Free and fast wifi in the skies with Qantas!!!

Qantas plans to connect their planes to the NBN Co's Sky Muster satellites, which allow an onboard hotspot that passengers can connect to enabling them to use super fast wifi. 

Several rounds of testing on the ground have already been performed and a test plane  is ready to be brta tested. 

"We are very excited that we are a step closer to introducing our fast and free inflight Wi-Fi," said Qantas' Head of Customer Experience Phil Capps. "Putting Wi-Fi on board the aircraft has been an extraordinary task for the team. It requires a significant amount of testing to ensure that, first and foremost, the safety of the installation meets Qantas' stringent standards, as well as ensuring the system will deliver the level of performance we expect at this stage of the trial."

The installation took a team of 10 Brisbane-based engineers 900 man hours to complete, which includes multiple wireless access points. This means that passengers throughout the plane will receive the same signal strength.

Initial testing produced speeds up to 10 times faster than conventional onboard Wi-Fi, allowing passengers to surf in the skies at the same speeds you would typically see in any home or office Internet services. These speeds would make it possible to download movies, TV shows and even live sporting events without issue.

The new technology fittings are expected to be rolled out across the entire Qantas domestic fleet starting in mid-2017 with a completion date in 2018. Qantas is also currently in talks with suppliers to extend the Wi-Fi services to its international and regional fleets.   

The future of public transport is exciting.... very exciting!!!!

Article by Bob Pritchard 

The future of public transport is arriving - and will change the way we commute long distance!

 Time to buy property on the route of Hyperloop

 Hyperloop One has signed an agreement with Dubai Roads and Transport Authority for a Hyperloop between Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Hyperloop One unveiled its concept for the futuristic transport system that will travel at roughly 700 mph and take passengers from Dubai to Abu Dhabi in 12 minutes, normally a two-hour drive.

Here is how the Hyperloop  will operate. Firstly, passengers will check their app to see their transportation options that day.  If a Hyperloop is available, the app will list the gate where the Hyperloop is available with details on how long it will take to arrive, detailing every step of your journey.  Part of that journey involves taking a pod from the designated gate listed on the app.

Just like in an airplane, there will be different classes of pods, from one designed for multiple people to a "lounge pod" for fewer people to kick back and relax.   The pod will then travel to the entrance for the Hyperloop. There will be 120 pod gates accommodating over 8,500 passengers per hour.

Four pods will be assigned to each Hyperloop tube.  Three of those pods will be for passengers with a separate one for cargo.  You will then have officially embarked on your Hyperloop journey.

Imagine being in New York and being able to travel to Washington, DC, in 20 minutes.   These city stops become like metro stops. There is a level of human freedom to be able to live anywhere in the world." 

Once the Hyperloop tube arrives at its destination, the four pods will leave the tube, exit the station, and travel on the street to the passenger's final destination.

Hyperloop will also transport cargo.  They secured $50 million in a funding round led by DP World, the third largest port and terminal operator in the world.

The port system means unloading can happen offshore, the Hyperloop travels underwater and the tube can unload the load the cargo in the desert.  It gets trucks off the roads and unlocks billions of dollars of waterfront property for redevelopment.

Futuristic transport is here!

The flying car has arrived

Interesting article by Bob Pritchard 

The flying car has finally arrived and will be commercially available for commuters in early 2018. Liberty is accepting pre-orders. The vehicle’s three wheels and retractable top-mounted rotor may make the vehicle look more like a gyrocopter than a traditional sedan, but it can drive and fly. Revolutionary machines such as this will naturally prompt questions about regulations surrounding their use. But PAL-V assures consumers that the Liberty was not only designed to overcome technical and qualification challenges, it also complies with existing safety standards, as well as car and aviation regulations.

                                      

Equipped with a pair of engines, one each for ground and air travel. Both engines are supplied by the Austrian aircraft-engine manufacturer Rotax, and produce 100 horsepower, achieve fuel economy of 31 mpg, and accelerate to 62 mph in less than nine seconds on its way to a 100-mph top speed.

Entering the flying mode transforms the Liberty from a 13.1-foot-long and 5.4-foot-tall car into a 20.1-foot-long and 10.5-foot-tall flying machine. In the sky, the Liberty makes 200 horsepower and can reach speeds as high as 112 mph while reaching a maximum operating altitude of 11,480 feet. Those seeking efficiency, though, will want to cruise at a more economical flying speed of 87 mph, which gives the flying machine a maximum range of 310 miles. Add a passenger in the Liberty's second seat, though, and that range drops to 248 miles.  Liberty's operator must have both a driver's and pilot's license to use the vehicle in its two forms.

Those interested in purchasing a Liberty will need to write a nonrefundable deposit check for $25,000 for the Pioneer Edition or $10,000 for the Sport. Alternatively, consumers can drop $2500 ($2000 of which is refundable) to lock in a spot on the Liberty's waiting list.

Flying taxis in Dubai from July

The United Arab Emirates city of Dubai is set to become the world's first to allow passenger-carrying drone taxis, according to an announcement Wednesday. Dubai will have people-carrying drones this US summer.  Guangzhou-based EHang has received an order from Dubai for its 184 model, which can carry one person and a suitcase with a combined weight of 117 kg.  Test flights are currently ongoing across Dubai’s skies.

Passengers simply select their destination, at which point a command center on the ground pilots the aerial vehicles, which have a peak altitude of 3.5 km, a top speed of 160 km/h, and can travel for 50 km (around half an hour) on a single charge.

The Dubai grand strategy will help increase traffic efficiency, productivity, reduce traffic congestion and pollution, and save millions of driving hours. In the case of malfunction or connection problems the drones are programmed to immediately land in the closest possible safe area.

How to start, add, or renew a business: KISS it

Great article by Geoff Kelly 

Keep It simple. And don’t be Stupid.

Most people seriously overcomplicate it, and that is very stupid. They also do a lot of guessing, and that is even more stupid.

Here’s the simplest plan to set up a new business, recover an existing business, or add a new product or service — whether you’re selling flowers by the bunch or high value business to business services.

1. Check out the Market 

First, look at the dimensions and quality of the market, and how you can reach prospects. Is it huge, or small? Do they already spend money on what you want to offer? Are they local or far flung? Is it feasible to reach them on the internet, or by various media, or personally?

Get a rough idea for how many potential prospects are in your desired market.

2.  Check out the Media 

Then, check for media to reach them. Are there digital or physical magazines popular with the group? Are they members of specific associations? Where do they show up? What do they often do?

If you believe there are enough good prospects and it is practical to reach them, go deeper. Ask others closer to the market. Check Government and other statistics. Go look and do your own sniff test.

3. Check out the Competition 

And then: How big and strong is the competition – including the option that they can do it for themselves (so many don’t consider this do-it-yourself option that is such a barrier to many business and retail services). Are you facing sharks or goldfish? How good are the outcomes they are getting for clients?

How do these competitors get clients? How are they attracting, selling and winning clients in different parts of the market? The best will use simple approaches – map their prospect to client funnels.

4. Check out  Price Points 

And then: What are the prevailing price points in the market?

What does the bulk of the market consider a fair price for normal service? What do they see as a premium price for a top shelf service? Or for a specialist service? What is it that they will pay more for?

5. Find  Prospects Pain and how are you going to solve it ?

Next: What do prospects need most? What frustrates them, stops them from doing what they most want? What stops them from getting more out of the products and services already in the market?

How can you fill these gaps? This will be the source of your compelling offer.

Line up all the benefits you can offer, and how clients will experience them. 

5. Prepare your Pitch 

From this, create your appeals and reality test them on real prospects. Your mother or your partner will be too kind to you – genuine prospects won’t be.

That’s your sales message.

6. Create a product or service that people want to buy and can do it easily 

And then: Make sure your product or service is:

•   simple to create and describe

•   easy to offer and fulfil

•   offers obvious value in terms of outcomes to price

•   gets satisfaction and/or outcomes fast (use milestones in longer term outcomes)

•   is easy to buy

  
  

7. Over- deliver - and do it fast 

So when you get new clients, you can deliver fast. And simply.

And last: Start fast and build on early progress and learning with massive action. Do more of what works, and stop or change what doesn’t.

8. Keep your Customers and make them advocates 

Standout business thinker Peter Drucker kept it simple when he said that business is about creating and keeping a customer. And that the two most important things to do are innovation and marketing. Everything else is a cost.

Of course we need other stuff too – technology, staff, legal compliance, funding and so on. 

But Drucker’s advice is not to allow these things to divert focus from the main game. 

If we don’t get and keep clients, we don’t have a business.

So start simple. Take ONE existing service or product that needs resurrection, or a new one. And run the above process to create the business. Then rinse and repeat with another, and another as long as you want for the growth you choose.

No need to complicate – just KISS it.

Geoff Kelly is an experienced business mentor and coach working mostly with business to business services clients. He works with people who want to make real improvement, and he shows them how to make the few changes that make the most difference to the results they want. He hates complicated, and loves simple.

His other practice is also simple, but high impact. Geoff helps professionals matter to decision-makers. Whatever you need - more clients, peer recognition, getting a strategy or idea adopted – your ultimate competitive advantage is having specific people know and value you and your ideas.

You can phone Geoff for more information like this on 0421 112 112 or email gkelly@kellystrategicinfluence.com.au

The future of work - the gig executive

Written by - Dexter Cousins is Managing Director of Tier One People, a unique search company advising small businesses on how to transform into enterprises.

 

What is a Gig Executive?

The Gig Economy is a term being used to reflect the rapidly evolving nature of what we used to call ‘temping’ or 'freelance' work. I have coined term Gig Executive to describe, a possible future career path for c-suite.

Platforms such as Uber are growing because they can easily access a flexible workforce. In the USA, data suggests that 1 in 3 workers are currently employed in Gig Economy jobs (although not all by choice.)

In Australia, platforms such as Airtasker, Freelancer.com, Workible (think Linkedin but for the retail and hospitality industry) and Expert 360 (management consulting) are changing the way in which the workforce engages. In a 2016 report by Upwork, the largest category for freelancers was web, mobile and software development (44 percent). Design and creative (14 percent), customer and admin support (13 percent), sales and marketing (10 percent) and writing (8 percent) make up the rest.

Based on the data, the Gig Economy way of working does not appear to apply to executive positions. Interim appointments have always existed, but these are fixed term appointments, usually to act in a caretaker role.

With the business world moving at such a rapid pace, should we expect the emergence of the Gig Executive?

Future trends that are impacting the executive workforce.

In an MIT report on the future of work, some of the predictions include:

• By 2022 more than 8% of the US workforce will be aged 65 or over.
• In 500 years, only 10% of the global population will be employed in paid work.
• In the next 5-10 years, companies will use data science and genetics to assess an executives suitability and job performance.

Estimates suggest that by 2020, the Gig Economy will account for 40% of the US workforce. What impact will this have on executive positions?

Closer to home, Australia’s joblook.gov.au predicts

“Over the five years to November 2019, the number of job openings for Chief Executives and Managing Directors is expected to be below average (between 5,001 and 10,000). Job openings count both employment growth and turnover (defined as workers leaving their occupation for other employment or leaving the workforce).” 

The data collated in 2015, reports there were 58,900 people in Australia employed as an Chief Executive or Managing Director.

The graph below shows some interesting stats.

Look at the yellow and red bars, what do they tell us?

The data seems to conflict. Future growth prospects to 2019 are high, and the prediction for future job openings is low, in comparison to other occupations.

Roy Morgan research estimates that the current unemployment figure in Australia is actually 9.2%. An additional 9.9% of the workforce are underemployed.

19.1% of Australia's workforce is currently underemployed.

Could the data be pointing to a future in which executives are under-employed? 

Are boards comfortable outsourcing decision making?

On a micro level, I am seeing a trend, outsourced Executive Services to small business. The concept is simple, instead of paying for a permanent, full-time, executive you can rent a CFO, CME, CEO, CTO, etc. as and when you need them.

Over the last 18 months, several executives in my network have branched out to offer such services. I have heard of one person being successful; everyone else has been back in touch this year about permanent opportunities. I did question if the difficulty in winning work was due to a lack of sales and marketing skills. In part this is true.

I decided to seek the feedback of boards and business owners on such services. They confessed to feeling uneasy giving authority to someone who isn’t part of the organisation. And potential investors tend not to look favourably on a business with a virtual executive team. 

An example of the Gig Executive.

Earlier this year, I won a brief to assemble an interim executive team. The client was looking to launch a new business, and the assignment resembled a Hollywood blockbuster movie, in which we had to assemble an all-star cast to complete a top-secret mission. Each member of the executive team was hand-picked for their specialist skills and ability to execute under pressure.

The usual approach in this scenario is to hire management consultants to develop the strategy. Then as the project gains momentum, additional hires made where needed. There is often a lack of cohesion which results in the project blowing the budget.

The benefits of hiring a Gig Executive.

The 'Hollywood Blockbuster' approach I mentioned earlier seems to avoid the common challenges, especially in the strategy phase. It enabled the team to execute ideas with stealth, and there was an immediate chemistry between everybody. For a business to go from a concept to launch in six months (in a heavily regulated environment) is a rare outcome. The assembled team have now handed the running of the new business to the current executives. It is too early to tell if the new business will be a success. However, the client has benefitted from significant cost and time saved over previous methods used.

Does this isolated example hold enough evidence to herald the emergence of the Gig Executive? If the Gig Economy continues to disrupt the workforce, it is inevitable that executives will see some impact. I am confident that any changes will present new opportunities for c-suite and senior management

. The key challenge will lie in winning the assignments as it requires a focus on networking, customer service, branding, marketing, and pricing.

Is AI good or bad for humanity?

Published by Loic Le Meur

Founder of Leade.rs http://leade.rs/Loicnewsletter

Everything is getting smarter. Basic AI is already here. It flies our planes on autopilot, plays video games and beats humans at chess and Go.

Better yet, AI can now teach itself to play a video game. How long will it take until it teaches itself to take over the world? Remember, AI already produced a brief financial crash.

AI is accelerating at an incredible pace, so quickly it’s said that AI should exceed our own intelligence between 2040 and 2060. Yes, even if “the brain is the most complex object in the known universe” (Nick Bostrom). “In our world, smart means a 130 IQ and stupid means an 85 IQ — we don’t have a word for an IQ of 12,952.” (Tim Urban in his must read AI story)

source: waitbutwhy

How bad could it be?

The train won’t stop when it exceeds our intelligence. Who knows what will happen when machines exceed our brains. There is no way to predict what the consequences will be for us.

Stephen Hawking says the development of AI “could spell the end of the human race”

Yes, that bad. But wait, it could be good.

Experts believe there is a 52% chance that it’s going to be good. Experts are people who know more and more about less and less, so let’s trust them for a minute.

Okay how good?

“Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) could solve every problem in humanity” says Tim Urban. It could “halt CO2 emissions by coming up with much better ways to generate energy that had nothing to do with fossil fuels. Then it could create some innovative way to begin to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Cancer and other diseases? No problem for ASI — health and medicine would be revolutionized beyond imagination. World hunger? ASI could use things like nanotech to build meat from scratch that would be molecularly identical to real meat — in other words, it would be real meat. Nanotech could turn a pile of garbage into a huge vat of fresh meat or other food. Better yet, Artificial Super Intelligence could allow us to conquer our mortality”

People think the chances of AI taking over the world are high enough that there is even a consortium between Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. Reid Hoffman and Pierre Omidyar have invested $27m to fund Ethics and Government of AI research.

There’s been a lot of money raised and many companies acquired in AI space in the last 12 months. Self driving seems to be where most of the funding is going.

If you have some time, you should read The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence part 1 and part 2. Watching the TED Talks on AI is great to.

Life after Jobs

Rapid automation is taking place in restaurants, airports, supermarkets and warehouses.

45,000 robots installed by Amazon.

Motor manufacturing becoming almost totally automated.

An insurance company that laid off 90% of its employees and replaced them with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders, which produced an increase productivity of 30% and they will see a return on its investment in less than two years . 

A Chinese factory just replaced 90% of its human workforce with automated machines, it experienced a 250% increase in productivity and an 80% drop in defects.  It is hard to argue against automation when statistics are clearly illustrating its potential.

The  factory used to need 650 human workers to produce mobile phones. Now, the factory is run by 60 robot arms that work around the clock across 10 production lines. The number of people employed drops to just 20, and given the level of efficiency achieved by automation, it won’t be long before other factories follow in their footsteps.  Three people  are assigned to check and monitor the production line, and the others are tasked with monitoring computer control systems. Any remaining work not handled by humans is left in the capable hands of machines.

 This is just the tip of the iceberg and the replacement of people by AI continues that acceleration.

This efficiency of automation comes at a price, though: our jobs. 

Last year, McKinsey showed that currently demonstrated technologies could automate 45 percent of the activities people are paid to perform and that about 60 percent of all occupations could see a minimum of 30 percent or more of their constituent activities automated, again with technologies available today.  Within 5 to 10 years we could see unemployment up to 60% of the available workforce.

According to a joint study conducted by Oxford University and the Oxford Martin School, “47 percent of jobs in the US are ‘at risk’ of being automated.”  And these won’t just be factory jobs, either. At the rate that robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are advancing, machines will soon be able to take over tasks in a variety of industries and do them just as well as, if not better than, humans. We already have robot lawyers capable of defending a range of violations, an AI that can deliver a medical diagnosis more accurately than a human doctor, robot journalists, and even therapists that can outperform their human counterparts.

The uncertainty surrounding the future of human employment in the age of automation is already apparent, and machines are poised to keep getting better and better at what they do. 

So what's the solution? How will we make ourselves useful? 

Governments and private organizations are putting some serious thought into this subject and are come up with some potential solutions to address widespread employee displacement.

Among those is universal basic income (UBI), a system in which all citizens of a country receive an unconditional amount of money on top of income they generate through other means. Pilot studies in countries like the United States, India, Canada, and Finland have already begun, and thus far, they’ve delivered promising results. It’s too early to say if UBI could address widespread job loss due to automation head on, but it could ultimately prove to be an empowering economic move as we make the transition.

The times they are a changing . . . and extremely rapidly.