As I said 8 years ago in my book Hyperinnovation:

'As the big broadband telesatelites go up, so the borders of product, service and nation-states alike, collapse. Integrated portable videophones with hip-hop stereo sub-bass conferencing one-to-one, one-to-all, all-to-all and all-to-one emerge on every street corner from Iceland to Ice-Tea'

Well, the first satellite dedicated to delivering broadband services to Europe has launched on an Ariane 5 rocket.

The Hylas spacecraft is designed to fill so-called "notspots" - remote locations such as rural villages where it is currently not possible to get a fast internet connection.

Controllers will now take a number of weeks to position the spacecraft properly in the sky some 36,000km above the equator, and to check out onboard systems.

Hylas (Highly Adaptable Satellite) is a commercial venture operated by start-up Avanti Communications of London, but the spacecraft itself incorporates technology developed with public funding through the European Space Agency (Esa).

The payload has flexibility to reallocate bandwidth and power in each of the eight spot beams that cover key market areas selected by Avanti. On Hylas, this can be done at any moment in time from the control centre. This agility is important because it will allow Avanti to keep up with market evolution.

It has a commitment that everyone in Britain should have access to a decent net connection by 2015. That means a minimum of two megabits per second (Mbps).

Some three million UK homes currently fall below this standard; and across Europe, there are many millions more who cannot currently get an adequate connection through terrestrial technology.

Hylas will be offering up to 10Mbps to its users. There'll be farmers, hotels, houses in the Lake District, in Scotland and parts of Cornwall that haven't been able to get broadband before; but now this satellite will deliver it. That brings them all online and that's something the coalition government is really committed to," he told BBC News.

From blog blow:

'Not so long ago, you didn't even know the sex of your baby until the day of birth.

Today, we can know not only the genda of our new baby before its birth, we can know - in much detail - its physiology, facial features, and internal health.'

How?

Click here for: '4-D Echographic images .'

Sleep-Box: Mini Hotels

In a world where people appreciate good design everywhere, cool mini hotel rooms are the latest ‘it’ trend.

In Tokyo, the Capsule Inn exemplifies the bare-essentials hotel rooms for brief use, and similar concepts are popping up at airports, train stations and downtowns around the world, replacing and mimicking the “day rooms” already existing at many airports.

Unlike Tokyo’s bed-only cabins where customers climb into a human equivalent of a honeycomb for a night’s rest, Yotel pods at Gatwick and Heathrow airports in London and Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam come in larger and more comfortable formats. These self-contained mini hotel rooms are equipped with a bed, table, HD TV and Wi-Fi.

The fourth Yotel is set to arrive in New York in 2011 with a location opening on 42nd and 10th street boasting 669 luxury rooms and the largest outside terrace in any hotel in New York

Also in Amsterdam, Citizen M has a hotel with 230 mini rooms at Schiphol Airport and a 215-room hotel in Amsterdam City. Citizen M plans to open similar hotels across Europe.

Qbic Hotels has opened two “cheap chic” hotels with mini rooms in the Netherlands: Qbic World Trade Centre Amsterdam and Qbic Maastricht, plus one in Antwerp, Belgium.

Taking the next step in rest and space efficiency, Russia’s Arch Group designed the SleepBox.

Along with an airport version of the rest pod, equipped with the usual, high-tech necessities offered by other companies, Arch Group has also designed an easy-to-relocate version fit for hostels. A small, mobile compartment, 2m (l) x 1.4m (w) x 2.3m (h), SleepBox is made of wood and MDF. SleepBox is meant to “allow very efficient use of available space and, if necessary, a quick change of layout”, making it perfect for hostels where demand and space available often come in conflict with each other. The hostel-specific SleepBox features bunk beds, flip-out tables and sockets for computers or phone chargers and not much else.

A Brief History of Time-Based Strategy.

The ‘speed thing’ - whether time-to-market, production cycle-times, or delivery lead-times, et al - isn’t new. It goes way back before it became vogue in late 20th century business strategy. Competition through swiftness goes back millennia in fact.

The Great Wall of China and Rome’s straight cobbled roads where constructed to deploy troops and ordnance at pace. Empires would fallen like dominos if it were not for these engineering super-highways.

When the first prototype of the K5054 (Type 300) Spitfire was assembled in 1936 it took almost 28 days of 24 hour shifts. By the end of the Battle of Britain in October 1940 it took a mere 9 hours to put the Mark-V (type 331) Spitfire together…. And hay, who said the Japanese pioneered Kaizen type continuous improvement?

Lockheed (now merged as Lockheed-Martin) also as far back a the World-War-II and through the 1970s continued to amaze the Pentagon by the speed at which they designed and built advanced tactical jet aircraft. In fact, one-tenth of the time compared to the competition. The driving force behind this stupendous rate of productivity was one Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson. He set up an organisation with all the processes in one giant hanger to cut across red-tape to get things done without fuss. Two of his most celebrated projects was the U-2 and SR-71 (Blackbird) spy plans. They went from rough sketch to airborne prototype in under 21 weeks (that’s 144 days).

In 1979 a client of the Boston Consulting Group revealed the conclusions of a benchmarking programme he carried out between his US factories against his Japanese affiliate’s factories. The findings were stark. The Japanese plants had substantially higher productivity, better quality, less inventory, less space and much faster throughput times. However, they were baffled as to how they achieved such competitive advantages? And after the best part of a 4 year study the cause of these effects were delineated. ‘Time’ was at the essence.

During these investigations many closely held assumptions as to how costs and customers behave were altered. Instead of costs going up as run-lengths are reduced; instead of costs going up as greater investment in quality; instead of costs going up with increasing variety and quicker response times; costs came down. Further, instead of customer demand being only marginally affected by expanded choice and better responsiveness, it proved astoundingly sensitive to better service.

After these conclusions were drawn, they began to leak out into the technical media, and so time-based strategy began to take off. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s speed became a big issue. In Japan Sony, Casio and Sharp adopted the temporal approach to new products. Six months for new platform digital watch, camera, phone, PDA, or forget it! State-side, the likes of Xerox, AT&T, H-P, Intel, and Motorola begun to see the benefit and implement time-based strategies and organisations. Eventually, in some cases, new product introduction went from many tardy years to months.

And so it was set. Manufacturing, and many a service industry was ablaze with buzz terms like ‘Simultaneous Engineering, ‘Integrated Design and Manufacturing,’ ‘Process Reengineering,‘ and ‘Time-to-Market.’

Today, arguable, Formular-1 racing hold the batten of speed across new product introduction and production cycle-times. Making use of ultra-fast design and manufacturing technologies, and highly talented, skilled and integrated teams of engineers and designers. Racecraft s go through significant adaptations week-to-week during race season.

A Brief History of Time-Based Strategy.

The ‘speed thing’ - whether time-to-market, production cycle-times, or delivery lead-times, et al - isn’t new. It goes way back before it became vogue in late 20th century business strategy. Competition through swiftness goes back millennia in fact.

The Great Wall of China and Rome’s straight cobbled roads where constructed to deploy troops and ordnance at pace. Empires would fallen like dominos if it were not for these engineering super-highways.

When the first prototype model of the K5054 (Type 300) Spitfire was assembled in 1936 it took almost 28 days of 24 hour shifts. By the end of the Battle of Britain in October 1940 it took a mere 9 hours to put the Mark-V (type 331) Spitfire together…. And hay, who said the Japanese pioneered Kaizen type continuous improvement?

Lockheed (now merged as Lockheed-Martin) also as far back a the World-War-II and through the 1970s continued to amaze the Pentagon by the speed at which they designed and built advanced tactical jet aircraft. In fact, one-tenth of the time compared to the competition. The driving force behind this stupendous rate of productivity was one Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson. He set up an organisation with all the processes in one giant hanger to cut across red-tape to get things done without fuss. Two of his most celebrated projects was the U-2 and SR-71 (Blackbird) spy plans. They went from rough sketch to airborne prototype in under 21 weeks (that’s 144 days).

In 1979 a client of the Boston Consulting Group revealed the conclusions of a benchmarking programme he carried out between his US factories against his Japanese affiliate’s factories. The findings were stark. The Japanese plants had substantially higher productivity, better quality, less inventory, less space and much faster throughput times. However, they were baffled as to how they achieved such competitive advantages? And after the best part of a 4 year study the cause of these effects were delineated. ‘Time’ was at the essence.

During these investigations many closely held assumptions as to how costs and customers behave were altered. Instead of costs going up as run-lengths are reduced; instead of costs going up as greater investment in quality; instead of costs going up with increasing variety and quicker response times; costs came down. Further, instead of customer demand being only marginally affected by expanded choice and better responsiveness, it proved astoundingly sensitive to better service.

After these conclusions were drawn, they began to leak out into the technical media, and so time-based strategy began to take off. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s speed became a big issue. In Japan Sony, Casio and Sharp adopted the temporal approach to new products. Six months for new platform digital watch, camera, phone, PDA, or forget it! State-side, the likes of Xerox, AT&T, H-P, Intel, and Motorola begun to see the benefit and implement time-based strategies and organisations. Eventually, in some cases, new product introduction went from many tardy years to months.

And so it was set. Manufacturing, and many a service industry was ablaze with buzz terms like ‘Simultaneous Engineering, ‘Integrated Design and Manufacturing,’ ‘Process Reengineering,‘ and ‘Time-to-Market.’

Today, arguable, Formular-1 racing hold the batten of speed across new product introduction and production cycle-times. Making use of ultra-fast design and manufacturing technologies, and highly talented, skilled and integrated teams of engineers and designers. Racecraft models go through significant adaptations week-to-week during race season.