Today’s priorities for supply chain leaders

Over the last three years, the main focus for many supply chain leaders has been resiliency. Disruptions have been rife, with the chain of events starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing with the blockage of the Suez Canal and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and leading to the impacts of the Red Sea attacks this year.

Resilience can mean different things, from the ability to continue buying inventory and delivering products to schedule, to simply maintaining profit margins. Ultimately, it is about being able to adapt quickly to unforeseen challenges.

Source: Unsplash

A key takeaway from the supply chain disruptions is that the backbone of business resiliency is cost management. At the start of the pandemic, transportation costs increased dramatically, and shippers were buying inventories wherever they could find them. US business logistics costs rose by a record 19.6 percent in 2022, and half of that increase was due to inventory carrying costs.

To remain successful, logistics decision-makers must prioritize both resiliency and cost management. The former means being dynamic and agile, requiring connectedness and real-time data. The latter means reducing expenditure, as high inventory levels and fulfillment & transportation costs could otherwise dent profitability. This is where a unified supply chain helps.

What is a unified supply chain?

Traditionally, in supply chains, transportation and distribution have been managed separately. This siloed approach often led to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for optimization across the entire network. A unified supply chain is an integrated approach to managing all its aspects, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished products. Components such as distribution, transportation, labor management, and automation work as a cohesive system, usually through a single app. This enables real-time visibility and collaboration across the supply chain network, eliminating silos and redundancy.

At a software level, the Transport Management System (TMS) needs to be connected to the Yard and Warehouse Management System (WMS) to improve operational efficiency. Managers can quickly and easily add capacity, adjust labor to match inbound arrivals, and change orders up to the point that a truck leaves the depot. Such integration streamlines operations, reduces costs, and enhances agility, allowing companies to react quickly to changing market conditions and customer demands.

The benefits of bringing the TMS and WMS together

To achieve a unified supply chain, companies invest in cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, best built from microservices to enable easy integration and scalability. By adopting adaptable and boundary-less solutions, organizations can ensure rapid innovation, personalized customization, and enhanced connectivity across all supply chain functions.

Source: Unsplash

However, according to a recent McKinsey study, logistics leaders have significant concerns regarding technology investment, mostly surrounding the cost of the solution and the impact of change management. Businesses ideally want to lower their total vendor footprint and tech TCO while still boosting their ROI. While these goals may seem at odds with each other, a unified supply chain can ultimately work to achieve them these goals.

A unified supply chain consolidates disparate systems, such as distribution and transport management into a single, integrated solution. Without the need for specialized software for each function, businesses significantly reduce their vendor footprint. This streamlining simplifies technology management and lowers the TCO associated with licensing, maintenance, and support.

Another key characteristic of the unified supply chain is its ease of implementation and adoption compared to traditional, siloed systems. A solution that can be up and running quickly reduces the time-to-value and increases the ROI. Moreover, this lowers support costs by minimizing the need for customization and integration.

Consider Manhattan Active

Manhattan, a leading provider of supply chain management solutions, is the only vendor of a unified supply chain offering. The Manhattan Active Platform gives managers total control over adjuestments for supply, demand, resources, and shipment variations, allowing them to think in terms of inbound and outbound rather than WMS and TMS.

With the platform’s microservices-based architecture and API-first approach, organizations can easily integrate and customize their solution, reducing implementation time and costs. Manhattan Active supports various developmental approaches, including low-code, no-code, and custom coding, enabling IT teams to tailor solutions precisely to their requirements with minimum dependency on external vendors.

Instead of high-cost development to alter monolithic applications, internal teams can easily tune the platform to suit end-users’ requirements quickly and iterate on improvements according to need. And because the platform is cloud-based, core functionality is not affected.

By leveraging computational and behavioral intelligence, the platform optimizes decision-making processes and workforce productivity, ultimately driving cost savings and revenue growth. Manhattan’s cloud-native SaaS model eliminates the need for on-premises infrastructure, reducing maintenance and support costs while increasing scalability and accessibility. Continuous updates every 90 days ensure access to the latest capabilities without additional investment.

To learn more about how bringing together your TMS and WMS into a unified supply chain could transform your business, contact the expert Manhattan team today.

The post What is a unified supply chain, and what are the benefits? appeared first on TechHQ.

The realm of transport and logistics has had a wild last four years. Disruptive factors include the COVID-19 pandemic, technological advancements (particularly in AI), economic conditions, geopolitics, climate change, regulatory shifts, and the increasing demand for digitalisation in the industry.

These challenges continue to shape and influence the sector globally but morph into new shapes that may take time to recognise. With help from logistics experts at Descartes Systems Group, TechHQ clarifies four central emerging logistics and transportation trends set to influence business success in 2024.

1. Labour shortages

A recent Descartes study found that 76 percent of organisations are experiencing notable workforce shortages. The road transport sector specifically faces a pressing challenge with a shortage of HGV and van drivers, disrupting the timely delivery of goods across various industries. Manufacturing, healthcare, and e-commerce sectors, all heavily reliant on transportation, bear the brunt of this. To counteract its effects, companies must consider investing in driver retention initiatives and competitive compensation packages. The latest route optimisation software will also help to maximise delivery capacity without adding new drivers or vehicles. In the future automation solutions like autonomous vehicles for efficient last-mile delivery operations may become the norm.

2. Rising costs

Escalating expenses, encompassing labour, fuel, and raw materials, will impact businesses’ bottom lines in all sectors. Experts say that the price of diesel is poised to rise sharply in the coming year, impacting the bottom line of many companies that rely on road transport. Manufacturers are likely to see elevated production costs, whereas service industries could grapple with increased operational expenses. Effective cost management strategies such as process streamlining, enhancing supply chain efficiency, and astute sourcing practices will be imperative for businesses. Additionally, embracing sustainable methodologies and integrating energy-efficient technologies can provide long-term relief from cost pressures.

Source: Descartes Systems Group

3. Customer experience

The so-called ‘Amazon effect’ – where customers put more pressure on their supplier to know where their product is – has pushed customer expectations in logistics and home delivery to new heights. A Descartes study in 2023 revealed that 67 percent of consumers experienced a home delivery problem in the three-month period surveyed, and 68 percent took some form of action against the retailer or delivery company. Adapting to these expectations means that retailers should offer a range of costed delivery options and implement tighter time windows for deliveries.

Monitoring driver performance and providing real-time delivery status information to customers based on accurate GPS location data will help to manage proactively expectations. Ensuring third-party delivery agents reinforce the retailer’s brand and delivers to the same standards is essential. Businesses can enhance the overall customer experience by focusing on these areas, driving their respective industries’ satisfaction, loyalty, and competitiveness levels.

4. New business models

Companies are urged to embrace new business models centred around innovative logistics and electronic customer engagement in response to the imperative to reduce costs and enhance customer satisfaction. Distribution industries are transitioning from fixed delivery cycles to hybrid routes, improving cost-efficiency and service responsiveness. These adaptable models hold promise for replication across all sectors. Additionally, adopting eco-friendly delivery options, such as consolidating orders for weekly delivery and leveraging technology to identify more sustainable delivery routes, not only meets growing consumer demands for environmentally conscious practices but also contributes to cost reduction. As delivery strategies evolve, logistics leaders are encouraged to seek inspiration beyond their sector and seize new opportunities.

Meeting these challenges with digital transformation

Meeting the above challenges to drive success in 2024 and beyond necessitates a new approach accessible through digitisation. For example, by harnessing advanced analytics, AI and machine learning, companies can gain comprehensive insights into fleet operations, optimising routes and resource allocation to effectively navigate labour shortages and rising costs.

Integrated customer engagement platforms provide clients real-time updates and self-service options, fostering transparency and trust while reducing operational strain. Furthermore, proactive drivers’ hours management, coupled with innovative mobile solutions, ensure a culture of safety and compliance, mitigate risks and enhance overall operational efficiency.

Source: Descartes Systems Group

The unique needs of high-volume carriers can be met with enhanced strategic and operational modeling capabilities. Integration with tachograph remote download devices enables intelligent route planning, ensuring compliance with drivers’ hours regulations while optimising resource usage. State-of-the-art load optimisation software enhances load-building accuracy, maximising payload capacity and minimising transportation costs.

The Descartes effect

Descartes route optimisation and delivery scheduling software offers transport operators and fleet managers an integrated solution to help address the challenges of labour shortages, rising costs, poor customer experiences and outdated business models. Descartes is seen as a trusted advisor for thousands of fleet operators, driven by the success of its customers. Global brands like Royal Canin, Ontex, and Sonepar – each with fleets from 15 to thousands of vehicles – have found savings and enhanced customer experiences by employing software solutions that optimise their logistics and fleet management processes. Schedule a consultation with the expert team today to discover how Descartes can take your business to new heights in 2024.

The post Breaking down the top four trends set to influence road transport and logistics in 2024 appeared first on TechHQ.

• Know Your Customer is a mandatory part of online transactions.
• Prohibitive costs form barrier to entry.
• Linux Foundation backs open source alternative.

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The ABCs of KYC: What is “Know Your Customer”?

While the possibilities of taking payments online offers both parties in a transaction massive convenience, the threat of online fraud is ever-present. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance reports that close to $1 trillion was lost to online fraud in 2023, a cost that increases secondary business costs paid in insurance premiums, payment gateway fees, and a host of other quiet additions to everyday bills that land each month on the desks of CFOs worldwide.

An integral part of digital payment processes is the myriad routines that run background checks on every transaction, like identity lookup, heuristic pattern recognition for anomalous behavior, and payment detail verification.

“World Trade Center, Bahrain” by Ahmed Rabea is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

These often furiously complex algorithms run quietly in the background, providing services like KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering). They’re provided by reputable payment gateways and identity verification systems as a matter of course. Naturally, they come at a cost, one that’s pretty much mandatory whan running a lawful business and one that’s usually sold at a price that can be dictated by providers – as such, it’s rarely cheap.

However, that situation seems set to change in the near future, as the Linux Foundation Charities (with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) has launched Tazama, an open source alternative to proprietary anti-fraud measures whose cost is often prohibitive, especially for organizations in the developing world. According to a press release from Linux Foundation Charities (LF Charities), it includes capabilities for fraud detection, AML compliance, and monitoring of online financial transactions. That means it should be able to provide as much know your customer data as traditional closed systems.

The service will be hosted by LF Charities (although its open source nature will enable independent hosting) and so act as a showcase for the efficacy of open source as a secure, independent, low-cost replacement for closed and costly systems.

“Cr48: Disabling boot verification” by jamalfanaian is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said, “We are excited to see an open source solution that not only enhances financial security but also provides a platform for our community to actively contribute to a project with broad societal impacts.”

“The launch of Tazama signifies another stride towards securing and democratizing digital financial services,” said Kosta Peric, Deputy Director, Payment Systems at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Greg McCormick, the Executive Director of Tazama, claims the platform has achieved 2,300 full payment transactions per second (TPS), which supports the type of throughput considered vital for a smooth and reassuring customer experience. The presence of delays, glitches, and timeouts is an anathema to payment processes (in B2C transactions, especially), as they suggest an unstable platform and worry users that they might be subject to fraud.

Several organizations are already working with Tazama to assess the platform’s effectiveness, including African organizations BCEAO and BankservAfrica, IPSL in the UK, and Jordan’s JoPACC. While emerging markets may be interested because of the lower potential cost of entry to a reliable payment platform, the overriding benefit of the open source Tazama will be the many thousands of eyes-on that will be able to attest to the veracity of the system and improve it overall.

The reputation of proprietary software in security-sensitive areas makes the case for Tazama. The experiences of Okta, SolarWinds, Lastpass and a half-dozen other companies suggests that in the area of highly-sensitive data, a limited number of developers and the tendency to place shareholder dividends before quality of product tends to create less secure software.

The post Tazama offers Know Your Customer options for all appeared first on TechHQ.

Cybersecurity professionals are in exceptional demand

Research by Gartner has predicted that by 2025, nearly half of all cybersecurity leaders will look to change jobs, with a quarter of them leaving the industry due to work-related stressors. The responsibility cybersec leaders have is rising thanks to the evolving landscape of cyber threats, which constantly demand innovative solutions and proactive defences. Another study from (ISC)² found that nearly 70 percent of cyber professionals claim their organization doesn’t currently have enough cybersecurity staff. Gartner said the resulting talent shortage will ultimately be responsible for over half of significant cyber incidents. Such events are costly, both in the direct financial sense through operational downtime and data recovery, and in the form of reputational damage.

Source: DartPoints

The manufacturing industry is the most vulnerable to cyber attacks

The problem is particularly relevant in manufacturing, which was the top industry affected by ransomware in 2023. The sector is becoming increasingly connected through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), incorporating sensors, actuators, and other devices networked together with computers’ industrial applications. This expands the attack surface available for cyber criminals to exploit to gain unauthorized access, disrupt operations, or steal sensitive data.

Manufacturers are also often targeted because a successful attack can impact all equipment and IIoT devices, leading to complete operational stoppage, with ripple effects on the supply chain. For example, in 2022, a ransomware attack on Kojima Industries Corporation, a vehicle parts manufacturer, forced Toyota to shut down 14 factories for 24 hours.

Additional common challenges the industry faces include intellectual property theft, user error, phishing, and espionage. It is therefore essential that manufacturers have robust business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans in place.

The security benefits of cloud or co-location services

The cyber security measures available to manufacturing businesses largely depend on where they store their critical data, whether on-premises, with a cloud service provider, or at a colocation data center.

On-premises infrastructure involves hosting servers locally, while colocation provides secure data center space for servers and equipment. Cloud services offer virtualized resources accessible over the internet, enabling on-demand access to computing power and storage. Many organizations have been moving away from on-premises infrastructure for several years due to its high upfront costs and maintenance requirements. Colocation and cloud services eliminate these expenses and offer greater scalability and flexibility, catering to the fluctuating demands of the manufacturing industry. Organizations that utilize colo and cloud can easily scale up resources in response to growth or a need for increased computing power for data analysis and other applications.

On top of this, colocation and cloud service providers tend to offer advanced security features that are not available when hosting on-premises. These might include physical measures like biometric access and 24/7 surveillance, or network features like advanced firewalls, intrusion detection systems, EDR/MDR, SIEM, and DDoS protection. They can encrypt customer or financial data in transit and at rest, providing an additional layer of security for the most sensitive information.

The provider should conduct regular security audits to ensure compliance with the industry standards relevant to manufacturing and data protection, like the SOC, HIPAA, and NIST frameworks. These can significantly ease a manufacturing company’s burden of achieving and maintaining compliance independently. Outsourcing IT infrastructure to colocation or cloud service providers also supplies businesses with additional third-party expertise. The third-party team can provide deeper insights into existing and emerging threats while offering invaluable guidance about how the company might best detect and defend against them. This allows manufacturers to allocate resources more efficiently, focusing on their core competencies while leaving cybersecurity management to the experts.

Source: DartPoints

Colocation and cloud services can form essential components of BCDR plans for organizations. They offer geo-redundancy, ensuring data and applications are replicated across multiple locations to minimize downtime during disasters or cyberattacks. These services also provide reliable data backup solutions, enabling the swift restoration of operations from secure offsite backups to reduce losses. Transitioning to cloud or colocation solutions with a trusted third party can help ensure long-term cybersecurity and operational resilience, providing peace of mind to a highly targeted industry.

Consider DartPoints

DartPoints, a leading provider of colocation, cloud, and cybersecurity, stands out as an invaluable partner for organizations grappling with the escalating threat of cyber attacks.

With a comprehensive suite of tailored cybersecurity solutions, DartPoints provides a unique, multi-layered defense strategy to safeguard manufacturing operations. Its approach encompasses round-the-clock monitoring, robust security protocols, and advanced technologies such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and sophisticated DDoS mitigation tools, ensuring that sensitive manufacturing data and intellectual property remain secure. Moreover, DartPoints offers regular data backup and fast recovery solutions, guaranteeing swift restoration in the event of data loss, while high levels of redundancy and failover capability minimize downtime during disasters.

The company’s customizable security postures cater to manufacturing companies’ unique risk profiles and business requirements, ensuring that security measures are aligned with specific operational needs, reporting requirements, or compliance standards. With 24/7 support and security monitoring services, manufacturing organizations can rely on DartPoints to provide unparalleled protection against cyber threats.

It responds to incidents much faster than a limited in-house team could, and boasts an uptime SLA of 99.999 percent. Its bases across the eastern US ensure low-latency connectivity and easy access.

Discover how cloud and co-location services from DartPoints can protect your manufacturing business from cyber attacks by visiting its website or speaking to one of the team today.

The post How cloud and co-location services can protect manufacturers against the rising threat of cyber attacks appeared first on TechHQ.

• The Apple electric car destined never to hit roads.
• In truth, no one ever asked for an Apple electric car, and its projected price-point was absurd.
• Apple will now focus on generative AI.

Anyone remember that Apple electric car idea? One of the company’s most ambitious projects has finally been canned, much to the surprise of some 2000 employees working on it. The effort has been decades long but an internal announcement on Tuesday finally put the project to bed.

Chief operating officer Jeff Williams and vice president in charge of the electric car effort, Kevin Lynch, informed employees – who have remained anonymous given that the information isn’t yet public – that the project will begin winding down and staff shifted to the artificial intelligence division.

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The Apple electric car team was known as the Special Projects Group (SPG). Given the scale of AI hype, it’s no wonder that team is growing under executive John Giannandrea. AI projects are an increasingly key priority at Apple and, let’s face it, there weren’t many people still holding out for an Apple car.

Work on the idea began in 2014, the multi-billion-dollar effort called Project Titan would have catapulted Apple into a whole new industry. At its conception, the Apple electric car would have a limousine-style interior and voice-controlled navigation.

The project was never smooth sailing – at all. The team’s leadership and strategy was changed several times: Lynch and Williams only took the reins a few years ago, following the departure of Doug Field, who’s now a senior executive at Ford.

Publicly, Apple contemplated many designs. You could almost be forgiven for thinking that this was a major issue for the company in realizing its electric vehicle, but self-driving technology was also a concern. Apple began road-testing its system in 2017 with dozens of vehicles on US roads – all inside the interior of a Lexus SUV.

The Apple car system gets tested in an SUV shell. Via the Financial Times.

Just one month ago, it was reported that the Apple electric car project had reached a make-or-break point. More secretive components were tested on a track in Phoenix – the latest internal strategy had been to delay the car’s release until 2028 and reduce its self-driving specifications from Level 4 to Level 2+ technology.

One idea, scrapped earlier than the whole project, was a car with no steering wheel or pedals. Time also went into the development of a remote command center that could take over for a driver. The SPG included employees from across the car industry, with designers from Aston Martin, Lamborghini, BMW and Porsche.

The car had been imagined at a cost of $100,000 but executives worried the vehicle wouldn’t achieve the profit margins Apple typically enjoys on its other products. There were also concerns from the board about spending millions of dollars every year on a project that might never be realized.

The move is a relief to investors, who sent Apple shares up on Tuesday after the news broke. Elon Musk has also celebrated the move – less competition for his Tesla – in typically graceless fashion, by posting a saluting emoji and a cigarette emoji on his platform X. If only there were a good verb for posting to what used to be Twitter.

Oh stop, our sides are splitting…

The move from Apple may just reflect the cooling of the EV market. Sales growth has wavered thanks to high prices and poor charging infrastructure discouraging mainstream buyers. Not that any new Apple product is viable for the mainstream buyer when it’s first released…

Still, the entire EV industry is pivoting, with General Motors and Ford shifting their attention to hybrid vehicles thanks to a lack of EV demand and too many manufacturing bottlenecks. Across the industry, automakers are slashing battery-electric car prices, production targets and – crucially for Apple – profit forecasts.

Apple is still heavily investing in other areas: it has spent $113 billion on research and development over the past five years with an average annual growth rate of 16%. Of course, it also launched the Vision Pro headset, its first new product category in almost a decade, with remarkable – not to say baffling – success.

Ultimately, focusing on AI may be a better bet, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Anurag Rana and Andrew Girard said in a note. “Apple’s decision to abandon electric cars and shift resources toward generative AI is a good strategic move, we believe, given the long-term profitability potential of AI revenue streams versus cars.”

Ultimately, then, the Apple electric car isn’t a huge loss, but it does prove that the technology industry is increasingly making cuts in other major project areas to keep up with AI development.

The post Apple’s electric car plans driven out by AI appeared first on TechHQ.

• Attitudes to smartphone use are shifting significantly.
• Some parental campaigners want significant bands on screen-time for children.
• One French town has banned scrolling in public – for everyone!

Smartphone use may be in its biggest decline since the devices entered common use. Or at least, attitudes towards how the technology impacts day-to-day life are increasingly unfavorable.

Back when owning an iPhone was almost as inconceivable for most people as trying out the Vision Pro is today, the idea that living for 30 days without a smartphone or any other device being within the self-challenge subgenre of movie would have been laughable.

Now, when the idea of going out for a day without a smartphone in your pocket seems almost ludicrous, a movie by Alex Lykos, following his experience of going cold turkey off his devices and called Disconnect Me was just released.

Alex Lykos lived for a month without his smart devices. Via IMDB.

As much as it reeks of Western privileges (although really, others in the genre like Supersize Me could be accused of the same), Disconnect Me attempts to identify the alienation that disconnecting now represents. Although the Guardian’s review of the movie criticizes some sweeping comments made by Lykos about the impact of technology on children, it concedes that “Lykos gives an affable and personal survey of different issues associated with smartphone use, from self-esteem to attention span.”

And we are far from short of evidence that the technologically driven world we inhabit has repercussions for every generation.

We all know smartphone use is bad for kids

The well-documented ill-effects of using smartphones and other technology from a young age range from physical strain and eye troubles to increased rates of unhappiness in younger and younger children.

Digital screen time is linked to the development of myopia in children and teenagers, and is also linked to dry eye syndrome, digital eyestrain and poor head and neck postures.

Via mykidsvision.org.

A slew of lawsuits recently filed against Meta also shine a light on the types of content to which children are exposed on social media, and the impact it has on their wellbeing. One such lawsuit in the US state of New Mexico alleges that Meta “proactively served and directed [children] to egregious, sexually explicit images through recommended users and posts – even where the child has expressed no interest in this content.”

Whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed internal studies showed platforms like Instagram led children to anorexia-related content.

Over in the UK, the government’s Department for Education has confirmed plans to ban use of mobile phones in English schools, issuing statutory guidance on how to do so – guidance that unions have said is already in place in a vast majority of schools: try having a conversation with a child while they scroll TikTok if you can’t imagine why.

Esther Ghey, the mother of Brianna Ghey, a schoolgirl who was murdered on February 11, 2023, believes her daughter was vulnerable after spending so much time online. This month, she’s called for  a complete ban on social media access for under-16s.

All that and the alarming links between the time children spend on smartphones and social media and the likelihood they’ll experience bullying, problems of low self-esteem and even self-harm, mean it’s easy to understand why smartphones aren’t conducive to a learning atmosphere.

Research from the London School of Economics found test scores for schoolchildren in Birmingham, London, Leicester and Manchester rose when their schools introduced mobile phone bans.

Making some kind of change to improve all of this isn’t an unpopular idea.

Thousands of UK parents have joined calls for a smartphone-free childhood led by two mothers in response to their fears around the norm of giving children smart devices when they go to secondary school (aged 11 or 12).

After Clare Ferynhough and Daisy Greenwell’s WhatsApp group Smartphone-Free Childhood was promoted on Instagram, over a thousand other parents joined overnight.

Smartphones expose children to a “world that they are not ready for” because they can access pornography and content on self-harm and suicide, which can have a detrimental impact on their mental health, Fernyhough said.

Shocked by the support, Fernyhough said she’d thought it was an “extreme view,” forming the group for solidarity among a minority. This view isn’t exactly surprising: Ofcom research found that 91% of children in the UK own a smartphone by the time they’re 11 and 44% by the time they’re nine.

Changing this is the only way to combat smartphone use in children; being the only one without a smartphone in a class full of other children with one would be alienating and unfair. “That’s a nightmare and no one will do that to their child. But if 20%, 30%, even 50% of kids are turning up with parents making that decision, they are in a much better position.”

Not good for adults, either

We might be keen to overlook the negative effects of smartphone use on young people because we so want to ignore them in ourselves. Sure, children are playing outside less, but have you noticed the quieter streets from around the edges of your own smartphone?

A teen with one earphone constantly in is less conspicuously rude if you’re distracted by your own scrolling.

One French village has decided to take this all more seriously, banning people from scrolling their phones in public. From a hairdresser in the village, Ludivine, a cardiologist, told the Guardian that “everyone is struggling with too much screen time.”

Signs outside a school in Seine-Port. Via the Guardian

Seine-Port has a population below 2,000 and voted yes in a referendum to restrict smartphone use in public. The rules for children are stricter: no screens of any kind in the morning, no screens in bedrooms, before bed or during meals.

If parents of teenagers sign a written agreement not to provide their child with a smartphone before the age of 15, the town hall will provide the child with a handset for calls only – the old-fashioned sort.

A postal worker from the town, Gabriel, said he’s against the move. The 20-year-old said that he spends five hours a day on his phone, “which [he thinks] is reasonable.”

“You can’t ban knowledge at your fingertips.”

All of this does indicate a shift in attitudes towards what was once welcomed as the key to a better future. Post-covid, there was some pushback against the move online caused by social distancing and there’s reluctance from many to buy into the smartphone ordering and payment systems that cropped up as restaurants and shops reopened.

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Further, as more and more gets done by smartphones, proof that they’re superior to the ‘real’ things they replace gets harder to show. Sure, the GPS on your phone makes navigating a new city far simpler than using a map did, but the iBeer gimmick got old fast.

People are increasingly dubious about online services being offered in place of “real” ones – and of the companies that own them. The reign of the tech genius is very much over – heralded by Musk and Zuckerberg’s distinct uncoolness – and, tentatively, screens are falling from favor.

That’s not to say anyone’s about to ditch their smartphone, but the concept of an online future is, at the very brink of being realized, less and less appealing.

The post Are smartphones a social issue? appeared first on TechHQ.

• Technically, the US has a shortage of transmission lines.
• Interregional transmission lines would help provision – but potentially hit utility profits.
• Power Vs. profit – the ultimate American standoff…

Without the power grid, there would be nothing. Or at least nothing for us to write about, and nothing to write it on; the human condition has become reliant on electricity for more or less everything. So, the system that provides it and ensures it gets across the country, must be well-planned and beneficial to as many people as possible. Right?

That depends on where you are: there aren’t enough transmission lines in the US to connect regional power networks, driving up the cost of electricity, reducing grid reliability and hampering the deployment of renewable energy.

High voltage transmission lines are what move large amounts of energy across long distances, linking power generation to power consumption. If done right, the transmission network contains a web of connections that create a reliable, redundant power supply system of huge scale.

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Electricity makes money for utility companies who, being good capitalists with shareholders to satisfy, want to keep hold of as much of it as possible. That means they refuse to pursue (potentially expensive) interregional transmission projects and go as far as actively impeding them, because new projects threaten their profits and disrupt industry alliances.

Utility companies are lobbying against reforms that would lose them money: addressing transmission shortages has long been on the agenda in Washington, but utility firm lobbying continue to ensure delays.

As things currently stand, around 40 corporations own the vast majority of transmission lines in America. Their hold on the backbone of US grids should be scrutinized.

With more transmission lines comes more capacity and connectivity, letting new power plants connect and more power to move between transmission networks. Utility companies don’t want that kind of competition, or for their allies to lose regional control – and so transmission expansion is something they oppose.

The existing transmission networks across America were built largely during the last century by for-profit companies. Nonprofit utility providers organized by governments and communities had some part in it too – but by comparison, a very minor one.

The geographical equations of transmission lines

It makes sense that transmission lines tend to be concentrated around fossil fuel reserves and population centers, but there’s another force at play, deciding where the lines are routed: historic utilities alliances.

Where agreements were made between companies to trade energy, sufficient transmission was built that would allow power to move between their local service territories. Over time, alliances have expanded but there are still non-allied utility companies with comparatively very weak connections.

Expansion opens opportunities for new power plant and transmission developers to undercut profits, taking control over the rules shaping the industry. The value of linking networks is widely accepted around the world – but it doesn’t make money for the American companies currently in control of the grid.

Connecting regional networks is critical to the incorporation of renewable energy. For example, four proposed high voltage lines totaling 600km along the seam of regional networks in the upper Midwest would connect at least 28 gigawatts of wind and solar energy. Although the plans have been around for years, utility companies in neighboring regions haven’t moved forward.

Proposed new transmission lines in the upper Midwest. Via Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue Study (JTIQ), MISO, SPP.

We might learn from the European Commission which in 2018 set a target that each member country would transmit across its borders at least 15% of the electricity produced in its territories. By the end of 2022, 23 gigawatts of cross-border connections in Europe were under construction or in advanced stages of permitting; it’s unlikely those losing profit over the changes were totally on board, but the change has gone ahead all the same.

In the US, building the line across the Midwest would cost $1.9bn, which is a staggering number – until you compare it with the cost of rebuilding aged transmission infrastructure every year.

Not only that, but interregional transmission for renewable energies also significantly reduces the cost of use for consumers. Even if renewables aren’t considered, costs would be massively reduced given that better integrated networks reduce the amount of generation capacity needed and decrease energy market cost. Reliability goes up, too.

What limited interregional connection there was proved paramount in preventing total disaster when Storm Elliott disabled power plants and pipelines from Dakota to Georgia in 2022. Imagine a reality in which localized disruption didn’t mean blackouts for entire states.

Won’t someone think of the profits?!

That isn’t how utilities companies see it, of course. For them, it means a whole bunch of drawbacks. More connections open the door for competitors who might undercut them on price; with profits in mind, having a monopoly is the more efficient choice, but interregional lines threaten utilities’ dominance over the nation’s power supply.

Also, building a whole new power plant in one area generates more money than just building transmission lines from an existing one. Transmission projects also mean competing against other developers for profit from that construction.

There’s some hope in the BIG WIRES Act introduced BIG WIRES Act introduced in September by Senator John Hickenlooper and Representative Scott Peters. The acronym, that’s so handily pertinent to the cause, stands for Building Integrated Grids With Inter-Regional Energy Supply. [Do you ever get the feeling politicians sometimes find the acronym first and work backwards? – Ed]

Hard not to see a case for nationalizing the power grid, but we won’t spell it out. Climate emergency and all, best to keep an eye on the electricity companies though, eh?

Unless you happen to know a friendly neighborhood god of thunder, you’d probably better look to your transmission lines.

The post Connectivity cuts profits for utilities corporations appeared first on TechHQ.

• Data storage solutions underpin the forward-going technologies like generative AI and machine learning.
• That means there’s a need for cleverer, more streamlined and ecological data storage.
• Hammerspace  is making its HPC parallel file system available as an NAS.

Hammerspace is the instantly accessible storage area in fiction, the imaginary extra dimension that hammers, say, appear from when Tom needs to set a trap for Jerry. It’s also the name of the US-based data storage company on a mission to change how people use their data.

It’s Hammer time!

Data is always in motion and, much like an anvil pulled from behind the back just in time, should be accessible as-and-when needed. Unlike its eponymous cartoon concept though, Hammerspace the company doesn’t require you to suspend your disbelief.

Welcoming Brian Pawlowski (who you might know from his work at Quantum) as VP of performance engineering, late last week Hammerspace announced the availability of its HPC parallel file system as an enterprise NAS for the first time.

A response to the need for a new storage architecture in an increasingly data-driven world, Hammerspace answers to the demands of the next data cycle.

Clear gaps are emerging in the way data is being used: the storage of unstructured data for deep learning sees silos form and it becomes difficult to access and unify data sources; the high performance demands necessary to keep GPUs utilized aren’t met by existing NAS, which isn’t designed for large compute performance.

From Hammerspace.

We all know that AI and ML are generating waves that wash upon every industry, but when it comes to data, the implications are particularly huge: there isn’t AI without data, and the emerging industry’s demands are forcing a reckoning on data storage methods.

Hammerspace is simplifying data pipelines for these new technologies by aggregating data into a single file system that’s globally accessible. It’s also directly enabling the future of AI, which demands performance rates not met by legacy NAS architectures.

Hyperscale NAS architecture speeds time-to-market and time-to-insight. Read the technical brief from Hammerspace here.

“We have traditionally separated scale-out file systems, commonly known as parallel file systems, from NAS precisely due to the nature of their performance for very large HPC/ AI environments. As we enter into this next generation of AI, new technologies, particularly in data infrastructure, are needed,” said Camberley Bates, VP and practice lead at The Futurum Group.

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Available globally and a world first, the Hammerspace data environment includes two broad sets of capabilities – hyperscale NAS and data orchestration. Available as a standard capability of the Hammerspace Global Data Environment and included in the cost of Hammerspace software licensing, the new offering answers to most data storage demands.

Data storage sustainability

While not every change in data storage systems directly pertains to sustainability, the data storage industry cannot be separated from its ecological implications.

Enabling the proliferation of AI by extension means increasing the strain on a climate emergency that’s already the realization of worst-case scenarios. The secrecy that surrounds data centers is one indicator – though, of course, security is also a factor in this – that best practice doesn’t always include the environmental angle.

Proving a cut above the rest must now mean proving a commitment to green initiatives. Hammerspace works to connect users with their data on any vendor’s data center storage or public cloud services so that their customers don’t have to compromise on the solution that they choose – a solution that should center environmental best practice.

Hammerspace has also expanded its third-party storage support to include tape storage, a method that supports ESG initiatives by reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint, but now doesn’t mean lengthier processing.

When it comes to hammer-based solutions…you probably have to be worthy of them.

The post Data living in motion – Hammerspace appeared first on TechHQ.

• Ruling says Air Canada must refund customer who acted on information provided by chatbot.
• The airline’s chatbot isn’t available on the website anymore.
• The case raises the question of autonomous AI action – and who (or what) is responsible for those actions.

The AI debate rages on, as debates in tech are wont to do.

Meanwhile, in other news, an Air Canada chatbot suddenly has total and distinct autonomy.

Although it couldn’t take the stand, when Air Canada was taken to court and asked to pay a refund offered by its chatbot, the company tried to argue that “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.”

After the death of his grandmother, Jake Moffat visited the Air Canada website to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto. Unsure of the bereavement rate policy, he opened the handy chatbot and asked it to explain.

Now, even if we take the whole GenAI bot explosion with a grain of salt, some variation of the customer-facing ‘chatbot’ has existed for years. Whether just churning out automated responses and a number to call or responding with the offkey chattiness now ubiquitous with generative AI’s output, the chatbot provides the primary response consumers get from really any company.

And it’s trusted to be equivalent to getting answers from a human employee.

So, when Moffat was told he could claim a refund after booking his tickets, he went ahead and, ceding to encouragement, booked flights right away safe in the knowledge that – within 90 days – he’d be able to claim a partial refund from Air Canada.

He has the screenshot to show that the chatbot’s full response was:

If you need to travel immediately or have already travelled and would like to submit your ticket for a reduced bereavement rate, kindly do so within 90 days of the date your ticket was issued by completing our Ticket Refund Application form.

Which seems about as clear and encouraging as you’d hope to get in such circumstances.

He was surprised then to find that his refund request was denied. Air Canada policy actually states that the airline won’t provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight has been booked; the information provided by the chatbot was wrong.

Via Ars Technica.

Moffat spent months trying to get his refund, showing the airline what the chatbot had said. He was met with the same answer: refunds can’t be requested retroactively. Air Canada’s argument was that because the chatbot response included a link to a page on the site outlining the policy correctly, Moffat should’ve known better.

We’ve underlined the phrase that the chatbot used to link further reading. The way that hyperlinked text is used across the internet – including here on TechHQ – means few actually follow a link through. Particularly in the case of the GenAI answer, it functions as a citation-cum-definition of whatever is underlined.

Still, the chatbot’s hyperlink meant the airline kept refusing to refund Moffat. Its best offer was a promise to update the chatbot and give Moffat a $200 coupon. So he took them to court.

Moffat filed a small claim complaint in Canada’s Civil Resolution Tribunal. Air Canada argued that not only should its chatbot be considered a separate legal entity, but also that Moffat never should have trusted it. Because naturally, customers should of course in no way trust systems put in place by companies to mean what they say.

Christopher Rivers, the Tribunal member who decided the case in favor of Moffat, called Air Canada’s defense “remarkable.”

“Air Canada argues it cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives—including a chatbot,” Rivers wrote. “It does not explain why it believes that is the case” or “why the webpage titled ‘Bereavement travel’ was inherently more trustworthy than its chatbot.”

Rivers also found that Moffat had no reason to believe one part of the site would be accurate and another wouldn’t – Air Canada “does not explain why customers should have to double-check information found in one part of its website on another part of its website,” he wrote.

In the end, he ruled that Moffatt was entitled to a partial refund of $650.88 in Canadian dollars (CAD) (around $482 USD) off the original fare, which was $1,640.36 CAD (around $1,216 USD), as well as additional damages to cover interest on the airfare and Moffatt’s tribunal fees.

Ars Technica heard from Air Canada that it will comply with the ruling and considers the matter closed. Moffat will receive his Air Canada refund.

The AI approach

Last year, CIO of Air Canada Mel Crocker told news outlets that the company had launched the chatbot as an AI “experiment.”

Originally, it was a way to take the load off the airline’s call center when flights were delayed or cancelled. Read: give customers information that would otherwise be available from human employees – which must be presumed to be accurate, or its entire function is redundant.

In the case of a snowstorm, say, “if you have not been issued your new boarding pass yet and you just want to confirm if you have a seat available on another flight, that’s the sort of thing we can easily handle with AI,” Crocker told the Globe and Mail.

Over time, Crocker said, Air Canada hoped the chatbot would “gain the ability to resolve even more complex customer service issues,” with the airline’s ultimate goal being to automate every service that did not require a “human touch.”

Crocker said that where Air Canada could, it would use “technology to solve something that can be automated.”

The company’s investment in AI was so great that, she told the media, the money put towards AI was greater than the cost of continuing to pay human workers to handle simple enquiries.

But the fears that robots will take everyone’s jobs are fearmongering nonsense, obviously.

In this case, liability might have been avoided if the chatbot had given a warning to customers that its information could be inaccurate. That’s not good optics when you’re spending more on it than humans at least marginally less likely to hallucinate refund policies out of thin data.

Because it didn’t include any such warning, Rivers ruled that “Air Canada did not take reasonable care to ensure its chatbot was accurate.” The responsibility lies with Air Canada for any information on its website, regardless of whether it’s from a “strategic page or a chatbot.”

This case opens up the question of AI culpability in the ongoing debate about its efficacy. On the one hand, we have a technology that’s lauded as infallible – or at least on its way to infallibility, and certainly as trustworthy as human beings, with their legendary capacity for “human error.” In fact, it’s frequently sold as a technology that eradicates human error, (and, sometimes, the humans too) from the workplace.

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So established is the belief that (generative) artificial intelligence is intelligent, when a GenAI-powered chatbot makes a mistake, the blame lies with it, not the humans who implemented it.

Fears of what AI means for the future are fast being reduced in the public media to the straw man that it will “rise up and kill us” – a line not in any way subdued by calls for AI development to be paused or halted “before something cataclysmic happens.”

The real issue though is the way in which humans are already beginning to regard the technology as an entity separate from the systems in which it exists – and an infallible, final arbiter of what’s right and wrong in such systems. While imagining the State versus ChatGPT is somewhat amusing, passing off corporate error to a supposedly all-intelligent third party seems like a convenient “get out of jail free card” for companies to play – though at least in Canada, the Tribunal system was engaged enough to see this as an absurd concept.

Imagine for a moment that Air Canada had better lawyers, with much greater financial backing, and the scenario of “It wasn’t us, it was our chatbot” becomes altogether more plausible as a defence.

Ultimately, what happened here is that Air Canada refused compensation to a confused and grieving customer. Had a human employee told Moffat he could get a refund after booking his flight, then perhaps Air Canada could refuse – but this is because of the unspoken assumption that said employee would be working from given rules – a set of data upon which they were trained, perhaps – that they’d actively ignored.

In fact, headlines proclaiming that the chatbot ‘lied’ to Moffat are following the established formula for a story in which a disgruntled or foolish employee knowingly gave out incorrect information. The chatbot didn’t ‘know’ what it said was false; had it been given accurate enough training, it would have provided the answer available elsewhere on the Air Canada website.

At the moment, the Air Canada chatbot is not on the website.

Feel free to imagine it locked in a room somewhere, having its algorithms hit with hockey sticks, if you like.

It’s also worth noting that while the ruling was made this year, it was 2022 when Moffat used the chatbot, which is back in the pre-ChatGPT dark ages of AI. While the implications of the case impact the AI industry as it exists here and now, the chatbot’s error in itself isn’t representative, given that it was an early example of AI use.

Still, Air Canada freely assigned it the culpability of a far more advanced intelligence, which speaks to perceptions of GenAI’s high-level abilities. Further, this kind of thing is still happening:

“No takesies backsies.” There’s that chatbot chattiness…

Also, does it bother anyone else that an AI chatbot just hallucinated a more humane policy than the human beings who operated it were prepared to stand by?

The post Oh, Air Canada! Airline pays out after AI accident appeared first on TechHQ.

• Where in the world can you get the highest tech salary?
• Why are some traditional bastions of high salary tech roles falling by the wayside?
• Australia – a case study of innovation.

Despite job shortage squeezes, a tech salary is highly sought because, at the risk of seeming grubby, tech saaries are traditionally high compared to salaries in “non-tech” industries. In the US, big tech means big money and that’s partly what keeps computer science classes populated. Luckily, global demand for engineers isn’t dropping, according to staffing service firm Human Resocia.

But in Japan, for instance,  IT engineers were only paid, on average, $36,061 in 2023. That figure sees Japan drop six places in worldwide rankings and come in at 26 out of 72 companies for best tech sector salary.

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“Even disregarding the effects of a weak yen, (Japan’s) competitiveness is receding when looking at salaries,” a member of the research team said. “There are concerns that Japan is becoming a less attractive destination.”

Switzerland was top of the charts, with an average salary of $102,839 followed by the US where the average tech sector salary is $92,378.

Pay for IT workers in Japan rose only 0.4% compared to the last year, which is a miniscule amount – especially when the US saw growth of 3.6% and China jumped 16.9%.

The number of people employed in IT across 109 countries analyzed by Human Resocia rose by an estimated 26.81 million, up 13.3% from the previous year. The largest growth happened in the US, where 4.45 million people were added to the workforce.

India’s IT workforce grew by 3.34 million people and China 3.28 million. Despite unfavorable wages, Japan’s staff growth was ranked 4^th, increasing by 1.44 million.

Japan, alongside the UK, entered a recession last week. Although previously a giant in the technology sector, it has been flagging.

That doesn’t mean the government isn’t trying. It plans to spend as much as ¥45 billion ($300 million) to back a research group developing chip technology – another step in a national push to catch up in semiconductor manufacturing.

Of course, Japan isn’t so much establishing ground in the chip market as reclaiming it. In 1988, Japanese firms accounted for 51% of chip sales worldwide. So what went wrong? Does the hardly competitive salary mean that the best Japanese engineers are leaving the country and putting their skills towards technological advance elsewhere?

Australian tech sector hard to enter

For years now Australia has been unable to train enough IT professionals to fill local requirements. Visas for skilled workers from offshore have been the solution so far, but the process is about to change.

By design, getting a work visa for Australia is complicated: you have to convince an “assessing authority” you’ve got the educational achievements and skills that Australia needs. For tech sector professionals, only one organization is a certified assessor – the Australian Computer Society (ACS).

The process for applicants hoping to work in the technology sector involves filling in a PDF. Sounds simple, but according to the ACS chief growth officer, Siobhan O’Sullivan, it results in 80% of applications arriving in an unfit state to be assessed.

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The complexity of the form – particularly tricky for those who don’t speak English as a first language – means that often, they’re submitted incomplete, omitting important documents or information.

More than half of applicants submit two forms, because another requirement to score a visa is to demonstrate that skills match the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO). More than 20 such ANZSCO codes apply to tech jobs. Applicants therefore submit multiple applications in the hope their skills match at least one ANZSCO code.

In an effort to make the application process simpler, O’Sullivan said it should offer an experience akin to that of consumer-facing apps like food delivery services. That would also cut down the ACS processing time; the organization finds itself with thousands of unprocessed applications and a response time of up to 14 weeks.

Next month, a new, interactive web form will be introduced. Identity documents will be sent to a third party for verification, meaning the ACS will no longer store them. It will also access assessments using an API instead of storing and securing sensitive personal information.

Another major change is that applicants will be able to specify three ANSZCO codes in one application.

All of this comes at a price, though: the cost of an application has more than doubled. Still, the argument is, current applicants are having to fill out multiple forms at around AU$550 ($360) apiece. The new fee, standing at AU$1100 ($720) will thus be cheaper overall.

Australia has emerged as a global technology powerhouse, and despite being affected by global technology layoffs, the country is arguably better off than Japan as a prospect for those looking for a high tech salary right now.

The post Where to work in tech around the world appeared first on TechHQ.