Rolls-Royce took delivery of the “Queen of the Skies” airplane at AeroTEC’s flight test center in Moses Lake, Wash., US, after it flew from Qantas’ home port of Sydney, Australia. During an extensive two-year transformation, AeroTEC engineers and technicians will convert the Boeing 747-400 from a commercial aircraft with 364 passenger seats to a state-of-the-art flying testbed equipped with extensive instrumentation and systems to take sophisticated measurements of engine performance in flight.
The crux of Skywave’s comfort is that in adjusting the seat it changes the points at which gravity puts pressure on various parts of the body.
Rather than reclining a backrest, raising a footrest, or adjusting the angle of the seat pan independently, a single movement allows all of these changes to happen at once and to be adjusted regularly. As a concept, it is truly fascinating and an impressive foray into industrial design.
“For this kind of very zero gravity concept, we are testing the market,” Drago says, explaining that the company is thinking of products like Skywave with exceptional seating comfort offered alongside sleeping options in a seat-plus-bed suite style.
CB Insights is not your old analyst firm. It says "We aggregate and analyze massive amounts of data and use machine learning, algorithms and data visualization to help corporations replace the three Gs (Google searches, gut instinct and guys with MBAs) so they can answer massive strategic questions using probability not punditry."
They have identified 14 trends (summarized below). Sign up here to get the detailed report.
"Today we’re taking another big step by making the biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history. This purchase is made up of a 1,600-megawatt (MW) package of agreements and includes 18 new energy deals. Together, these deals will increase our worldwide portfolio of wind and solar agreements by more than 40 percent, to 5,500 MW—equivalent to the capacity of a million solar rooftops. Once all these projects come online, our carbon-free energy portfolio will produce more electricity than places like Washington D.C. or entire countries like Lithuania or Uruguay use each year.
Our latest agreements will also spur the construction of more than $2 billion in new energy infrastructure, including millions of solar panels and hundreds of wind turbines spread across three continents. In all, our renewable energy fleet now stands at 52 projects, driving more than $7 billion in new construction and thousands of related jobs.
To ensure maximum impact, all of our latest deals meet the rigorous “additionality” criteria we set out long ago for our energy purchases. This means we’re not buying power from existing wind and solar farms but instead are making long-term purchase commitments that result in the development of new projects."
Clockwise from top left: Wind and solar projects that currently serve Google in Sweden; North Carolina; the Netherlands; Oklahoma; and Chile.
Welcome to the age of the ultra-marathon flight. Qantas just ran a test flight nonstop from New York to Sydney. As Time describes
"The research on the passengers and crew will feed into Project Sunrise, Qantas’s plan to start direct commercial services connecting Sydney with New York and London. Other super-long flights from Australia’s eastern seaboard to South America and Africa might follow, Qantas says.
On board, Joyce tells me he’ll “absolutely” roll out this flight’s regime on his other long routes — if the science shows it helps. The trick is accommodating those who want to drink and snooze at will, Joyce says.
But don’t go booking your round-the-world flights just yet. Qantas needs new planes from Boeing or Airbus SE that can do the job with a full load of passengers, and a new deal with crew to work longer than 20 hours."
Of course, no airline can help you with jet lag after you land, and even less when you turn around a few days later.
So, it is good to see a new generation of apps to fight jet lag. From Wired
"Every frequent flier has a trick to outrace jet lag, but Beyer-Clausen’s come-to-Jesus moment came when he met Steven Lockley, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and an expert in circadian rhythm studies. Lockley has worked with astronauts and Formula 1 race car drivers to improve sleep quality through light exposure.
Together, he and Beyer-Clausen designed the Timeshifter app. It joins several others in the App Store that promise to beat jet lag: Entrain, a free app, similarly leverages light exposure to reset circadian rhythms. Uplift, for $10, offers a few physical exercises based on “biorhythmic acupressure.”"
A new breakthrough out of Tufts University, just published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, could fast-forward us into a new era of wearable electronics that are woven like clothing, and even might be sewn into our skin and organs to track our health.
The scientists developed a transistor out of linen thread. That means the thread can transfer electricity like an insulated wire, be turned on and off instantaneously like a processor, and connect a network of sensors on or inside your body.
A Quartz reporter says "Earlier this week, I managed to do something that’s generally been impossible in New York City: I didn’t take my wallet out for two days straight, and still managed to pay for food, get around, and live my life. I didn’t even have to try."
He talks about Apple Pay, Apple Card, Square readers, how government issued IDs are going digital - soon we may not need a wallet for any credit cards, driver's license, cash.
He also talks about how keys and key holders are disappearing.
So, can we start predicting the end of trouser pockets?
Sure, but bear in mind blue jeans still have the pocket that was used for watches in the 1800s and coins since. May be it is waiting for the key fob which may soon compete to take over home access and also some payment tasks from the phone?
Lots of innovation at the USPS as it looks next-gen delivery trucks, drone delivery, in handwritten address deciphering and much more.
This is about something more modest but in some ways even more impressive in its elegance.
Last Thursday night, I was staring at 5 emails from the USPS like the one below, spaced every three minutes. They represented letters to the IRS or and other entities for which I needed a certified return receipt. I went to the USPS office at 9 pm when no human was working, but I had the kiosk (officially called the Automated Postal Center) all to myself. It weighed my envelopes, asked me to confirm the zip codes (the USPS says it delivers to nearly 160 million addresses in the US) , ran my debit card, printed stamps and bar codes for me to affix. Then it emailed my receipts.
The digital receipts each had a tracking number I could link to on the USPS site and monitor progress. This morning, I have 4 PDF files of the return receipts with the electronic signatures - am waiting for the final one. Impressive how digital the whole process.
Just a few years ago, and for most customers even today (there are only 2,900 of these kiosks across the country compared to over 32,000 retail locations), it meant waiting in line for a human during business hours, writing out the paperwork and getting a return receipt card in your mailbox. Then you digitized that on your own. No way you could have that turned around in 2 business days.
3 minutes for each of my transactions felt long. The kiosk screen flow could be improved, especially when you have multiple transactions. However, the certified letter has one of the more complex menus on the APC. There are far simpler transactions like buying stamps or renewing your P.O. Box.
As I was filing our quarterly Form 941 last week, it hit me that we have entered the last quarter of this decade. As I flew into LaGuardia on Monday, it took me back two decades to my time at Gartner. In October 1999, there was nervousness about the damage Y2K could cause, but also euphoria at the phenomenal few years many tech vendors had enjoyed. The introduction of the euro promised another bonanza for the near future. Enterprise vendors, particularly two sectors that I followed - enterprise applications and service providers - had reason to feel very good about themselves.
In New York I heard an optimistic Mike Salvino , the new President and CEO of DXC, at a HfS event. I heard similarly optimistic (for different reasons) Cognizant executives at one of their events the day before - they also have a new CEO. I also kept up with the celebratory mood at HRTech in Vegas virtually.
At Gartner, I had followed SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and their SI partners. CSC, EDS and HP Services were players back then. They continue to live on in the form of DXC, founded a couple of years ago. Cognizant had revenues of less than $ 100 million in 1999. It has grown like a rocket with over $16 billion in revenues now. HRTech was only 2 years old in 1999. But the backwaters of the HR function had led the client/server applications market. This time around, it has similarly led the cloud applications market.
There is lots to appreciate and applaud.
However, the even bigger lesson of the last couple of decades is the many missed opportunities. Outsourcers missed out on the cloud infrastructure market. It was theirs to lose and so far, players from left field like Amazon and Microsoft have benefited. After 20 years of cloud applications (Salesforce was born in 1999), application vendors can barely cover 20% of the country/industry grid. At the HfS event last week, the biggest attention was on robotic process automation (RPA). Hardly any talk of Amazon's Kiva warehouse robots, or UPS's drones or other operational automation. Or automating the labor intensive outsourcing space. CRM vendors completely missed out on the digital advertising market. Google, Facebook, and digital agencies have made out like bandits in the vacuum. SaaS vendors had an amazing business model which bundled multiple contracts - the license, the maintenance, the hosting, the application management - into one. Then they got greedy like their on-premise competitors. I saw Bruce Rogow, my former Gartner colleague in New York and he told me he sees how in his travels he see CIOs struggle with new opex/capex funding paradigms. Instead of delivering a knock out punch, SaaS vendors mostly co-exist with their on-prem competitors. Outsourcers saw every one of their clients develop smart products and let contractor manufacturers like Foxconn and Flex dominate that market. They have let GE, ABB and others generate excitement about the IoT space.
Vendors ask me, what's next? Blockchain, machine learning, quantum computing, sure. But much bigger opportunities will persist from those missed in the last two decades. A new generation of vendors will move in. Vendors will cannibalize each other. And here is the most important nugget. Customers learn from their mistakes - I am seeing that in the new wave of SAP related services. In writing my recent book, I saw much more caution about using SIs as they implement S/4HANA. There is a "fool me twice, shame on me" vibe.
So, forget about doing business as usual. The best thing every vendor can do as we enter a new decade is to be introspective, even if Wall Street is pleased with your performance. Ask the tough questions - how the hell did we miss as many markets as we did? And how do we re-organize to make sure and not miss so many markets again?
Exciting times ahead.
I will let you in on a secret. I have been to all kinds of intimidating places in my travels to 70+ countries. However, nothing scared me more than a underground station in Tokyo on my first visit there in 1984. The unfamiliar maps and signs, the large crowds and the thought I would end up somewhere where no English was spoken all conspired and I turned around and took a taxi.
On our recent trip to Japan, I was glad to have my wife with me. I was thankful my daughter built an itinerary which allowed to build courage on relatively simpler train networks in Osaka and Kyoto before we tackled Tokyo.
How complex is the Tokyo train grid? Metropolitan Tokyo has nearly 900 interconnected train stations. The busiest station - Shinjuku - handles over 3.5 million passengers a day! In the 35 years since my first visit, the grid has become much more complex, but in some ways much more pleasant. We particularly enjoyed the Yurikamome autonomous, over ground, waterfront transit line. It is relatively new and you can see the elaborate urban planning and see how the city keeps expanding even as it prepares for the 2020 Olympics. It is the green line in the Southeast of the city in the map below. We took it across 14 stops and were awestruck how thin and tiny it looks compared to the rest of the network.
I am glad we tried out all kinds of trains in Japan. It punctuated how trains are the fabric of the country as they carry over 22 billion passengers a year. Train stations there are hubs of social activity. We stayed in hotels in Osaka and Kyoto near major stations. We ate in the nearby underground food courts. We learned about Ekiben - bento boxed meals, sold on trains and train stations in Japan. We saw 7-Elevens near every station with their own selections of sandwiches and snacks (unbelievably, there are over 20,000 7-Elevens in Japan).
We learned about train etiquette - food and drink ok on long distance trains, not on local ones. Speak in whispers, no mobile phones. There are posters which parody train "jerks" who don't follow norms. In contrast, there is a whole generation of train nerds - nori-tetsu, people who enjoy traveling on trains; yomi-tetsu, those who love to read about trains, especially train schedules; oto-tetsu, the people who record the sound of trains; sharyo-tetsu, fans of train design; eki-tetsu, people who study stations; and even ekiben-tetsu, aficionados of the snack boxes sold at stations. The cars are strikingly clean and safe. It was jarring to see young girls under 10 get on the trains on their own and go to school in their tidy uniforms.
Our favorite train was the Shinkasen, the bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo in a little over 2 hours at over 175 mph. The more I asked about it, the more fascinated I got. 25,000 volts overhead are converted via pantograph to kinetic energy across the 16 cars. There are regular ultrasonic checks for cracks in the wheels and immaculate calibration of the 128 wheels. There is a body incline system which offsets the centrifugal forces across curves at that speed. A diagnostic version of the train painted yellow, called Dr. Yellow, runs over every foot of the rail network every few days and the crew documents specific issues that nighttime crew come and repair. Dr. Yellow is a celebrity. Parents bring their kids to cheer the train every time it comes through town. They are the next generation of Japanese train nerds.
In a country plagued by earthquakes, they have rail-side sensors which provide early warnings of tremors so the trains can be slowed down or stopped. At that speed, anything less would be catastrophic. So far, the train has delivered an amazing safety record.
The Shinkansen platforms have their own fascinating nuances. Braille markers show where specific cars stop. Automated safety barriers which only open when the train has come to a complete stop. Displays which are accurate to the second for trains which rarely run late even when snow and fog affect performance.
Watch this Smithsonian documentary for more mind-boggling details of this high-speed network.
Not surprisingly the trains in Japan have developed their own unique set of jobs. There are “pushers” who literally push people into crowded trains during rush hour. There are cleaning ladies dressed in pink who clean out every Shinkansen train in under 10 minutes. We saw a lady employee at one of the stations with this unusual gadget. It helped her retrieve a mobile phone which had fallen on the tracks. Like they say, they have seen everything and plan for even more.
On my next visit, I will make time for the Train Museum in Nagoya and try out the simulator for the Shinkansen. Maybe I will time it for 2027 - the next-gen magnetic levitation version will be ready by then. Early tests show it will double today’s speeds!
The Saudi oil bounceback
From Fortune
In the wee hours of a sweltering Saturday in September, a volley of missiles and aerial explosives pierced the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry. The attacks knocked out about 5% of global oil production almost immediately, yet one month later, they might as well never have happened.
Saudi Aramco says it’s currently pumping 9.9 million barrels a day, the same as before the Sept. 14 surprise attacks at Abqaiq, the world’s biggest oil-processing facility, and the field at Khurais. While the attacks laid bare Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability to major disruptions, Brent crude has slid below where it was beforehand, trading Monday at less than $60 a barrel."
Here's how:
* Using crude in storage to meet customer contracts
* Swapping some cargoes of light grades with medium or heavy barrels
* Cutting domestic refinery runs and buying fuel abroad
* Contractors worked non-stop to repair units
* Spare and redundant capacity allowed Aramco to rely on processing units that weren’t running at the time of the attacks
October 26, 2019 in Globalization and Technology, Industry Commentary, Logistics, Supply Chain | Permalink | Comments (0)