The tablets come preloaded with an education platform designed by Ilham Habibie’s CREATE Foundation
As Indonesia continues to stress and develop a burgeoning tech scene, Indosat Ooredo, one of Indonesia’s largest telecos, is investing in the country’s digital education infrastructure.
Indosat Ooredo has pledged US$1 million to support teachers, build infrastructure and improve the education process in 65 schools participating in the Hasri Ainun Habibie ORBIT Foundation and the CREATE CyberSchool from CREATE Foundation.
The five-year-long program is called ‘Indonesia Belajar’ (Indonesia is learning) and equips each school with tablets preloaded with education tools. Furthermore, the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia will train 500 teachers to help them integrate the new technology into their classrooms.
“This is in line with the Ministry’s strategic goal to strengthen the roles of teachers, parents and education institution staff in an integrated education ecosystem. We appreciate Indosat Ooredoo’s commitment. We hope that Indonesia’s education world keeps on improving and is able to boost Indonesia’s competitive advantage globally,” said Anies Baswedan, the Minister of Education and Culture.
CREATE CyberSchool is a cloud-based education platform from the Indonesian think tank CREATE Foundation, which was founded in 2004.
The stated goals of the CREATE Foundation are “To foster youth development to become active, productive and love scientific activities, and capable of applying his/her knowledge towards development of products/services which are fruitful to society, nation and human kind.”
Founder and Head Trustee at CREATE Ilham Habibie is also a member on the board at the Hasri Ainun Habibie ORBIT Foundation.
He is the first son of former Indonesian president and aeronautical engineering expert BJ Habibie, who succeeded his father’s work in developing and manufacturing N-250 airplanes through state-owned Indonesian Aerospace (Dirgantara Indonesia).
CREATE has a heavy emphasis on science and technology in schools making a telco giant partnership logical.
“By supporting the roll out of the CREATE CyberSchool both students and teachers will enjoy the benefits of the Foundation’s innovative educational software, enhancing educational processes at the same time,” said Alexander Rusli, President Director and CEO 0f Indosat Ooredoo, in an official statement.
Ooredo Group is a communications giant headquarted in Doha, Qatar. On November 19th, Indosat, already an Ooredo operator, adopted the brand. During the change, Indosat Ooredo also launched a business strategy with the goal to enhance accessibility.
Corporate retreats, intended to be a needed break for your team, often end up inspiring dread instead. What’s a CEO to do about it?
Maybe it’s the word ‘retreat’ itself that is a problem. According to Merriam-Webster, the first definition of the noun “retreat” is: “movement by soldiers away from an enemy because the enemy is winning or has won a battle.” Only secondary definitions refer to it as a place of privacy and safety.
No wonder employees tend to flinch at the thought of an off-site. It has become so off-putting that companies have spoofed the concept of corporate retreats in ads, such as this one by American Airlines.
But retreats can boost team collaboration, creativity, and be “a fabulous way for entrepreneurs to pop the bubble they may find themselves in,” says Beth Buelow, Founder of coaching company The Introvert Entrepreneur.
One of my companies does two annual retreats a year. And our latest one, this past December, showcased a few reasons why our staff (and I) look forward to them.
Our culture, like many built and staffed by Millennials, runs on collaborative leadership, a style of leadership that is “anti top-down.” Roles and responsibilities fluctuate and evolve, rather than stay stringently in place.
Retreats are an ideal situation to introduce or further a collaborative leadership style, allowing more junior level employees a chance to lead a whole section of the day.
Plus, I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear me talk for seven hours straight. So, as the Founder, I get a chance to watch the leadership styles of others and how colleagues respond.
Measure the impact
Many retreats end with the Monday-morning problem: When you return to the office, forget about the retreat, and carry on with business as usual, according to HR Advisor.
How do you know if your retreat even mattered? We now find this out immediately by taking an organisational checkup, as recommended in Gino Wickman’s Traction, right before the retreat and upon wrap up. I consider Traction the bible of business, whether you have five employees or 5,000.
The checkup is a quick 20-question assessment which any staff member can answer. I hope for increased scores after a day and a half of reviewing our goals, issues, mandates and so forth.
But the numbers objectively justify wishful perceptions. In our last retreat, the scores showed that our off-site increased our organisational checkup score by 14 per cent, a hard number that shows by merely outlining and discussing our business, we became a healthier company.
A study by Harvard Business School recently found that the link between learning-by-thinking and greater performance is explained by a personal evaluation of one’s capabilities to organise and execute actions to obtain designated goals. Said differently, in the words of American philosopher John Dewey, “We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.”
Every retreat, we have a discussion about what we individually and collectively learned in the past six months. Everyone is asked to prepare the learned lessons beforehand, which makes for a double dose of reflection pre- and during retreat.
Plan for unplanned time
Google is now famous for its 20-per cent rule, which allows employees to use one fifth of their time freely. What Google knows, unsurprisingly for the company ranked best in the US to work at, is that free time boosts creativity. Employees know this as well.
A recent study found that 51 per cent of respondents think that it’s necessary to have free time to be creative. During our retreats, we purposely put ‘free time’ on the agenda. Not only is the unscripted time a relief from a rigid schedule, it also yields fresh thoughts and ideas that get shared later on.
Beck Bamberger founded BAM Communications in 2007 and has since founded three other businesses, Bite San Diego, Nosh Las Vegas and Pangea Pal. In 2011, she won an Emmy for on-camera hosting in a talk show format for her show, Next 500. She is currently a board member of Gen-Next, a marketing domain expert with CONNECT’s SDSI organization and a Big Sister with Big Brothers Big Sisters.
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organisation comprising the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship programme that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
Pulkit Jaiswal, the 22-year-old CEO and founder of Singapore-based startup SwarmX, believes that the drone industry is still in the “dark ages.”
Sure, drones have come a long way. They’ve shed their label as killing machines and captured the public imagination with their potential to deliver packages, take stunning footage, and even do search and rescue.
But most are just expensive, remote-controlled toys. Drone races are becoming a thing. Photographers mount cameras onto their manually-operated quadcopters.
It’s true autonomous drones are being employed in enterprises, where they’re starting to be used for security and surveillance. But operating them is labor intensive and costly.
SwarmX’s mission is to change that. It wants to make entire drone fleets – and not just individual drones – easy to command.
Consider how assignments are carried out today. A drone operations team deploys on-site. They survey the environment and plan the mission. The drones take off, visit the set waypoints, and return to have their batteries and memory cards swapped by hand. The cycle repeats itself again and again.
That’s not all. Missions occur in the middle of nowhere. Without sophisticated computers and fast internet connections out in the field, the team must return to headquarters just to process and upload the data to the cloud and send it to clients.
The size of the data and the huge amount of junk within is a huge problem. “If you do 10 flights, 45 to 50 minutes each, you’re gathering about a terabyte of information already. Most of it is completely useless to the client,” says Pulkit.
Inspired by bees
Pulkit looked to nature for a fix. In particular: bees and their hives. SwarmX’s innovation lies not in its aerial drones, but the platform surrounding them.
One key piece of this system is a literal Hive – a weatherproof docking bay for drones. Once the robot lands, the door opens, and the landing pad slowly descends into the Hive with the drone, like in a sci-fi movie. The landing is made using precision infra-red sensors, which Pulkit says are more accurate than GPS.
Once inside the metal cocoon, the drone charges its batteries through a conduction plate. A full charge takes 45 minutes. In that time, it transfers data to a processor in the Hive, converting it into a smaller format, at hundreds of megabytes instead of gigabytes.
The data is viewable over a local network, which is more secure than transferring it to clients over the cloud.
Hives can be deployed on-site in remote locations, for example at a gas pipeline an oil company wants monitored. All you need are three drones to conduct 24/7 surveillance, since they can take turns to patrol the skies and replenish their power. Almost like a real beehive.
Pulkit aims to partner up with the most popular drone manufacturers – think DJI and 3D Robotics – to make the Hive compatible with most models.
The hardware is just one piece of the SwarmX puzzle. Paired with the docking bay will be a drone operating system suitably called HiveMind, which allows users to manage drone fleets, as well as visualize and store data.
The OS can be accessed on a tablet, desktop computer, or at a command center. Whether you’re a soldier on the field or a security team at your headquarters, you can issue commands and receive data from your drones.
HiveMind uses what is calls “objective-based fleet management.” Instead of giving instructions to each individual drone, you simply define, for example, which area you want monitored, and at what time. The software figures out the rest. So there’s no need to figure out how exactly to deploy the drones to fulfill the objectives.
The software comes with machine learning algorithms that’ll eventually allow drones to recognize any signature, be it humans, cars, cranes, or tractors. Instead of blindly following orders, it could become intelligent enough to deviate from a set path to monitor a suspicious object.
The end result, it’s hoped, is the simplest mission planning yet.
Concept video for future SwarmX applications:
For Pulkit, this is his second try at a drone startup. He started Garuda Robotics two years ago but left because he believes in moving toward 100 percent drone autonomy, which he claims separates him from the rest of the enterprise drone industry.
“I’m chasing a completely different vision,” says the Thiel Fellowship 20 under 20 finalist. SwarmX, he believes, is his best attempt at creating the future of robotics. “This is it. This is my last shot,” he says.
Wearing a black sweater with ripped jeans, Pulkit dresses like a grungier Steve Jobs. “Drones today are where the internet was in ’92 and computers were in late 70s. We’re past the Apple II of the drone industry, and heading to the Macintosh,” he told me previously.
Finding investors in Asia who share his view of the technology has been hard, though. “I just don’t go to conventional VCs anymore to ask for money. Mostly ‘cause I don’t think a lot of them, especially here in the region, have a good understanding beyond software. They believe software is eating the world, and it’s true. But that’s not gonna be the case in the future.”
Citing futurist Ray Kurzweil, his major inspiration, Pulkit believes genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology will be the main drivers of an upcoming technological singularity, an event where the rise of artificial intelligence will lead to exponential technological progress with an unpredictable effect on society.
He draws the famous curve charting how technology is on the cusp of exploding upwards after a relatively flat trajectory. SwarmX, he points with his marker pen, could be at a point just before the inflection.
“People assume how quickly drones will integrate into our lives. But it’s gonna be at least five or 10 times faster than what people perceive it to be. Some people think what we’re building is too sci-fi. It’s too futuristic. But guess what? People are already using it.”
Beginning of a dream
His rhetoric may be sweeping, but it’s worth noting he’s just started on a very steep climb.
Prototypes for both the hardware and software have been built, and trials are underway with private defense companies, government organizations, and multinational companies.
One collaborator is the Singapore Police Force. SwarmX has completed trials with them, and they’re figuring out how they might use drones to secure high-profile government buildings and the border.
“This is pretty important to Singapore because there have been recent threats from certain organizations around the world,” he says.
Security and surveillance are Pulkit’s main focus areas, given how lucrative the markets are. The first deployment – he can’t say what exactly – is set for March 2016.
Nonetheless, he adds that drones can have more humanitarian uses as well. He’ll soon head to the Philippines to see how SwarmX can get involved in spotting survivors and surveying damage, especially in the aftermath of a typhoon.
The startup has raised seed money from investors, including private defense contractors, a mining tycoon, and a venture capital firm in Singapore.
“These are not short-term investors looking for short-term benefits. These are long-term investors who really see [the singularity] happening,” he says.
He assembled a team of seven to build out the dream. Joining him as co-founder is Roger Chang, former CEO of Pirate3D, a company famously known for failing to deliver on its US$1.5 million crowdfunding campaign for a 3d printer.
“[Roger’s] a hardware hacker, and he’s made tons of mistakes at Pirate3D and corrected them as well. He’s like a written book that pretty much says, ‘this is how you should not run this company.’ And that’s very valuable to us ’cause we don’t want to make mistakes. After what I’ve gone through and what Roger has gone through, we want to just get it right this time,” says Pulkit.
Another co-founder is Nigel Wylie, who Pulkit says is well-connected to the defense industry and governments. He acts as the company’s salesman. Nigel previously started a company that kills algae in water using ultrasound emitters.
Rounding out the team is a software engineer, a mechanical engineer, a data scientist, and, yes, a marine engineer.
Flashing a diagram, Pulkit explains his goal of allowing drones of various sizes and shapes to plug into the system.
“One platform to rule them all, that’s my motto,” he says.
“It extends to not just aerial drones. We’re building a Hive equivalent for water. So drone boats can plug in at the harbor and go out and kill algae. It extends to ground drones as well. We’re building the mother of all robotics systems.”
South African website building startup VIGO has announced a partnership with Asian domain registrar Webnic, under which VIGO’s website building software will be offered to Webnic’s client base across South East Asia, mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Through the partnership, Webnic will make use of VIGO’s website building software to enable clients to not only register domain names, but also create responsive websites and e-commerce platforms for their businesses.
Webnic is ranked among the top 50 domain registrars in the world, operating in 60 countries; and boasting a reseller programme which consists of more than 3,000 resellers.
VIGO founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Carl Wallace has previously told Disrupt Africa the startup’s goal is to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) prosper; with Wallace reaffirming this goal following the new partnership.
“The core focus of VIGO is to provide SMEs in developing countries with the tools they need in order to grow their businesses and by entering the Asian market, we can enable millions of business owners to get their products and services online, to market to a global audience,” said Wallace.
“We had to find a partner in Asia who shares our passion for helping small business owners, while knowing they have sufficient knowledge of the local market to effectively roll out a project of this magnitude – we most certainly found that, and more, with Webnic,” he said.
In preparation for Asian uptake, VIGO has been translated into various languages commonly spoken across Asia, including Mandarin and Indonesian, with Japanese, Taiwanese, Cantonese, and others to be added soon.
Wallace said the startup is also open to translating the software into various African languages, if the demand is there and would spur uptake.
“Africa is the mobile first continent and our solution is still strongly targeted to appeal to this growing market,” said Wallace.
“VIGO has always taken pride in being fully mobile and accessible to anyone on any device and if we could increase accessibility by offering the platform in various languages, then it is something we would like to commit to.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Rewriting your DNA is getting closer to reality. A revolutionary technology is opening new frontiers for genetic engineering.
Hundreds of scientists and ethicists from around the world are gathering in Washington this week to debate the boundaries of human gene editing. There’s worry that the fast-moving research may outpace safety and ethics scrutiny.
It’s a question that gained urgency after Chinese researchers made the first attempt at editing genes in human embryos. The laboratory experiment didn’t work well but did raise the prospect of one day passing modified DNA to future generations.
The molecular biologist who co-invented the most-used gene-editing tool is calling on scientists, policymakers and the public to determine the right balance in how it’s eventually used and will be discussed at this week’s gathering.
OLONGAPO, Philippines (AP) — A U.S. Marine has been found guilty of killing a transgender Filipino after discovering her gender in a hotel in the Philippines last year.
Lance Corporal Joseph Scott Pemberton was convicted Tuesday of homicide by first strangling Jennifer Laude and then dunking her head into a toilet bowl in the hotel they had checked into after meeting in a disco bar in Olongapo city, northwest of Manila. Court clerk Gerry Gruspe said Pemberton was sentenced to up to 12 years in jail.
The killing has reignited calls by left-wing groups and nationalists for an end to America’s military presence in the Philippines at a time when the U.S. is reasserting its dominance in Asia, and Manila has turned to Washington for support amid an escalating territorial dispute with China.
Beijing (AFP) – The Chinese scientist behind the world’s biggest cloning factory has technology advanced enough to replicate humans, he told AFP, and is only holding off for fear of the public reaction.
Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020.
But cattle are only the beginning of chief executive Xu Xiaochun’s ambitions.
In the factory pipeline are also thoroughbred racehorses, as well as pet and police dogs, specialised in searching and sniffing.
Boyalife is already working with its South Korean partner Sooam and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to improve primate cloning capacity to create better test animals for disease research.
And it is a short biological step from monkeys to humans — potentially raising a host of moral and ethical controversies.
“The technology is already there,” Xu said. “If this is allowed, I don’t think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology.”
The firm does not currently engage in human cloning activities, Xu said, adding that it has to be “self-restrained” because of possible adverse reaction.
But social values can change, he pointed out, citing changing views of homosexuality and suggesting that in time humans could have more choices about their own reproduction.
“Unfortunately, currently, the only way to have a child is to have it be half its mum, half its dad,” he said.
“Maybe in the future you have three choices instead of one,” he went on. “You either have fifty-fifty, or you have a choice of having the genetics 100 percent from Daddy or 100 percent from Mummy. This is only a choice.”
Xu, 44, went to university in Canada and the US, and has previously worked for US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and in drug development.
– Snuppy the cloned dog –
Presenting cloning as a safeguard of biodiversity, the Tianjin facility will house a gene bank capable of holding up to approximately five million cell samples frozen in liquid nitrogen -– a catalogue of the world’s endangered species for future regeneration.
Boyalife’s South Korean partner Sooam is already working on a project to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction by cloning cells preserved for thousands of years in the Siberian permafrost.
Sooam also serves a niche market recreating customers’ dead pet dogs, reportedly for $100,000 a time.
Sooam founder Hwang Woo-Suk was a national hero with his own postage stamp before being embroiled in controversy a decade ago after his claims to be the first in the world to clone a human embryo were discredited.
Hwang, who created Snuppy, the world’s first cloned dog, in 2005, lost his university position, had two major papers retracted, and was accused of crimes ranging from violation of bioethics laws to embezzling research funds.
Earlier this year he was quoted in South Korea’s Dong-A Ilbo newspaper saying that his firm was planning a cloning joint venture in China “because of South Korea’s bioethics law that prohibits the use of human eggs”.
“We have decided to locate the facilities in China in case we enter the phase of applying the technology to human bodies,” he was quoted as saying.
– ‘Weird experiments’ –
For now, Xu seeks to become the world’s first purveyor of “cloned” beef, breeding genetically identical super-cattle that he promises will taste like Kobe and allow butchers to “slaughter less and produce more” to meet the demands of China’s booming middle class.
Cloning differs from genetic modification, but its application to animals would enable the firm to homogenise its output.
“Everything in the supermarket looks good –- it’s almost all shiny, good-looking, and uniformly shaped. For animals, we weren’t able to do that in the past. But with our cloning factory, we choose to do so now,” Xu said.
“Remember, this is a food. We want it to be uniform, very consistent, very premium quality,” he added.
There is controversy over whether cloned beef is safe for human consumption — research by the US Food and Drug Adminstration says that it is, but the European parliament has backed a ban on cloned animals and products in the food chain.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has yet to review the issue.
Han Lanzhi, a GMO safety specialist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said Boyalife’s claims about the safety, scope and timeline of their operations were alarming — and implausible.
“To get approval for the safety of cloned animals would be a very drawn-out process, so when I heard this news, I felt very surprised,” she said.
“There must be strong regulation because as a company pursuing its own interests, they could very easily do other things in the future,” she added.
Xu sought to be reassuring, telling AFP: “We want the public to see that cloning is really not that crazy, that scientists aren’t weird, dressed in lab coats, hiding behind a sealed door doing weird experiments.”
November was another pretty ugly month for a swathe of financial asset classes, with pretty much everything down in dollar terms.
The charts below come from Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid, showing how stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies did around the world in the last 30 days. Other than a tiny handful of asset classes that appreciated in value, pretty much everything slumped:
It looks better in local currency terms, but the strongest performers (like Russian, German and Japanese stocks) have all seen their local currency value slide against the dollar since November, too:
BERLIN (AP) — BMW’s CEO says that at some future point it will no longer make economic sense to keep adapting diesel engines to ever-tougher rules, but he isn’t saying when.
Harald Krueger was quoted Tuesday as telling German daily Handelsblatt that the European Union’s fuel consumption and emission targets for 2020 and beyond can only be achieved with diesel.
He added, however, that “the point will come in the future when it will simply be uneconomic to adapt the diesel drive ever further to the demands of increasingly ambitious legislation.” Electric power will then play “the decisive role.”
Asked what effect the diesel emissions cheating scandal at Volkswagen has had at BMW, Krueger said there has been no impact yet on demand but it’s too early to calculate the long-term consequences.
