New Florence. New Renaissance.

Real-time travel auditor

With corporate customers, Yapta loads its software into travel department booking systems. It doesn't charge for the service but takes a cut of the savings, usually about 35%, Mr. Filsinger said. With consumers, use of the tracking tool is free. Companies, like consumers, can set a threshold on minimum savings before an alert is sent, to take into account change fees and other expenses. The company recently launched a similar system to check for falling hotel room prices, but so far that's offered only to corporate travel departments and not consumers.

The bigger the fare, the bigger the potential savings, so travel managers say they have seen their most eye-popping results on international business-class tickets.

One Friday, Al Mazzola, director of travel services at Sykes Enterprises Inc., a Florida technology-consulting company, booked a $19,000 business-class ticket from Tampa to Shanghai and back, only to see it fall to $7,000 over the weekend. With the Yapta alert, the company grabbed the new price. "I was stunned. I've never seen savings like that,'' Mr. Mazzola said

WSJ

Infograph Credit

 

“Systems of Advantage” at OOW

In contrast to Larry Ellison’s keynote last night which focused on systems of record and systems of engagement that Oracle is delivering in the cloud, Mark Hurd this morning had 8 CIOs representing some of the most complex enterprises in the world. They represent over 1.2 million employees and annual revenues of nearly $ 340 billion.

The contrast was striking – these CIOs are focused more on the term we coined ‘systems of advantage” in The Digital Enterprise. They have plenty of IT architects, they build plenty of custom systems, they are pushing the envelope on a wide range of supply chain, product, customer facing, globalization areas

Tim Theriault of Walgreens, whose mobile apps I have written about before, discussed their complex supply chain which provisions lobsters to stores in the Northeast and Elvis pictures in Vegas. He discussed home health care Walgreens sees an opportunity in since 2/3 of the US is within 3 miles of a store. He later told me they are using a “light” electronic patients record system from Greenway.

Jamie Miller of GE talked about the Industrial Internet (see here) . She talked about simplification efforts – core processes at scale with cloud like models, and innovation at the edge.

Filippo Passerini of P&G talked about global supply chain issues to keep shelves stocked to not disappoint 4 billion consumers that use its products. He described social listening as they do several product launches year, and the significant data visualization technologies they have deployed.

Yael Cosset of dunnhumby, which describes itself as a “customer science” company, talked about the Big Data of “consumer digital breadcrumbs” and the personalization and consumer engagement opportunities. He also talked about the future of “quantified self” data that wearable technologies are generating and opportunities for healthcare and CPG companies.

Albert Hitchcock of Pearson talked about the challenges in the educational publishing industry, talked about homogenization of customer data.

Stephen Little of Xerox talked about a transition from a manufacturing to a services business (they acquired ACS a few years ago and even the copier business is more about services). In a later breakout he described trends in vertical BPO (“smart city’ work and healthcare particularly healthy) and the far more competitive ITO market.

Rob Carter of Fedex talked about the large number of infrastructure, platform and business services they leverage. He has long been a “rock star” CIO and the SOA effort at such a large company is one of the most complex they have invested in

Kimberly S. Stevenson of Intel talked about IT productivity they have invested in – virtualization etc and now they are focused on business productivity as they move into wearables, mobile devices and other formats as the PC market has matured.

The session could easily have gone another couple of hours. As an example, once a year, GE does a full day update on the Industrial Internet and they break it out by impact on major verticals like Aviation, Healthcare, Oil & Gas, Power & Water and Transportation.

My favorite session at OOW!

Lockers evolved

Swapbox runs a network of computerized kiosks that let users cheaply send as well as pick up packages at their convenience, going a step beyond Amazon Lockers.

Bloomberg

Super Glues

About 27 pounds of adhesives go into the typical car today, up from 18 pounds a decade ago, said Daniel Murad, chief executive of ChemQuest Group Inc., a Cincinnati consulting firm.

In aerospace, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner illustrates adhesives' growing importance. About half of the Dreamliner airframe is made of carbon fiber. The fuselage is produced by wrapping a mold with tape "impregnated" with epoxy, and baked under pressure to bond materials. Each of the air frame's five sections uses between 40,000 and 50,000 fewer metal fasteners than conventional airliners, Boeing said.

WSJ

Photo of hot melt adhesives from H B Fuller

A celebration of urban innovation

National Geographic Traveler’s piece on smart cities covers wide ground from Harbin, China, Tallinn, Estonia to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Photo below of rotating pods at Canton Tower in Guangzhou, China

Sailing Stones

GPS tracking and time-lapse imaging helps solve one of life’s mysteries – how heavy stones slither across Death Valley in CA.

Courtesy of Scripps Oceanography

 

The five-figure bike

Prices for elite bicycles are soaring. High-performance materials, such as titanium and carbon fiber, and more advanced components, including electronic gear-shifting systems, drive up costs. The average wholesale price of a bicycle sold at specialty shops, which generate the most dollars in U.S. bike sales, jumped 75% in 2013 from a decade earlier, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association.

And bicycle enthusiasts, typically wealthier than average and competitive, seem willing to pay for the most advanced bikes available.

Trek, a leading bicycle manufacturer, offers seven stock models priced at more than $11,000. A growing number of small companies make hand-built bicycles, which can be far more expensive than mass-produced ones. Ben Cox, owner of the Newbury Park Bicycle Shop, in Newbury Park, Calif., says he sells five to 10 bikes a week at $10,000 or more. For a handful of his customers, Mr. Cox says, "there is no ceiling."

WSJ

 

City built from scratch

On completion developers say Lusail (in Qatar) will become home to more than a quarter of a million residents, and be capable of hosting tens of thousands more at its array of luxury hotels.

Lusail is formed by four islands and includes two luxury marinas, the 56,000 square metre Marina Mall and the enormous 241-acre Entertainment City which will include a giraffe zoo, a snow park and a Six Flags amusement park.

The mall is set to open in 2017 and its design, based on desert canyons, includes roofs that repel the heat, a body of running water and water falls throughout its five interconnected pods that boast cinemas, restaurants and retail outlets.

Residents and visitors will move around getting around on a light-rail network, an underground network tunnels for pedestrians and water taxis, they will also have access to two golf courses.

As with all the proposed developments that formed part of the appeal for FIFA delegates when awarding the world's biggest sporting event to Qatar, the major elements of the city will be environmentally friendly - the stadium, complete with a solar-powered cooling system so players and fans don't bake in the summer desert sun, will have no carbon footprint.

All amenities, including energy, transport and communications systems will be run out of a single hub so the city can react to issues such as weather and traffic in a streamlined manner - surveillance cameras will also populate the city for security purposes. 

Daily Mail

Not your Dad’s ERP skillsets

I have written a longer blog post about Inforum last week here. But in the days since, I have been thinking about the skillsets Dr. Ziad Nejmeldeen, Chief Scientist at Infor, talked about at the Dynamic Science Lab he leads with several MIT alum. The graph below describes some of the science they bring in their backgrounds.

Infor's captive design agency, Hook + Loop on the other hand now has over a hundred “creative” staff with credentials such as Pulitzer Prize winner for Infographics, Digital Effects Editor of the movie The Avenger and fashion designer for Kenneth Cole.

Charles Phillips CEO, spent a significant portion of his talk on Amazon Web Services, the “super computer” they leverage for scaling cloud computing. Another different set of infrastructure skills.

It’s a long way from the engineering, sales and support staff that most ERP vendors have traditionally recruited.

It truly is a very different world.

Zappos Insights

Back in 2008, we started a new department called Zappos Insights. The purpose of this is to help external groups learn about the Zappos culture and hopefully to inspire other companies to think about how to use happiness as a business model for customers, employees, and business partners. In just the past three and a half years, we have had more than 50,000 people come through our free tours and in-depth training.

Our intent isn't to create Zappos clones or to push the Zappos core values on other organizations. Rather, we share the process and stories of creating core values--whatever they may be--and living by them. Research has shown that it actually doesn't matter what your values are. What matters is that you have them and align your entire organization around them. The power comes from the alignment rather than the actual values themselves.

Tony Hsieh in Inc