Model Airplanes

analysis

AVIATION ANALYSIS

Lack of planning by airlines, unhealthy competition, unfavourable government policies and actions have combined to shorten the lifespan of domestic airlines, writes Chinedu Eze All over the world, Airlines’ profit margin is thin. Airlines generate huge revenues, which are guzzled by aviation fuel, maintenance of aircraft, charges and salaries. In Nigeria naïve airline owners often get carried away by such huge resources and start diverting funds to other businesses. The consequence of this is the collapse of the airlines. Many industry observers believe this was what led to the demise of many indigenous carriers of such as Okada Air, Oriental airlines, Chanchangi and Air Nigeria.

Former Director-General of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Captain Fola Akinkuotu once told THISDAY that Nigerian airlines do not have properly articulated business plan and do not prepare for long term profit making. These, he said have contributed significantly in the collapse of many of such airlines. This might also be the reason behind the collapse of Bellview, EAS Airlines, Afrijet, ADC, Sosoliso, Okada Air and many others.

On the short life span and unprofitability of Nigerian airlines, Akinkuotun said: “My immediate outlook is that for you to succeed in the business you have to have a model; you have to have properly articulated business plans; then you have to ask yourself, do I understand this business? I think that some of the reasons why we have not been successful in running airlines are because we have not done proper planning; we do not

Article source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201503061710.html

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We’ll go first to Jeff Stein from Northcoast Research.

Jeff Stein

First a question on e-commerce, I’m wondering I know it’s still a little bit early, but David I’m wondering if you could just kind of give us a glimpse into what your offering might look like online, I presume furniture would be a piece of that? And do you intend to be able to offer your progressive financial leasing program online? And then just a quick follow up, with regard to the port situation any of that that you’ve seen in the first quarter? Thank you.

David Campisi

Thanks Jeff. I’ll take the first part of that, the e-commerce piece is definitely in the early stages, but we have done a lot of work looking at the skew count that we’re going to launch within next year and I would tell you for sure furniture is a big piece of that. And obviously Soft Home and parts of Hard Home will be part of that as well, Appliances, Table Top and so on, as well as some of the seasonal businesses. We’re obviously not going to put Food and Consumables on the Web site, but we certainly clearly know what the skew count looks like and it’s where we have to make those buys over the next few months, so yes, very excited about the categories that we will launch with and it’s very focused. Again as I said before first things first we’re going to — working

Article source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/2981336-big-lots-big-ceo-david-campisi-on-q4-2014-results-earnings-call-transcript

It is the industry that has been derelict and it is the industry—not simply Malaysian Airline—that is responsible for the “non-trackable situation.”

The second lesson involves something less tangible but equally worrying, the cultural influences on the way the emergency was handled.

Malaysia has been a one-party state for decades and, like all one-party states, has a reputation for cronyism and sinecure appointments in government-controlled businesses – in this case an airline, the management of airports, and air traffic control. From the moment Malaysian officials began giving press briefings their behavior reflected how unused they were to public accountability.(and how used they were to a compliant media.) Very quickly, as the pressure mounted on them for explanations, they combined paranoia with a search for scapegoats – and found them in the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and the copilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid.

There was a very public police raid on Captain Shah’s home, where he had a flight simulator installed on his computer, and inferences that he had planned and rehearsed the whole diversion from the route to Beijing on the simulator. (After several months the FBI analyzed his computer hard-drive and nothing incriminating was discovered.)

Officials appeared and disappeared and any theory they voiced passed straight into the news cycle, once there it was difficult ever to discredit or dislodge. The most bizarre intervention was by a very influential former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who suggested that the CIA had hacked into the 777’s navigation system and spirited the whole airplane

Article source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/feature2/2015/flight-370-did-not-disappear.html

Power may be the key to success in smart glasses market. TechInsights analyzes the situation.

Cisco estimates that 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020 and wearable technology is expected to play a large part in this growth of the “Internet of Things”, or IoT. As consumers, we expect wearables to improve our daily experiences and generally make our lives easier and better by unobtrusively and conveniently sensing, analysing, monitoring and tracking. These tiny connected devices are intended to consume very little power while collecting massive amounts of data.

A notable entrant was Google Glass, a higher end wearable technology that can capture videos, browse the internet and brings an augmented reality component allowing users to interact with the environment around them. Google Glass seemed to be innovative and ahead of its time but from a hardware and software perspective, even these wearables have a long way to go to meet the performance of even the current technology: our smartphones.

With Google’s recent decision to halt sales of the current model of Glass and reorganize the Glass team, it’s clear Google also saw the need for change.

In order to achieve the performance needed for wearables to in fact be wearable, and be capable of being the next wave in the IoT, significant technological innovation will be required. The companies that are ahead in this innovation, from both technological and IP perspectives, will be the ones to drive success in the near future.

[Article source: http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1325858