Brand Stories
Barry Sternlicht Brings Back Starwood Brand – Full Timeline

Barry Sternlicht, who built Starwood into a hospitality giant before selling it to Marriott for about $13 billion in 2015, is reviving the Starwood name.
Sternlicht’s current hotel management company, SH Hotels & Resorts, will rebrand as Starwood starting in February, the New York Times reported.
The new Starwood is starting out significantly smaller than how its predecessor ended, with just 14 hotels across three brands (Baccarat, 1 Hotels, and Treehouse) compared to the original’s 1,300 properties and 11 brands.
However, the 64-year-old Sternlicht has ambitious plans, with 22 hotels in development through 2028. He said he would be willing to sell a stake in Starwood to help expand the pipeline more quickly.
Sternlicht’s dreams are taken more seriously than most in the hotel sector because he runs Starwood Capital Group, a private equity firm with over $115 billion in assets. Sternlicht was 11th on Skift’s recent Power Rankings.
An unanswered question is whether Starwood will introduce a loyalty program across the 1 Hotels, Treehouse, and Baccarat brands.
Starwood was an innovator in hotel loyalty programs. As loyalty expert Gary Leff noted, Starwood was the “first to market with ‘true redemption’ (any standard room was available for redemption on points) and suite upgrades for frequent guests, if available at check-in.” It also “launched innovative loyalty features like 24-hour check-in.”
Ask Skift: Timeline on how Starwood became a hotel empire
Starwood’s journey from a small real estate venture to a $12.2 billion acquisition target showed how innovation and strategic acquisitions can transform an industry.
Starwood’s story’s timeline from Ask Skift also hints at what Sternlicht might do as he resurrects the brand and his hotel empire-building aspirations.
Starwood’s Early Years
- 1991: Barry Sternlicht launches Starwood Capital Partners with $20 million, starting with buying Doral Inn in New York City.
- 1994: Sternlicht creates Starwood Lodging through merger of Starwood Capital assets.
- 1995: Partners with Goldman Sachs to buy the upscale hotel brand Westin for $561 million. Becomes “paired-share REIT” through the acquisition of Hotel Investors Trust.
Starwood’s Expansion
- 1997: Makes two game-changing moves — buys Westin ($1.8 bilion) and ITT Sheraton ($9.8 billion, beating Hilton’s hostile bid).
- 1998: Launches W Hotels by converting the Doral Inn, creating arguably the first branded boutique hotel chain.
The Innovation Years
- 1999: Introduces industry-changing Westin Heavenly Bed and Starwood Preferred Guest rewards program.
- 2010: Hits 1,000-hotel milestone globally.
- 2014: Pioneers keyless entry and mobile check-in.
The Big Exit
Accommodations Sector Stock Index Performance Year-to-Date
What am I looking at? The performance of hotels and short-term rental sector stocks within the ST200. The index includes companies publicly traded across global markets, including international and regional hotel brands, hotel REITs, hotel management companies, alternative accommodations, and timeshares.
The Skift Travel 200 (ST200) combines the financial performance of nearly 200 travel companies worth more than a trillion dollars into a single number. See more hotels and short-term rental financial sector performance.
Read the full methodology behind the Skift Travel 200.
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Brand Stories
When Trump Turns Artificial Intelligence into a Political Weapon

Tehran – BORNA – At the core of this plan is the Trump administration’s clear attempt to centralize power at the federal level and eliminate state authority in AI regulation. In the initial version of a new tax bill, a provision was included that would have banned any state-level AI legislation for 10 years. Although this provision was removed by the Senate with a decisive vote of 99 to 1, Trump continues to pursue this goal through indirect means.
Under this plan, only states that do not have “heavy” regulations on AI would be eligible for AI-related funding. However, the concept of “AI-related funding” is so vague that, according to experts, any discretionary funding, from broadband financing to support for schools and infrastructure, could fall under this definition.
Grace Gaddy, a policy analyst, warned that this ambiguity is intentionally designed to put states in a complicated position.
Will the FCC Become the Regulator of AI?
A more concerning part of the plan is where the President calls for the involvement of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in regulating AI. According to the plan, the FCC must examine whether state regulations pose a barrier to the agency’s duties under the Communications Act of 1934. However, the FCC has no prior experience in regulating algorithms, websites, or social networks and is not even considered a privacy authority.
Cody Vancek, senior policy advisor at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), stated, “The idea that the FCC would have oversight over AI is nothing but a distortion of the Communications Act. This agency is not a comprehensive technology regulator, and such authority has not been defined for it.”
One of the new executive orders signed by Trump in line with this plan is titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” which prohibits government agencies from using AI systems with “ideological bias.” The order stipulates that large language models must be “neutral, nonpartisan,” and “truth-seeking,” avoiding the reproduction of values such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Indirect Pressure on Technology Companies
While the government is trying to impose its ideological standards on AI providers, companies are facing a major challenge, including receiving government contracts or the risk of losing access to the massive government market.
OpenAI has introduced a version of ChatGPT specifically for government agencies called “ChatGPT Gov,” and XAI has launched “Grok for Government.” If these models are designed based on the government’s requirements, we will likely soon see the impact of these policies in public versions as well.
Legal or Illegal? That Is the Question
Many experts believe that the Trump administration’s attempt to prevent state-level AI regulation is likely legally indefensible. However, when a government repeatedly violates the law and the judiciary fails to take a stand, the “illegality” no longer serves as an effective deterrent.
About the author: Fateme Moradkhani covers technology, surveillance, and AI ethics for Borna News Agency, with a focus on global cyber power and digital militarization.
End article
Brand Stories
AI’s last mile just got a supercomputer, courtesy of ASUS and NVIDIA

They say that the most difficult part of transportation planning is last-mile delivery. A network of warehouses and trucks can bring products within a mile of almost all customers, but logistical challenges and costs add up quickly in the process of delivering those goods to the right doors at the right time.
There’s a similar pattern in the AI space. Massive data center installations have empowered astonishing cloud-based AI services, but many researchers, developers, and data scientists need the power of an AI supercomputer to travel that last mile. They need machines that offer the convenience and space-saving design of a desktop PC but go well above and beyond the capabilities of consumer-grade hardware, especially when it comes to available GPU memory.
Enter a new class of AI desktop supercomputers, powered by ASUS and NVIDIA.
The upcoming ASUS AI supercomputer lineup, spearheaded by the ASUS ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 desktop PC and ASUS Ascent GX10 mini-PC, wield the latest NVIDIA Grace Blackwell superchips to deliver astounding performance in AI workflows. For those who need local, private supercomputing resources, but for whom a data center or rack server installation isn’t feasible, these systems provide a transformative opportunity to seize the capabilities of AI.
Scaling up memory to meet the parameter count of large AI models
A key piece of the puzzle for accelerating locally run AI workloads is available GPU memory. If a given model doesn’t fit into local memory, it may run very slowly, or it may not run at all. The 32GB of VRAM provided by the highest-end NVIDIA consumer-grade graphics card on the market, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, is sufficient for many smaller models. But scaling up your system’s VRAM to handle models with even more parameters isn’t necessarily a straightforward affair.
Multi-GPU systems are a feasible solution for some users, but others have been looking for a solution that’s designed specifically for the needs of AI workflows. By equipping the Ascent GX10 and ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 with large single pools of coherent system memory, we’re able to put astonishing quantities of memory at your fingertips. The Ascent GX10 wields four times as much GPU memory as a GeForce RTX 5090, while the ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 offers up to 784GB — over twice as much GPU memory as a workstation equipped with four NVIDIA RTX PRO™ 6000 GPUs.
AI supercomputer performance in a desktop PC form factor
Designed from the ground up for AI workflows, the ASUS ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 will be one of the first pioneers in a new class of computers, based on the NVIDIA DGX station.
This system is powered by the NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip. Featuring an NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPU and an NVIDIA Grace CPU connected via the NVIDIA® NVLink®-C2C interconnect, this superchip provides a slice of data center performance in a desktop workstation. Even more so than today’s high-end desktop systems, the ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 ensures that businesses and researchers can develop and run large-scale AI training and inference workloads thanks to up to 784GB of large coherent memory.
It all runs on the NVIDIA AI Software Stack including NVIDIA DGX OS, a customized installation of Ubuntu Linux purpose-built for optimized performance in AI, machine learning, and analytics applications, with the ability to easily scale across multiple NVIDIA DGX Station systems.
The AI supercomputer in the palm of your hand: the ASUS Ascent GX10
The ASUS ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 is much easier to deploy than a solution based on rack servers, but there are situations where even a desktop-class form factor is still too large. The ASUS Ascent GX10 democratizes AI by putting petaflop-scale AI computing capabilities in a design that you can hold in the palm of your hand.
The ASUS NUC lineup demonstrates our proven expertise in offering complete PC experiences in ultracompact designs. No mere iterative step forward, the Ascent GX10 takes our experience in the mini-PC market and melds it with the groundbreaking performance of the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. This superchip connects a Grace CPU with 20 Arm cores with a robust Blackwell GPU through NVIDIA® NVLink®-C2C technology. All told, it delivers up to 1,000 AI TOPS of processing power, with 128GB of coherent unified system memory allowing the system to handle 200 billion parameter AI models.
Need the Ascent GX10 to handle even larger models, such as Llama 3.1 with its 405 billion parameters? Integrated NVIDIA® ConnectX®-7 Network Technology allows you to harness the AI performance of two Ascent GX10 systems working together.
Part of a complete AI solution set
ASUS stands out from every other manufacturer on the market with the breadth of AI products that we’re able to offer. The ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 and Ascent GX10 slot into a complete lineup that meets the needs of AI enthusiasts at every level. For those looking to build their own AI PC out of consumer-grade components, for those who need AI performance built into their everyday laptop, for enterprises who need a single-rack AI server solution, even for those institutions looking to design, deploy, and operate a data center for AI applications, the ASUS product portfolio is ready.
Yet the ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 and Ascent GX10 are far more than mere additions to our AI product stack. The jump from AI PC to AI supercomputer is nothing less than revolutionary, and these systems give you this level of performance in a complete turnkey solution that fits on a desktop.
Aspects of these systems are still in development, but we’ll share more details as soon as we’re able. In the meantime, explore how ASUS can help your organization seize the capabilities of AI.
Brand Stories
ALL Accor Booking & Loyalty

ALL.com and the ALL.com app deliver seamless digital booking and so much more. This true one-stop shop for travel and daily life sits at the heart of how we deliver exceptional guest experiences while driving measurable growth and value.
Greatest choice, best price: easily accessible and seamlessly bookable, All.com amplify brand visibility and showcase hotels to attract new guests.
Diversifying our offer: ALL.com places our complete ecosystem – from restaurants to meeting solutions and more – at clients’ fingertips, unlocking incremental revenue for our properties.
Powerful business driver: ALL.com delivers visibility, scale, and reputation, driving direct booking, fostering long-term loyalty, and reducing distribution costs for hotel owners.
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