New Florence. New Renaissance.

Forget national airline. How about a national space agency?

Santa Maria is the southernmost island of the Azores archipelago, about 850 miles west of Portugal. Its serene weather, white sandy beaches, and seclusion have made it a peaceful destination for tourists. That’s about to change.

Over the next few decades, Portugal plans to convert this tiny piece of land surrounded by ocean into one of the world’s busiest spaceports. The country wants rocket launches of satellites and spacecraft to occur with a frequency rivaling that of planes taking off from a small airport. It wants to attract international customers who will get involved in Earth observation and remote sensing, telecommunications, space tourism, and even asteroid mining.

And Portugal is not alone in venturing into the space economy in this way. No fewer than 13 countries have established brand-new space agencies in just the past decade, the majority of them in the last five years. Aiming to fill lucrative niches that NASA and the other space behemoths have overlooked, these agencies from unlikely places are making strong plays at partnering with a commercial sector that’s hungry to stake claims in the expanding space economy. The age of the small space agency is here.

MIT Technology Review

 

Luxembourg is making a bid for space mining

 

 

Building a "hurricane proof" island

The Climate Resilience Execution Agency of Dominica (CREAD) has attempted to climate-proof as many aspects of life as possible: healthcare, transportation, energy and agriculture. Efforts include the banning of plastic on the island (because of infrastructure problems with collecting trash and bringing it to a landfill).

If all goes according to plan, Dominica will be able to bounce back from the next inevitable hurricane in a matter of weeks rather than years.

Travel and Leisure

Despite Dominica’s ambitions, the first climate-resilient island may actually be 200 miles away in the French West Indies. “St. Barts was as hurricane-proof as any island could be,” says Nils Dufau, president of Tourisme de St. Barts. Because of the island’s wealth, strict building codes, and smart preventive strategies, St. Barts came through the storms relatively unscathed. (The main cause of damage—and lingering hotel closures—was flooding.) “Our electric grid was already three-quarters underground, and now we’re accelerating the rest,” Dufau says. “It means most of the island didn’t lose power—and for those who did, it wasn’t for long.” St. Barts is now testing marine barriers, watertight doorways, and “wash-through channels” that protect building foundations, all to ease flood damage from storms.

Bloomberg

Tech to help with Chunyun - the world's largest annual human migration

From CNN Travel

Considered the largest human migration on the planet, Chunyun -- the 40-day period when Chinese people head home to celebrate the Lunar New Year Spring Festival with their families -- officially began on January 10 and will end on February 18. Some 3 billion trips are expected to be made during the 2020 Chunyun period, a slight increase from last year's figure (2.99 billion trips).

New tech will play a part in easing congestion at train stations, highways and airports. More than 1,000 train stations in the country have been installed with e-ticket check-in system to speed up ticketing procedures. Last year also saw the opening of the long-awaited Beijing Daxing International Airport. The Civil Aviation Administration of China estimated that the new airport in the capital city will ferry 190 million passengers during the Lunar New Year period, with 15% more flights than usual. In addition to featuring technology to help flying in low visibility, to reduce the chances of flight delays during adverse weather conditions, Daxing International Airport has also adopted facial recognition and automated technologies to increase efficiency.

Airports around China have scheduled at least 17,000 flights every day, 13.3% higher than last year, to deal with the traffic. Wang Yang, chief engineer of the Ministry of Transport, said that about 790,000 buses and 19,000 boats will be utilized to ferry home-comers. Some 330,000 kilometers of highway has also been built and expanded. Shortly before the Spring Festival rush, the country implemented an electronic collection system at all the toll booths at provincial borders.

a video from last year's travel

 

 

 

 

Medellin: World's "Smartest City"

Think of a gondola suspended under a cable, floating high off the ground as it hauls a cabin full of passengers up a long, steep mountain slope. To most people, the image would suggest ski resorts and pricey vacations. To the people who live in the poor mountainside communities once known as favelas at the edges of Medellín, Colombia, the gondola system is a lifeline, and a powerful symbol of an extraordinary urban transformation led by technology and data.

The technology that helped save Medellín is not what you'd see in San Francisco, Boston or Singapore—fleets of driverless cars, big tech companies and artificial intelligence. It is about gathering data to make informed decisions on how to deploy technology where it has the most impact. And it is about establishing a constituency for change that transcends wealth and class. When experts get together to discuss the path to smarter cities, Medellín often comes up as a standard against which any city's vision for transformation should be measured—including the judges of Newsweek's Momentum Awards.

Here is another perspective

 

 

Google as Interpreter

Interpreter mode, the feature that allows Google Assistant to translate your conversations in real time, is coming to phones. Google says it will work with 44 languages and can be invoked by saying commands like “Hey Google, help me speak Thai” or “Hey Google, be my German translator.”

Once you’re in interpreter mode, the Assistant will translate your speech and read it out loud. On phone screens, the Assistant is able to offer up Smart Replies that can speed up the conversation by letting you respond without having to speak.

The Verge

 

 

 

2019 in review - the gift of mobility

At the end of every year, I like to flip through our photo albums. What really stood out this year was the wide range of transportation we used during our travels. Some were humble, others luxurious, still others scary - I could use a whole range of adjectives to describe them. It hit me that while we are excited about the future of EVs, AVs, flying cars, last mile bikes and scooters, it is amazing how much choice people have - today - to get from point A to B.

Here is a gallery from a few of my trips

Chao Phraya Express Boat

If you don't mind the occasional bumps and the crowds, this river ferry is one cheap and quick way to get around Bangkok's crowded streets.

The Emirates A380

You can spend hours at the bar at the back of the double decker, 4-engine jumbo jet or you can take advantage of the free wifi, streams from 3 cameras on the plane, hundreds of channels of entertainment. Here is the view from one of the cameras. Read more about my experience here

Navigating Indian Ghats during the Monsoons

My journey from Mumbai to Pune showed as only 80 miles but it was estimated at 3 hours to get there, 4 hours to get back given the clogged streets.  The flight or train options were even less convenient so I got a ride in a Toyota Innova Crysta minivan.  The expressway that cuts through the Western Ghats (The Sahyadri Mountain Range) has historically been a dangerous road. And this was the peak of the monsoon season so it was hairy at times. The driver, thankfully, was excellent

Segway HT

This was scarier than the ride through the Ghats. The user manual says “Whenever you ride the Segway HT, you risk death or serious injury from loss of control, collisions, and falls.” The training took a couple of hours (the trainer was concerned we would not know how to stop and then hurt someone), but after that we enjoyed our ride through the streets of Vail, CO

The Shinkansen

Japan's pride bullet train reaches 175 mph - but even more fascinating are the logistics of running and maintaining that high-speed network in a country prone to earthquakes. See more in my post here

Slowest ride in world?

From one of the fastest to one of the slowest trains in the world...I had tried the Las Vegas Monorail and the Aria Express Tram - both are sleek and efficient and I presumed the tram between the Excalibur and Luxor would be similar. However, going south on that line you have to make a stop and then backtrack. It is a cable car made by the Austrian company DCC Doppelmayr and is rated to go as high as 22 mph, but with the stops it works out to roughly 2 mph. Next time I will walk.

London Underground

For nostalgia I tried the London Underground on a Sunday - it used to be my daily commute when I worked there in the late 80s. The old faithful continues to chug along at average speeds of 20 mph, and carry over 5 million passengers a day

San Francisco Cable Car

For more nostalgia, I took the still-manually operated cable car. I had first tried it couple of decades ago. I particularly wanted to observe the turntable at Powell and Market where the car reverses direction.

The Airbus EC130

The view from a helicopter over Hoover Dam and into the Grand Canyon is stunning. I was just as fascinated with the conversation with the pilot of the EC130.

The Provincetown III

This catamaran makes its winter home in our hometown. Stable even at its speed of 30 knots, it made for a very pleasant ride across Tampa Bay

Kyoto taxi

The ride itself was not unusual but I was impressed how many electronic devices surround a taxi driver in Japan - GPS, walkie talkie, credit card processor, receipt printer, cameras and more

Airport buses

I had the opportunity to take several airport buses this year - from Seattle Airport to Vancouver, from Osaka Itami airport to downtown, and from London Heathrow to Nottingham. I am impressed how efficient bus travel has become (even the immigration and customs across the US/Canada border was a dream) and many of the buses now have wifi and a toilet.

Tokyo Yurikamome line

Tokyo has nearly 5,000 miles of rail, much of it underground. I really enjoyed a ride on the (relatively new) Yurikamome line. It is autonomous, over ground and spotless. Two 8 year old girls old without any adult supervision boarded the train with their school bags. Struck me how safe that transit is.

I could go on and on...but let me stop and just wish you as the Irish do "May the road rise to meet you..." Safe travels. 

 

Chernobyl as tourist destination

The Exclusion Zone is a misnomer. People could always venture in, and lately, as the Ukrainian government has made it far easier to visit, several tour companies have reported an uptick in demand. Bookings of Intrepid Travel’s tours, for instance, have spiked 131%, since the HBO show debuted this past May. Exclusion Zone tours of various kinds can be booked through the company Chernobyl Tour. I hired a private guide via a Ukrainian government agency that oversees the area. How safe is the zone to visit? Tatiana Zotina, a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Radioecology at the Institute of Biophysics of Russian Academy of Sciences in Krasnoyarsk, said it is “probably not dangerous” to take an excursion or an official sightseeing tour since the guides avoid the areas with high radiation levels. Other experts agree that there’s little risk to tourists in terms of radiation exposure.

WSJ

 

 

 

The world's longest flights

Eight hours from Sydney to Singapore? It’s a doddle. 12 hours from Hong Kong to London? No sweat.

With a high-tech assist from Airbus and Boeing, airlines are steadily pushing the boundaries of long-distance flying.

Even the language is being redefined. The new frontier is the “ultra-long range” flight, where globe-striding jets regularly tackle journeys of more than 16,000km (8,600nm).

For passengers, that translates to 18+ hours in the air. But for many business travellers, even those non-stop marathons prove the superior alternative to airport layovers halfway along the route.

Executive Traveller

 

It then profiles flights on Singapore, Qatar, Qantas and Emirates Air

Extreme 911

Last month, a recluse living in the woods in Scotland had a health emergency. The man, who’s in his 70s, sent out a distress signal that was picked up some 4,500 miles away in Greater Houston. And help was sent and the man is recovering.

But why was his beacon picked up in Houston — not somewhere in the United Kingdom?

Well, that’s because Montgomery, about an hour north of Houston, is home to the GEOS International Emergency Response Coordination Center. It operates like an extreme 911, picking up satellite distress signals from all over the world.

The center, which is staffed around the clock, gets calls from hikers deep in the wilderness, people whose boats are sinking in the middle of the ocean, and park rangers attacked by bears, just to name a few.

Houston Public Media

 

 

Digitizing India's $ trillion gold stash

Indians stockpile more of the precious metal than citizens of any other country, and their hoard is seven times the amount of gold mined globally in 2018. Now, Bangalore-based Rupeek is giving the centuries-old business of gold lending an internet-aided makeover to help Indians cash in on the 25,000 tons of the metal the World Gold Council estimates they’ve stashed away. Backed by two of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Accel, the startup allows people to borrow money against their hoard, often built up from wedding gifts or inherited from their families. “Indians have a mind-boggling $1 trillion worth of gold sitting in their homes, several times the gold in Fort Knox,” says Sumit Maniyar, Rupeek’s founder and chief executive officer.

A motorcycle-borne loan agent from the startup arrived within the hour. He used a computer vision-aided testing kit to appraise the metal’s purity. A team 600 miles away crunched data to complete the background check and process the loan electronically. About 30 minutes later, 200,000 rupees ($2,800) had been deposited in Mhatre’s bank account by one of Rupeek’s partners, an Indian private lender called Federal Bank. The startup’s 24/7 control room turned on the risk-monitoring system to track the agent, ensuring he securely deposited the jewelry at the bank’s nearest vault.

BusinessWeek

Gold testing has become increasingly portable as the video below shows