region. The DC3000ME and FURY Renegade G5 drives hit 14,000 megabytes per second with high IOPS, which helps enterprises train models quicker and run analytics without choking on data bottlenecks. Antoine Harb from Kingston said the region is moving past AI testing phases into actual deployment, and storage speed is becoming the make-or-break factor for scaling operations.
The company is positioning itself as more than just a memory vendor by targeting hybrid cloud setups, robotics, edge computing and real-time processing use cases. Kingston keeps pushing the 3-2-1 backup strategy for data...
Dubai Chambers and e& UAE just locked in a partnership to hook up small businesses and startups with custom telecom packages that actually make sense for their operations. The deal focuses on getting smaller companies access to communication infrastructure without the usual corporate pricing nightmares, while helping them scale up using the city's digital backbone.
Khalid AlJarwan from Dubai Chambers said they want entrepreneurs leveraging advanced tech systems to grow faster, and Esam Mahmoud from e& UAE mentioned their service ecosystem should speed up digital transformation for emerging businesses. The whole thing ties into Dubai's economic plan to triple its GDP and crack the top three global business hubs by hitting 2033 targets.
