Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Several airlines are experiencing higher than normal winds on routes between the United States and Europe, forcing pilots to stop for gas on what would normally be a non-stop route. Unplanned pitstops are nothing new. But with airlines looking to save costs wherever possible, several are relying narrow body aircraft flying close to the limit of their range to serve city pairs that would not fill up a larger, and longer range airplane.

In December United reported 43 stops for extra fuel out of some 1,100 transatlantic flights using the company’s Boeing 757s according to the Wall Street Journal. The Boeing 757 has long been favored by many airlines for longer routes with lower passenger demand. Though out of production for several years, the 757 offers carriers a range of more than 4,500 miles in a small enough package to keep operating costs low enough to justify routes that could not fill the larger 767 or Airbus A330. American and US Airways also use the 757 on transatlantic routes and have reported more than normal fuel stops. Delta has the largest 757 fleet in the world, but says it has yet to need a fuel stop for its transatlantic flights this winter according to the Journal article.

Weather forecasts usually provide accurate enough wind predictions for pilots to adjust fuel loads on an airplane to ensure a non-stop flight. And airplanes often fly with less than full tanks since the engines end up burning more fuel in order to carry the weight of the extra gallons. But with the higher winds, even full tanks may not be enough. Airlines are having to stop at airports along the great circle route between Europe and the United States including in Ireland, Iceland, Canada and even as close as Maine and New York before continuing on to their final destinations.

Airlines are required to carry enough fuel to complete the flight to the destination based on the weather forecast, fly on to a nearby alternate airport if weather or some other issue prevented a landing at the planned destination and still have enough fuel for 45 minutes of flying. The idea is to have enough reserve fuel for unanticipated problems beyond bad weather in the forecast.

It’s possible that some of these flights would have made it to their destinations without refueling, but the pilots are opting to stop for gas in order to prevent using up their reserve fuel.

United says it is compensating passengers for missed flights, hotels and other hassles encountered when the flight includes a visit to somewhere like Gander in eastern Canada. Before modern long range airliners were able to make non-stop transatlantic flights, airports like the ones in Canada, Iceland and Ireland were commonly used as refueling stops for flights between the North America and Europe. The Boeing 707 made a fuel stop in Gander on its way to Paris during its much heralded first flight from New York with Pan Am in 1958.

Today many major cities on both continents are linked by non-stop flights. The longest non-stop flight currently being flown by an airline links Newark, New Jersey to Singapore aboard a Singapore Airlines flight that stretches the range to just under 10,000 miles. The flight lasts more than 18 hours.

Photo: Flickr/curimedia

 

 

The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles — it delivers smart mobility services. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.

In order to tackle urban transportation challenges in cities around the world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the National Research Foundation of Singapore launched a five-year cooperative project in 2009 — Future Urban Mobility (FM) — to look at new models and technology tools aimed at sustainability. The FM team is one of four interdisciplinary research groups that are part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre, or SMART Centre. FM is developing SimMobility, a simulation platform where researchers explore transportation, environmental impacts, energy and land use and the activities of individual travelers in the mix.

Some of the projects of FM include autonomous driving — as in, cars that drive themselves — and simultaneous research is being done in the areas of vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication looks at applications for both safety and information retrieval.

Applications are being developed so your car will get information about the location and intentions of vehicles in your vicinity, contributing to the process of autonomous driving. Vehicle-to-infrastructure projects are less safety-related and more focused on traffic operations, including the possibility of your car receiving information from traffic signals regarding data like when an upcoming stoplight will turn green. With this data, you can adjust your speed and slow down without having to stop at the signal, thus reducing stop-and-go traffic movement.

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Mobility On Demand

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Another area of the FM project is mobility on demand. A bike-sharing services is an example of mobility on demand: You get the mobility you need, when you need it, at the place you need it, and you can take it to your destination and drop it off without having to return it to the pickup location. At this time, car-sharing services like Zipcar are not considered mobility on demand because you have to return the car at the same location you obtained it. One solution investigated in 2007 to address the issue of space for car-sharing stations was CityCar, led by the late MIT professor William J. Mitchell. The mobility on demand project is exploring additional solutions.

“Today’s phones have more computing power — in number of transistors — than supercomputers of 50 years ago. Yet, we don’t use it much beyond individual computing,” explains Li-Shiuan Peh, associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT. “Phones have to access all web services through the Internet as they are computed on servers. My group is exploring ways to better harness the immense computer power of phones, networking a collection of phones together to run and drive novel services.”

A recent application Peh’s team developed and prototyped consists of phones mounted on car windshields with no Internet and no servers — just phones talking to each other. SignalGuru is an iPhone app service that lets users know when traffic lights will turn red or green so they can avoid stop-and-go driving and save on gasoline. They deployed the service at MIT and in Singapore and saw a one- to two-second accuracy in predictions and a 30% savings in gas.

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LIVE Singapore

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The LIVE Singapore! project is “a convergence of art, digital media and information technology” that gives citizens access to visualizations of data from multiple digital streams from the city. The public exhibition of this project opened at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and consisted of five large-scale projections of multi-dimensional maps of the city showing the movements of people, vehicles including planes and automobiles, electricity consumption and other elements.

“Employing real-time data recorded and captured by a vast system of communication devices, microcontrollers and sensors commonly found in our urban environment and mapping this information onto multi-dimensional maps of Singapore, we have been able to merge cartography, statistical analysis and data platform technology,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab. “This suggests new ways to view, understand and ultimately navigate our city like never before.”

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DynaMIT

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The DynaMIT project is a computer system that predicts the future of traffic and transportation conditions and provides the information in real-time to travelers and traffic managers. DynaMIT, led by Moshe Ben-Akiva, professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, stands for “Dynamic Network Assignment for Managing Information to Traveler.” Ben-Akiva and his research group at the MIT Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) recently received the The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ITS Outstanding Applications Award in 2011.

So what does it do? DynaMIT provides short-term predictions of congestion in a specific traffic network and then attempts to anticipate congestion before it occurs. DynaMIT uses a mash-up of real-time and historical traffic data for a given area and operates on a continuous basis to not only analyze real-time information, such as from traffic sensors, but add a behavioral model to show the potential impacts of human reaction to the data received (i.e. gaper’s block). The output offers a prediction for a “short horizon” and essentially simulates a network of transportation for an hour into the future every five minutes, completing each simulation in about a minute. The simulations are run faster than real-time using both parallel and distributed computing. The system utilizes “network decomposition” — a traffic network is divided into sub-networks that are then simulated on multiple processors. This kind of work couldn’t be done without modern computer methods.

“DynaMIT allows us to look into the future and see what the travel times, speeds and bottlenecks will be in the next hour,” explains Ben-Akiva. “If we develop and broadcast information about future traffic conditions, it will affect the behavior and as a result, will affect what will happen in the future and invalidate the prediction unless we take that in account.”

Right now, Ben-Akiva’s team is working on DynaMIT 2.0 to re-engineer the system for new data that might become available to incorporate into their system, including navigation systems and travelers equipped with smartphones.

DynaMIT has been tested in a variety of locations including Los Angeles (but not in relation to the recent “Carmageddon”) and Irvine, California, Beijing and Singapore. How well does DynaMIT predict?

Says Ben-Akiva, “We’re testing it right now in Lisbon, Portugal, and it predicts very well. It has a unique advantage over other prediction methods in that it can be used to predict how a network will behave under situations where there is an event affecting demand or supply of transportation, whether it’s a planned event or unplanned event.”

Ben-Akiva explains that a “planned event” might be roadwork, in which case capacity is taken away because a lane is closed or road blocked. An “unplanned event” might be an accident or flooding or another occurrence that causes a reduction in capacity. There could also be events that increase demand, such as a sporting event. In all of these situations, historical data is hindered because there is an unusual or unexpected change in either demand or supply, and that is exactly where DynaMIT excels.

“We did a test of unusual situations or unplanned events in Portugal and demonstrated that the system of DynaMIT has a significant advantage over data-mining, artificial intelligence or statistical methods that essentially combine historical with real time data to extrapolate it into the future,” says Ben-Akiva.

Where do we go from here? In the future, car manufacturers will be installing more and more electronics in our vehicles. Soon, there will be equipment that allows vehicles to communicate with some sort of traffic information hub to provide information in real-time about the locations and the speed of travel and much more, as well as receive information that can be applied by the vehicle and the traveler. And when will we have cars that “drive themselves?” Soon, say the experts — soon.

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Series Supported by BMW i

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The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles; it delivers smart mobility services within and beyond the car. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.

Are you an innovative entrepreneur? Submit your pitch to BMW i Ventures, a mobility and tech venture capital company.

Image courtesy of LIVE Singapore!, MIT

Ben Crawford is the CEO of domain industry firm CentralNic. Prior to joining that firm in 2009, Crawford worked at various jobs which combined his love of sports with Internet technology, including serving as executive producer for IBM’s official Sydney Olympic Games website.

The final barrier to a new era for the Internet was lifted this morning, when the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) voted 13 to 3 in favor of introducing new top level domains (“TLDs”) to compete with .com, .net, .org and country codes like .ca and .mx.

The vote, held in Singapore before a thousand-strong audience of tech insiders and broadcast live online, was met with a standing ovation. A core deliverable of ICANN since its inception, new TLDs have been the subject of six years of intense debate contributing to ICANN’s bottom-up approach to policy making. As one board member put it, “every imaginable aspect has been examined six ways from Sunday.”

A hundred potential applicants have gone public over those years with their ambitions to acquire new top level domains. These range from cities like .paris and .nyc, to brands like .canon and .hitachi, to verticals like .gay and .ski. Hundreds more have kept their plans secret, particularly due to the uncertainty that previously clouded the topic.

Why the need for these new TLDs? ICANN’s mission includes introducing more consumer choice — a blessing for everyone frustrated with finding that the ideal domain name for their new project is unavailable at the existing extensions.

For trademark owners, acquiring their own TLD creates a completely brand-safe online zone free from phishing, domain spoofing, knock-off sites, counterfeiting, and the gamut of other damaging activities that plague the Internet. Plus, a .brand TLD gives marketers the choice of any domain they want ending with their trademark. No matter what name you come up with for your new product or promotion, with your own .brand, the domain is available.

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A More Equitable Internet

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On a global scale, the need for new TLDs derives from the drive for an altogether greater good — a more equitable Internet. Regional communities such as the Galicians in Spain, the Venetians in Italy and the Kurds in Iraq have been active in asserting their need for domains that reflect their languages and cultures.

Moreover, recent developments will permit new TLDs to be in characters other than ASCII text (the letters and numbers on English-language keyboards). These new top level domains will usher in a true globalization of the Internet, with URL support in Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, Arabic, and dozens of other scripts.

Supporting the view that the public wants new top level domains are the recent successes of “repurposed country codes” like .co (officially the TLD for Colombia, but sold as an abbreviation for “company”) and .me (officially for Montenegro, sold for “unique personal brands”) as well as new SLDs (second level domains) like us.org in the United States and .com.de, about to be launched in Germany.

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Opposition

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There are of course opponents to new TLDs. Complaints about the cost (an $185,000 application fee plus the cost of producing a 200-odd page application, plus the set-up and running costs) have been responded to by ICANN with the announcement of a $2 million grant program designated for applicants from developing countries. But the main objections actually come from major brands that already spend hundreds of thousands of dollars registering domains “defensively” to prevent others from using them, and which are concerned that a proliferation of new domains will cause these costs to escalate vastly with no added benefits.

ICANN has sought to mitigate this risk by introducing far more stringent protections for trademark owners than those that exist under the current generic TLDs, including a system that allows the rapid takedown of domains that abuse trademarks.

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The Process

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The timetable announced for the introduction of the new top level domains starts immediately with the preparation of complex application documents. As running a TLD involves taking responsibility for core infrastructure of the Internet, specialist technical providers are required to support each new TLD, and the applications must include comprehensive and fully-funded business plans and detailed policy documents governing the rules for usage of the new domains. The application window is between January and April 2012, and the applications are scrutinized by ICANN and then made public, so that objections from any quarter may be heard before the domain is granted.

The earliest we are likely to see one of these new TLDs in our search engine results is early 2013.

For new TLDs that are contested — for instance where multiple applicants apply for the same or similar domains — assuming all applications are of equal merit, the domain will be auctioned and sold to the highest bidder. As premium dot com domains occasionally sell for millions of dollars, we can expect these bidding wars to reach tens of millions of dollars. Toys ‘R’ Us paid $5.1 million for the domain toys.com in 2009. What does that mean for the value of .toys?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enot-poloskun

Facebook plans to open an ad sales office in Hong Kong, in an effort to strengthen its presence in the region.

The move comes not long after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to China, where he was seen visiting the Beijing headquarters of China’s largest search engine, Baidu.

“By continuing to build our presence in the region, Facebook will be able to directly provide full support to advertisers here and help them create and execute campaigns that will have a meaningful impact on their businesses,” said Blake Chandlee, vice president and commercial director of Asia Pacific, Latin America and emerging markets.

Facebook has been banned in mainland China since 2009, but it’s available in Hong Kong and Taiwan. This latest move by Facebook is another step toward conquering the Asian market, after opening an office in Singapore in September 2010.

Image courtesy of Flickr, smemon87

via Asia Media Journal