New Florence. New Renaissance.

Google Earth and an incredible journey

“For years, Saroo would stay up late at night poring over maps and imagery in Google Earth, trying to find a place that would match his 20-year-old memories of childhood. He remembered a water tank, a bridge, a fountain near a movie theater. He knew that the station where he'd been separated from his brother started with a 'B.' He thought his village was called "Ginestlay," but couldn't find it on any map. In a nation as vast and as densely populated as India, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

And then, after years of wandering Google Earth, he spotted a promising-sounding train station called Burhanpur, and traced the railway tracks north to the city of Khandwa. There it was: not Ginestlay, but a neighborhood called Ganesh Talai. Close enough! He flew to India, but when he arrived at his childhood home, it was dark and locked. Luckily, a neighbor knew where his family had moved to, and he was quickly reunited with his mother and siblings. The power of cartography!”

Conde Nast Traveler

The story is now on the big screen. Very well done. Trailer below

 

 

“A thousand flies could not be wrong”

During my recent round the world trip we had a chance to try all kinds of meals that foodies would appreciate. But we also made it a point to try out humble places -  many which don’t take reservations, don’t take credit cards, and yet serve a wide range of freshly cooked and raw food.

And some of them are even getting recognized by foodies like Hawker Chan in Singapore which has qualified for a Michelin star. Singapore loves the hawker concept and has several collections where you can get everything from fish and chips to a shrink wrapped slice of papaya to a ready to drink and eat baby coconut.

We hit a gem in Abu Dhabi called Lebanese Mill. Lines form for this place where you can get traditional mezze – hummus, falafel etc, and a decent roast chicken.

Mumbai is dotted with small cafes like Prabhakar Tea House. They serve udipi snacks like dosai and idli and a soft drink or a cup of sweet, milky tea for about 50c. Funnily if you ask for bag of tea and hot water to brew your own cup, the price triples

In Hong Kong we ran into places like Amy’s Kitchen. You could drive by it hundred times and not notice - in picture below it is behind the silver van. Given the name, we expected a menu in English but had to point to pictures on the menu. The shrimp curry turned out halfway decent!

As they say eat where the locals do. Not sure I could advise though that you drink what they drink

Lifelong learning

General Assembly, for example, is just one of a number of coding-bootcamp providers. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by companies such as Coursera and Udacity, feted at the start of this decade and then dismissed as hype within a couple of years, have embraced new employment-focused business models. LinkedIn, a professional-networking site, bought an online training business, Lynda, in 2015 and is now offering courses through a service called LinkedIn Learning. Pluralsight has a library of on-demand training videos and a valuation in unicorn territory. Amazon’s cloud-computing division also has an education arm.

Universities are embracing online and modular learning more vigorously. Places like Singapore are investing heavily in providing their citizens with learning credits that they can draw on throughout their working lives. Individuals, too, increasingly seem to accept the need for continuous rebooting. According to the Pew survey, 54% of all working Americans think it will be essential to develop new skills throughout their working lives; among adults under 30 the number goes up to 61%. Another survey, conducted by Manpower in 2016, found that 93% of millennials were willing to spend their own money on further training. Meanwhile, employers are putting increasing emphasis on learning as a skill in its own right.

The Economist

How emojis are born

The universal set of emoji are “regulated,”for lack of a better term, by the very unsexy- and unfunny- sounding Unicode Consortium, which gives each approved emoji its own universally recognized, unique code. The nonprofit consortium is an alliance of big tech companies,
including Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook and others, that pay an annual fee of s18,000 to vote on characters and other text decisions. Having one central coding depot ensures that devices created by competing companies recognize each other’s text and symbols. Emoji make up just a small percentage of the many text codes issued by the organization. The process of creating new emoji takes about 18 months from start to finish, and anyone can submit applications to the consortium for a new icon, along with the reasoning behind it.

Delta Sky magazine

Photo Credit

The Dyson dynasty

Dyson may be the world’s most interesting engineering and design firm. It’s not just because they manufacture 40,000 inventive products a day, from high-end vacuum cleaners to fans with no blades, but because it’s a multi-billion dollar empire that’s owned, not by shareholders, but by one man, its founder, James Dyson.

James Dyson is approaching 70, and of three children, he has one son who has been anointed his successor: Jake. (His other son is a musician, while his daughter is a fashion designer.)

FastCompany

 

 

Carnival’s Cruise of the Future

For the Carnival cruise of the future, the personalization will begin at home, when you start choosing exactly what to book. Then your Medallion arrives in the mail. A small disk, about the size of a quarter and laser-etched on the back with your name, you wear it on a bracelet of your choice. Inside, the Medallion has long-range and near-field sensors, so that all the sensors on the ship can pinpoint exactly who you are, and where you are. Equally as important is the app, dubbed Compass, which you can access to change your itinerary and make new bookings for restaurants and shows. The choices you make, the tours you tap on to find out more, even the places you linger the longest on the ship all become fodder for machine-learning algorithms that try to map what you’ve done to what you’re most likely to enjoy.

FastCompany

Photo Credit

Raptor AR glasses

Connected via Bluetooth to an associated app, the GPS-enabled glasses are meant to offer a better option over some smart glasses that place an eyepiece on the lens, potentially partially obstructing a rider's view. In addition to the app component (promised for both iOS and Android), the glasses also offer a side interface that can be operated using swipe gestures, allowing the cyclist to operate the glasses without stopping or taking his eyes off the road. The company says the Raptor will also offer handlebar and voice control interfaces to control its functions.

Mashable

The smart nursery

Your infant starts crying, and instantly the room's baby monitor snaps into action. The lights come on. A soothing lullaby begins playing. Mom and dad get notifications on their smartphones.

That's just one of the scenarios Mattel sketched out for Aristotle by Nabi, a $299 voice-controlled smart baby monitor that the toymaker is announcing at CES.

USA Today

 

 

Drones in the construction industry

For builders, the case for return on investment is straightforward. Drones are cheaper to fly than manned aircraft and faster than human surveyors, and they collect data far more frequently than either, letting construction workers track a site’s progress with a degree of accuracy previously unknown in the industry. With the right computing tools, builders can turn sensor data into 3D structural models, topographical maps, and volumetric measurements (useful for monitoring stockpiles of costly resources like sand and gravel). Collectively, that intelligence allows construction companies to more efficiently deploy resources around a job site, minimize potential issues, trim costs, and limit delays.

Fortune

The Spirit of Pan Am 001

Most of us have only a foggy memory of Pan Am, the airline which went into bankruptcy in 1991. In its glory days, the airline was a pioneer in many ways including as charter customer for the jumbo jet, the Boeing 747. And it launched the first round-the-world scheduled service way back in 1947. PA Flight 1, a DC-4, would fly out of San Francisco and make several stops in the Pacific and end up in Calcutta, India. There it met Flight 2, a Constellation that had flown eastward from New York, and flew back through stops in the Middle East and Europe.

Pan Am continued to evolve the RTW service and rotate the stopovers in the decades that followed, including places like Beirut and Teheran, few international airlines service any more. Periodically it would run variations of the flight for diehard RTW fans. An example was flight Clipper 50 in 1977 (to celebrate its 50th anniversary) which straddled both the North and South poles. Passengers paid $ 3,333 in first and $ 2,222 in economy on a record setting journey that took 54 hours, 7 minutes and 12 seconds and covered 26,706 miles.

Competitors would take pot shots that Pan Am could not technically fly a RTW since Pan Am did not have rights to the domestic New York to California segments but flying on PA 001 became a bucket list item for many travelers.

And even for business travelers the RTW fare was attractive if they could stay within the many rules that went with the fare - one direction only, no back tracking, no more than 12 stopovers across the globe, all travel within 6 months, changes to itinerary required a change fee, traveling south of the equator added a significant premium etc.

When I accepted an assignment for Price Waterhouse in Saudi Arabia in the mid 80s, I was determined to fly RTW at least once. Being a "hardship" assignment, Price Waterhouse would pay for 2 annual business class trips back to the US. I negotiated instead to use the budget to get RTW fares in economy. When you have boring nights in places like Yanbu, you have time to plan the comply with the many rules of RTW fares. I also found that if you originated your journey in London (which back then had number of bucket shops) you could get significantly better value and choice in airlines. I managed to do the RTW three times.

Unfortunately, Pan Am was in terminal decline by that stage. And I had many scars to show from long delayed flights, lost baggage, rude service, and honestly it killed my appetite for long range air travel. I fly a couple of international flights a year now but don't particularly enjoy them even when upgraded.

Fast forward to 2016. Planning to be at a wedding reception in India in December, and with a couple of business meetings planned on the way, I told my kids we ought to consider a stopover in Europe and one in Asia on the way back, providing they found us good fares and used frequent flyer miles. In other words, craft a RTW itinerary without the shackles of all the fare rules. Find they did - many point to point flights and the itinerary grew and got personalized to each of our schedules. Our stops were in Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore and Hong Kong and we used those for side trips to Abu Dhabi, Delhi/Agra and Macau. Between us, we flew Air France, Air India, Delta, Emirates, Hainan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Southwest and Tiger. (And even MetroJET, though that is a hydrofoil service not an airline)

As I do after such family trips I have a 200 page report on all the stuff we experienced and saw. It was an amazing trip and we were blessed with lovely weather and few delays. But here's a quick look at what is different in the three decades since I flew the RTW trips on Pan Am - besides of course the fact that we could build our own routing.

There is incredible choice in airlines, most of them affordable, especially one-way in economy class. The equipment is much newer. On the trip we flew mostly 777s, A330s, 787s, 737-700s - most under 10 years old. The planes all had decent seat back entertainment, power charging facilities and a wide array of navigation information. Internet availability is still a bit sketchy. And pleasantly decent leg space on every segment - I am 6 2 and usually fussy about that.

In just about every respect, the in-flight experience was better than that on the 20 year old 747s I flew on Pan Am. The couple of negatives - carry on luggage guidelines are still too confusing and stingy, so each flight we added a little more check in time in case we had to shuffle stuff around. There was meal service on most flights and choice of 2-3 cuisines on every flight - as a result the service seemed rushed on flights less than 4 hours.

The quality of airports is so much better. Mumbai has an impressive new airport with 30+ 100 foot columns but Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong put it to shame with the volume of traffic they support and the facilities in their airports. They are shopping malls, art galleries, movie theatres and more. Immigration in each was a breeze - short forms, pleasant greetings, digital passport scanners ubiquitous. So much so that my wife remarked that US immigration coming home seemed unwelcoming in contrast. The negative of these airports - because of their size and distance from main cities, you have to plan 3-4 hours each way.

Put an RTW on your bucket list. Just don't try to do it in 54 hours like Clipper 50 did! And splurge and do it in business or first.

And if I can help with your planning, drop me a line.