CARS that need no driver are just around the corner according to Google, which has been testing vehicles bristling with aerials and cameras on public roads in America. But Google does not make cars (yet), so it will be up to firms that do to bring the technology to market. And carmakers are a conservative bunch. Still, slowly and steadily the autonomous car will arrive, with the help of an increasing number of automated driving aids. Volvo recently demonstrated one such feature: a car that really does park itself.
Some cars already have systems that assist with parking, but these are not completely autonomous. They can identify an empty parallel-parking space and steer into it while the driver uses the brake. The Volvo system, however, lets the driver get out and use a smartphone application to instruct the vehicle to park. The car then trundles off, manoeuvres into a parking place and sends a message to the driver to inform him where it is. The driver can collect the car in person or use his phone to call it back to where he dropped it off. Autonomous parking could thus be provided at places like shopping centres and airports, which are controlled areas in which automated vehicles can be managed more easily than on open highways.
In the past, designs for doing this have relied on car parks being fitted with buried guide wires that a vehicle can follow to an empty bay. That, though, creates a chicken-and-egg problem: car-park operators will not invest in such infrastructure until there is a sufficient number of suitably equipped cars on the road. Drivers, conversely, will not want to buy self-parking cars if there is nowhere to use them.
This means, as Mikael Thor, a Volvo safety engineer working on the project, observes, that for autonomous parking to work most of the technology will have to be in the car itself. The Volvo test car, which looks like a normal car, therefore uses on-board GPS mapping, cameras with image-recognition software, and radar sensors to find its own way around a car park and avoid pedestrians and non-autonomous vehicles. Mr Thor says the system is five to ten years from commercial deployment. If it proves a success then infrastructure might adapt to it, for instance by packing cars into tighter spaces (with no one in them there is no need to make room for their doors to open), but would not need to anticipate it.
Driverless cars would also need to communicate with one another, to enhance safety. That, too, is coming. A number of carmakers are developing wireless networking systems through which vehicles can exchange data, such as their speed, their steering angle and even their real time Location system, to forewarn anti-collision systems and safety devices if an accident looks likely.
Ford, for example, recently tested a brake light that can provide an early warning to other motorists. If the brakes are applied hard in an emergency, a signal is broadcast. This illuminates a warning light in the dashboard of suitably equipped following vehicles, even if they are out of sight around a bend or not immediately behind the vehicle doing the braking.
Ford has been testing this system as part of a collaborative research project with several European carmakers. They have put a fleet of 150 experimental vehicles on the roads. When it tested a group of these, Ford found the technology let drivers brake much earlier, helping avoid collisions. A driverless car would be able to react even faster.
Another member of the research group, BMW, has been testing driverless cars on roads around Munich—including belting down some of Germany’s high-speed autobahns. The ordinary-looking BMW 5-series models use a variety of self-contained guidance systems. These include cameras mounted on the upper windscreen, which can identify road markings, signs and various obstacles likely to be encountered on roads.
The BMWs also use a radar, to gauge how far the vehicle is from other cars and potential obstacles, and a lidar, which works like a radar but at optical frequencies. The lidar employs laser beams to scan the road ahead and builds up from the reflections a three-dimensional image of what this looks like. The image is processed by a computer in the vehicle, which also collects and compares data from a high-accuracy GPS unit. A series of ultrasonic sonars similar to those used in vehicles to provide parking assistance are placed around the car to add to the virtual picture. And just to make sure, a set of accelerometers provide an inertial navigation system that double-checks the vehicle’s position on the road.
Although these cars can be switched to an autonomous driving mode, like Google’s vehicles they are still required to have someone in the driving seat who can take over in the event of any difficulty. The BMWs can steer themselves, slow down, brake and accelerate, even changing lanes to overtake slower vehicles. BMW, though, does not yet talk of when it might offer fully autonomous cars to customers; rather it says that it expects to see “highly automated” driving functions available in its models from around 2020.
The metric they are chasing is 40 HPV — hours per vehicle — by 2015. At the moment, the plant produces at 52.8 HPV, a 30% improvement on five years ago. Getting to 40 will take a massive effort.Next year, the W205 factory will move into continuous production using three eight-hour shifts. This will require an even higher level of consistency as there will be no down time which can be used to make up for slow production.
Mr van der Merwe is acutely aware that the South African operation faces growing global competition. The W205 will be produced in South Africa, the US, Germany and China.
"China is a fierce competitor. South Africa's future does not lie in competing on labour cost. It's much more important to develop the skills base."South Africa's advantage lies in the "tenacity" of its workforce and what he describes as "the general culture in the workplace".
It is a culture that must be built, and prospective employees attend intensive training sessions that plug the gaps in the education system and incubate a mindset of high productivity."You cannot just inform somebody about such a system. You have to learn it, you have to live in it, you have to believe in it," says Mr Zimmerman.
Exiting the plant onto East London's Settlers Way, you drive about 100m before turning left into an industrial area where Mercedes is preparing the new intake of workers for next year's new production line.
In a converted warehouse, human resources manager Stephen Goold presides over the training of 800 potential new recruits in the plant's Shop Floor Skills Centre. They are all school-leavers and about 600 of them will find jobs on the new production line.
Then comes a statistic that brings home the Eastern Cape's dire employment crisis: the 800 trainee workers were chosen from more than 23,000 applicants. If there is an invisible fuel powering their learning, it is hope. They may be entry-level factory workers, but in this blighted region, they are an elite, the few who have obtained a foothold in a precarious regional economy.
On the day I visit, trainees are testing their ability to follow complex sequences of mechanical instructions. In one corner, a team is taking apart and reassembling the doors of a C Class saloon, in another, they are undoing fastenings they cannot see behind a screen.
In yet another, students write notes furiously as a lecturer brings them up to speed before a whiteboard. Whittling the 23,000 down to 800 gives Mercedes the opportunity to select the very brightest.
"The assessment process means good quality in, good quality out," says Mr Goold.Further down the road is the East London Industrial Development Zone, where most of the plant's component suppliers are based.From its factories come seats, roof trim, door panels, bearings, exhaust systems, key chassis components, fuel tanks and the pressed "aluminium skin panels" that will be welded together into the body.
Between 45% and 50% of the new C Class will be local, but this includes parts supplied by local component manufacturers, who import some of their parts. The true figure is closer to 25%.Again, the competition is fierce. Mr Zimmerman points out that South African leather components used to be exported to other Mercedes plants, but more efficient Eastern European competitors have begun to take over.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/ for more information.
2013年6月30日星期日
2013年6月27日星期四
How to Solicit the Customer Feedback Your Startup Needs
What is the fuel that propels a startup from idea to launch to a sustainable success? Is it a killer idea? Funding? Revenue? Attracting the best talent? A visionary leader?The correct answer is customer feedback — lots and lots of customer feedback that you, as the founder of your startup, can leverage in order to develop a great product for which users will go crazy.
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
How to Solicit the Customer Feedback Your Startup Needs
What is the fuel that propels a startup from idea to launch to a sustainable success? Is it a killer idea? Funding? Revenue? Attracting the best talent? A visionary leader?The correct answer is customer feedback — lots and lots of customer feedback that you, as the founder of your startup, can leverage in order to develop a great product for which users will go crazy.
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
How to Solicit the Customer Feedback Your Startup Needs
What is the fuel that propels a startup from idea to launch to a sustainable success? Is it a killer idea? Funding? Revenue? Attracting the best talent? A visionary leader?The correct answer is customer feedback — lots and lots of customer feedback that you, as the founder of your startup, can leverage in order to develop a great product for which users will go crazy.
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年6月25日星期二
Austria cleaning industry makes real progress
In the Austrian cleaning sector there are currently 8,100 companies, employing a total of 52,000 people. The proportion of female employees is high, at 85 per cent and there is a distinct preference for workers who are over 45. Otherwise, employees range from 15 to 65. Manual workers account for 90 per cent of sector employees, with clerical staff making up the remaining 10 per cent.
The industry in Austria is still enjoying growth, despite the economic difficulties facing most European countries. In 2005 against 2000 it was 66 per cent; in 2008 against 2005, 75 per cent; and 2013 against 2008, 50 per cent. Contracts are often outsourced to third parties in the field of house cleaning and maintenance services. Where memorial, fa?ade and external building cleaning are concerned, however, outsourcing occurs only in the case of specialist cleaning. The greatest opportunities for growth are considered to be in the health and care sectors.
There are three large companies in the contract cleaning market - ISS Facility Services, Simacek and Dussmann-Service. Together they account for around 30 per cent of market share.
The largest challenge facing cleaning companies currently is finding motivated workers – there is a significant skills shortage in the sector. To counteract this there has been massive expansion of training schemes in recent years, and there is now a recognised standard for cleaning
training schemes. Another positive development has been the Austria-wide standardisation of requirements for final apprenticeship examination and master craftsman’s diploma.
This issues of sick leave, maternity rights and parental leave are also very challenging ones for employers. However relations between cleaning workers and their employers are generally very good because of the opportunities for staff from a migrant background to engage in German courses of more than four hours.
A new collective framework agreement was also finalised this year after more than 20 years of negotiation, and that includes much improved regulations covering the whole of real time Location system.
Despite the significant progress made by the industry in recent years, cleaning is still in principle a necessary evil in the eyes of many clients – its image and profile are still a long way from where they should be. There is much room for improvement in terms of results-oriented cleaning and also daytime cleaning.
Clients do have a very positive attitude towards paying a fair price for the services they receive when all the staff are properly trained. But there is still a great tendency to opt for the lowest tender both in the public and private sectors.
Initiatives by the industry association and cleaning companies have resulted in a number of successful public relations and advertising campaigns in the mission to improve the image of cleaning. Still the regulatory environment presents real obstacles, along with the issue of company taxation. Companies are also now expected to react proactively to the increasing awareness of environmental issues – the ‘greening’ of the industry.
The cleaning business can also not escape the fact that both public and private clients are being forced to economise, in which case it is not always possible to provide the best service. In these cases, the service has to be adapted accordingly.
When people in the Midtown neighborhood look to the east, they see the oceanfront being resurrected with new rides, Joe's Crab Shack and major condo hotel projects.When they gaze west, they see International Speedway Corp. positioning for a massive reinvention of the track's frontstretch grandstands and hundreds of surrounding acres.When residents in the city's center focus on their own streets, they have a few new signs of hope to grab onto, also.
There's the state-of-the art Midtown Cultural and Education Center that opened a year ago. A new cafe and ice cream shop have sprouted on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and a historic bar on that street has just started a new life as a renovated church.
Within the next few months, Daytona Toyota will start building its new $4.5 million body shop and used car center on a vacant car dealership site at the bustling corner of International Speedway Boulevard and Nova Road. Just behind that Toyota development, the first building in a new affordable housing complex on Keech Street is under construction.
Rodney Peters is with Because We Care, a company that has been providing in-home private duty home care to the senior community since April 2004. Their services include personal and companion care. Because We Care meets the client’s needs with the right caregiver so that the family’s loved one can remain at home for as long as possible. According to Peters, "Our caregivers assist a family member with the activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing, transferring, feeding, grooming and toileting." They also prepare meals, provide light housekeeping, medication reminders and run errands.
Ana Marie Roesch is with George & Schwartz, an Atlanta-based contracting company that provides many services in demand by the commericial and property management industry as well as single family homes. Explained Roesch, "We have a Commercial Division that is highly skilled in the pressure cleaning of parking decks, garages and high rise office buildings and industrial buildings." Additionally they have a full service Residential Division that caters to apartment communities, condominium associations and subdivisions.
The industry in Austria is still enjoying growth, despite the economic difficulties facing most European countries. In 2005 against 2000 it was 66 per cent; in 2008 against 2005, 75 per cent; and 2013 against 2008, 50 per cent. Contracts are often outsourced to third parties in the field of house cleaning and maintenance services. Where memorial, fa?ade and external building cleaning are concerned, however, outsourcing occurs only in the case of specialist cleaning. The greatest opportunities for growth are considered to be in the health and care sectors.
There are three large companies in the contract cleaning market - ISS Facility Services, Simacek and Dussmann-Service. Together they account for around 30 per cent of market share.
The largest challenge facing cleaning companies currently is finding motivated workers – there is a significant skills shortage in the sector. To counteract this there has been massive expansion of training schemes in recent years, and there is now a recognised standard for cleaning
training schemes. Another positive development has been the Austria-wide standardisation of requirements for final apprenticeship examination and master craftsman’s diploma.
This issues of sick leave, maternity rights and parental leave are also very challenging ones for employers. However relations between cleaning workers and their employers are generally very good because of the opportunities for staff from a migrant background to engage in German courses of more than four hours.
A new collective framework agreement was also finalised this year after more than 20 years of negotiation, and that includes much improved regulations covering the whole of real time Location system.
Despite the significant progress made by the industry in recent years, cleaning is still in principle a necessary evil in the eyes of many clients – its image and profile are still a long way from where they should be. There is much room for improvement in terms of results-oriented cleaning and also daytime cleaning.
Clients do have a very positive attitude towards paying a fair price for the services they receive when all the staff are properly trained. But there is still a great tendency to opt for the lowest tender both in the public and private sectors.
Initiatives by the industry association and cleaning companies have resulted in a number of successful public relations and advertising campaigns in the mission to improve the image of cleaning. Still the regulatory environment presents real obstacles, along with the issue of company taxation. Companies are also now expected to react proactively to the increasing awareness of environmental issues – the ‘greening’ of the industry.
The cleaning business can also not escape the fact that both public and private clients are being forced to economise, in which case it is not always possible to provide the best service. In these cases, the service has to be adapted accordingly.
When people in the Midtown neighborhood look to the east, they see the oceanfront being resurrected with new rides, Joe's Crab Shack and major condo hotel projects.When they gaze west, they see International Speedway Corp. positioning for a massive reinvention of the track's frontstretch grandstands and hundreds of surrounding acres.When residents in the city's center focus on their own streets, they have a few new signs of hope to grab onto, also.
There's the state-of-the art Midtown Cultural and Education Center that opened a year ago. A new cafe and ice cream shop have sprouted on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and a historic bar on that street has just started a new life as a renovated church.
Within the next few months, Daytona Toyota will start building its new $4.5 million body shop and used car center on a vacant car dealership site at the bustling corner of International Speedway Boulevard and Nova Road. Just behind that Toyota development, the first building in a new affordable housing complex on Keech Street is under construction.
Rodney Peters is with Because We Care, a company that has been providing in-home private duty home care to the senior community since April 2004. Their services include personal and companion care. Because We Care meets the client’s needs with the right caregiver so that the family’s loved one can remain at home for as long as possible. According to Peters, "Our caregivers assist a family member with the activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing, transferring, feeding, grooming and toileting." They also prepare meals, provide light housekeeping, medication reminders and run errands.
Ana Marie Roesch is with George & Schwartz, an Atlanta-based contracting company that provides many services in demand by the commericial and property management industry as well as single family homes. Explained Roesch, "We have a Commercial Division that is highly skilled in the pressure cleaning of parking decks, garages and high rise office buildings and industrial buildings." Additionally they have a full service Residential Division that caters to apartment communities, condominium associations and subdivisions.
2013年6月23日星期日
Project of vegetable markets still a ‘pipe dream’!
With an aim to cater to the needs of ever-increasing population in the metropolis, the government’s plan to establish two new sabzi mandis (vegetable markets) on the city’s outskirts remains what the sources call ‘a pipe dream’ as the construction on the sites could not be kicked off even after the passage of more than four years.
In 2009, the Sindh government had decided to set up two new vegetable markets (sabzi mandis) at a cost of Rs 3 billion on the city’s outskirts to facilitate ever-growing population.
These markets, having the total cost of Rs 3 billion and spreading over 100 acres of land, are supposed to be established at Northern Bypass and Ghaghar Phattak on Indus Highway.
The government had purchased the land for the said purpose in 2008, however, the work on the sites could not be started due to apathy of authorities concerned. The construction work of both the markets had to be completed by June 2010, sources in the agriculture department told Pakistan Today.
According to the summary approved by the Sindh chief minister, officials said the scrutiny committee had fixed market price in respect of category A-1 of Deh Gundapass at R s4 million per acre and Rs 10 million per acre for Deh Joveji. Thus, the cost of the required land of 200 acres would be Rs 1,400 million, adding that the process of purchasing land for the project had taken a long time, they said.
The funds for the construction of boundary walls and gates, transport, machinery and equipment, operational cost/recruiting contingencies, media campaigns, consultancy charges and third-party monitoring cost (one percent) had been provided by the provincial government through the Annual Development Programme (ADP). However, the ill-planning and apathy of authorities had put this important plan in cold storage.
The project is aimed at improving farm productivity, food security and economic conditions of the small farmers, besides augmenting the country’s economy to support farmers for selling their products at reasonable rates.
The soil of Sindh has a lot of potential for growing varieties of vegetables specially the lower parts of the province for its climatic conditions which have also advantages for growing many off-season vegetables. Besides, it is the second largest province of the country in area where vegetables were being cultivated, they said, adding the marketing aspects of vegetables had not received sufficient attention despite the government’s efforts for the promotion of agriculture sector.
The markets were to facilitate the growers and traders by providing basic infrastructure, wide roads, ample vehicle parking space and utilities like water supply, sewerage, surface drainage, internal RCC roads, electricity, mosques, lavatory block and post office. It would also have space for cold storage, construction of auction platforms and public facilitation centres such as banks, post office, information centre, digital display boards and weigh bridges.
The market committee of Karachi is responsible for operation of markets under the provision of APM Act 1939 and would ensure transparent auction of the products. Moreover, the sources said the market fee would be charged from the buyers as per the Agriculture Produce Market Act 1939.
Talking to Pakistan Today, Abdul Rauf Tanoli, General Secretary of the Welfare Association of Wholesale Vegetable Market, said the establishment of new vegetable markets would not facilitate traders and consumers. The government had yet to provide basic facilities, including potable water, electricity, sewerage system and roads at the existing market that had been declared as a model market of the country, he added.
He said the government was wasting billions of rupees on such projects instead of maintaining the infrastructure of the existing one. He alleged that many market committee officials were involved in corruption and failed to facilitate traders which had badly affected the revenue collection. He demanded that the government should appoint sincere officials on the market committees and ensure provision of basic amenities.
I'm all for capitalism, but true capitalism. I'm not for businesses profiting at the expense of the taxpayer. If companies are investing their own money that is fine and dandy. But when they want to dip in the public treasury, that's when they have crossed the line. It's why I oppose stadiums and arenas built at taxpayer expense only to turn around and charge enormous prices for parking, tickets, food and other stuff to those same taxpayers. Then turn around and pay no taxes at all like the NFL,NBA and NHL team owners
Every week I have to drive on Interstate I-90 in Massachusetts. This is a public road built with taxpayer money in the 1950's,earns millions of dollars, then turns around and every years requests millions more in Transportation monies from Washington for road repairs. Where did all that money go that was made from collecting tolls?
Pork barrel politics is what we have in Washington. Conservatives complain about the 48 million people who are collecting SNAP benefits so they don't starve or us seniors that live on that meager social security we get ,yet ignore the Billions that we paid out every year in Corporate Welfare programs
Both parties are equally as guilty when it comes to their special projects in their home districts. We in Massachusetts have Congressman Jim McGovern that on one hand argues against the cuts to the SNAP program, yet with his other hand requests public monies for questionable projects, like Proposed Recipient: Assumption College, Worcester.
Construction of a Parking Garage at Assumption College. Assumption College plans to construct a simple, economical and efficient parking garage between the Kennedy classroom building and the athletic fields in order to accommodate the ever-increasing number of people from the community who spend time on campus. In particular, the senior citizens attending the Worcester Institute for Senior Education (WISE) program are in dire need of parking that is not far from the location of the majority of their seminars and activities. When students, faculty, and senior citizens cannot find appropriate parking on campus, the cars overflow to neighborhood streets, dissipating some of the community goodwill generated by having activities on campus in the first place. This is a valuable use of taxpayer funds because it will allow senior citizens, students, and faculty to have convenient, safe parking options.
This is a private college that has a big endowment fund, lots of Alumni and charges an in-state college tuition of $34,000 for off campus and $48,000 per student for on campus living. So why the special treatment? Here's why-- Paul Belisto. He is the Executive Director of Community Relation's at Assumption College and before that he worked for Congressman McGovern's office.
Again this is a private NGO that should get its own funding for projects and not be using taxpayer monies regardless of the reasons. Corporate Welfare. The federal budget is filled with outrageous, inappropriate, useless, counterproductive, and simply wasteful spending like this project of Congressman McGovern's.
Washington has become an endless soup kitchen for special interests, with a grant or loan seemingly available for every interest group with a letterhead and at least three members. Legislators need to find some political courage and take a meat ax to the budget. It is a target-rich environment.
Admittedly, there are some essential programs, such as providing for our seniors, the poorest of our society, children and the disabled. Or the judicial system. But even where Washington is doing something useful, say national law enforcement, many of its activities are not justified. For instance, the FBI performs a useful role, but not the Drug Enforcement Agency, which tosses people in jail for hurting themselves. Paying out billions of dollars to police departments to become local military style units, when that money could have been used in education programs that prevent crime and help get people back to work.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
In 2009, the Sindh government had decided to set up two new vegetable markets (sabzi mandis) at a cost of Rs 3 billion on the city’s outskirts to facilitate ever-growing population.
These markets, having the total cost of Rs 3 billion and spreading over 100 acres of land, are supposed to be established at Northern Bypass and Ghaghar Phattak on Indus Highway.
The government had purchased the land for the said purpose in 2008, however, the work on the sites could not be started due to apathy of authorities concerned. The construction work of both the markets had to be completed by June 2010, sources in the agriculture department told Pakistan Today.
According to the summary approved by the Sindh chief minister, officials said the scrutiny committee had fixed market price in respect of category A-1 of Deh Gundapass at R s4 million per acre and Rs 10 million per acre for Deh Joveji. Thus, the cost of the required land of 200 acres would be Rs 1,400 million, adding that the process of purchasing land for the project had taken a long time, they said.
The funds for the construction of boundary walls and gates, transport, machinery and equipment, operational cost/recruiting contingencies, media campaigns, consultancy charges and third-party monitoring cost (one percent) had been provided by the provincial government through the Annual Development Programme (ADP). However, the ill-planning and apathy of authorities had put this important plan in cold storage.
The project is aimed at improving farm productivity, food security and economic conditions of the small farmers, besides augmenting the country’s economy to support farmers for selling their products at reasonable rates.
The soil of Sindh has a lot of potential for growing varieties of vegetables specially the lower parts of the province for its climatic conditions which have also advantages for growing many off-season vegetables. Besides, it is the second largest province of the country in area where vegetables were being cultivated, they said, adding the marketing aspects of vegetables had not received sufficient attention despite the government’s efforts for the promotion of agriculture sector.
The markets were to facilitate the growers and traders by providing basic infrastructure, wide roads, ample vehicle parking space and utilities like water supply, sewerage, surface drainage, internal RCC roads, electricity, mosques, lavatory block and post office. It would also have space for cold storage, construction of auction platforms and public facilitation centres such as banks, post office, information centre, digital display boards and weigh bridges.
The market committee of Karachi is responsible for operation of markets under the provision of APM Act 1939 and would ensure transparent auction of the products. Moreover, the sources said the market fee would be charged from the buyers as per the Agriculture Produce Market Act 1939.
Talking to Pakistan Today, Abdul Rauf Tanoli, General Secretary of the Welfare Association of Wholesale Vegetable Market, said the establishment of new vegetable markets would not facilitate traders and consumers. The government had yet to provide basic facilities, including potable water, electricity, sewerage system and roads at the existing market that had been declared as a model market of the country, he added.
He said the government was wasting billions of rupees on such projects instead of maintaining the infrastructure of the existing one. He alleged that many market committee officials were involved in corruption and failed to facilitate traders which had badly affected the revenue collection. He demanded that the government should appoint sincere officials on the market committees and ensure provision of basic amenities.
I'm all for capitalism, but true capitalism. I'm not for businesses profiting at the expense of the taxpayer. If companies are investing their own money that is fine and dandy. But when they want to dip in the public treasury, that's when they have crossed the line. It's why I oppose stadiums and arenas built at taxpayer expense only to turn around and charge enormous prices for parking, tickets, food and other stuff to those same taxpayers. Then turn around and pay no taxes at all like the NFL,NBA and NHL team owners
Every week I have to drive on Interstate I-90 in Massachusetts. This is a public road built with taxpayer money in the 1950's,earns millions of dollars, then turns around and every years requests millions more in Transportation monies from Washington for road repairs. Where did all that money go that was made from collecting tolls?
Pork barrel politics is what we have in Washington. Conservatives complain about the 48 million people who are collecting SNAP benefits so they don't starve or us seniors that live on that meager social security we get ,yet ignore the Billions that we paid out every year in Corporate Welfare programs
Both parties are equally as guilty when it comes to their special projects in their home districts. We in Massachusetts have Congressman Jim McGovern that on one hand argues against the cuts to the SNAP program, yet with his other hand requests public monies for questionable projects, like Proposed Recipient: Assumption College, Worcester.
Construction of a Parking Garage at Assumption College. Assumption College plans to construct a simple, economical and efficient parking garage between the Kennedy classroom building and the athletic fields in order to accommodate the ever-increasing number of people from the community who spend time on campus. In particular, the senior citizens attending the Worcester Institute for Senior Education (WISE) program are in dire need of parking that is not far from the location of the majority of their seminars and activities. When students, faculty, and senior citizens cannot find appropriate parking on campus, the cars overflow to neighborhood streets, dissipating some of the community goodwill generated by having activities on campus in the first place. This is a valuable use of taxpayer funds because it will allow senior citizens, students, and faculty to have convenient, safe parking options.
This is a private college that has a big endowment fund, lots of Alumni and charges an in-state college tuition of $34,000 for off campus and $48,000 per student for on campus living. So why the special treatment? Here's why-- Paul Belisto. He is the Executive Director of Community Relation's at Assumption College and before that he worked for Congressman McGovern's office.
Again this is a private NGO that should get its own funding for projects and not be using taxpayer monies regardless of the reasons. Corporate Welfare. The federal budget is filled with outrageous, inappropriate, useless, counterproductive, and simply wasteful spending like this project of Congressman McGovern's.
Washington has become an endless soup kitchen for special interests, with a grant or loan seemingly available for every interest group with a letterhead and at least three members. Legislators need to find some political courage and take a meat ax to the budget. It is a target-rich environment.
Admittedly, there are some essential programs, such as providing for our seniors, the poorest of our society, children and the disabled. Or the judicial system. But even where Washington is doing something useful, say national law enforcement, many of its activities are not justified. For instance, the FBI performs a useful role, but not the Drug Enforcement Agency, which tosses people in jail for hurting themselves. Paying out billions of dollars to police departments to become local military style units, when that money could have been used in education programs that prevent crime and help get people back to work.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年6月20日星期四
Newly insured Illinoisans may not find doctors
As hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans become newly eligible for health insurance next year, their search for adequate medical services will be most difficult in pockets of the state where a shortage of primary care physicians could be made more acute by the federal health overhaul.
Illinois is slightly above average compared to other states in its overall supply of primary care doctors. The problem — as in most states — is that doctors aren't evenly distributed, leaving some areas relying on nurses and physician assistants to provide care. Doctors don't necessarily go where need is greatest. Instead, studies have shown, they cluster in affluent areas.
Illinois Department of Public Health Director LaMar Hasbrouck, a physician leading a workgroup studying the gaps, said solutions in Illinois may include delivering health care through real-time video hookups, a fast track to credentials for military veterans who gained medical experience at war, sharing nurses across state borders and "warming up to the idea" that nurses and physician assistants can do more to deliver primary care.
Licensed practitioners need to work "at the very top of their license and experience and professional competency, so we can get every ounce of care from them," Hasbrouck said at a meeting on implementing the health law in Illinois.
The Illinois State Medical Society, which represents more than 11,000 doctors, successfully lobbied against legislative measures this year to give nurses with advanced degrees more authority to practice without a doctor's supervision and to allow trained dentists to give flu shots and other immunizations. The doctors argued that it's unsafe to push those boundaries.
Twenty-two counties in Illinois have primary care doctor shortages, according to state and federal health officials. Another 200 pockets of Illinois have shortages, both in urban and rural areas. It would take nearly 1,000 new primary care doctors, according to a government estimate, to bring all those areas up to a healthy supply.
The most severe shortage is in Gallatin County on the Kentucky border in the far southeastern part of the state. The county of 5,500 residents has no hospital, dentist or full-time doctor. Some residents pay $50 a year for an air ambulance service that can fly them to a hospital in emergencies. Women deliver their babies at hospitals an hour away.
The lack of primary care is both a fact of life and a detriment to health, said retired teacher and community volunteer Kappy Scates of Shawneetown, whose regular doctor is in a neighboring county 20 miles away. "People without insurance or a medical card put off going to the doctor. They try to take care of their kids first," she said, adding that increased coverage through the Affordable Care Act will help.
Other Illinois counties with severe shortfalls of primary care doctors are scattered throughout the state. Many are sparsely populated and losing residents, according to Census data.
In the south, along with Gallatin County, widespread primary care doctor shortages exist in Washington, Clay, Fayette, Clinton, Johnson and Hamilton counties. In central Illinois, the countywide doctor shortages are in Menard, Macoupin, De Witt, Marshall, Shelby, Douglas, Mason, Moultrie, Piatt, Brown and Woodford. In northern Illinois, the counties with shortages are Henderson, Mercer, Carroll and Ogle.
Federal officials determine areas with doctor shortages based on a complex formula that involves not only the population-to-primary care physician ratio, but percentage of people living in poverty, measures of infant health and distance to the nearest available source of care.
With nearly 10,600 primary care doctors caring for patients, Illinois ranks 22nd among states in its rate of doctors per 100,000 residents, according to a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges. That puts the state slightly above average for its supply of active primary care doctors.
Recommendations from a 2010 report on the physician workforce in Illinois were never implemented, said Dr. Russell Robertson, dean of the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago. He still holds out hope for the new statewide strategy, which he will take part in creating.
But Robertson said there are forces — such as the so-called "hidden curriculum" — that make recruiting new primary care physicians difficult. During training, he said, student doctors study with physicians who are specialists and who unintentionally dissuade them from primary care.
The body is also similar in style to the NX20's. Although the Galaxy NX is technically a compact system camera, measuring 136.5 x 101.2 x 25.7mm and weighing 495g with a standard battery means that to describe it as "compact" is pushing it. It's actually as large as a small DSLR and reassuringly hefty to boot. Admittedly, some of the weight in hand during our brief play will have been made up by the 18-55mm Samsung lens on the front, but we wouldn't expect this camera to be used for standard holiday snaps.
Inner specifications are impressive. Like the Samsung Galaxy S4, the Galaxy NX is powered by a 1.6GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. There is also 16GB of internal memory, with a microSD card slot allowing for expansion by up to a further 64GB.
The aforementioned compatibility with 4G data in regions that support it (3G in those that don't) is a brilliant move that will make you wonder how you ever got on without it. You will be able to instantly upload pictures to the cloud - most likely through Dropbox, as Samsung has a partnership - no matter where you are. And if you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot, all the better, as it won't come out of your network plan.
Wireless internet connectivity even comes in the form of dual-band Wi-Fi (a/b/g/n), so it should be super quick and stable too. And there's Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity and GPS in-built. An accelerometer means you can even play tilt-based games on the camera, such as Real Racing 3 or the like.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
Illinois is slightly above average compared to other states in its overall supply of primary care doctors. The problem — as in most states — is that doctors aren't evenly distributed, leaving some areas relying on nurses and physician assistants to provide care. Doctors don't necessarily go where need is greatest. Instead, studies have shown, they cluster in affluent areas.
Illinois Department of Public Health Director LaMar Hasbrouck, a physician leading a workgroup studying the gaps, said solutions in Illinois may include delivering health care through real-time video hookups, a fast track to credentials for military veterans who gained medical experience at war, sharing nurses across state borders and "warming up to the idea" that nurses and physician assistants can do more to deliver primary care.
Licensed practitioners need to work "at the very top of their license and experience and professional competency, so we can get every ounce of care from them," Hasbrouck said at a meeting on implementing the health law in Illinois.
The Illinois State Medical Society, which represents more than 11,000 doctors, successfully lobbied against legislative measures this year to give nurses with advanced degrees more authority to practice without a doctor's supervision and to allow trained dentists to give flu shots and other immunizations. The doctors argued that it's unsafe to push those boundaries.
Twenty-two counties in Illinois have primary care doctor shortages, according to state and federal health officials. Another 200 pockets of Illinois have shortages, both in urban and rural areas. It would take nearly 1,000 new primary care doctors, according to a government estimate, to bring all those areas up to a healthy supply.
The most severe shortage is in Gallatin County on the Kentucky border in the far southeastern part of the state. The county of 5,500 residents has no hospital, dentist or full-time doctor. Some residents pay $50 a year for an air ambulance service that can fly them to a hospital in emergencies. Women deliver their babies at hospitals an hour away.
The lack of primary care is both a fact of life and a detriment to health, said retired teacher and community volunteer Kappy Scates of Shawneetown, whose regular doctor is in a neighboring county 20 miles away. "People without insurance or a medical card put off going to the doctor. They try to take care of their kids first," she said, adding that increased coverage through the Affordable Care Act will help.
Other Illinois counties with severe shortfalls of primary care doctors are scattered throughout the state. Many are sparsely populated and losing residents, according to Census data.
In the south, along with Gallatin County, widespread primary care doctor shortages exist in Washington, Clay, Fayette, Clinton, Johnson and Hamilton counties. In central Illinois, the countywide doctor shortages are in Menard, Macoupin, De Witt, Marshall, Shelby, Douglas, Mason, Moultrie, Piatt, Brown and Woodford. In northern Illinois, the counties with shortages are Henderson, Mercer, Carroll and Ogle.
Federal officials determine areas with doctor shortages based on a complex formula that involves not only the population-to-primary care physician ratio, but percentage of people living in poverty, measures of infant health and distance to the nearest available source of care.
With nearly 10,600 primary care doctors caring for patients, Illinois ranks 22nd among states in its rate of doctors per 100,000 residents, according to a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges. That puts the state slightly above average for its supply of active primary care doctors.
Recommendations from a 2010 report on the physician workforce in Illinois were never implemented, said Dr. Russell Robertson, dean of the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago. He still holds out hope for the new statewide strategy, which he will take part in creating.
But Robertson said there are forces — such as the so-called "hidden curriculum" — that make recruiting new primary care physicians difficult. During training, he said, student doctors study with physicians who are specialists and who unintentionally dissuade them from primary care.
The body is also similar in style to the NX20's. Although the Galaxy NX is technically a compact system camera, measuring 136.5 x 101.2 x 25.7mm and weighing 495g with a standard battery means that to describe it as "compact" is pushing it. It's actually as large as a small DSLR and reassuringly hefty to boot. Admittedly, some of the weight in hand during our brief play will have been made up by the 18-55mm Samsung lens on the front, but we wouldn't expect this camera to be used for standard holiday snaps.
Inner specifications are impressive. Like the Samsung Galaxy S4, the Galaxy NX is powered by a 1.6GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. There is also 16GB of internal memory, with a microSD card slot allowing for expansion by up to a further 64GB.
The aforementioned compatibility with 4G data in regions that support it (3G in those that don't) is a brilliant move that will make you wonder how you ever got on without it. You will be able to instantly upload pictures to the cloud - most likely through Dropbox, as Samsung has a partnership - no matter where you are. And if you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot, all the better, as it won't come out of your network plan.
Wireless internet connectivity even comes in the form of dual-band Wi-Fi (a/b/g/n), so it should be super quick and stable too. And there's Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity and GPS in-built. An accelerometer means you can even play tilt-based games on the camera, such as Real Racing 3 or the like.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年6月18日星期二
Access Prepaid Worldwide launches BA multi-currency card
The partnership will allow British Airways Executive Club members to earn more Avios points, receiving one Avios point for every ￡1 loaded (or reloaded) onto the card. The travel card which is available now offers a more convenient way to make payments for Executive Club members who travel to different countries; as only one card is needed for payment across certain continents and currencies.
The Executive Club Multi-currency Cash Passport card works with the option to load up to seven currencies while locking in the exchange rate at a point in time. When used in market, the card intelligently selects the local currency to ensure the best rate. If the local currency is not on the card, funds are used from other currencies loaded to ensure the transaction is approved. The chip and PIN enabled BA Executive Club Multi-currency Cash Passport will hold seven currencies; EUR, GBP, USD, AUD, CAD, NZD, and ZAR.
Executive Club members who purchase a Multi-currency Cash Passport card and load to the value of ￡50 in the first two months, will be eligible to enter a prize draw. The prize package is for two people and will comprise of return flights to Rome, 4* accommodation, ￡500 spending money and 100,000 Avios points. The promotion runs until 31st July.
Steve Grigg, President at Access Prepaid Worldwide stated: "Building on our partnership with Avios, we are delighted to offer BA Executive Club customers our Multi-currency Cash Passport. Not only does it provide a safe and secure way to carry your currency overseas, but will also allow members to collect more Avios. With smart wallet technology, the ability to hold seven different currencies on one card and the Indoor Positioning System of our in-house team of friendly and expert staff 24/7, we look forward to seeing BA Executive Club customers reap the benefits of this card."
Marion King, UK & Ireland President at MasterCard said: "We are proud to be working rking with British Airways to offer their Executive Club customers the convenience to make safe and secure payments in many different countries, using one card. The MasterCard, Access and British Airways collaboration through the Executive Club Multi-currency Cash Passport product demonstrates our commitment to progress within the airline arena. Our subsidary Access Prepaid Worldwide have been instrumental in the innovation and market-leading solution which will make the Executive Club Multi-currency Cash Passport a huge success."
Ian Romanis, British Airways' Head of Loyalty, said: "We are always looking at new and innovative ways to improve the service we offer British Airways Executive Club customers and are sure the Multi-currency Cash Passport card will provide even greater flexibility when travelling overseas for business or leisure."
Prosecutors say DeRosa and an accomplice, 33-year-old John Eric Castleberry, went to Curtis and Gloria Plummers' home in the Le Flore County community of Poteau on Oct. 2, 2000, and convinced the couple to let them inside. DeRosa had worked at the couple's ranch.
Authorities say DeRosa and Castleberry stabbed the couple, who were in their 70s, and slashed their throats. Prosecutors say the duo made off with $73 and the Plummers' pickup truck, which was later found abandoned at a nearby lake.
Castleberry pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the couple's death and testified against DeRosa as part of a deal that included a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Although it's been almost 13 years since the victims were killed, their family members say they still feel the void their deaths created.
"I miss having a sister. I struggle when someone asks if I have a sister," Jo Milligan wrote in an April 24 letter to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. "Glo (or Gloria) was my big sister – my only sister – my only sibling. And Curt became my brother when I was 5 years old," Milligan wrote. "When shopping and I pass birthday cards, Valentine cards, etc., always the ones for `Sister' reach out to me. And I cry in the card aisle."
The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board last month voted 3-2 to reject DeRosa's request for his death sentence to be commuted to a life term. Speaking at the hearing via teleconferencing from prison, DeRosa apologized to the victims' family.
"I can't express how truly sorry I am for the pain I've caused the Plummer family," DeRosa said from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. "I take full responsibility for their deaths. If not for me, they wouldn't have died that night."
DeRosa told the board he had turned to religion since his arrest and convictions and urged the board to set aside his death sentence so he could be a positive influence on the prison system's general population.
In recent years courts all over Britain have seen an increase in cases involving Romanian cashpoint gangs. The near-industrial scale of their activities makes the current crime trend of shoulder surfing — reading someone’s PIN over their shoulder at the cashpoint, then grabbing their card and fleeing — look amateurish in comparison.
Last December Leonid Rotaru appeared at Taunton Crown Court in Somerset, charged with being part of a gang that got away with the details of 9,000 cards and a potential theft of ￡3million.
Chief Commissioner Virgil Spiridon, head of Romania’s cybercrime squad, told The Sun: “Gangs from Bacau travel mostly to the UK — they like it there. We have other gangs in Romania who operate in France, but the Bacau gangs go to Britain. Maybe it is because they have a good result there.”
But the city’s boom times may soon be over, according to Mr Spiridon. Over the past few months British police have travelled to Romania to meet their counterparts to devise a way of bringing the cashpoint crime spree to an end.
The Executive Club Multi-currency Cash Passport card works with the option to load up to seven currencies while locking in the exchange rate at a point in time. When used in market, the card intelligently selects the local currency to ensure the best rate. If the local currency is not on the card, funds are used from other currencies loaded to ensure the transaction is approved. The chip and PIN enabled BA Executive Club Multi-currency Cash Passport will hold seven currencies; EUR, GBP, USD, AUD, CAD, NZD, and ZAR.
Executive Club members who purchase a Multi-currency Cash Passport card and load to the value of ￡50 in the first two months, will be eligible to enter a prize draw. The prize package is for two people and will comprise of return flights to Rome, 4* accommodation, ￡500 spending money and 100,000 Avios points. The promotion runs until 31st July.
Steve Grigg, President at Access Prepaid Worldwide stated: "Building on our partnership with Avios, we are delighted to offer BA Executive Club customers our Multi-currency Cash Passport. Not only does it provide a safe and secure way to carry your currency overseas, but will also allow members to collect more Avios. With smart wallet technology, the ability to hold seven different currencies on one card and the Indoor Positioning System of our in-house team of friendly and expert staff 24/7, we look forward to seeing BA Executive Club customers reap the benefits of this card."
Marion King, UK & Ireland President at MasterCard said: "We are proud to be working rking with British Airways to offer their Executive Club customers the convenience to make safe and secure payments in many different countries, using one card. The MasterCard, Access and British Airways collaboration through the Executive Club Multi-currency Cash Passport product demonstrates our commitment to progress within the airline arena. Our subsidary Access Prepaid Worldwide have been instrumental in the innovation and market-leading solution which will make the Executive Club Multi-currency Cash Passport a huge success."
Ian Romanis, British Airways' Head of Loyalty, said: "We are always looking at new and innovative ways to improve the service we offer British Airways Executive Club customers and are sure the Multi-currency Cash Passport card will provide even greater flexibility when travelling overseas for business or leisure."
Prosecutors say DeRosa and an accomplice, 33-year-old John Eric Castleberry, went to Curtis and Gloria Plummers' home in the Le Flore County community of Poteau on Oct. 2, 2000, and convinced the couple to let them inside. DeRosa had worked at the couple's ranch.
Authorities say DeRosa and Castleberry stabbed the couple, who were in their 70s, and slashed their throats. Prosecutors say the duo made off with $73 and the Plummers' pickup truck, which was later found abandoned at a nearby lake.
Castleberry pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the couple's death and testified against DeRosa as part of a deal that included a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Although it's been almost 13 years since the victims were killed, their family members say they still feel the void their deaths created.
"I miss having a sister. I struggle when someone asks if I have a sister," Jo Milligan wrote in an April 24 letter to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. "Glo (or Gloria) was my big sister – my only sister – my only sibling. And Curt became my brother when I was 5 years old," Milligan wrote. "When shopping and I pass birthday cards, Valentine cards, etc., always the ones for `Sister' reach out to me. And I cry in the card aisle."
The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board last month voted 3-2 to reject DeRosa's request for his death sentence to be commuted to a life term. Speaking at the hearing via teleconferencing from prison, DeRosa apologized to the victims' family.
"I can't express how truly sorry I am for the pain I've caused the Plummer family," DeRosa said from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. "I take full responsibility for their deaths. If not for me, they wouldn't have died that night."
DeRosa told the board he had turned to religion since his arrest and convictions and urged the board to set aside his death sentence so he could be a positive influence on the prison system's general population.
In recent years courts all over Britain have seen an increase in cases involving Romanian cashpoint gangs. The near-industrial scale of their activities makes the current crime trend of shoulder surfing — reading someone’s PIN over their shoulder at the cashpoint, then grabbing their card and fleeing — look amateurish in comparison.
Last December Leonid Rotaru appeared at Taunton Crown Court in Somerset, charged with being part of a gang that got away with the details of 9,000 cards and a potential theft of ￡3million.
Chief Commissioner Virgil Spiridon, head of Romania’s cybercrime squad, told The Sun: “Gangs from Bacau travel mostly to the UK — they like it there. We have other gangs in Romania who operate in France, but the Bacau gangs go to Britain. Maybe it is because they have a good result there.”
But the city’s boom times may soon be over, according to Mr Spiridon. Over the past few months British police have travelled to Romania to meet their counterparts to devise a way of bringing the cashpoint crime spree to an end.
2013年6月16日星期日
Bangor residents to decide school budget
Bangor voters will cast ballots inside the Cross Insurance Center for the first time on Tuesday to decide the fate of Bangor Public Library’s copper roof replacement bond and the city’s $42 million school budget.
Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. June 18 at the new arena, 515 Main St. Voters should enter on Dutton Street and park in the lot on that street. Overflow parking will be available in the Hollywood Casino parking garage and golf carts will transport people across the street to the polls.
Superintendent Betsy Webb has called the budget “bare-bones” in a year when neither the school system nor city know for sure what severe fiscal challenges they might face when the state passes its own budget.
Question 2 asks whether voters want to continue to hold referendums on the school budget for the next three years. A yes vote means residents will continue to have to approve the school budget. A no vote means the City Council’s approval of the school budget will make it final without going before voters.
The final question is whether the city should take out a $3 million bond to replace Bangor Public Library’s failing 100-year-old copper roof. Officials say “Band-Aids” won’t work anymore.
For the bond to pass, a majority of voters in the election would need to approve the loan. However, if the total number of votes cast is less than 10 percent of the registered voters in the city, then the bond question will automatically pass, even if a majority of voters don’t approve.
The bond is one-third of a $9 million renovation and modernization project, according to library Director Barbara McDade. Stephen and Tabitha King have pledged $3 million toward the effort, but only if the bond passes and the library raises another $3 million on its own.
Alberto Santos-Dumont (he preferred the equals sign to a hyphen, so, what the hell, I’ll write it that way from here on out) was one of the pioneers of early aviation, developing the world’s first practical steerable powered dirigible blimps and later moving to heaver-than-air craft, making the first fixed-wing aircraft flight in Europe. These contributions are well-documented, but I want to focus more specifically on his unique personal transportation solutions, which I think represent the absolute best situation of any person in history, and possibly of any person in the foreseeable future.
I normally write about cars, and for most of us that represents the core of our personal transportation solution. For some of us, that solution also includes subways or rail travel for intra-city travel, and if we have to go long distances, we’ll take flights on large commercial airliners.
Santos=Dumont had a very different approach. He lived in Paris, and in addition to the petrol and electric automobiles he owned, he got around town in a small, powered, steerable dirigible of his own design. He did this mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, long before there were any inklings of ideas about air-traffic control laws, so Santos=Dumont had free run to float over the city at rooftop level, stopping in at cafés or even his own apartment, tooling around the Paris airspace like he fucking owned the place. Which he basically did, in any way that matters.
Just think about it for a second: say you live in one of the greatest cities in the world, but like all great cities, it’s dense, crowded, and a pain to get around in. What would be the ideal way to get around? Through the air! You wouldn’t need outright speed, but you would want something that could hover indefinitely, stop and manoeuvre with the agility of a car, and make you look like King Badass’s Boss’s cool Dad when you got in and out of it. A personal blimp fits all these criteria perfectly.
Some background on Alberto Santos=Dumont is probably worth talking about now, if only so you can make the inevitable Bruce Wayne/Batman associations in your head. Santos=Dumont was the son of a very wealthy Brazilian coffee grower. It was in his father’s extensive and highly innovative coffee fields that young albert first encountered steam driven machinery and even a locomotive, which fascinated him.
Dumont’s No.6 airship was used to win the Deutch Prize, which was to be awarded to the first steerable, powered airship to be able to make the 6.8 mile round trip between the Eiffel Tower and the Parc de Saint Cloud in Paris in 30 minutes or less. Santos=Dumont rounded the Eiffel Tower in only nine minutes and all was looking great when he had engine trouble, causing the engine to stall.
He couldn’t restart the engine from his control basket, so he had to shimmy across the flimsy, skeletal airframe to the engine, without any safety harnesses or anything, with only the raw badassium secreting from his pores to protect him. He eventually got the engine restarted, and managed to finish the course with only 30 seconds to spare.Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en!
Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. June 18 at the new arena, 515 Main St. Voters should enter on Dutton Street and park in the lot on that street. Overflow parking will be available in the Hollywood Casino parking garage and golf carts will transport people across the street to the polls.
Superintendent Betsy Webb has called the budget “bare-bones” in a year when neither the school system nor city know for sure what severe fiscal challenges they might face when the state passes its own budget.
Question 2 asks whether voters want to continue to hold referendums on the school budget for the next three years. A yes vote means residents will continue to have to approve the school budget. A no vote means the City Council’s approval of the school budget will make it final without going before voters.
The final question is whether the city should take out a $3 million bond to replace Bangor Public Library’s failing 100-year-old copper roof. Officials say “Band-Aids” won’t work anymore.
For the bond to pass, a majority of voters in the election would need to approve the loan. However, if the total number of votes cast is less than 10 percent of the registered voters in the city, then the bond question will automatically pass, even if a majority of voters don’t approve.
The bond is one-third of a $9 million renovation and modernization project, according to library Director Barbara McDade. Stephen and Tabitha King have pledged $3 million toward the effort, but only if the bond passes and the library raises another $3 million on its own.
Alberto Santos-Dumont (he preferred the equals sign to a hyphen, so, what the hell, I’ll write it that way from here on out) was one of the pioneers of early aviation, developing the world’s first practical steerable powered dirigible blimps and later moving to heaver-than-air craft, making the first fixed-wing aircraft flight in Europe. These contributions are well-documented, but I want to focus more specifically on his unique personal transportation solutions, which I think represent the absolute best situation of any person in history, and possibly of any person in the foreseeable future.
I normally write about cars, and for most of us that represents the core of our personal transportation solution. For some of us, that solution also includes subways or rail travel for intra-city travel, and if we have to go long distances, we’ll take flights on large commercial airliners.
Santos=Dumont had a very different approach. He lived in Paris, and in addition to the petrol and electric automobiles he owned, he got around town in a small, powered, steerable dirigible of his own design. He did this mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, long before there were any inklings of ideas about air-traffic control laws, so Santos=Dumont had free run to float over the city at rooftop level, stopping in at cafés or even his own apartment, tooling around the Paris airspace like he fucking owned the place. Which he basically did, in any way that matters.
Just think about it for a second: say you live in one of the greatest cities in the world, but like all great cities, it’s dense, crowded, and a pain to get around in. What would be the ideal way to get around? Through the air! You wouldn’t need outright speed, but you would want something that could hover indefinitely, stop and manoeuvre with the agility of a car, and make you look like King Badass’s Boss’s cool Dad when you got in and out of it. A personal blimp fits all these criteria perfectly.
Some background on Alberto Santos=Dumont is probably worth talking about now, if only so you can make the inevitable Bruce Wayne/Batman associations in your head. Santos=Dumont was the son of a very wealthy Brazilian coffee grower. It was in his father’s extensive and highly innovative coffee fields that young albert first encountered steam driven machinery and even a locomotive, which fascinated him.
Dumont’s No.6 airship was used to win the Deutch Prize, which was to be awarded to the first steerable, powered airship to be able to make the 6.8 mile round trip between the Eiffel Tower and the Parc de Saint Cloud in Paris in 30 minutes or less. Santos=Dumont rounded the Eiffel Tower in only nine minutes and all was looking great when he had engine trouble, causing the engine to stall.
He couldn’t restart the engine from his control basket, so he had to shimmy across the flimsy, skeletal airframe to the engine, without any safety harnesses or anything, with only the raw badassium secreting from his pores to protect him. He eventually got the engine restarted, and managed to finish the course with only 30 seconds to spare.Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en!
2013年6月8日星期六
Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 is a feature rich smartphone
Let’s get this out of the way right up front. I use an iPhone 5 presently and I’ve used iPhones since the first version, so I’m not likely to ever want to change that. So why, you might ask, do I feel that I need to review a Samsung Galaxy S4?
Simply put, the fact that I use a different phone is of no consequence to this review. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is a great smartphone, regardless of what I use, and my inability to be able to use the device to it’s potential is more a reflection of my inexperience with a different operating system than I’m used to.
I won’t get into the ridiculous argument of which phone is better – it’s the old PC vs Mac debate that’s raged for years. It doesn’t matter – the best device is the one that you understand, meets your needs and you enjoy using, regardless of operating systems.
Outwardly, the S4 doesn’t look all that different from the S3, which was a hugely popular phone – and Samsung’s statistics show that the new Galaxy 4S is the fastest selling phone they’ve ever made, so obviously the 4S is a hit with consumers.
The Galaxy 4S is large – that’s certainly one of its drawing cards. At 69.8mm W x 136.6mm H x 7.9mm D, the Galaxy S4 has a 5-inch, 1080p display which is vivid, bright and absolutely beautiful to look at. The Galaxy 4S weighs in at 130 grams, which I find very light for such a large device.
It’s thinner then the SIII, but with a much faster 1.9GHz quad core processor and even more bells and whistles, plus the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system. The S4 is loaded with sensors, with an Accelerometer, Geomagnetic, Gyro, RGB light, Barometer, Proximity, real time Location system, Temperature & Humid, Hall sensors – it’s a highly capable smartphone.
Over 17 hours of talk time and over 300 hours of standby time make this a battery you won’t have to charge at the end of every day.
Users can preview content simply by hovering a finger over the screen, they can run two apps at the same time with Multi Window, and safely use their phone while driving, by using Samsung’s S –Voice Drive mode.
Actually, the best place for any phone while driving is the trunk – handsfree may free your hands but it doesn’t keep your mind completely focused on driving either, so I wouldn’t recommend any phone be used while driving.
This is cool – Group Play enables a connection with up to 10 different devices so users can all share the same content on separate screens. If it’s an online game, music or video, or even a document between co-workers, all the connected users can experience whatever is being shared at the same time.
And, of course, there’s the ability to access content and preview folders without touching the screen by using Air View. Smart Gesture offers fast, simple navigation to browse your photo library or answer incoming calls simply by moving your hand over the screen.
The more I played with the demo version of the phone I had, the harder I found it to use. It does so much, in so many innovative ways that my poor old brain just couldn’t assimilate the information fast enough. Of course kids will learn the phone inside out in ten minutes, but for me, it does too much – but it’s cool quotient is over the top. Of course I could have started by using Easy Mode and working my way up to using all the technology onboard this device, but I’m a guy, and a tech writer, so I should be able to pick just about any device up and master the use of it in a short period of time – oh if only it worked that way!
All smartphone users are familiar with face to face chat in some form or another and this Galaxy S4 is no different, except that it will allow you to have a video chat with two people at the same time and the Dual Shot will let you take a still picture of your subject and you at the same time – kind of neat for seeing your reaction to something you’re taking a picture of.
Multi Window offers multitasking, with the ability to open two separate windows at the same time so you could read your e-mail and text messages on the same screen at the same time.
The new S Translator on the Galaxy S4 offers users the ability to either speak or type what they want translated into one of eight different languages. The phone then will display what you said or even read it back, something that would be helpful while travelling. I didn’t test this out, so to be quite honest while it seems like a very worthwhile application for a traveller, I can’t attest to the efficacy of it.
Simply put, the fact that I use a different phone is of no consequence to this review. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is a great smartphone, regardless of what I use, and my inability to be able to use the device to it’s potential is more a reflection of my inexperience with a different operating system than I’m used to.
I won’t get into the ridiculous argument of which phone is better – it’s the old PC vs Mac debate that’s raged for years. It doesn’t matter – the best device is the one that you understand, meets your needs and you enjoy using, regardless of operating systems.
Outwardly, the S4 doesn’t look all that different from the S3, which was a hugely popular phone – and Samsung’s statistics show that the new Galaxy 4S is the fastest selling phone they’ve ever made, so obviously the 4S is a hit with consumers.
The Galaxy 4S is large – that’s certainly one of its drawing cards. At 69.8mm W x 136.6mm H x 7.9mm D, the Galaxy S4 has a 5-inch, 1080p display which is vivid, bright and absolutely beautiful to look at. The Galaxy 4S weighs in at 130 grams, which I find very light for such a large device.
It’s thinner then the SIII, but with a much faster 1.9GHz quad core processor and even more bells and whistles, plus the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system. The S4 is loaded with sensors, with an Accelerometer, Geomagnetic, Gyro, RGB light, Barometer, Proximity, real time Location system, Temperature & Humid, Hall sensors – it’s a highly capable smartphone.
Over 17 hours of talk time and over 300 hours of standby time make this a battery you won’t have to charge at the end of every day.
Users can preview content simply by hovering a finger over the screen, they can run two apps at the same time with Multi Window, and safely use their phone while driving, by using Samsung’s S –Voice Drive mode.
Actually, the best place for any phone while driving is the trunk – handsfree may free your hands but it doesn’t keep your mind completely focused on driving either, so I wouldn’t recommend any phone be used while driving.
This is cool – Group Play enables a connection with up to 10 different devices so users can all share the same content on separate screens. If it’s an online game, music or video, or even a document between co-workers, all the connected users can experience whatever is being shared at the same time.
And, of course, there’s the ability to access content and preview folders without touching the screen by using Air View. Smart Gesture offers fast, simple navigation to browse your photo library or answer incoming calls simply by moving your hand over the screen.
The more I played with the demo version of the phone I had, the harder I found it to use. It does so much, in so many innovative ways that my poor old brain just couldn’t assimilate the information fast enough. Of course kids will learn the phone inside out in ten minutes, but for me, it does too much – but it’s cool quotient is over the top. Of course I could have started by using Easy Mode and working my way up to using all the technology onboard this device, but I’m a guy, and a tech writer, so I should be able to pick just about any device up and master the use of it in a short period of time – oh if only it worked that way!
All smartphone users are familiar with face to face chat in some form or another and this Galaxy S4 is no different, except that it will allow you to have a video chat with two people at the same time and the Dual Shot will let you take a still picture of your subject and you at the same time – kind of neat for seeing your reaction to something you’re taking a picture of.
Multi Window offers multitasking, with the ability to open two separate windows at the same time so you could read your e-mail and text messages on the same screen at the same time.
The new S Translator on the Galaxy S4 offers users the ability to either speak or type what they want translated into one of eight different languages. The phone then will display what you said or even read it back, something that would be helpful while travelling. I didn’t test this out, so to be quite honest while it seems like a very worthwhile application for a traveller, I can’t attest to the efficacy of it.
2013年6月7日星期五
Communicating with the iGeneration
The oldest member of this generation is, as of this year, old enough to drive, voted in their first presidential election and is probably on their way to college. They don't know a world without smart phones, have never used a card catalog, consider email antiquated, and have no use for printed books.
This year, and every year thereafter, digital natives will be entering the marketplace in droves. By 2020, the entire generation will be adult consumers. We are past the age of Gen Y, which entered the work force during the great communications disruption of the past decade symbolized by the iPhone and then iPad. They entered the workplace with a different mindset, changed social behaviors and a sense of entitlement.
But with the coming of age of the next generation -- a generation often called Generation Z, but more likely to be known as the iGen generation (a nod to Apple?) -- there is likely to be such an enormous disruption that fundamentally it will change how brands and consumers communicate and, more importantly, the media’s role in this process.
"iGen," the generation born between 1994 and 2004 will, in just a few short years, be joining Gen Y as a majority among digital natives. This new consumer that came of age in 2012, landed in a marketplace environment where the online world and real world are inescapably connected and where TV is served through computers, where the Internet is omnipresent and global borders are virtually eliminated. The iGen generation has the entirety of human knowledge on their phones and, as such, is projected to be the largest and deepest generation gap in history.
Companies' success or failure in relating to this new "public" will be contingent upon their ability to communicate with iGen and earn their advocacy.
They will need to recognize that there has never before been a generation so globally plugged in and so informed and that traditional strategies and tactics will be increasingly ineffective ways to connect with them. iGen is a generation born with consumer-driven capitalism at its core and altruism at its heart. Their patterns and behaviors are opposed to anything that has come before them and they basically ignore messages from brands.
So if iGen-ers will no longer be paying any attention to any traditional form of controlled brand messaging, how are brands supposed to communicate with iGen?
It has become abundantly clear that it is simply in iGen-ers' DNA to listen to their trusted network, rather than controlled messages from brands. They only care about information if it is relevant to them and, since the power of brand-engagement is in the hands of the consumer, iGen-ers will serve as their own gatekeepers, awarding relevant information by sharing it with their trusted network of peers and burying irrelevant information so it will be invisible to their peers. Brand communications must change to be relevant to, and accessible, by iGen.
Brands have to earn admittance to their infinite touch points. And there is a price for admission. Brands must become fluent in their language and habits, converse in two-way genuine and authentic communication, and deliver on brand promises.
An acceptable bypass into iGen's circle of trust is to leverage influencers that already have access to iGen's infinite touch points. These influencers can be anyone from individuals active on social media to just people with a lot of friends or it can also include the professionals in the communication industry.
If a brand can ethically earn favor from influencers, then Brian Solis' one-to-one-to-many process of communication is leveraged. iGen may not listen to brands, but iGen will listen to influencers they trust when they talk about brands.
"We're redefining computing by leaving laptops behind" and using tablets and smartphones, she said. "The world of computing has gone mobile … We're starting to demand things in our pockets that used to be on our desktops."
Johnson cited research forecasts that 7.5 billion smartphones will ship worldwide over the next five years, joining the 1.5 billion smartphones already in the market. She noted that 1 million new smartphones now join the network every day, about three times the number of babies that are born throughout the world each day.
Noting that mobile data consumption has already been at least doubling every year, she predicted that usage will grow by an astounding 1000 percent over the next 10 years.
"Everything wants to get connected in our environment today, everything wants to talk," she said, citing other predictions that there will be 25 billion connected devices globally by 2020. "It's just an onslaught."
Lastly, Johnson foresees the development of a "digital sixth sense," or "a merging of the physical and digital worlds," in the near future. As consumer electronics makers start to put sensing monitors into their mobile handsets, she believes that wireless devices will increasingly enable users to "augment" their reality with "overlapping metadata."
For example, Johnson envisions people in remote locations using mobile devices and medical sensors on their bodies to collect and send vital health information to doctors hundreds or thousands of miles away. She noted the current push to develop a Star Trek-like medical tricorder that could scan the body for a variety of health problems and conditions without touching the skin. Click on their website www.ecived.com/en for more information.
This year, and every year thereafter, digital natives will be entering the marketplace in droves. By 2020, the entire generation will be adult consumers. We are past the age of Gen Y, which entered the work force during the great communications disruption of the past decade symbolized by the iPhone and then iPad. They entered the workplace with a different mindset, changed social behaviors and a sense of entitlement.
But with the coming of age of the next generation -- a generation often called Generation Z, but more likely to be known as the iGen generation (a nod to Apple?) -- there is likely to be such an enormous disruption that fundamentally it will change how brands and consumers communicate and, more importantly, the media’s role in this process.
"iGen," the generation born between 1994 and 2004 will, in just a few short years, be joining Gen Y as a majority among digital natives. This new consumer that came of age in 2012, landed in a marketplace environment where the online world and real world are inescapably connected and where TV is served through computers, where the Internet is omnipresent and global borders are virtually eliminated. The iGen generation has the entirety of human knowledge on their phones and, as such, is projected to be the largest and deepest generation gap in history.
Companies' success or failure in relating to this new "public" will be contingent upon their ability to communicate with iGen and earn their advocacy.
They will need to recognize that there has never before been a generation so globally plugged in and so informed and that traditional strategies and tactics will be increasingly ineffective ways to connect with them. iGen is a generation born with consumer-driven capitalism at its core and altruism at its heart. Their patterns and behaviors are opposed to anything that has come before them and they basically ignore messages from brands.
So if iGen-ers will no longer be paying any attention to any traditional form of controlled brand messaging, how are brands supposed to communicate with iGen?
It has become abundantly clear that it is simply in iGen-ers' DNA to listen to their trusted network, rather than controlled messages from brands. They only care about information if it is relevant to them and, since the power of brand-engagement is in the hands of the consumer, iGen-ers will serve as their own gatekeepers, awarding relevant information by sharing it with their trusted network of peers and burying irrelevant information so it will be invisible to their peers. Brand communications must change to be relevant to, and accessible, by iGen.
Brands have to earn admittance to their infinite touch points. And there is a price for admission. Brands must become fluent in their language and habits, converse in two-way genuine and authentic communication, and deliver on brand promises.
An acceptable bypass into iGen's circle of trust is to leverage influencers that already have access to iGen's infinite touch points. These influencers can be anyone from individuals active on social media to just people with a lot of friends or it can also include the professionals in the communication industry.
If a brand can ethically earn favor from influencers, then Brian Solis' one-to-one-to-many process of communication is leveraged. iGen may not listen to brands, but iGen will listen to influencers they trust when they talk about brands.
"We're redefining computing by leaving laptops behind" and using tablets and smartphones, she said. "The world of computing has gone mobile … We're starting to demand things in our pockets that used to be on our desktops."
Johnson cited research forecasts that 7.5 billion smartphones will ship worldwide over the next five years, joining the 1.5 billion smartphones already in the market. She noted that 1 million new smartphones now join the network every day, about three times the number of babies that are born throughout the world each day.
Noting that mobile data consumption has already been at least doubling every year, she predicted that usage will grow by an astounding 1000 percent over the next 10 years.
"Everything wants to get connected in our environment today, everything wants to talk," she said, citing other predictions that there will be 25 billion connected devices globally by 2020. "It's just an onslaught."
Lastly, Johnson foresees the development of a "digital sixth sense," or "a merging of the physical and digital worlds," in the near future. As consumer electronics makers start to put sensing monitors into their mobile handsets, she believes that wireless devices will increasingly enable users to "augment" their reality with "overlapping metadata."
For example, Johnson envisions people in remote locations using mobile devices and medical sensors on their bodies to collect and send vital health information to doctors hundreds or thousands of miles away. She noted the current push to develop a Star Trek-like medical tricorder that could scan the body for a variety of health problems and conditions without touching the skin. Click on their website www.ecived.com/en for more information.
2013年6月5日星期三
The Last Of Us
Survival horror is dead, right? Resident Evil has gone off the rails and the last couple of Silent Hill games were barely better than the recent movies (which were, you know, bad). They are franchises which have lost their patience with the moody, spine-tingling scenarios they used to set up in favour of epic Hollywood set-pieces and Rambo-like shootouts. It's a trend that was arguably in part triggered by the Uncharted series, the Indiana Jones-like japes that The Last Of Us developers Naughty Dog wowed all PlayStation 3 fans with across this console generation.
Those expecting The Last Of Us to be like Uncharted are in for a shock. If anything, it's the closest we've come to a truly next-gen survival horror game since Resident Evil 4 shook up the real time Location system, and it's a triumph of smart game design.
But to call The Last Of Us solely a survival horror game is to tell only part of its story. Naughty Dog have proved themselves to be incredibly adept gaming and cultural magpies, mining all sorts of influences (both gaming and otherwise) to create a game that constantly surprises, horrifies and delights. There's a slice of Splinter Cell here, a scene ripped out of Cormac McCarthy's novel 'The Road' here, and indeed a fair helping of Uncharted's all-out-action too. There's more variety in an hour of The Last Of Us than some third-person adventures manage in their entire playtime.
Pulling all of these disparate parts together is a story that plays out like a post-apocalyptic road movie. A worldwide epidemic has turned the majority of the planet's population into fungal monstrosities, with spores floating in the air that first turn humans into raging animals and then, over time dull all their senses except for hearing and cause them to deform with large mushroom-like growths. The few who have managed to avoid infection live out their lives in high-walled police state cities, barely eating enough to survive. A mysterious freedom fighting force named the Fireflies aims to bring balance to the hardships of city life, but for many the relative safety behind the walls is far more preferable than the dangers beyond. Urban life as we know it is irreversibly changed; in the 20-odd years since the infection took hold, skyscrapers have crumbled, cars rust in piles on motorways and nature has reclaimed the land, growing over the concrete monoliths of civilisation past. Only wildlife and the roaming, screaming infected remain.
You take on the role of Joel, a middle-aged, gruff smuggler who is both feared and liked in equal measure. Though just as likeable, he's no Nathan Drake; Joel's past is touched by tragedy, and he has done questionable things in order to survive in this harsh new world. He's tasked with smuggling Ellie, a young girl born after the outbreak of infection, beyond the city walls for mysterious reasons. It quickly transpires that she is the most precious cargo Joel has ever cared for, and the pair embark on a journey that takes them across the dark heart of the deformed American wasteland.
The Last Of Us is survival horror in the truest sense. Joel and Ellie will constantly be scavenging, always on the verge of running out of ammunition, always looking for the means to incrementally improve their meagre arsenal. Every shot fired not only runs the risk of alerting deadly enemies but takes away resources that may be truly hard to come by in the future.
Such low supplies not only makes each encounter with the infected tense and frightening, but also truly challenging. There's no "one-approach-fits-all" to fights, and you'll have to think on your feet in order to survive. Sometimes it's a matter of patience, crouching quietly behind cover and listening with Joel's focus ability (think of it like a spider-sense for the ears, allowing you to hear - and see - enemy movements through walls) in order to get a grasp of the numbers you're facing and the places the infected are hiding. Perhaps you'll need to quietly strangle a few, or throw a bottle to cause a distraction to sneak past them all entirely. Other times there's no choice but to face them head on, but even then a well-designed arsenal of weaponry forces your approach to combat to be a thoughtful one.
This sense of variety is aided by the enemy and level design. From 28 Days Later style-runners that swarm Joel to the creepy, blind Clickers that use sound waves in order to hunt and shamble towards your position, to putrefying Bloaters with ranged spore attacks and armoured plating, each feels a vastly different foe. And when they combine forces to attack Joel all at once, it can be a chaotic battle to make it out alive. From tight, pitch-black corridors to wide open spaces, some with plenty of cover spots and some with next to none, some with the chance for attacks from on high, others where your best bet is to take a low-down path, your surroundings keep you on your toes as much as the monsters.
Human enemies will also attack Joel and Ellie from time to time, be they military forces on the lookout for the runaways or scavengers whose morality has been dashed with the struggle to keep on living. They're a truly devious challenge, often attacking in numbers and changing patrol routes regularly, with an uncanny ability to communicate your last known position and eventually surrounded you. Though you have a flashlight at your disposal, the shadows are often your best friend, and The Last Of Us' stealth sequences are right up their with the best moments the Splinter Cell games managed.
As well as a spot of bare-knuckle boxing (taking the best bits of Uncharted 3's interactive environments to use as on-the-fly bludgeoning spots), Joel has access to a number of bats, clubs and handguns, a shotgun and rifle, a bow and projectile consumable weapons including molotov cocktails and nailbombs, as well as shivs that can be used to sneak-kill enemies and unlock some doors in the game. Scavenging parts littered around levels will let Joel craft new projectiles, while weapon benches can be found to upgrade your guns. Supplements can also be found to improve your skills such as the range of your focus listening and maximum health. Though it's not full of space-age weaponry, each offensive item in the game serves a unique purpose in combat, making their varied use a necessity to survival. By comparison, in Uncharted I spent 90% of all three games just using the pistols. Do that here and you'll die a lot. Neat touches, like seeing a molotov smash on a runner enemy, only to attract Clickers that in turn burst into flames as they stand over the source of the splintering glass sound, is as satisfying a combat moment as I've had in any game. You'll also sometimes enlist companions who can cover your back out in the dangerous world.
Those expecting The Last Of Us to be like Uncharted are in for a shock. If anything, it's the closest we've come to a truly next-gen survival horror game since Resident Evil 4 shook up the real time Location system, and it's a triumph of smart game design.
But to call The Last Of Us solely a survival horror game is to tell only part of its story. Naughty Dog have proved themselves to be incredibly adept gaming and cultural magpies, mining all sorts of influences (both gaming and otherwise) to create a game that constantly surprises, horrifies and delights. There's a slice of Splinter Cell here, a scene ripped out of Cormac McCarthy's novel 'The Road' here, and indeed a fair helping of Uncharted's all-out-action too. There's more variety in an hour of The Last Of Us than some third-person adventures manage in their entire playtime.
Pulling all of these disparate parts together is a story that plays out like a post-apocalyptic road movie. A worldwide epidemic has turned the majority of the planet's population into fungal monstrosities, with spores floating in the air that first turn humans into raging animals and then, over time dull all their senses except for hearing and cause them to deform with large mushroom-like growths. The few who have managed to avoid infection live out their lives in high-walled police state cities, barely eating enough to survive. A mysterious freedom fighting force named the Fireflies aims to bring balance to the hardships of city life, but for many the relative safety behind the walls is far more preferable than the dangers beyond. Urban life as we know it is irreversibly changed; in the 20-odd years since the infection took hold, skyscrapers have crumbled, cars rust in piles on motorways and nature has reclaimed the land, growing over the concrete monoliths of civilisation past. Only wildlife and the roaming, screaming infected remain.
You take on the role of Joel, a middle-aged, gruff smuggler who is both feared and liked in equal measure. Though just as likeable, he's no Nathan Drake; Joel's past is touched by tragedy, and he has done questionable things in order to survive in this harsh new world. He's tasked with smuggling Ellie, a young girl born after the outbreak of infection, beyond the city walls for mysterious reasons. It quickly transpires that she is the most precious cargo Joel has ever cared for, and the pair embark on a journey that takes them across the dark heart of the deformed American wasteland.
The Last Of Us is survival horror in the truest sense. Joel and Ellie will constantly be scavenging, always on the verge of running out of ammunition, always looking for the means to incrementally improve their meagre arsenal. Every shot fired not only runs the risk of alerting deadly enemies but takes away resources that may be truly hard to come by in the future.
Such low supplies not only makes each encounter with the infected tense and frightening, but also truly challenging. There's no "one-approach-fits-all" to fights, and you'll have to think on your feet in order to survive. Sometimes it's a matter of patience, crouching quietly behind cover and listening with Joel's focus ability (think of it like a spider-sense for the ears, allowing you to hear - and see - enemy movements through walls) in order to get a grasp of the numbers you're facing and the places the infected are hiding. Perhaps you'll need to quietly strangle a few, or throw a bottle to cause a distraction to sneak past them all entirely. Other times there's no choice but to face them head on, but even then a well-designed arsenal of weaponry forces your approach to combat to be a thoughtful one.
This sense of variety is aided by the enemy and level design. From 28 Days Later style-runners that swarm Joel to the creepy, blind Clickers that use sound waves in order to hunt and shamble towards your position, to putrefying Bloaters with ranged spore attacks and armoured plating, each feels a vastly different foe. And when they combine forces to attack Joel all at once, it can be a chaotic battle to make it out alive. From tight, pitch-black corridors to wide open spaces, some with plenty of cover spots and some with next to none, some with the chance for attacks from on high, others where your best bet is to take a low-down path, your surroundings keep you on your toes as much as the monsters.
Human enemies will also attack Joel and Ellie from time to time, be they military forces on the lookout for the runaways or scavengers whose morality has been dashed with the struggle to keep on living. They're a truly devious challenge, often attacking in numbers and changing patrol routes regularly, with an uncanny ability to communicate your last known position and eventually surrounded you. Though you have a flashlight at your disposal, the shadows are often your best friend, and The Last Of Us' stealth sequences are right up their with the best moments the Splinter Cell games managed.
As well as a spot of bare-knuckle boxing (taking the best bits of Uncharted 3's interactive environments to use as on-the-fly bludgeoning spots), Joel has access to a number of bats, clubs and handguns, a shotgun and rifle, a bow and projectile consumable weapons including molotov cocktails and nailbombs, as well as shivs that can be used to sneak-kill enemies and unlock some doors in the game. Scavenging parts littered around levels will let Joel craft new projectiles, while weapon benches can be found to upgrade your guns. Supplements can also be found to improve your skills such as the range of your focus listening and maximum health. Though it's not full of space-age weaponry, each offensive item in the game serves a unique purpose in combat, making their varied use a necessity to survival. By comparison, in Uncharted I spent 90% of all three games just using the pistols. Do that here and you'll die a lot. Neat touches, like seeing a molotov smash on a runner enemy, only to attract Clickers that in turn burst into flames as they stand over the source of the splintering glass sound, is as satisfying a combat moment as I've had in any game. You'll also sometimes enlist companions who can cover your back out in the dangerous world.
2013年6月4日星期二
Merchants continue to resist migration
Although networks, issuers, and acquirers are making strides in the switch to EMV, a significant number of retailers are resistant to making the required upgrades to their point-of-sale hardware. During a recent RAMP Mobile Retail Services conference, a panel of major retailers, a processor acquirer, and a merchant association executive collectively criticized EMV mandates.
Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover Financial Services continue to hold fast to the October 2015 deadline for merchants to have the technology in place to handle EMV payments (fuel merchants have an additional two years). Failure to upgrade their hardware will result in an increased fraud liability burden for merchants.
Although it’s well known that the U.S. EMV migration is coming about much later than other countries, many do not see this as a negative. In fact, they see it as quite the opposite, as it allows us in the U.S. to learn from the experiences of other countries, potentially easing the transition here.
One of the biggest complaints merchants make is in regard to the technology itself. Many are concerned that by the time they complete the switch to EMV, a new upgrade will be required, leaving them constantly behind the curve.
For example, Murphy Oil has 16,000 gas pumps to convert for EMV compliance. An upgrade of that magnitude is anticipated to cost the company millions of dollars. That, combined with the potential risk of the technology becoming obsolete by the time the switch is completed, has led Murphy Oil to indicate they may not make the switch to EMV at all.
According to the panel, another merchant concern centers on the ongoing chip-and-PIN vs. chip-and-signature debate. With a number of card issuers choosing not to require the use of a PIN to add security to EMV-chip card payments, some merchants are concerned about the level of fraud protection the switch will actually offer. There is also some merchant unease about EMV’s failure to address the shift in fraud to card-not-present transactions.
Also discussed at the conference is the general lack of awareness about EMV among smaller merchants and the potential challenges this will pose to the success of the U.S. migration. The panel also broached the subject of EMV terminals and security. The group agreed that a security standard must be established for the entire merchant community, not only for card networks and financial institutions.
Members of the panel conceded that although a number of merchants are unlikely to fully adopt EMV until the last minute, many merchants are taking the necessary steps toward meeting the requirements.
Last fall, a crowd of reporters gathered at the Tim Hortons at Bay and Wellesley to watch the Olympic triathlete Simon Whitfield buy a cup of coffee with his BlackBerry. He tapped his phone against a payment terminal, and commerce occurred invisibly. “Mobile payments have arrived!” declared a VP from Rogers. The company had orchestrated the event to unveil Suretap, a service that, in partnership with CIBC, allows customers to use phones to wirelessly pay for stuff.
Suretap was then just a pilot project, with a somewhat limited scope—only for CIBC account holders, only for people with Rogers wireless service, only compatible with BlackBerry phones and restricted to transactions of $50 or less. By the spring, fewer than 10,000 Canadians had given it a try. But leaders in telecommunications anticipate a rapid, widescale embrace of wireless payments, resulting in phones that act as full-service digital wallets that store everything—credit cards, debit cards, TTC passes, government-issued ID, gift cards and library cards. In a recent survey of bankers and retailers, 80 per cent said they expect the digital wallet to go mainstream in the next few years.
At a daylong financial technology conference at the Toronto Board of Trade in late March, representatives from Samsung, Visa, Rogers and Interac gathered to map out this bold new future, salivating over its possibilities. One Telus executive on a panel at the conference called it the Holy Grail of 21st-century commerce. Bell, Telus and Rogers are so optimistic about this business that they have put aside their differences and teamed up to form EnStream, a system that will enable banks to issue virtual credit cards onto our smartphones.
Pawel Chrobok, EnStream’s director of business development, predicts that with a single tap at checkout, all transactions will occur simultaneously: the customer will make a purchase that will be charged to a credit card or direct to a bank account, be credited the value of digital coupons or gift cards stored on the phone, earn Air Miles and receive a digital receipt. The prospect delights retailers because lines in stores will move quicker and more people will buy more things. The banks will be happy because they’ll issue tons of new cards, all at a fee. The phone companies love that they’ll get to charge banks for access to the phone owner’s SIM card.
CIBC has spent roughly $25 million supporting the development of a technology called Near Field Communication. It’s a chip that now comes with new models of BlackBerry and Android phones, and it lets the user make secure transactions when placed within a few centimetres of an NFC-compatible terminal, thousands of which have been installed in Canadian stores—at great expense to card companies, banks and merchants. Any machine that accepts a tap payment from a credit card will also take NFC transactions from a smartphone. (Rumour has it the iPhone 6 series, expected out in 2014, will include an NFC chip, lending hope to frustrated Apple fans who dubbed the technology “Never Fucking Coming.”)
Our infrastructure for smartphone payment has quickly become so robust that an international study conducted by Master-Card ranked Canada the number two most “mobile-payment ready” nation in the world, just behind Singapore and just ahead of the United States. The technology is here, lying dormant. Do we have the will to use it? A recent financial industry research paper applauded Canada’s technological readiness for mobile payments, but added this caveat: “For Canadians, the benefits are not fully understood.”Click on their website www.ecived.com/en for more information.
Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover Financial Services continue to hold fast to the October 2015 deadline for merchants to have the technology in place to handle EMV payments (fuel merchants have an additional two years). Failure to upgrade their hardware will result in an increased fraud liability burden for merchants.
Although it’s well known that the U.S. EMV migration is coming about much later than other countries, many do not see this as a negative. In fact, they see it as quite the opposite, as it allows us in the U.S. to learn from the experiences of other countries, potentially easing the transition here.
One of the biggest complaints merchants make is in regard to the technology itself. Many are concerned that by the time they complete the switch to EMV, a new upgrade will be required, leaving them constantly behind the curve.
For example, Murphy Oil has 16,000 gas pumps to convert for EMV compliance. An upgrade of that magnitude is anticipated to cost the company millions of dollars. That, combined with the potential risk of the technology becoming obsolete by the time the switch is completed, has led Murphy Oil to indicate they may not make the switch to EMV at all.
According to the panel, another merchant concern centers on the ongoing chip-and-PIN vs. chip-and-signature debate. With a number of card issuers choosing not to require the use of a PIN to add security to EMV-chip card payments, some merchants are concerned about the level of fraud protection the switch will actually offer. There is also some merchant unease about EMV’s failure to address the shift in fraud to card-not-present transactions.
Also discussed at the conference is the general lack of awareness about EMV among smaller merchants and the potential challenges this will pose to the success of the U.S. migration. The panel also broached the subject of EMV terminals and security. The group agreed that a security standard must be established for the entire merchant community, not only for card networks and financial institutions.
Members of the panel conceded that although a number of merchants are unlikely to fully adopt EMV until the last minute, many merchants are taking the necessary steps toward meeting the requirements.
Last fall, a crowd of reporters gathered at the Tim Hortons at Bay and Wellesley to watch the Olympic triathlete Simon Whitfield buy a cup of coffee with his BlackBerry. He tapped his phone against a payment terminal, and commerce occurred invisibly. “Mobile payments have arrived!” declared a VP from Rogers. The company had orchestrated the event to unveil Suretap, a service that, in partnership with CIBC, allows customers to use phones to wirelessly pay for stuff.
Suretap was then just a pilot project, with a somewhat limited scope—only for CIBC account holders, only for people with Rogers wireless service, only compatible with BlackBerry phones and restricted to transactions of $50 or less. By the spring, fewer than 10,000 Canadians had given it a try. But leaders in telecommunications anticipate a rapid, widescale embrace of wireless payments, resulting in phones that act as full-service digital wallets that store everything—credit cards, debit cards, TTC passes, government-issued ID, gift cards and library cards. In a recent survey of bankers and retailers, 80 per cent said they expect the digital wallet to go mainstream in the next few years.
At a daylong financial technology conference at the Toronto Board of Trade in late March, representatives from Samsung, Visa, Rogers and Interac gathered to map out this bold new future, salivating over its possibilities. One Telus executive on a panel at the conference called it the Holy Grail of 21st-century commerce. Bell, Telus and Rogers are so optimistic about this business that they have put aside their differences and teamed up to form EnStream, a system that will enable banks to issue virtual credit cards onto our smartphones.
Pawel Chrobok, EnStream’s director of business development, predicts that with a single tap at checkout, all transactions will occur simultaneously: the customer will make a purchase that will be charged to a credit card or direct to a bank account, be credited the value of digital coupons or gift cards stored on the phone, earn Air Miles and receive a digital receipt. The prospect delights retailers because lines in stores will move quicker and more people will buy more things. The banks will be happy because they’ll issue tons of new cards, all at a fee. The phone companies love that they’ll get to charge banks for access to the phone owner’s SIM card.
CIBC has spent roughly $25 million supporting the development of a technology called Near Field Communication. It’s a chip that now comes with new models of BlackBerry and Android phones, and it lets the user make secure transactions when placed within a few centimetres of an NFC-compatible terminal, thousands of which have been installed in Canadian stores—at great expense to card companies, banks and merchants. Any machine that accepts a tap payment from a credit card will also take NFC transactions from a smartphone. (Rumour has it the iPhone 6 series, expected out in 2014, will include an NFC chip, lending hope to frustrated Apple fans who dubbed the technology “Never Fucking Coming.”)
Our infrastructure for smartphone payment has quickly become so robust that an international study conducted by Master-Card ranked Canada the number two most “mobile-payment ready” nation in the world, just behind Singapore and just ahead of the United States. The technology is here, lying dormant. Do we have the will to use it? A recent financial industry research paper applauded Canada’s technological readiness for mobile payments, but added this caveat: “For Canadians, the benefits are not fully understood.”Click on their website www.ecived.com/en for more information.
2013年6月2日星期日
Kingdom famous for memorable destinations
Can’t make up your mind on where to go this summer? Want to go somewhere new and exciting? Want to discover new places? Well, how about a road trip around the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We recommend you to pack light and don’t forget your camera. We have chosen ten exciting destinations within the Kingdom that would make a great trip for the whole family.
Start with the Kingdom’s capital located right in the middle of Saudi Arabia. It is the hub of government offices, big corporations, factories and embassies, which makes it a popular destination for businessmen and job seekers. Riyadh is a blend of the old and the new, which is strongly reflected in the architecture and homes. You will enjoy shopping in the malls such as Centria mall for luxury brands, to local market such as Al-Zall market that features many locally-made products. Food and dining out is very enjoyable and the variety of restaurants is just amazing. Tourists will find interesting things to do from picnicking at the park to feeding animals at the zoo or even camping out in the Tihama desert. This place has something for everyone.
They call it the Bride of Nature. It is known for the colorful buildings and great weather. Located in the south of the Kingdom and mostly visited during the summer season, Aseer is an agricultural area known for olive trees, and honey, which is known to be the best of its kind in the Kingdom, so don’t hesitate to take some with you back home. Local and open markets are very big in Aseer where tourists can find great deals from local products such as clothing, food and furniture. The farmer market is also a crowded place, especially on weekends and is a must-see to discover the local harvest.
The stone-built village, stern guardian of a trade route now in disuse for a long time,nestled in the valley at the foot of Souda Mountain, was hewn, dressed and built with relatively crude tools out of the local rock. It required a huge amount of human effort to build it. Eventually it fell into disrepair and became part of history. It has been restored and preserved by the local community and has won the Prince Sultan bin Salman Prize for Preservation of Urban Heritage in 2006.
Abha has established itself as the tourist capital of the region and displays all the trappings of the mass tourist trade. Cable cars, luxury hotels, amusement parks and some well-developed easily accessible tourist sites, all located in the cool mountains, which make it a popular summer destination for thousands.
When you arrive in Najran, it is very hard not to notice the kind and peaceful people of Najran. They are very friendly and very protective of the visitors and guests. The artifacts of Najran reflect very rich traditions. Traditional clay houses in Najran are considered one of the most beautiful houses in the world. Najran offers adventurous travelers opportunities for hiking, rock climbing, walking, and trekking around the green land. Local-made handicrafts are attractive, which you will find in the open markets. You well see locals making soap, and designing clay, wooden and leather goods, accessories and more. You can also visit the National Museum, park and zoo to see the real story behind this location.
It is known as the Kingdom’s Pearl of the South. The agriculture and greenery in this area is just remarkable and makes a perfect background for a picture. The islands and beaches of Jazan are also famous among locals who spend their weekends fishing and enjoying water activities and sports there. Farasan Island is one of the most famous islands in the south of Saudi Arabia, especially known for its Hareed, parrotfish, festival when swarms of this pretty fish appear in the shallow waters in the Al-Hasis gulf close to the Farsan Island. The fish gets its name from the numerous teeth that are arranged in a tightly packed mosaic on the external surface of the jawbones, forming a parrot-like beak.
It is the perfect destination for those who are looking to spend their summer by the beach, natural desert or see cultural sights. Tabuk also offers many resorts, parks and adventures to the visitors. Tabuk is actually one of the few cities in the Kingdom where snow falls during winter and that’s when many locals head to the Louz Mountain to enjoy snow activities. The beaches are beautiful and offer tourists different activities such as water sports and fishing throughout the year in addition to camping, camel riding and feeding animals at the zoo.
Those who are looking for desert adventure head for Hail. It is a perfect place for camping in the desert where you can enjoy many activities from hunting, camel riding to musical Bedouin nights. The city also pays close attention to history where old buildings still exist and locals are still holding on to their traditional clothing and food so if you want to learn more about this area visit the Hail Museum.
Known as the City of Flowers, Taif has flower factories that produce oil, perfumes and rose water. Anyone can visit those factories. Locals head to Taif especially during the summer to escape from the heat and enjoy this city’s cool weather. Aside from flowers, Taif is known for the fruit harvest that is later collected and sent to all Saudi cities and sold in local markets. A beautiful way to explore the area is to have a ride on the telepherque, mountain cable cars, where you can see the beauty of Taif. Families can enjoy an afternoon at the local park and zoo where they can picnic and feed the monkeys who are famous in this area.Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en!
Start with the Kingdom’s capital located right in the middle of Saudi Arabia. It is the hub of government offices, big corporations, factories and embassies, which makes it a popular destination for businessmen and job seekers. Riyadh is a blend of the old and the new, which is strongly reflected in the architecture and homes. You will enjoy shopping in the malls such as Centria mall for luxury brands, to local market such as Al-Zall market that features many locally-made products. Food and dining out is very enjoyable and the variety of restaurants is just amazing. Tourists will find interesting things to do from picnicking at the park to feeding animals at the zoo or even camping out in the Tihama desert. This place has something for everyone.
They call it the Bride of Nature. It is known for the colorful buildings and great weather. Located in the south of the Kingdom and mostly visited during the summer season, Aseer is an agricultural area known for olive trees, and honey, which is known to be the best of its kind in the Kingdom, so don’t hesitate to take some with you back home. Local and open markets are very big in Aseer where tourists can find great deals from local products such as clothing, food and furniture. The farmer market is also a crowded place, especially on weekends and is a must-see to discover the local harvest.
The stone-built village, stern guardian of a trade route now in disuse for a long time,nestled in the valley at the foot of Souda Mountain, was hewn, dressed and built with relatively crude tools out of the local rock. It required a huge amount of human effort to build it. Eventually it fell into disrepair and became part of history. It has been restored and preserved by the local community and has won the Prince Sultan bin Salman Prize for Preservation of Urban Heritage in 2006.
Abha has established itself as the tourist capital of the region and displays all the trappings of the mass tourist trade. Cable cars, luxury hotels, amusement parks and some well-developed easily accessible tourist sites, all located in the cool mountains, which make it a popular summer destination for thousands.
When you arrive in Najran, it is very hard not to notice the kind and peaceful people of Najran. They are very friendly and very protective of the visitors and guests. The artifacts of Najran reflect very rich traditions. Traditional clay houses in Najran are considered one of the most beautiful houses in the world. Najran offers adventurous travelers opportunities for hiking, rock climbing, walking, and trekking around the green land. Local-made handicrafts are attractive, which you will find in the open markets. You well see locals making soap, and designing clay, wooden and leather goods, accessories and more. You can also visit the National Museum, park and zoo to see the real story behind this location.
It is known as the Kingdom’s Pearl of the South. The agriculture and greenery in this area is just remarkable and makes a perfect background for a picture. The islands and beaches of Jazan are also famous among locals who spend their weekends fishing and enjoying water activities and sports there. Farasan Island is one of the most famous islands in the south of Saudi Arabia, especially known for its Hareed, parrotfish, festival when swarms of this pretty fish appear in the shallow waters in the Al-Hasis gulf close to the Farsan Island. The fish gets its name from the numerous teeth that are arranged in a tightly packed mosaic on the external surface of the jawbones, forming a parrot-like beak.
It is the perfect destination for those who are looking to spend their summer by the beach, natural desert or see cultural sights. Tabuk also offers many resorts, parks and adventures to the visitors. Tabuk is actually one of the few cities in the Kingdom where snow falls during winter and that’s when many locals head to the Louz Mountain to enjoy snow activities. The beaches are beautiful and offer tourists different activities such as water sports and fishing throughout the year in addition to camping, camel riding and feeding animals at the zoo.
Those who are looking for desert adventure head for Hail. It is a perfect place for camping in the desert where you can enjoy many activities from hunting, camel riding to musical Bedouin nights. The city also pays close attention to history where old buildings still exist and locals are still holding on to their traditional clothing and food so if you want to learn more about this area visit the Hail Museum.
Known as the City of Flowers, Taif has flower factories that produce oil, perfumes and rose water. Anyone can visit those factories. Locals head to Taif especially during the summer to escape from the heat and enjoy this city’s cool weather. Aside from flowers, Taif is known for the fruit harvest that is later collected and sent to all Saudi cities and sold in local markets. A beautiful way to explore the area is to have a ride on the telepherque, mountain cable cars, where you can see the beauty of Taif. Families can enjoy an afternoon at the local park and zoo where they can picnic and feed the monkeys who are famous in this area.Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en!
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