Monthly Archives: November 2018

Le contrôle biométrique pour un gain de temps aux aéroportsDe façon générale, les globe-trotteurs, toutes catégories confondues, demandent à ce que la technologie continue de simplifier et d’améliorer leur expérience voyage. Le contrôle biométrique aux aéroports est plébiscité par 81% des voyageurs d’affaires, contre 75% dans le loisir. Pour Gordon Wilson, président de Travelport, « L’industrie du voyage a toujours été pionnière dans les nouvelles expériences technologiques et a adopté des solutions très tôt. Aujourd’hui, il y a une demande très forte en matière de recherche vocale et en filtrage biométrique à laquelle nous devons répondre. Observer cet enthousiasme commun nous motive à fabriquer les technologies du futur. »

Les murs intelligents de La Matière BavardeAu moment de se coucher, le client n’aura plus besoin de se lever pour éteindre la lumière ou lancer une musique relaxante. Grâce à La Matière Bavarde développée par Marianka, il n’aura qu’à effleurer le mur au dessus de lui pour se retrouver dans la pénombre. La technologie, placée sous du marbre, du bois ou de la tapisserie, est capable de capter la présence du corps grâce à une sous-couche intelligente

L’expression « dormir avec les poissons » pourrait potentiellement changer de sens. L’hôtel Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, une marque d’Hilton vient d’inaugurer sa première suite subaquatique aux Maldives.  Début novembre, Hilton a inauguré The Muraka, la première suite sous-marine de l’hôtel Conrad Maldives Rangali Island. Les voyageurs en quête d’expérience touristique extraordinaire peuvent désormais passer une nuit en immersion à 5 mètres de profondeur au cœur du récif maldivien. Il s’agit plus d’une innovation de services que technologique mais la prouesse architecturale mérite d’être soulignée. L’établissement comporte une deuxième suite située en surface.Après un chantier étalé sur plusieurs années, « l’achèvement de The Muraka constitue un exploit personnel » pour son créateur, Amhed Saleem, Directeur chez Crown Compagny et architecte en chef de la résidence maldivienne.

Alibaba Group’s 10th annual Singles Day sale on 11/11 racked up $30.8 billion (RMB213.5) in sales, and set a new record for the platform with a 27% rise over last year’s $25.3 billion take.A total of 230 countries and regions had completed transactions for the gross merchandise volume (GMV) settled through Alipay, and 180,000+ brands and businesses participated including Nike, Adidas and L’Oréal. And 237 brands exceeded $14 million in GMV including Apple, Dyson, Kindle, Gap, Estée Lauder and Nestlé.The event was spurred to record sales in part by a burgeoning and tech-savvy Chinese middle class and Alibaba’s addition of in-store retail via more brick-and-mortar stores and food and hotel services.The company’s Singles Day volume once again exceeded US online sales from Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, and topped Amazon’s Prime Day shopping extravaganza.

last year, computer scientists at Vicarious, an AI firm in San Francisco, offered an interesting reality check. They took an AI like the one used by DeepMind and trained it on Breakout. It played great. But then they slightly tweaked the layout of the game. They lifted the paddle up higher in one iteration; in another, they added an unbreakable area in the center of the blocks.A human player would be able to quickly adapt to these changes; the neural net couldn’t. The seemingly supersmart AI could play only the exact style of Breakout it had spent hundreds of games mastering. It couldn’t handle something new.“We humans are not just pattern recognizers,” Dileep George, a computer scientist who cofounded Vicarious, tells me. “We’re also building models about the things we see. And these are causal models—we understand about cause and effect.” Humans engage in reasoning, making logi­cal inferences about the world around us; we have a store of common-sense knowledge that helps us figure out new situations. When we see a game of Breakout that’s a little different from the one we just played, we realize it’s likely to have mostly the same rules and goals. The neural net, on the other hand, hadn’t understood anything about Breakout. All it could do was follow the pattern. When the pattern changed, it was helpless.

Globally, indigenous people and rural communities collectively hold more than half of the world’s land, but they legally own just 10 percent, and even less of it is registered and titled, according to a study published in July 2018 by the World Resources Institute (WRI). In sub-Saharan Africa, where competing governments have over the past decade invited foreign companies — from countries as disparate as Britain and Bangladesh — to invest in land to produce food and biofuels, that challenge is particularly acute.“Companies … acting in bad faith may take shortcuts which do not respect the rights of communities,” says Laura Notess, a WRI research analyst.In Tanzania, land is public property held by the president as trustee on behalf of the people. Its registration, however, is often a cumbersome process riddled with corruption and mismanagement, according to Transparency International. Though the law requires companies to obtain land through the Tanzania Investment Centre, an independent regulator, firms in some cases have tried to bribe local leaders to directly lease parcels of land.“Evidence indicates that during the implementation of large-scale investments, the rights of rural communities over land and natural resources have not been respected,” says Emmanuel Sulle, a researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies in Cape Town.The legal framework governing land is so riddled with holes that there’s often no express illegality needed for a dispute to arise. In Nyamitanga, for example, villagers had agreed to hand over 1,500 hectares of land to AGO. The firm, in return, was to build a school and a dispensary and fix a water-supply system, local residents said. But no contract was signed. It turns out, no contract was needed. Verbal approval was enough under the country’s village land law, and AGO took the land. The promises never materialized, and eventually, faced with protests and a project struggling to take off, AGO walked away. Asked, the company has denied any wrongdoing.But finding ways around laws is no longer just the preserve of big companies in Tanzania. Traditionally, individual land-use rights are awarded through what are known as certificates of customary right of occupancy (CCROs). Loure, who has run a nonprofit called the Ujamaa Community Resource Team since 2003, helped forge partnerships between villagers and local authorities, eventually leading to the issuance of the first CCRO in 2013. Communal registration of land use for communities like the Maasai gives them collective strength and bargaining power in negotiations with any land seeker.

Le groupe SNCF a annoncé ce lundi soir, suite au conseil d’administration de sa filiale SNCF Mobilités, la vente de son activité d’autocars longue distance OuiBus à BlaBlaCar… tandis que ce dernier a officialisé sa levée de 101 millions d’euros auprès de ses investisseurs historiques et de…. la SNCF. Cela lui permettra d’ailleurs de poster ses offres de trajets en bus et de covoiturage sur la plate-forme de réservations oui.sncf d’ici la fin de l’année. Vous suivez toujours ?L’opération permettra à OuiBus (qui accumule 165 millions d’euros de pertes depuis 2013, dont 36 millions d’euros en 2017), entre autres, de profiter de la force de frappe de BlaBlaCar et ses 65 millions d’utilisateurs répartis dans 22 pays. L’objectif : déployer le service à l’international, comme l’explique à nos confrères des Échos Nicolas Brusson, directeur général de BlaBlaCar. « Ouibus est un énorme succès français que nous voulons développer au niveau européen en intégrant le car longue distance à notre offre, comme nous l’avons fait avec succès en Russie. » Une intégration que Frédéric Mazzella, cofondateur de BlaBlaCar, estime avoir toujours été dans l’ADN de la plateforme. « Ce projet s’inscrit dans notre vision : offrir à nos membres une mobilité partagée, pratique et économique, qui réduit l’impact environnemental de nos déplacements. Notre mission a toujours été de remplir les véhicules vides et un bus rempli émet 10 fois moins de CO2 par personne qu’un voyage seul en voiture. »

Jaime Bettencourt, senior vice president of premier sales and account management at Mood Media, told eMarketer that atmosphere and store experience was the lead reason why consumers ages 18 to 24 shop in-store instead of online. "Consumers still want to shop. They want that immediacy of buying and having an item," she said.According to a new Euclid study, nearly half (48%) of millennials said they shop in-store a least once per week compared to 41% of Gen X and 43% of boomers. Interestingly, those store visits by millennials don't necessarily translate to in-store purchases. Instead, they spur online buying. After a store visit, 56% of millennials buy online at least half of the time compared to 45% of both Gen X and boomers. What's more, 21% of millennials "almost always" buy online after seeing an item in-store while just 10% of the older generations do. 

‘The thought and care that has gone into the design of our store is just the beginning of a food-system revolution that needs to happen before it’s too late,’ Fubini explains of Natoora’s environmentally-conscious commitment to working with responsible growers, who are dedicated to their craft in the face of what he refers to as ‘industrial monoculture’. ‘Now more than ever, seeking out flavour and seasonality in produce is paramount – not only from an environmental perspective but also in terms of our cultural heritage. We need to start seeing farming in terms of craftsmanship.’As well as supplying fresh produce to 1000 of the best restaurants in the world (and now the residents of Chelsea), Natoora’s big-picture mission is to revolutionise the food system, building a transparent supply chain that respects the real seasonality of produce; the phrase ‘radical seasonality’ is stenciled across the wall of the store, alongside a product origin locator map.

“This is disruptive technology, and it’s changing the way we think about moving passengers,” says Walder. “But unlike other disruptive technologies—like Uber coming into cities—hyperloop is something that has to work collaboratively and cooperatively in partnership with them.” Turns out you can’t just start building people tubes without talking to local governments.Virgin Hyperloop One wants to work with many cities. It has a provisional agreement with the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra to build a hyperloop between the cities of Punne and Mumbai, and hopes to start construction on a 6.8-mile test loop next year. The company is working on very early stage feasibility studies with the American states of Ohio and Missouri. And it has opened conversations with the UAE, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia, and Estonia. The company also has a 1,600-foot test track in the Nevada desert.The company also announced today that Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem will serve as chairman. Bin Sulayem is currently the CEO and chairman of DP World, Dubai’s port operator and the largest investor in Virgin Hyperloop One, and will replace recently departed chairman Richard Branson.Transit advocates and professionals have often argued that moonshot-like technologies like hyperloops are shiny distractions—that governments should use their time and money to create fast, frequent, and usable transit instead of finding (and debugging) the next new thing. So a few reacted with surprise when they heard Walder, a steadfast transit realist, was getting into hyperloop.“‘Intriguing’ is a good word,” says Bruce Schaller, a former New York City transportation official who is now a consultant. “Walder had already moved away from the mainstream transit type of job, but if you thought running a bikeshare company was a little bit novel…” Schaller laughs. “You haven't heard anything yet.”Walder says he’s excited by the challenge of hyperloop, and the prospect that the new transportation option could reorder every part of city life. “Hyperloop could help us reimagine the ways we build cities and satellite cities, and make travel incredibly simple,” he says. “It’s an incredible new technology, but we have to move from being at the science fair to turning this into a real project.” Which is, of course, his new job.