For all the concern over automation removing jobs from the workforce, companies like Blueprint are actually helping to ease a labor shortage that has crimped construction of residences and commercial properties across the country. The plants enable developers to fill the gap by having houses and apartment buildings manufactured off-site, for less money and in a fraction of the time. Even Marriott International Inc, the world’s biggest hotel operator, is increasingly turning to modular construction for some of its properties.
Labor costs are more favorable for factory construction, according to David Reed, vice president of Champion’s modular division. Workers make about $15 to $20 an hour in rural Pennsylvania. That compares with $50 to $100 an hour in the markets the manufacturers serve, like New York’s Hudson Valley, and the Washington, D.C., area, Reed said.
Builder Kris Megna works with Champion to create houses as large as 10,000 square feet (930 square meters) in the pricey suburbs of Boston. Megna, 31, who founded Dreamine Modular Homes in 2010, said almost any custom design is possible, even though the modules can’t be much bigger than 60 feet by 16 feet (18 meters by 5 meters). Walls between sections can be knocked down for open-concept kitchens, and cutouts can create vaulted ceilings, he said.
“The house is 60 percent complete when it arrives, and that means 60 percent of the headaches of building are gone,” Megna said.
The most coveted jobs are in Silicon Valley, and most selective US universities are members of the Ivy League. So it stands to reason that tech giants like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook would scoop up best and brightest from those bastions of power and privilege.
Think again. None of the eight Ivy League schools—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania—cracked the top 10 on a list of the universities sending the most graduates to tech firms, according to an analysis by HiringSolved, an online recruiting company.
“I want fire-breathing dragons, or I need it to rain and thunder to get a show going ... I need something really, really amazing to happen up there to get people’s attention.”
Jennifer Donner Smith, Senior Director, Corporate Events at Oracle, shared she has wanted a dramatic open since the first SuiteWorld event in 2011.
With a move of the show from San Jose to Las Vegas this year, she got her wish and lots more and it made for an awesome show - “Next starts Now” the week before.
Watch the video of the opening keynote below. There is so much going on in each frame - then follow along with some of the geeky details that Jennifer and Jeffrey Welk of the production company, Tencue shared with me
The LED Wall
The wall was 50 feet wide by 16 feet high. We used to do projection for that size of screen and our first design was to do a typical projection onto a flat surface, a screen surface. It turns out LED has evolved so fast and so far that we could have the same quality of image at almost the same price point as doing projection. So that was near 4k imagery in LED in a 50 foot screen. And again, two years ago, the capability didn't even exist, and last year it would have been probably twice the price if not five times the price. It also was built onto a lightweight carbon fiber frame which allowed us to do minimal rigging. The LED was mounted on simple chain motors so that we could move the large screen up and down it in and out. When you first walked in it was sitting literally on the floor and flew up about six feet during the opening performance just to give it a different kind of background, different motion.
The 3D mapping
A year ago, we surveyed the keynote room. We did a full 3D pointer array map of the physical exhibit hall so that we could lay out the project with great accuracy in the design phase. It was all HD projection on the white plaster walls of the building. It was 230 feet of projection surface composed of six stacks of projectors. Each stack was 60,000 lumens, so it was a phenomenal amount of projection power on it. That's the equivalent of 360 of the type of projectors you use in your office.
It's controlled by a piece of equipment called a Watchout, which has the detailed pixel map built into the template and therefore we could easily add the content, whether it was video content during the opening, or still content during the presentation. The image size, I believe about I think 9,000-10,000 pixels wide. So, beyond 8K in terms of actual projection quality or image quality.
The imagery
Tencue and a creative agency, Bodie Group generated the actual presentation that you saw on the LED and the coordinating images that were on the back wall. As each speaker's slides were being edited we'd have an idea and we had an on-site designer, who would pull new content ideas. We'd review it quickly, put it into the system and put it on the wall to see if we liked it. Some of the photography was original and some was computer generated. A lot of color enhancement, a lot of compositing in order to create some of that 3D stuff. Remedy Editorial, a creative agency created the opening building scene with the office environments pulsating and vibrating.
The fire pods
Each fire pod had four propane canisters and you choose to set off one, two, or four of them for it to, as far as the height and intensity of the burst and then you pre-selected time or length of burn. Usually when we do indoor pyrotechnics of this type, there is much more stringent Fire Marshal requirements, but these specific types of fire pods are designed for close proximity. And so we only needed to create a 15 foot barrier around each fire pod.
The Haka Dancers
In their business suits earned a Maori compliment of Ka pai! from analyst Ben Kepes who is from New Zealand. "There is a large Hawaiian population in Las Vegas and we got in touch with Hula group and they were enthusiastic. So, no they were all local to Vegas."
The rapper
Lyrics Born, a Japanese-American rapper played MC throughout the keynote in his red and gold kimono
The cadence
So these were a lot of really intentional decisions in terms of how we could keep this experience moving forward for the audience and not feel static. Music selection, whether it was hip-hop music or more rock-and-roll varied dependent on who the presenter was and whether they were following Lyrics Born and those interstitials that Lyrics Born to set up each segment. That's something that (President) Jim McGeever requested. he wanted more, what we describe as texture, he wanted things to happen, cause he had so many different customers coming up on stage, so, on his urging, we came up with the idea of Lyrics Born doing those little set-ups for the industry, for each vertical segment. And we think that added a really nice narrative story to the keynote. Also, NextFest – our Wednesday gala was a 90's theme with special unannounced guests so we teased that with both the old and the new mix in the morning keynotes.
The Vegas edge
You can’t compare. Las Vegas is set up for this kind of thing. And we certainly had gotten to a point that remaining in San Jose was not an option.. It was an enormous upgrade just in the sense of the resources that you have ... across the board, not just for the keynote, but things need to be fixed, there's people to reprint things, ample overnight rooms and space, décor resources etc. Vegas is singular in the world. there's no comparison to the scope and scale of events that can take place in Vegas.
The three elite runners chosen for what Nike christened the Breaking2 project — Kipchoge of Kenya, Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea, and Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia — were set to race 26.2 miles around 17.5 laps of the junior circuit at Monza, all wearing Nike’s controversial and undeniably fast new shoe, the Vaporfly Elite. The race began at 5:45 am local time, in darkness, in front of around 700 spectators and with the runners attended by a pace car, which shot out a green laser line to guide a retinue of all-star pacemakers including Bernard Lagat.
Eliud Kipchoge, the world’s best marathon runner, missed breaking the 2 hour barrier by just 25 seconds.
One of the key innovations of the Breaking2 initiative has been its pacing structure, a blockading diamond of six pacers to shield the runner from wind, which has been tested in wind tunnels to be the most advantageous to a following runner. A total of 30 pacers were split into teams of three runners, who each were instructed to run 4.8 km at two-hour pace, three times. (There were also pacers held back to help contenders who dropped behind.) These teams of three flowed in and out of a diamond formation in a transition area at the top of the home straightaway.
AutoDraw is a new kind of drawing tool. It pairs machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help everyone create anything visual, fast. There’s nothing to download. Nothing to pay for. And it works anywhere: smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc.
AutoDraw’s suggestion tool uses the same technology used in QuickDraw, to guess what you’re trying to draw. Right now, it can guess hundreds of drawings and we look forward to adding more over time.
Companies now fight “presenteeism,” a neologism that describes the lackluster performance of foggy-brained, sleep-deprived employees, with sleep programs like Sleepio, an online sleep coach, and sleep fairs, like the one hosted last month in Manhattan by Nancy H. Rothstein, director of Circadian Corporate Sleep Programs and otherwise known as the Sleep Ambassador, for LinkedIn. For the last few years, Ms. Rothstein has been designing sleep education and training programs for a number of Fortune 500 companies. At the LinkedIn sleep fair, she taught attendees how to make a bed (use hospital corners, please) and gave out analog alarm clocks. (It was her former husband’s snoring, she said, that led her to a career as a sleep evangelist.)
In fact, the dogged pursuit of an airborne escape from traffic has been with us for more than half a century, from the limited-edition Aerocar of the 1950s to the host of contemporary companies now taking pre-orders for their airborne vehicles.
Dutch startup PAL-V announced last week that it was taking $10,000 deposits for its $400,000-and-up two seat Liberty flying car, while Slovakia-based AeroMobil began doing the same for its $1 million-plus machine due out in three years. Both models would require a runway and a pilot's license.
Other big players include Massachusetts-based Terrafugia, whose XF-T looks like a car with wings folded by its sides and, notably, can take off and land vertically, using so-called VTOL technology. The company's site claims flying an XF-T won't require a full pilot's license.
BusinessWeek describes the recent opening of the Pandora theme park at Disney World, and has a nice graphic which shows how it has successfully replicated characters in its movies into faves for visitors to its parks
“The theme park industry views Pandora as Disney’s response to the Wizarding World and the company’s attempt to reassert itself as the industry’s leader. Nobody doubts Disney’s prowess. The bigger question is whether it has chosen the proper vehicle in Pandora. Avatar remains the highest-grossing movie of all time, with box office receipts of $2.8 billion, however it hasn’t grown into a Potter-order super franchise with millions of ardent fans. Chapek declines to mention Universal by name, let alone concede that he might be feeling any competitive heat. He does say it’s nice that his company’s closest rival has discovered the virtues of theme park world construction, but that Disney created this business and will continue to define it with its forthcoming attractions.
“We will set a new bar,” Chapek vows. And he isn’t just talking about Avatar. He’s referring to another new attraction, scheduled to open two years from now in Anaheim and Orlando. This one is based on a fictitious universe as big and lucrative as Harry Potter’s: Star Wars.”
Retail-giant Walmart has recently filed a patent which details the use of drones designed to move products inside stores.
According to the patent, an airborne drone will be dispatched to fetch an item located within a retail shopping facility and bring it back to the delivery area within the store.
The drones will be equipped with sensors and 3D map technology to ensure that they stay on their designated space. The drones are expected to fly above shelves rather than on aisles to avoid accidents with customers.
Elon Musk's 'Boring Company' revealed its massive tunneling equipment and plans to dig tunnels under Los Angeles.
For context, a few months ago, Musk announced his interest in digging underground tunnels for cars to reduce traffic, launching a company called The Boring Company.
His vision (for the fellow Angelenos out there) involves being able to travel from "Westwood to LAX in 6 min"… which could otherwise take an hour during rush hour.
Current state-of-the-art tunneling technology is very slow and expensive (for reference, subway extension projects today cost about $1 billion per mile, and a snail can travel 14x faster than current tunneling tech).
The Boring Company aims to create a 10x improvement in the price of tunneling.
Silicon Valley’s fave recruiting grounds
The most coveted jobs are in Silicon Valley, and most selective US universities are members of the Ivy League. So it stands to reason that tech giants like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook would scoop up best and brightest from those bastions of power and privilege.
Think again. None of the eight Ivy League schools—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania—cracked the top 10 on a list of the universities sending the most graduates to tech firms, according to an analysis by HiringSolved, an online recruiting company.
Quartz
May 09, 2017 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)