What we’re tracking in Egypt on 3 November 2016
Okay, so is there anything else going on in Egypt this Morning? Why yes. Funny you should ask. A handful of notes below, then we’re back to the FX crisis in Last Night’s Talk Shows.
The Emirates NBD / Markit PMI is due out at 6:15am today. Sadly, we’re not holding our breath in anticipation of it reversing the trend of the past 12 months. Have faith, though: At least we’re not Hong Kong, where the October reading “marked the twentieth straight month of contraction for Hong Kong’s private sector,” the Financial Times reports.
The two-day EU-Arab World Summit opens today in Athens. Investment Minister Dalia Khorshid, Federation of Egyptian Chambers of Commerce president Ahmed El Wakeel and Chamber of Chemical Industries chief Sherif El Gabaly are all due to attend.
Microsoft launching a “Slack killer.” iSheep though we may be, we’ve made no secret of the fact that we really like what Microsoft boss Satya Nadella has done with the company’s product line. If you’ve wanted software in the vein of group message app Slack (think “IRC on steroids” for the greybeards among you) but are deeply embedded in Office 365, you’ll want to check out the new Microsoft Teams this morning. The full launch won’t come until sometime early in 2017, but a product preview is available this morning. The Verge has more. Microsoft’s announcement is here. You can also check out the Teams promo video (watch, run time: 2:07) or, for the Slack loyalists among you, read Slack’s full-page New York Times ad welcoming Microsoft “to the revolution” on Slack’s blog.
The World Series of baseball ends tonight. We’ve never been fans of that particular game (though we’re appreciative that it was, for years, the only forum in which a black man could publicly wave a bat at a white man in America and not be lynched), but we do like drama. And you can’t have grown up steeped in Americana not appreciate this: The Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians have waited a combined 176 years to win a World Series. Tonight, one will celebrate, the other will be brokenhearted,” writes the New York Times.