The Snarchitect | Technology meets creativity meets culture. And snarky commentary to make it all taste great.

UPS had a bad holiday season

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Rick

UPS had a bad holiday peak season and paid the price. (Login required)

United Parcel Service Inc. delivered holiday packages on time this season, but it paid a steep price.
The company surprised Wall Street Friday by announcing that preparations to handle the holiday rush cost it $200 million more than expected. It now expects adjusted fourth-quarter earnings per share of $1.25, well below the $1.47 estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
The Atlanta-based company also warned that its 2015 earnings projection is now likely out of reach in part because of pension costs and currency fluctuations.
Right on the heels of the UPS news, rival FedEx Corp. sounded a different note. It touted a new volume record for the holiday season and affirmed its 2015 targets, assuming “moderate economic growth and a modest net benefit from fuel.”
UPS’s stock sank 9.9% to $102.93 in Friday trading as analysts questioned management’s ability to properly forecast and adjust to the new norms of e-commerce. FedEx shares fell 3% to $176.11.
Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analysts said they were “troubled by the company’s inability to get peak [operating expenses] right during what is increasingly becoming the most important quarter of the year.” UPS, they wrote, “got the service but not the cost, which is going to leave the market wondering if they can only have one or the other.”
UPS was determined this past holiday season to avoid the problems it had the prior year when online shoppers overwhelmed the network with last-minute orders before Christmas. More than a million express packages arrived late, according to Shipmatrix Inc.
Package volume and revenue in the 2014 season were about as planned, but the delivery company overcompensated, Chief Financial Officer Kurt Kuehn said in a statement. “Ultimately, we built an operating plan that would provide superior service if volume levels exceeded expectations.”

www.wsj.com

Earliest known version of the Gospel of Mark

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Rick

A bit off-topic, but so amazing, it’s worth reporting: an early, possibly draft, copy of the Gospel of Mark (from, you know, The Holy Bible) dating from the first century, recovered from paper later recycled into an Egyptian death mask.

This first-century gospel fragment was written on a sheet of papyrus that was later reused to create a mask that was worn by a mummy. Although the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs wore masks made of gold, ordinary people had to settle for masks made out of papyrus (or linen), paint and glue. Given how expensive papyrus was, people often had to reuse sheets that already had writing on them.
In recent years scientists have developed a technique that allows the glue of mummy masks to be undone without harming the ink on the paper. The text on the sheets can then be read.

+ Actually, come to think of it, this story should go into the category of “amazingly amazing”, to plagiarize Zaphod Beeblebrox.
www.livescience.com

Boeing and University of Washington partner on engineering center

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Rick

Boeing and the University of Washington partner on an advanced engineering center.

Boeing and the University of Washington are taking their collaboration to greater heights with a new campus research center where doctoral engineering students, UW professors and Boeing engineers will work side by side on projects focused on automating aircraft assembly processes.
The jet maker is investing $800,000 per year initially to fund the first four research projects at the new Boeing Advanced Research Center, company spokesman Peter Conte said.
Jointly led by Boeing-employed engineers working as affiliate instructors and UW engineering professors, the 4,300-square-foot facility at the Department of Mechanical Engineering has been planned for more than a year.

www.aviationpros.com

Latest entrants to Cisco business incubator

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Rick

Cisco announced the latest group of small companies selected for its business incubator program.

Cohort companies take part in a six-month program of events, mentoring and collaboration geared towards bringing ideas to reality. Entrepreneurs selected to participate receive support from and introductions to business groups within Cisco, access to co-working space, and mentoring from industry experts. Program events feature opportunities to present products and ideas to investors and partners, as well.
Four of the new cohort will join the Cisco Entrepreneurs in Residence in Silicon Valley:

Measurence (www.measurence.com), based out of New York, provides a mobile analytics and intelligence platform for retailers and other businesses.
ParStream (www.parstream.com), located in California and Germany, offers a complete analytics platform built for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) solutions utilizing massively parallel processing technologies.
PLAT.ONE (www.platone.co), from Italy, delivers a “cloud-ready” end-to-end IoT and machine-to-machine application platform.
Preferred Networks (preferred-america.com) of Japan adds intelligence to the Internet of Everything by applying machine learning and Big Data technologies to devices and networks.

www.pressreleasepoint.com

Why can’t the online grocery business make it big?

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Rick

The grocery delivery logistics business has the potential of large revenue, but really thin margins. Still, the big players can’t afford to take a pass on the opportunity.

But look more closely at the report, and you see the major challenges these companies will face as they try to make these fledgling businesses viable. IBIS World estimates that the online grocery business collectively brought in $10.9 billion in sales in 2014. Profit, it estimates, was just $927.1 million, or 8.5 percent of total revenue. By 2018, the researchers project that profit margins will slip to 6.9 percent of sales. In part, that’s because these operators will continue to contend with the high distribution costs associated with getting perishable items to customers.
The report also predicts that big players, particularly AmazonFresh, will play a role in compressing margins for the whole industry. Amazon has often sought to vanquish its competitors by undercutting them on price, and the report suggests that the company may use that tactic in the grocery business, dropping their prices as low as possible and, in doing so, pressuring their competitors to make similar price cuts. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)
Even though it’s a tough business model right now, report author and industry analyst Will McKitterick says companies of all stripes feel they can’t afford not to take a chance on it.
“For larger companies, it’s definitely a process to build the infrastructure, develop the delivery networks,” McKitterick said. “All of that takes a lot of time, and if they miss the boat now, then they’re going to be in a pretty bad position” later on if throngs of consumers take to online grocery shopping.

www.washingtonpost.com

The balance between IT and lean manufacturing

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Rick

For true lean manufacturing, is IT even really needed? Purists would say no, but the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Then again, some people question whether computer systems are even needed for achieving lean manufacturing. After all, some lean tools entail merely physical processes and best practices on the shop floor, where transactional enterprise systems have little to offer. Also, given that computers were not widely available when lean manufacturing and kanbans first emerged, many enterprises have stuck with manually-driven lean methods. For such methods, an evolutionary step forward entails the use of custom spreadsheets and reports to support lean functions such as kanban management and heijunka calculations (see Lean and World Class Manufacturing and the Information Technology Dilemma—The Loss of Corporate Consciousness). It is interesting to note, however, that even in such cases, material requirements planning (MRP) systems still can be used to hold core master data on items and bills of material (BOM), though these records have to be tweaked with an eye toward lead time-oriented information.
…
As usual, the truth might be somewhere in a middle—lean manufacturing and IT are not in opposition, and all good lean systems have both physical systems in the plant and near real time IT backbones that centralize data, especially if there is an automatic data entry and capture function. In fact, some people say that the whole point of the lean philosophy is to simplify the physical processes so that one does not need to manage overly complex data systems, though it is still necessary to manage the relevant data at the points where corrections are needed. To that end, many IT systems are designed to bring from the field only the data that management or decision-makers can do something about.
The reality is that most companies operate in a hybrid, mixed-mode environment where flow or lean and traditional batch or push manufacturing models coexist within the same facility, and where production and demand requirements can change throughout the different stages of a product’s life cycle. Manufacturers can produce both high-volume goods with steady demand and low-volume goods with fluctuating demand, and their product mix may include engineer-to-order (ETO), make-to-order (MTO), and make-to-stock (MTS) items.

www.technologyevaluation.com

Rapid increase in quality and presence of retail WiFi

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Rick

In the era of customer hyper relevance, we know that retail WiFi drives loyalty. This, combined with a move to cloud based central inventory management, is driving WAN infrastructure optimization and upgrades.

Greg Griffiths, Vice President of Product Alliances, EarthLink, remarked, “Our purpose in teaming up with IHL Group and AirTight for this important study is to provide retailers with actionable data to help them plan their next-generation engagement and technology roadmaps. We also see an increasing need for WAN optimization, driven by the bandwidth needs of the new centralized order management systems.”
According to IHL Group, nearly 70% of specialty retailers are designing their next Point-of-Sale system based on a central order management system, which will put up to five times more load on the network for core store transactions than most retailers use today. To accommodate this load, many retailers will require an update of their WAN infrastructure.
“Research findings show that retail has the necessary infrastructure in place and is poised for growth around multichannel engagement using in-store WiFi,” said Kevin McCauley, Director of Retail Market Development, AirTight Networks. “The companies that implement within the next year will have first mover advantage to perfect their engagement strategies. The forthcoming benchmarking tool will help retailers cut through the complexity around that.”

pointofsale.com

http://pointofsale.com/201501214552/Point-of-Sale-News/Study-Finds-28-of-Retailers-Report-Increased-Customer-Loyalty-Due-to-In-Store-WiFi.html

Personal digital augmentation

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Rick

The next big thing in personal development may just be a little augmentation, some personal digitization.

Graafstra has been using the technology primarily to unlock doors in his home, although he says he has also used it for starting his motorbike, accessing a safe and turning on his computer.
As one of a growing number of biohackers implanting tech in their bodies, he believes the chips are about ease of life and cutting down on the number of managed devices he has to take care of.
He says having to remember to take such devices with you everywhere you go can be a constant source of concern or inconvenience – for example, the whereabouts of keys can play on people’s minds and the time spent looking for them over many years can add up significantly.
Graafstra says it’s for this reason that the chips are more use in his hand than in his phone, the phone again being one of those things that is a managed device.

factor-tech.com

Golden State Warriors “stadium of the future”

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Rick

The Golden State Warriors are one of the more digitally progressive sports franchises in the U.S. Take a look at their “stadium of the future.”

One of the more futuristic technologies being explored by the Warriors is known as LiFi. The technology uses light to transmit data, letting users do things like stream Internet video to a TV from a light in the ceiling.
LiFi works by attaching an Ethernet-wired ceiling-based device to a standard LED light. The data about to be beamed through the air are sent to that bulb, which is instructed to flicker millions of times per second to communicate a signal — kind of like an extremely speedy morse code. The light signal — which looks identical to a normal light — is picked up by a receiver.
In the case of the new Warriors complex, LiFi could be implemented in lampposts outside the arena, passing information to people as they walk nearby. The beams could act like the beacons inside the arena, distributing content to passersby.

www.cnet.com

Lower gas prices? Take your 747 out of the garage

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Rick

If the price of gas keeps falling, it may be time to get that old moth-balled 747 out of the garage.

Aircraft such as the four-engined Airbus A340 or earlier models of the Boeing 747 which have been sentenced to desert storage or to be dismantled, are winning a stay of execution because lower oil prices make them economic for some carriers.
“We are seeing a big pick-up in demand for aircraft we thought we would scrap,” Aengus Kelly, chief executive of AerCap, told the Airline Economics conference in Dublin.
AerCap, the world’s largest independent leasing company, has recently leased out older passenger aircraft and freighters such as Airbus A340s, Boeing 747s and 757s, rather than sending them to be dismantled, he said.
Others said some airlines were retrieving mothballed Boeing 747s from desert storage to get them flying again.