The commercial space industry had its second major accident this week when Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo dropped from the airplane that carried it some 50,000 feet over the Mojave desert. In a test flight, the space plane’s rocket engines ignited—and then something went wrong, destroying the spacecraft, reportedly killing one of its pilots, and leaving the other in serious condition.
Screenshot of CNN coverage of SpaceShipTwo accident, showing a large piece of vehicle debris: pic.twitter.com/yOchbiKwGA
The accident follows the Oct. 28 failed launch of an Orbital Sciences rocket attempting to carry out a commercial mission to the International Space Station.
Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded by British tycoon Richard Branson, has developed a rocket-powered space plane to fly tourists just above the 100km-altitude demarcation line into space before returning to earth. Some 700 customers have paid $250,000 deposits to ensure a ride on the plane in the future.
In a recent interview, Branson said that his company would begin flying into space before Christmas, and that he and his son Sam would be passengers on the craft in the new year. Asked about the risks involved, Branson said,
That’s why the program has taken three years longer than we’d hoped. But we believe we’re there now. The rocket is performing beautifully. We have lots more test flights before we go. We’ll actually put the spaceship into space before the end of this year, where there’ll be a number of flights into space before I take him. But, I’m not going to put him up there or our customers up there until we really feel we’ve got it absolutely right.
The flight marks the first firing of the plane’s rocket engines since February, and the first time a new mixture of fuels has been tested in flight. In May,the company, in conjunction with its chief contractor, Scaled Composites, decided to adopt a new kind of plasticine fuel that promised better performance for its plane. SpaceShipTwo’s rocket engine was originally designed by Sierra Nevada Corp., which recently lost a contract competition with Boeing and SpaceX to carry American astronauts to the International Space Station.
UPDATE, 6:13 p.m. SNC says it “had no involvement in the build or qualification testing of the motor used in this flight, nor in the integration of this motor to SS2,” and that it stopped working on the project in May. Virgin Galactic’s May announcement about the fuel change noted that “both industrial partners will continue to support the motor program as the company progresses toward commercial service.”
While it will be hard to draw any kind of conclusions about the state of the space industry until the causes of these accidents are determined, both are a reminder that rocket flight remains a challenge even for modern technology.
This is the final weekend before the 2014 US midterm elections, and Americans will see plenty of political ads, have their doors knocked on by canvassers and their phones called by volunteers. Who is paying for all this? As is traditional, the largest source of US campaign funding is the financial sector.
This election—probably the least interesting in recent years—is largely a fight over which political party will control the Senate. If the pollsters and forecasting models are to believed, the Republicans should pick up enough seats to do so.
This probably won’t change the policymaking gridlock in Washington—while Republicans will have full control of the legislative agenda, they will be unlikely to enact any laws while Barack Obama is president, unless they suddenly develop a new interest in compromise.
But setting that agenda is still important, with both parties looking ahead to the 2016 presidential election as the real inflection point.
What the financial sector wants from all of this is less restrictive regulations, lower taxes, and less funding for the regulatory agencies who police their sector, and it hopes Republican control will help give it to them. Here’s how the sector aims to get there.
This is a list of the politicians who received the most money from banks and securities companies in 2014. Topping the list is Booker, whose state of New Jersey is home to a significant financial industry.
Next up are McConnell and Boehner, are the top Republican lawmakers in Washington. Cornyn, Schumer, and Warner are all members of the Senate committee that oversees financial regulation. Markey fundraises from the many private equity and consulting firms in Massachusetts, including Bain Capital, the firm founded by Mitt Romney, the last Republican candidate for president.
Cotton is running in an important senate race this year, but much of his financial fundraising is likely linked to his service on the House Financial Service committee. McFadden is the lone member of the list who isn’t an incumbent; he’s challenging Minnesota senator Al Franken in a somewhat quixotic campaign, but he’s also a former Lazard banker who relies on his network to finance his campaign.
And Graham, a long-serving Republican, counts on big-time Republican donors at Elliott Management and KKR to finance his campaign this year.
The next thing to look at are the seven senate races that forecasters expect will decide control of the senate—most of them lean Republican, hence the overall odds, but these are the states where we can expect upsets.
You might be surprised to see that the Democratic candidate has out-raised the Republican candidate in four of the seven races, but that’s something of an artifact of the first strategy mentioned above: They are all states where a Democratic incumbent is under pressure from an insurgent Republicans, and the first rule of political fundraising is that incumbents have an advantage when it comes to big business.
But the fact that most of the insurgents are on level ground with the incumbents shows that some in the financial sector sees good odds for the challengers.
If you’re looking for the biggest disparity between the two parties, look no further than the fundraising disparity between the two sets of party committees that act as the marshals of the election battle. Donations to the Republican party outnumber those to the Democratic party significantly. These donations are then passed on to candidates, used to purchase independent advertisements or invested in operations dedicated to turning out voters.
The political correctness movement has mostly zapped The Patriarchy from the English lexicon. These days, primly neutered chairpeople, fishers, and police have elbowed chairmen, fishermen, and policemen into obsolescence.
But “man” wasn’t always so butch. In fact, Old English mann primarily meant “human being.” So how did ye Old English-speakers know which bathroom to use? They used two words for man and woman: wer and wif.
For instance, via the Oxford English Dictionary, from the laws of King Alfred:
Gif oxa ofhnite wer oððe wif … (‘If an ox gores a man or a woman to death…’)
How a book on herbal medicine describes the Rogaine of yesteryear:
Þeos ylce wyrt gedeþ þæt ægþer ge wera ge wifa feax wexeþ. (‘This same plant causes the hair of both men and women to grow.’)
And from the book of Exodus, Old English edition:
Bete swa micel swa ðæs wifes wer gyrnð. (‘Let him give as much compensation as the woman’s husband wants.’)
Medieval woodcut showing Queen Despaigne’s stepson being mauled by a werewolf in medieval France.
Then, between the mid 1100s and late 1200s, those meanings started shifting.
“What happened in Middle English—between about 1150 and 1450 or so—was that, one, wer was eventually lost,” says Don Ringe, linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “leaving no word for ‘male human’ except the ambiguous mann.”
Unlike its male counterpart, however, wif lived on, gradually becoming restricted to its modern meaning of “wife,” says Ringe. To fill the more general female noun void, wifmann—literally “female-person”—emerged, turning into wimman, womman, wummon, and other variations as Middle English evolved. “Woman,” eventually, won out.
To this day, only one word present in English today retains its original meaning—a compound word combining wer and wulf.
Of course, werwulf and today’s werewolf are slightly different; as Ringe observes, Old English speakers “don’t seem to have believed in female werewolves.”
Werewolves almost exclusively were male, notes Sean Morris, an English literature professor at Whittier College. The concept was widespread in pre-literate Europe, he says, noting that references to lycanthropy (“wolf-man-ness”) pop up in the works of Herodotus, Ovid, Virgil, and Pliny the Elder, among others. Usually in these stories, says Morris, “the men do something inhuman—cannibalism or child-murder—and receive a curse from the gods.”
Then, for nearly a millennium, werewolves weren’t actually bad. Scandinavian traditions invoke them to celebrate battle prowess, and Arthurian furries were noble and chivalrous.
So when did our modern trope of uncontrollable bloodlust emerge?
“I think most of the modern werewolf traditions owe to the werewolf trials of the late Middle Ages, tied to the witch-hunting craze,” says Morris. In legal documents from the 15th through the 17th centuries, many were accused of changing themselves into wolves, then attacking and killing other people.
But it’s only fairly recently that culture has equalized that opportunity—with True Blood’s fairer-sex werewolves, for example, or Veruca from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Still, linguistic pedants would be right in arguing that the exclusively male wer root makes “female werewolf” an oxymoron.
If we’re going to be gender-neutral about it, it’s probably time to embrace “wolfman.”
Central bankers do not envy Elvira Nabiullina. The governor of Russia’s central bank must devise policies to deal with a collapsing currency, soaring inflation, and stagnant economic growth. Western sanctions have shut out banks, energy firms, and other important players from global capital markets. And now oil prices are plunging, putting a dent in the government’s primary source of income.
The Russian economy’s woes have been reflected by the ruble, which has lost nearly a quarter of its value against dollar so far this year. The decline has helped dampen the impact of falling energy prices, but also stoked inflation. To prop up the ruble, the central bank has spent more than $26 billion of its foreign-exchange reserves in this month alone.
To conserve this cash to support the economy stung by sanctions, the central bank wants to let the ruble float freely next year, steering its monetary policy exclusively via interest rates instead of burning its reserves defending exchange-rate targets. Given the recent rout in the ruble, traders were expecting the bank to hike rates at its board meeting today, bidding up the currency sharply in anticipation:
Nabiullina delivered, jacking up the repo rate from 8% to 9.5%, a much bigger rise than expected. But the ruble rallied for about five minutes before promptly resuming its decline. At the time of writing it’s more or less back where it was before yesterday’s rally.
The central bank’s announcement betrayed some indecision—a function of the tricky line that Nabiullina must walk— suggesting that it would be keen to reverse course and “start monetary policy easing” as soon as signs of lower inflation emerged. Steen Jakobsen, chief economist at Saxo Bank in Copenhagen, reckons that the ruble would need to drop another 10% against the dollar before he would consider the risk-reward proposition attractive.
“Whatever initiative [the central bank] has to support the currency in the short term, it will only just smooth out the ride down as long as capital continues to flow out,” he tells Quartz. The Kremlin is cracking down on its citizens’ corporate and personal wealth stashed abroad, but most expect money to continue to flow out of the country at a rapid clip (some $85 billion so far this year).
The combination of rising inflation, higher borrowing costs, and weak economic growth is “hollowing out Russians’ disposable income,” Jakobsen says. He’s a frequent traveler for business and, unusually, last week the London-to-Moscow flight normally packed with businesspeople mulling deals and shoppers laden with luxury goods was only a quarter full. “The flight was half empty, the airport was half empty, the shops were half empty. That will have ramifications.”
BAMAKO, Mali—I was talking to Yaya Sarro, a molecular biologist at the National Laboratory, when the biological samples from the newest possible Ebola case arrived for diagnosis. It was six days after Mali’s first patient, a two-year old girl who had taken a long bus ride from Guinea with her grandmother and sister, tested positive for Ebola. She died on Oct. 24, 600 km northwest of the capital in Kayes. Now Malians, hospital staff, contact tracers, the ministry of health, a few journalists and a coalition of international partners were anxiously waiting for the next case to appear. Eighty-five people were under surveillance, mostly in Kayes, but some in the capital. Families were in isolation.
Two stocky doctors had brought the sample from Selingué, a town directly on the border between Guinea and Mali, where a man had died after presenting a few of the unspecific symptoms of Ebola’s profile. Hours earlier, the doctors took samples of his blood, saliva, and mucus from his nose. They packaged the samples in a plastic tube, triple-wrapped it in a custom box and drove to Bamako. They handed over the box as Yaya left to suit up.
Bamako’s national laboratory sits atop one of two wide hills behind the capital of Mali. On one peak is the presidential palace; on the other is the hospital and medical school. Inside is a level-3 biosafety laboratory (BSL), outfitted by the American National Institute of Health to handle Tuberculosis, HIV and as of this summer, Ebola. The lab is run by Malian doctors and infectious disease scientists. No one knows if or how the disease will spread in Mali; however it does, a drop of it will come to this lab first.
If Ebola stays in Mali, this lab will be the country’s invaluable resource. Amadou Kone, another molecular biologist, said that when the little girl’s samples arrived last week, they had results within hours. That is staggeringly fast and not just for West Africa. In April, before samples were tested here, a few cases of Ebola were suspected in Bamako. People were put into isolation, their samples sent to Dakar or Atlanta. The results took three weeks to come back while panic and rumor spread on the streets of the capital and frightened patients sat in quarantine. “Our work can allow families to go home,” Yaya said.
As Yaya and his colleague re-emerge in blue jumpsuits and step into the clean room’s antechamber, Dr. Ousmane Koita, who runs the lab, plays valet. We watched through glass windows.
Labcoats are not permitted beyond the thresholds of BSL2 or BSL3 lab. This sticker is found at the entrance to the break room, where any materials other than food and office supplies are strictly prohibited.(Photo by Colin Baker)
Level-3 biosafety facilities have negative air pressure. They have backup systems and alarms should a ventilator malfunction. Their humidity and temperature are controlled. Air goes in but it does not go out. There is an autoclave, work hoods, boxes of gloves, paper towels, and bottles of disinfectant. Sound doesn’t move between the interior and the exterior. Ebola is designated a level-4 biosafety virus in Europe, America, Singapore and Australia: handling it requires showers, dressing procedures and total isolation from the rest of the building. But no level-4 facilities exist in West Africa—the nearest is in Gabon. So in April, when the disease was proving its tenacity in neighboring Guinea, American doctors saw the threat and nominated Bamako’s level-3 lab capable of diagnosing Ebola. That is how a room designed to protect researchers from TB and HIV became a room where they could also defuse the world’s scariest bug.
According to the NIH, the buddy system is vital while suiting and un-suiting when handling dangerous infectious diseases. Yaya and his colleague supervise each layer as it is added.(Photo by Colin Baker)
Dr. Koita tapes the first pair of gloves to seal the inner layer of the suit. Another will be added.(Photo by Colin Baker)
The white cardboard box of samples is sitting on the floor in the antechamber at Yaya and his colleague’s feet. They pull on Tyvek paint suits, grey booties, white respirator masks, plastic goggles. They look ready for a day of asbestos scrubbing. The purple, long-fingered gloves come on. Sarro tells me these are strong and expensive. Koita takes a roll of masking tape and winds it around Kone’s wrists. A second pair of gloves, a blue shower cap to cover the hair and the hood are pulled tight. Kone and his colleague are heating up; their hands look a little bit limper. They let Koita pull white bibs over their chests and tie them around the back. “Like a cook,” Sarro tells me. Finally, the plastic facemask. Koita turns them around and checks the points of vulnerability. He touches their wrists, their waist, their face; the valet checking his man before the duel against the box. Koita leaves the room. Yaya’s colleague opens the door to the lab, kicks the cardboard box through and seals himself in.
Some materials are needed from outside. Amadou finds vials and solution in the adjacent room, and Yaya and his colleague collect them through a window.(Photo by Colin Baker)
Laboratory equipment inside the facility is the same as equipment outside. Here, solution is pipetted into the sample.(Photo by Colin Baker)
Within 15 minutes of opening the box, Yaya and his colleague have mixed the samples with lysing agents that destroy cellular structure, leaving behind a soup of impotent genetic material. They give us thumbs up. After marking the tubes with a Sharpie, they begin cleaning up and stripping down. Everything is slathered with disinfectant.
This part, crucial in any contact with possible Ebola, is geometrically confusing. They scrub everything down and squirt chlorine over their hands and clothes, then peel off their protective layers. First the facemasks, then the hoods, the goggles, and the top gloves all are flung into red biohazard bags. Soon their faces are exposed. They unzip their jumpsuits and shimmy, pulling the suits down and off with the gloves. But they’re still inside the dirty chamber, the level-3 biosafety containment lab, the place where a moment ago possible Ebola was assumed to be everywhere. They must pay attention, Sarro tells me, to pull from the inside of the suit only. That maintains the clean envelope they are creating. The gloved hands remove every piece, then come off themselves, from the inside, fingers last.
By the time the samples reach the BSL2 working hood, they are completely deactivated. Infection is no longer a risk, but contamination is.(Photo by Colin Baker)
The samples are prepped for the polymerase chain reaction, in which enzymes and proteins will cleave and copy the genetic material in the sample to amplify its signal millions of times. Tags matching genes on the Zaire strain of Ebola will allow the researchers to declare whether this sample is positive or negative.(Photo by Colin Baker)
Mali’s best SmartCycler machine is used to identify the genetic contents of the sample. In Liberia, two such machines are used daily.(Photo by Colin Baker)
Within the hour the samples are under a new hood in the next room (biosafety Level-2, suitable for most biological and chemical agents), sitting in a red tray marked EBOLA along the side. The samples are in six small, milliliter doses, mixed with reagents and amplifying solutions. These are placed in an American-made Polymerase Chain Reaction machine, the workhorse of genetic analysis, which will alternate hot and cold over the next hour while enzymes make millions of copies of the suspect RNA. The results will be compared to the Zaire strain, the Uganda strain, the Sudan strain, and a control. A single genetic match, about 70 bases long, proves Ebola. It is 8pm. By 9:30pm, a green line on a computer screen will be flat if the dead man was negative, or curved gently upwards if he was positive.
For Sarro and Kone, diagnosing Ebola is no more frightening than diagnosing anything else. They joked in the BSL2 room that Ebola is a delicate bug, easy to break. Tuberculosis, which is airborne, is far scarier. For a molecular biologist, “at our level, the virus is always dead,” said Kone. Are they surprised to have identified Ebola in Mali? “No, it was a matter of time” said Dr. Koita. They are confident that if the government and health ministries track contacts and push public hygiene, Ebola will not last. Some responders are less sure. We eat bananas and soda in the break room after pumping hand sanitizer.
I knock on Koita’s door at 8:45pm—I want to know the shape of the green line. “The results,” he tells me, “go from here directly to the ministry and to the president.” Apparently information stays on the inside, and I’m outside.
Mali’s first Ebola case triggered a huge and swift response, motivating flights of experts from abroad and trucks of material to the affected site within days, in large part because this lab provided a diagnosis in real-time. I’m told the next day that Tuesday night’s sample was negative, as the doctors had expected. The body was released to the family
The biologists worked on Tabaski, the most important holiday for Malian Muslims. They work nights and weekends. They will likely be on-call for a long time.
The US Federal Reserve just finished creating “money” out of thin air and using it to buy financial assets. But the practice—known as quantitative easing—continues to drive global markets. The only difference is the sole source of the freshly created money isn’t the Eccles Building.
Case in point: This morning’s surprise announcement that Haruhiko Kuroda’s Bank of Japan would boost its already aggressive quantitative easing plan, by between ¥10 trillion and ¥20 trillion (that’s roughly between $90 billion and $180 billion) this year. The AP reported:
Kuroda said the increase was required to prevent a reversal into a “deflationary mindset” that the country’s leaders contend has stymied growth for many years. Countering such a trend is “the most important thing we can do,” Kuroda said. “Whatever we can do, we will.”
Japan’s monetary and fiscal authorities have been pushing hard to restart growth since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe retook office in December 2012, ushering the era of “Abenomics.”
Japan isn’t the only central bank battling against the threat of falling prices. Broad-based price declines—deflation—might sound good to an individual. But for an economy as a whole, deflation is sort of like trying to drive with the emergency brake on. Falling prices, prompt people to delay purchases, make debts tougher to pay off, and create something of a vicious cycle that becomes a persistent headwind against growth. That’s the short version of why Japanese economic growth has been so poor over the last two decades. And that’s why the BoJ wants to break the “deflationary mindset.”
Now, Europe also seems to be on the verge of deflation. Many individual countries, including large countries like Spain and Italy, are already seeing outright declining prices. And that seems to be moving the European Central Bank closer—albeit painfully slowly—to undertake its own kind of quantitative easing program. (And not a bit too soon. As the chart, below, shows the ECB’s money creation efforts have lagged global efforts. And the European economy is paying the price.)
This is a good thing. The global economy desperately needs a vibrant Japan and Europe to help drive growth forward. After all, Japan is the world’s third largest economy. By some measures, the European Union is the world’s largest economic entity. Of course, monetary policy can’t do everything. But as the experience in the US has shown, they can do a lot when political powers are completely hamstrung. Tough reforms are even tougher if they’re done in the context of collapsing growth. Central banks can’t do everything. But they can do a lot while governments try to change gears. And they should.
The goal of any new product, in pretty much any industry, is to “surprise and delight” customers. When Lewis Road Creamery started selling its chocolate milk in northern New Zealand at the beginning of October, customers were definitely delighted—but it was the creamery that ended up most surprised.
I love how @lewisrdcreamery accidentally created the most sought after celebrity in New Zealand and it’s a drink!
Lewis Road Creamery was, until a few weeks ago, best known for its butter. Then the boutique New Zealand dairy company decided to do something new with its fresh milk products by partnering with Whittaker’s, a local confectioner, to create a chocolate drink. Each batch is made by melting Whittaker’s 5 Roll milk chocolate into fresh Lewis Road whole milk. The creamery started out making 1,000 liters per week, for sale in 750mL and 300mL bottles priced at NZ$6.49 and NZ$3.69, respectively. (That’s $5.10 US dollars or four euros, for the larger bottles.)
But 1,000 liters a week was nowhere near enough to meet demand; now Lewis Road—staffed by only five people, according to DairyReporter.com—is struggling to churn out 40 times that volume while Kiwis scramble to get their hands on the product. This is “the Kiwi equivalent of the Cronut,” according to one New Zealand media company.
Just received our Lewis Road Creamy Chocolate Milk instore and still selling out when will the craze stop pic.twitter.com/YMNAdGZkS2
As one satisfied customer, who apparently received two bottles of the milk as a gift, explained to her followers on Instagram: “Should be available in any local super markets, they just sell out really quickly. They are the new trend because they are made from the creamiest milk & best chocolate in New Zealand, and they have such a short supply.”
According to Euromonitor, the drinkable milk market in New Zealand is led by Fonterra, which happens to be the country’s largest company and the world’s largest dairy exporter; in 2013, Fonterra sold a limited edition milk made with Cadbury’s Pineapple Lump candies, which became very popular and perhaps paved the way for more drinkable milks mixed with candy, such as Lewis Road’s.
Lewis Road Creamery chocolate milk is so coveted by Kiwi consumers that some grocery stores have hired security guards to monitor hour-long lines for the milk, and others are limiting individual purchases to no more than two bottles per customer.
Bluetooth beacons. Wi-Fi. The NFC technology used in contactless payments. Video cameras. Heat sensors. Facial-detection cameras. Eye-trackers.
The ways in which stores can monitor their customers are only growing—and consumers aren’t happy about it. A third of American adults who regularly use the internet say they would stop buying from companies that track their online shopping behavior, according to a survey conducted by Forrester, a research firm. But nearly half say they would stop shopping from firms that monitor their behavior in stores.
And don’t just take Forrester’s word for it: there are plenty of real life examples of customers reacting badly.
Even the lure of a discount isn’t enough to convince shoppers that they should allow companies unfettered access to their data. “Failing to take privacy implications into account when considering in-store data collection and use may push your customers away,” write Forrester’s researchers.
Why are customers okay with online tracking but creeped out by it offline? Part of it has to do with conditioning. Over the past few years, the debate over privacy has grown louder. Since 2012, we have gone from the days of fretting about what Facebook showed our friends to accepting that our online communications will be intercepted by government, our phone records shared, our browsing patterns tracked, our data sliced, diced, processed, analyzed, sold, traded, repackaged, and mangled.
Yet the offline world—the one where we have been buying and selling things in relative anonymity for as long as long as human beings have engaged in commerce—is still perceived to be the “safe, analog” way of doing things, according to Forrester.
None of which means that retailers are going to put their hands up and say, “come on in, we’re just going to ignore all this valuable customer data.” But there is hope, considering the public’s antipathy towards in-story tracking, that the way retailers go about collecting data may—may—be somewhat less intrusive than insidious than it is online. To retain customer goodwill, they ought to be honest about their data-collection, make explicit what is being collected and how, and only do so after people have opted-in.
That isn’t just good practice; if customers vote with their wallets, it would also be good business.
Everyone knows that Japan’s high internet penetration rates, economic size, and strong consumer spending make it a more attractive destination for foreign expansion than China, Korea, or almost any nation in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, its equally well-known barriers to entry – a notoriously difficult language and “Galapagos syndrome” – can make it seem impenetrable. Over the next several weeks, Tech in Asia will show you how to take your company into Japan.
Most market expansion guides would start by explaining basic actions like registering your company or finding office space. Those are very real concerns but we’re going to address them in the future. More than properly filled out paperwork, a company in a strange land needs local supporters – people who can guide them through the business landscape or even take the extra step of joining the team.
So, how do you find allies and employees in Japan?
Learning who is who
First, be prepared to dedicate some serious time to Japan. After preparing and analyzing reams of data, you probably want to just hit the ground running. You can try, but it’s highly likely you’re going to find that you ran in the wrong direction and now need to expend twice the energy to course correct.
Take several trips to Japan for one to two weeks at a time. Tokyo will likely be your home base. With few exceptions like the strong medtech scene in Osaka, key industry players are probably based in the nation’s capital.
Cold calling them is not the worst idea, but it’s better to make a connection via a trusted third party. Dig into your existing contacts, there are probably a few people who can link you with the people you need to know in Japan. If the well seems to have run dry, LinkedIn is a good resource for finding discussion groups or individuals pertinent to your work.
Japan is not one of LinkedIn’s strongest countries but there are still plenty of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and other interesting folks listed. There is also a higher percentage of English speakers registered, which means you don’t have to waste time fumbling through interpreters or Google Translate.
If you can time your trip around industry events, you can save a lot of time. Conferences bring your industry peers into the same room for one purpose – networking. Your growing contact list will be able to point out some must-attend events and a simple Google search will turn up some others.
Startup events are also well worth attending. Check the calendar for Japan’s biggest conferences, the semi-annual Infinity Ventures Summit, TechCrunch Disrupt Tokyo, and Tech in Asia’s own Startup Asia. You can also find smaller events in Tokyo via the open Facebook group Tokyo Startup Events. You might be a star in your home country, but in Japan you’ll essentially be just another startup. Meeting your peers will give you a good sense of how they perceive the top firms and how they are trying to distinguish themselves.
Another place to look is Btrax. The company specializes in market entry services and offers advice for free to startups. Some tips might surprise you. “There is even no need for registering a corporation until you start making serious money from the market,” says Brandon Hill, the company’s founder and CEO. More on that in a future article.
Finding out who cares
The constant networking serves two main purposes. One, if you ask the right questions, you can start to learn about the quirks of the Japanese market and how you can navigate them. Localizing your product will almost certainly be necessary in order to make your prospective new customers happy. Two, you can find future business partners and people who will be excited about the opportunities that your company offers.
As exciting as it is to get user insights and positive feedback from potential clients, you won’t be able to execute any of your plans without meeting some hardy souls who want to join your team and the roller coaster.
There is a wealth of resources available for finding staff. Wantedly is widely used by area startups to find new employees who have the right skills and culture fit. Justa exclusively focuses on startup recruiting. BizReach has a strong reputation for executive search, but it has recently branched out into job searches for younger people as well.
If you don’t want to make a big commitment, Jeek and Career Baito are well-regarded intern sourcing services.
Don’t sweat the language, that’s not the hard part
Without strong Japanese skills, how much of this can you do? Pretty much all of it.
If your product is strong, you will get meetings with Japanese companies, even if your counterparts do not have a thorough grasp of English. Business is business and most Japanese companies will find a way to make the meeting work. Of course, you can also take the extra effort to bring along an interpreter if you see fit.
This might seem like a slight headache but it is only temporary. Once you hire your first bilingual employee or intern, language problems will essentially go away. Japan’s low English proficiency can be frustrating, but it should not be an excuse for avoiding the market.
Your real challenge is making sure your product can delight consumers in Japan just as in your home country. The clock is reset to zero and you’ll need to start the climb back up to one yet again.
Next time: Registering your company, registering yourself
Zambia has always been one of the least reported-on countries in the international press. There’s something about its lack of conflict, regular elections, and no great examples of easy “Africa rising” narratives that gives the country a low profile.
That is, until Wednesday.
With the death of President Michael Sata, Zambia lost an iconic leader. A man that fused populist politics with economic nationalism—who after decades in opposition—was elected to the post by a largely urban, largely poor base.
Sata’s death also unleashed a flood of speculation in both Zambian and international media around the details of succession. But while Zambian media focused on the details and interpretations of the constitution—a 90 day caretaker presidency before a mandated general election—the international buzz was mostly around race. Earlier this month, when Zambian Vice President, Guy Scott, stood in for Sata at the UN General Assembly it led The Economist magazine to speculate on whether Scott, a white Zambian, would become acting president in the event of Sata’s death, making him “the first white man to head an African state since the end of apartheid in South Africa two decades ago.” This narrative has dominated the international response since.
“White leader appointed in Zambia” is at this moment the top headline at BBC News Africa, BBC News and BBC worldwide. http://t.co/n3D5vzAnhM— siddhartha mitter (@siddhmi) October 29, 2014
But Scott’s whiteness has never been as big a deal to Zambians as it has to outsiders. At an election rally in 2008, I watched Scott take the stage in front of 10,000 rowdy supporters and launch into a passionate speech in fluent Nyanja and Bemba, Zambia’s most common indigenous languages, ending it by doing the signature dance of his party, the Patriotic Front. He was a crowd favorite—more so, it seemed, than Sata himself.
To me, the subtext around much of the giddy international coverage about a white African leader—or “reverting to white rule” as the Telegraph unfortunately led with, before changing it—is the still pervasive belief in the West that Africa’s underdevelopment is due to corrupt or backwards “indigenous” governance.
This is racist nonsense.
Despite having a Cambridge degree, as every article likes to point out, Scott is politically much like Sata, his longtime mentor—a proponent of both higher foreign direct investment and higher mining royalties with a populist streak that earns him support among Lusaka’s youth. Scott has been a fixture in Zambian politics since the early nineties and is always at pains to display his African-nationalist bonafides: a close professional relationship with Robert Mugabe (whom he reveres), and strong words regarding Chinese business practices in the country.
Another truism in the press is that Scott is ineligible to become president of Zambia because of the fact that his parents, who emigrated from Scotland before independence, were not born in the country. But while Scott himself has stated that he is ineligible, Elias Munshya, a trained lawyer who has written extensively about the Zambian constitution, believes his candidacy should not be a problem: according to him, if Scott’s candidacy were to go in front of the Zambian Supreme Court, they would very likely give him the go ahead. According to Munshya, because there was no concept of citizenship in Zambia under British colonization “residents of Zambia at independence became Zambian.” This puts Scott’s candidacy claims, says Munshya, on equal footing with anyone else whose parents were born before 1964.
But Scott’s chances of getting elected are much harder to predict. “It could go either way,” says Munshya. “The Patriotic Front is divided at the moment. If the party rallies behind him and the supreme court rules on his candidacy, he stands a chance to win.”
But by not announcing an intention to run, Scott gets a chance to play kingmaker. He can bide his time, getting a feel for public opinion and assessing who the factions within the ruling party will agree on. If he does well in the next three months, this could very well be him.
You can follow Aaron on Twitter at @aaronleaf. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
A new music video from rock band OK Go is a dazzler: One long camera take shows the four band members lip-synching their song “I Won’t Let You Down” while smoothly gliding around on motorized unicycles. They’re joined by more than 2,000 precision-trained Japanese dancers with umbrellas—some of them also riding the unicycles—for a Busby Berkeley-scale dance routine, before the camera itself (which we realize is a drone) soars high into the sky.
This scarcely does the video justice, so just go watch it if you haven’t seen it already—we’ll wait. It’s awesome.
The not-so-secret star of the show is a “personal mobility device” called the Uni-Cub, made by Honda, which sponsored the music video. The Uni-Cub turns out not to be a unicycle, technically speaking—it’s a battery-powered self-stabilizing vehicle with a number of interlocking wheels that allows for travel at 6 kph (3 mph) in just about any direction.
Don’t call it a unicycle—it doesn’t like that.(Honda)
“The keyword is a pedestrian. People are riding on the Uni-Cub but are still able to act like pedestrians,” Shinichiro Kobashi, chief engineer of the Smart Mobility Development Division at Honda R&D, said in an interview earlier this year with the Japan Times.
So is Honda preparing us for a future where humanity will scoot around on self-propelled office chairs, forever banishing the tedious chore of walking? (Or, more insidiously, turn us all into the slothfully obese humans of Wall-E?) Not quite.
Setting aside its sci-fi pedigree and synchronized-dancing potential, the Uni-Cub is designed with much more mundane tasks in mind—for museum tour guides, airport workers, and anyone who is paid to do a lot of pacing in “barrier-free indoor environments.” But the Uni-Cub and devices like it may eventually have an even more valuable role to play in rapidly aging societies like Japan: Keeping people mobile as they get older.
Shut up and take my money!
The first thing to know about the Uni-Cub (technically the Uni-Cub β, for the latest iteration of the device) is that you can’t buy one. Although many dozens of them appeared in the OK Go video, and have been deployed at industry trade shows and Japan’s national science museum, Honda has announced no specific plans to make the Uni-Cub commercial available.
What if I’m a giant corporation?
You still probably won’t be able to buy one—only rent it. Honda says it is currently trying to “verify the business feasibility by offering the UNI-CUB β for a variety of uses by other businesses and organizations through a fee-based leasing program.”
Does the Uni-Cub come in my size?
It’s one size fits most, and is designed for people who are at least 155 cm (5 ft) tall and who who weigh less than 100 kg (220 lb)—so perhaps that will put any fears of a WALL-E-style obesity epidemic to rest. An early version the of the Uni-Cub is shown in an Honda promotional video as its rider cruises through a non-descript office—like using a self-propelled Aeron chair:
What about, ahem, the Segway?
Yes, with its futuristic aura and self-stabilizing gyroscopes, the Uni-Cub does uncomfortably echo the Segway, the first mass-market personal electric vehicle that was wildly overhyped ahead of its launch, but is now mostly associated with mall cops and tourists. (Also, G.O.B from “Arrested Development.”)
Honda takes pains to note the differences between the Uni-Cub and the Segway—particularly the fact that Uni-Cub users can blend into a crowd without peering down at people.
“If you compare [the Uni-Cub] to a pushbike or a Segway, it’s much more friendly to being in crowded environments,” Honda spokeswoman Vikki Hood told the BBC. “Those things are a bit antisocial, but the Uni-Cub works in harmony with the environment and people around it.”
Unlike the Segway, the Uni-Cub steers without the use of handlebars—just lean in any direction and off you go. “That might be how the UNI-CUB β works out what to do, but in reality, it felt as if it was mind-reading my intentions,” said a reviewer for Gizmag. “It’s the nearest thing to a natural machine brain interface I’ve ever encountered.”
Would my grandparents really ride one of these?
Well, not yet. The Uni-Cub relies on balance for steering—it uses some of the same motion-control technologies as Honda’s ASIMO robot—and so older people with balance problems might find it difficult to use. But the company clearly has the elderly in mind, especially since Japan is aging more quickly than any other developed economy, and is pursuing a host of high-tech solutions, including robot caretakers.
“We want to keep refining the device so that elderly people can use it as easily as possible,” an anonymous Honda official involved in Uni-Cub testing told the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The official added that the Uni-Cub “is suited for seniors with weak knees and legs because they can move forward, backward and make full turns while seated on the device.”
Honda did not respond to a request for comment when asked specifically about its plans to adapt the Uni-Cub for the elderly. But the company clearly sees elderly mobility devices as a growth market: the same R&D lab that gave birth to the Uni-Cub is also developing a “Walking Assist Device,” which is like an exoskeleton to help people whose legs muscles have been weakened by a stroke or disease. Clinical trials are already underway at hospitals in the US and Japan.
“There’s plenty of fish in the sea,” so the saying goes. And thanks to the rise of the internet era, that sea looks bigger than ever. The online dating industry in the US alone is now worth US$2.1 billion. Looking at Indonesia, however, there hasn’t been a single winner in the online dating industry. Wavoo wants to change that fact.
Launched on Halloween Day today, Wavoo is a dating app focused on the Indonesian market. It functions just like Tinder – swipe to the left if you’re not keen on the person, and swipe to the right if you’re interested. Matched couples can get to know each other by using the chatting feature.
It has a lot of other similarities with Tinder like Facebook login requirement and the ability to update your status. It also comes with two additional features.
The first feature is the “wink.” While the swipe feature lets you choose and reject people anonymously, you reveal who you are by sending winks to potential dates. The other new trick in Wavoo is its “Nearby” function which uses augmented reality tech on your camera (pictured below). With it, you can see other Wavoo users according to the proximity distance you set. The distance can go up to 100km.
The two guys behind Wavoo are Yudhi Mandey and Gema Megantara. They have received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Mountain SEA Ventures to start dominating the online dating industry in Indonesia.
Before this, Mandey worked on Tristup, Indonesia’s version of “Bang with Friends”. He said that although they were able to garner over 500,000 registered users, the startup was too controversial for widespread adoption. They decided to shut it down and moved from the original web app to Wavoo, a smartphone app. “This is like a rebranding effort, or pivot,” says Mandey.
It took the duo just two months to develop the Wavoo app. In that timeline, the team went to universities and asked the students there to be beta testers so they could understand their target market. These 800 “handpicked” users then served as Wavoo’s early adopters, creating a database of potential romance for new users to peruse.
So what makes them think they can be Indonesia’s number one dating app? Mandey says:
We launched Tristup few years ago even though we didn’t know the market at all, so we didn’t target a specific market to go to. With Wavoo, we’re trying to push the app this time by approaching Indonesia first. [...] Probably as our success story with Tristup, we adopt idiot proof kinda approach, with just one click anyone can join, without the need to fill any forms.
Besides Wavoo, the other apps used by Indonesians to find potential mates include Tinder and WeChat’s Look Around feature.
Wavoo is currently available on iOS. Its Android version will arrive soon.
