After less a month, the largest Chinese online shopping carnival, “double eleven”, is going to come again. On each year’s November 11^th, the major e-commerce platforms in China, like Taobao and Jingdong, will launch an incredible promotion, which is going to increase sales revenue significantly. Last year, Taobao made more than 15 billion dollar’s sales revenue on that single day. However, “double eleven” not only brings more revenue, but also causes huge pressure to China’s logistics providers, as they have to process a great amount of packages after this carnival. As a result, many consumers complained that they have to wait for a couple of weeks to receive what they bought during “double eleven”.

Is this problem going to be solved this year? The answer is yes by Jingdong, the largest competitor of Taobao. Instead of outsourcing logistics business to third-party logistics company like Taobao does, Jingdong builds its logistics network completely by itself. This year, Jingdong is going to extend the number of its highly automated warehouse from 9 to 13. These warehouses are located at major cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, and Guangzhou, aiming to improve the general logistics performance in different regions.

So how are these warehouses different from the others? In addition to AS/RS system and automated conveyor belt system, Jingdong implements many kinds of robots at its warehouses. For example, one of Jingdong’s warehouse in Shanghai has four kinds of robots, including transfer robot, sorting robot, grabbing robot, and palletizer robot. The total number of robot in this warehouse is more than 1000, leading to 100% of automation at that warehouse. In addition, Jingdong even applies drones to patrol around the warehouse for safety. According to Jingdong’s report, such a high tech warehouse is able to sort 9000 pieces of package per hour.

Although applying robotic technology will improve a warehouse’s logistics performance significantly, many people are wondering if this technology is going to cut a lot of job opportunities as warehouses become more and more automated. Focusing on this point, Jingdong presents a new plan for its warehouse workers, which is to provide more training so that they will be able to know how to control robots and work together with robots.

Reference:

– http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/q4xmXMtPxgu4ODQuLbIgAQ

– http://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/china/2016/11/161111_alibaba_singles_day_e-shopping_2016

Cloud computing, often referred as “the cloud”, is an IT paradigm enabling access to shared pools of configurable resources. It’s composed of 3 types of services, which are software-as-a-service (SAAS), platform-as-a-service (PAAS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS). SAAS, such as Google Docs, allows customers to use provider’s application running on a cloud infrastructure for data storage and project collaborations. PAAS (e.g. Cloud9 and Codiad) enables to process data stored on an online platform, without the complexity and the cost of managing and investing in the underlying hardware. Another service model, IAAS (e.g. Amazon S3 and Azure), provides companies with computing resources online, including servers, networking, storage and data center on a pay-per-use base.

According to Oracle’s Dave Donatelli, Executive Vice President of the company’s Cloud Business Group, “If you’re in the infrastructure business the Cloud has fundamentally changed the industry”. “… any hardware vendor without a successful public Cloud business will face significant business challenges.” Traditional incumbents must figure out the Cloud Computing issue to survive under the disruptive technology. But what is the exact impact of Cloud on traditional hardware and software industry?

• The Cloud is slowly overtaking B2C software products (e.g. Microsoft Office) and hardware products (e.g. USB) by moving services to cloud platform online, which changes the whole business model of the entire software and hardware industry.
• In B2B service, The Cloud decreases demands of servers and storage infrastructure in 2 ways: 

1. Decreasing corporates’ hardware upgrading demand by freeing their existing hardware from complicated operations.
2. Decreasing corporates’ hardware initial investment by lowering capability uncertainty.

• The Cloud changes the critical attributes of hardware in the market to fit the new cloud trend. For example, cloud service providers seek scalable, stable and cost-efficient hardware that provides cloud service better, instead of high-end hardware that fits traditional infrastructure. Also, corporates and individuals tend not to need large capability but thinner hardware that provides good internet connection.
• The disruption can be explained by 3 reasons:

1. The traditional industry is newly easy to enter since the cloud technology and concept changes the industry business model by shifting services from offline to cloud platform online.
2. The traditional markets are attractive to attack since some incumbents subsidise other unprofitable sectors with profits from software industry such as Microsoft.
3. It is difficult for the traditional industry to defend the new cloud trend because of large sunk costs, legacy system and lock-in customer base.

The future of the Cloud entails possible changes to software products and IT structures. Network requirements (depending on the size and growth of the firm) will be rapidly matched by the Cloud Computing model counterpart. This will help firms scale up their IT infrastructure. Firms may use multiple Cloud services to not be stuck with one provider, however, this will require additional IT training for the respective Cloud platforms. Lastly, the Cloud has some concerns for security, and therefore in-house technology and Cloud usage must find its balance.

Check out our video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tnUB1ayvls&feature=youtu.be

Created by group 3 (N. Chen, D. Ozer, D. Jia, Y. Kang)

Nowadays, nearly everyone is aware of the advent of self-driving cars. However, when will this technology be widely used in our daily life? What kinds of opportunities and challenges will be brought by self-driving cars? These might be some questions that most people are not able to answer. Recently, I read a book named Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead (Driverless), which provides an overview of the disruptive technologies that enable self-driving cars, and discuss the potential benefits and risks that could be caused by this technology.

Opportunities & Benefits

According to Driverless, all self-driving cars are going to be used as public transportation in the future, which means people do not need to purchase a car anymore, as they can ask a self-driving car to pick them up whenever they want. This will create a huge market for taxi company, and will also change the business model of car manufacturers. In term of benefits, the biggest one is safety. The fully use of self-driving cars will significantly reduce the number of car accidents, which is going to safe more than a million of human lives per year.

Challenges & Risks

There is no doubt that this new technology will disrupt many industry, and will also make hundreds of thousands of drivers lose their jobs. In addition, since self-driving cars are much safer than conventional cars, the automobile insurance companies are going to lose many individual customers, and therefore they need to provide some new insurance service as a response. Furthermore, a huge risk of using a self-driving car is that the car might be hacked by hackers, which will put the user in danger.

Conclusion

As a result, although the use of self-driving cars could bring many benefits to us, there are still many problems need to be solved. The authors of Driverless state that in the year of 2050, about 70% of newly sold cars will be self-driving cars. If this prediction was accurate, we are really not far away from a completely new society. Therefore, in order to be fully prepared for the future, I think it is necessary for us to get a better understanding of this new technology.

Reference

– Lipson H. & Kurman M., Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead, The MIT Press, 2016.

– https://www.sciencenews.org/article/five-challenges-self-driving-cars