Who is popular today?

Irish property investor Tetrarch Capital has teamed up with the Michael J Wright hospitality group to seek planning permission for a €10 million redevelopment of Howth Castle to transform it into a retail, food and tourist destination. Ciarán Hancock has details of the plan.
The Central Bank is right not to rush to authorise fintechs such as Revolut to provide products and services in the Republic, Minister of State for Financial Services Séan Fleming has said. Charlie Taylor reports on Mr Fleming’s comments, which come just two days after Revolut announced it had dropped plans to use the e-money licence it had been offered by the Central Bank to offer banking services such as personal loans to Irish customers.
The topic also features on this week’s Inside Business podcast.
A Christmas spending splurge by consumers generated more than ¤3 billion in VAT receipts for the Government in January. This was €400 million more than in the first month of 2020, before Covid hit. Eoin Burke-Kennedy has more on the latest exchequer data.
Meta Platforms, the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, beat Wall Street estimates for quarterly revenue on Wednesday but disappointed on forecasts. Its shares fell.
Ciara O’Brien takes a deeper look at Meta, tracking exactly how Facebook has moved into the metaverse.
Activity in the Irish services sector picked up in January as confidence was boosted by the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, the latest purchasing managers’ index (PMI) from AIB shows. Laura Slattery reports.
Karlin Lillington reckons Neil Young, who created a rumpus by removing his music from Spotify, may have given the digital music and podcast service exactly the kick it deserves. Your monthly subscription – if you pay at all – does not reflect the value of anything but the easy, exploitative monetisation of others’ work by giant platforms, she writes.
Spotify on Wednesday night meanwhile forecast weaker than expected subscriber expectations for the current quarter, sending its shares down 15 per cent in late trade.
In our Innovation section, Frank Dillon considers a book from Mahadeva Matt Mani that outlines seven imperatives for achieving change in a business. Smart companies, he writes, focus on building differentiation in what they do and how they operate rather than on what they sell.
Olive Keogh profiles Michael Guerin, the the founder of Imvizar, an augmented reality start-up focused on making it as easy to access AR content as the aforementioned Spotify makes it to access music. 
Catch up with all of our Innovation stories here.
This week’s tech review features the Oppo Find N 5G, the foldable phone that could be yours for just over €1,000, but only if you live in China, at least for now. Hopefully this will change soon, writes Ciara O’Brien, because this phone is a contender.
Stay up to date with all our business news: sign up to our business news alerts and our Business Today daily email news digest.