Shopee is the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan. In just four years, Shopee has grown from just 10 employees to more than 1,500. Shopee's new 6-storey regional headquarters at Kent Ridge spans 244,000 sg ft and can accomodate up to 3,000 employees.
The new headquarters is designed with the main overarching concepts of promoting connectivity, collaboration and community.
Shopee is a platform tailored for the region, providing both buyers and sellers with an easy, secure and fast online shopping experience through strong payment and logistical support.
With a wide selection of product categories ranging from consumer electronics to home & living, health & beauty, baby & toys, fashion and fitness equipment, Shopee aims to continually enhance its platform and become the region’s e-commerce destination of choice.
By 2027, the National Environment Agency (NEA) will complete the building of 20 new hawker centres, located in different parts of Singapore to serve the needs of residents. To date, seven of these new hawker centres have been completed and have started operations. Experience from the last four years shows that new hawker centres largely take time to establish themselves. As more hawker centres are built in the coming years, a new Staggered Rent Scheme will be introduced to support stallholders’ businesses in the initial years of the new hawker centres’ operations.
After a hiatus of almost 30 years, the new hawker centre building programme started from 2011 to ensure that residents have continued access to affordable food in a hygienic environment. To date, seven new hawker centres have been built and are managed by socially-conscious enterprises, of which two have gone on to their second term of operation. In their regular review of hawker centres, a key learning point is that new hawker centres take time to establish themselves. Time is generally needed to raise potential patrons’ awareness of these new centres and for the stallholders at the centres to build up a regular clientle and stabilise their businesses.
13 more new hawker centres will be completed by 2027. With the Staggered Rent Scheme, stallholders of these new hawker centres will benefit from lower rentals in the first two years of the centres’ operations, at 80% and 90% of stall rentals respectively. The upcoming hawker centre at Bukit Canberra, targeted to be operational in the second half of 2020, will be the first new hawker centre to benefit from the implementation of the Staggered Rent Scheme.
As part of the Ministry of Education’s continuing efforts to support students with Special Educational Needs (SEN), Pathlight School will operate a second permanent campus in Tampines from January 2023. This was announced by Second Minister for Education, Ms Indranee Rajah, during her visit to Pathlight Campus 1, where she also recently officiated the opening of its inclusive worksite.
Established by the Autism Resource Centre (Singapore), Pathlight is a government-funded Special Education (SPED) school, which offers the national curriculum to students with moderate-to-severe SEN, and students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To address the growing demand from students with ASD who are able to access the national curriculum, the new Campus 2 will provide about 500 additional primary level school places.
The new purpose-built campus will be located at the site of the former East View Primary School at Tampines Street 91. The site was selected based on the geographical distribution of Pathlight’s current demand, and the site’s close proximity to mainstream schools such as Junyuan Primary School and St Hilda’s Primary School. Such physical proximity will enhance opportunities for interaction through joint activities, between Pathlight students and their peers in mainstream schools.
To support learning for Pathlight students, the new Campus 2 will have infrastructure provisions similar to mainstream primary schools, plus specialised facilities to cater to the needs of students with ASD. These include an Indoor Sports Hall, a daily living skills room, and therapy rooms.
Currently, Pathlight has two campuses, with about 1,400 primary, secondary and vocational track students. The interim Campus 2 will continue to serve its students when the new Campus 2 starts operation in January 2023.
MOE will continue to monitor and review the demand for SPED school places, and will work with Social Service Agencies to provide sufficient capacity to cater to the needs of specific student profiles. Please refer to the Annex for more information on MOE’s ongoing efforts to meet demand for places in SPED schools.
The Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) urban training facilities built in the 1990s comprise clusters of low-level buildings replicating traditional shop houses and provision shops, without performance measuring instrumentation. Up to the early 2000s, these facilities had met SAF's training requirements and served the SAF well. Going forward, with more built-up areas, the Next Gen SAF requires better urban training facilities to deal with the new security threats and challenges that Singapore now faces. This need for SAFTI City (The Singapore Armed Forces Training Institute) was announced by the Minister for Defence at the Committee of Supply Debate in 2017.
Scheduled to open progressively from 2023, SAFTI City, jointly developed by the Singapore Army and the Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), is designed to meet the evolving defence needs of the SAF, and to support training for a wider range of operations from peace to war. These operations include homeland security, counter-terrorism, and disaster relief operations. Its infrastructure will provide a realistic and challenging training environment for soldiers.
Built on current military training area, the key features of SAFTI City are:
a) Realistic and Challenging Training Environment. An integrated Transport Hub comprising a bus interchange, an MRT station with multiple surface exits, high-rise interconnected buildings, dense building clusters, multiple road networks, as well as other public amenities such as shopping centres, will allow for a realistic and challenging training environment.
b) Configurable Buildings and Changeable Road Networks. Built-in swing panels allow traffic flow and buildings to be configured to training needs. This will allow soldiers to encounter a different layout of buildings and street landscape each time they train in SAFTI City.
c) Smart Technology. SAFTI City will also be a smart city, leveraging smart technologies to enhance training effectiveness and soldiers' learning experience. Smart technologies include:
(1) Targets with Shoot-back Capability. Soldiers and smart targets will be equipped with sensors for monitoring and data capturing. When smart targets are engaged, they can respond by shooting back and retreating from the location.
(2) Battlefield Effects. Battlefield effects, which include the use of smoke and blast simulators, will be used to enhance training realism.
(3) Data Analytics. Battlefield instrumentations and video cameras will be employed to track the troops' real-time actions. Furthermore, training performance will be collated and processed by a data analytics system to provide accurate feedback to the troops on their individual and team performances. With gamification integrated into the training and detailed individual feedback, individual soldiers and teams can benchmark their scores against each other, motivating them to improve further. These technological improvements enable the SAF to train more efficiently and effectively.
Phase 1 of SAFTI City will have over 70 buildings, including three 12-storey blocks, simulated underground facilities, and urban training structures. With a total estimated gross floor area of 107,000 m2, phase 1 of SAFTI City will be able to accommodate brigade-level training.
Lifestyle company Zouk Group have announced that they will be launching US Burger Joint, Five Guys in Singapore.
The Five Guys franchise outlet is slated to open in the last quarter of this year in a "central" area.
In 1986, Five Guys opened its first location in Arlington, Virginia as a family-run restaurant named after five brothers.
Five Guys founder Jerry Murrell's mother always told him, "If you can give a good haircut or if you can serve a good drink at a bar or if you can serve a good hamburger, you can always make money in America."
Skyports and Volocopter have announced a cooperation to build the first mobile Volo-Port for air taxis. UK-based global vertiport owner and operator Skyports and air taxi pioneer Volocopter unveiled plans for the Volo-Port – the physical landing pads for so-called eVTOL (electric take-off and landing) – through stunning designs produced by internationally renowned agency Brandlab.
Ground-based vertiport infrastructure is critical to the success of future urban air mobility (UAM), including air taxi operations in congested cities. Construction of the first Volo-Port will be completed later this year. The partners plan to build it in Singapore for the scheduled public flight trials in the second half of 2019. A full-scale Volocopter vehicle is on display at the Greentech festival.
The Volo-Port prototype will:
Enable real-life testing of the full customer journey to perfect the passenger experience;
Showcase planned customer services, including pre-flight checks, passenger lounges and boarding procedures;
Allow practical testing of ground operations and services, including battery swaps and charging, maintenance, safety and security;
Provide the opportunity for authorities and industry regulators to interact with the infrastructure and provide feedback before they are asked to approve the final design.
Vertiports are the only physical infrastructure required for air taxis to commence operations in cities in the near future. Volo-Ports are designed to provide passengers with a seamless air taxi experience that is safe, secure, and relaxing. They will merge with their surroundings, allowing passengers and passers-by to see through the whole structure.
The Land Transport Authority (LTA) has released the Land Transport Master Plan (LTMP) 2040 report. This report encapsulates LTA’s long term plans to build a convenient, well-connected, inclusive and fast land transport system that will meet the needs and aspirations of Singaporeans over the next two decades and beyond.
The LTMP 2040 report contains detailed responses to recommendations made by the LTMP Advisory Panel (LAP) in February 2019 and accepted by the Government in March 2019. These recommendations were the product of extensive public consultations led by the LAP and facilitated by LTA officers. Over 7,400 responses were received from commuters, transport workers, academia, industry partners, unions, students and interest groups over six months. Their ideas helped to shape the Panel’s nine recommendations, which were grouped under three key themes – A 45-minute City with 20-Minute Towns; Transport for All and Healthy Lives, Safer Journeys.
To realise the goal of a 45-minute city with 20-minute towns, LTA will continue investing in public transport to make journeys more seamless and convenient. By 2040, new regional hubs outside the city will also bring jobs closer to homes, thereby shortening the average time taken to travel to work. We will also continue to expand the active mobility network to facilitate first-and-last mile journeys. Overall, commuters should have more time to live, work and play.
The LTMP 2040 report unveiled several key public transport enhancements. These include the expansion of the rail network, including several new stations and rail lines which will be developed over the next two decades.
Two new MRT stations will be opened on the North South Line (NSL) by the mid-2030s. Brickland Station will be added to the NSL. Located between Choa Chu Kang and Bukit Gombak stations, it will give residents in areas such as Keat Hong, Bukit Batok West, Pavillion Park and the Brickland district in Tengah town easier access to the rail network.
Click here to read more details about this masterplan project.
In year 2022, residents of Bidadari estate will be able to enjoy a new regional park. This announcement was made by the Housing and Development Board (HDB). Bidadari Park is a multi-agency collaboration between HDB, national water agency PUB and the National Heritage Board (NHB).
The 10-hectare Bidadari Park will feature a lake, a 700 metre heritage walk, a 6-km experiential trails and a play area for children.
Apart from retaining of more than 350 mature trees in the area, the park will also be welcoming more than 2,000 new trees.
“At strategic locations, observation decks, viewing sheds, and pavilions will serve as tranquil rest spots for visitors, offering different views of nature in a rustic and naturalised setting,” said HDB.
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