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Read more: A push for walk-and-talk meetings

The practical idea behind robotic telepresence is to put managers in two places at the same time, providing both cost and time saving in an increasingly global work environment.

So far, such robots have been used more extensively in hospitals, where the expertise of doctors on the other side of the country, or the world, can be crucial for patients.

Use in corporate offices is still at a very early stage. But those in the industry say it is just the next step in making long-distance communication feel more realistic.

Compared to videoconferencing, interacting with a robot has shown to be more similar to face-to-face interaction, according to Cory Kidd, who has a doctorate in human-robot interaction from the MIT Media Lab in the United States. He is also chief executive of Intuitive Automata, a robotics company.

Kidd says that while robotic teleconference technology is improving month to month right now, many people still find the robots awkward and intrusive — a response that is often seen with new ways of doing things.

“If you look at any sort of new communication technology, there is always backlash against it shortly after it comes out,” he said.

Videoconferencing and even telephones were seen as strange and unusual when they were first introduced, Kidd pointed out, and as with any new technology that may go mainstream, it will take getting used to.

“The telephone was going to destroy society because it was so intrusive and changes our lives,” he said.

Read more: The jobs of tomorrow

Researchers are also trying to find ways to make the human-robot interaction seem more like the users are really present. At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for example, researchers are developing a telepresence robot that can also convey body language through robotic arms.

“When we communicate, we also observe body motions to understand meaning,” said Lam Tin-lun, a research fellow at the university’s Advanced Robotics Lab who is heading the project.

Lam says while the technology might seem strange at first, it does not take much time to adapt to an office with colleagues moving around as robots.

When a prototype of his model was tested in an office, he said, after a week or two, the sight of the robot going about its business was no longer a novelty and workers ceased to be surprised by it.

“They stopped looking at the robot and just did what they always needed to do,” he said.

As the technology advances over the next few years, prices will also go down, meaning greater accessibility for companies that will not have to sink a huge investment into the systems. RoboDynamics, a robotics maker in Santa Monica, California, has said it will sell telepresence robots for about US$1,000 two years from now.

Read more: How foreigners find jobs in China

One area that developers say will most likely undergo improvements is the interface — what the user’s control buttons will look like while directing the robot.

iRobot recently launched a new model, in collaboration with Cisco, that does not need manual driving. When first deployed in a work environment, the model would go all around the office to map the place. Then the user would only have to indicate whose desk or office to go to, using an iPad app, and the robot would drive itself there while avoiding obstacles or people. It also knows how to go back to its charging station when no longer in use.

But one contentious issue that still needs to be worked out is etiquette.

“As you start seeing these in offices and other work environments, people have to get used to it, and there are all these social norms in terms of how you fit in,” Kidd said.

“Can a robot walk up and interrupt a conversation you’re having? Or should the robot wait because the person is remote? Does it matter who it is on the other end and how do you convey that? So there are a lot of social questions that over the long term are really going to determine the success and the failure of this technology.”

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/4RseRiWsez8/index.html

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Emirates has been voted the world’s best airline, and best in-flight entertainment, by passengers at the annual Skytrax World Airline Awards. The awards are decided by 18.2 million passengers in 160 countries around the world.

Japan’s ANA won a new award for cabin cleanliness, as well as receiving a five-star airline rating.

Cathay Pacific won the world’s best cabin crew.

Air Asia took the prize for best low-cost airline.

The best economy class award goes to Garuda Indonesia.

Malaysia Airlines’ satay service wins best signature dish.

Air New Zealand won best premium economy.

The best first class award goes to Etihad Airways.

Qatar Airways was voted best business class.

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(CNN) — I am always being asked “‘what makes the best airline?”

The answer is consistency. With any airline there is no point having a great flight on Monday, an awful flight on Tuesday and a mediocre flight by Friday. It is the ability of an airline to provide what it promises on every flight, every day that makes the difference.

Read: Emirates wins best airline

And that is much more difficult than it seems. Remember, the airline has hundreds of planes spread across 24 time zones. Its staff are also jet lagged and tired after red-eye crossings and may not have slept well on their layover.

Service levels have been improved and our expectations have risen with them. When the screen doesn’t work, the seat won’t recline and the toilet breaks down, we rightly get miffed.

Then there is the sheer amount of modern technology that can go wrong from complicated premium business class seats with motors and electronics, to the inflight entertainment which is a selling point for many airlines. When it goes wrong, everyone suffers and complains.

Those airlines that maintain the creature comforts as well as the aircraft machinery are the ones that win awards. They recognize we have a choice when we book tickets — often even within the same alliance you have a choice of different carriers to your destination: For instance, when I fly London to Cape Town with Star Alliance, I could go South African Airways, EgyptAir, Lufthansa or Turkish Airlines.

Consistency and care, time and again. That is what wins you awards!

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/-A-4V7htap8/index.html

Believe it or not, China is the beer-chugging capital of the world. The Chinese public gulped down 59.3 billion liters of alcohol in 2012 — nearly double the amount quaffed in the U.S. Beer accounted for 84% of that figure, according to market research firm Euromonitor. Yet per capita, Chinese consumption was only about 35 liters annually — less than half of the United States, according to Bloomberg – and still has enormous room to grow.

That has led to a microbrewery boom in Beijing. “There’s a whole slew of places that are about to emerge,” said Ryan O’Neal Johnston, owner of Beijing’s The Drive-Thru Bar. “For anyone interested in anything besides lagers and Tsingtao, it’s on.”

Enter Carl Setzer, A 31-year old native of Cleveland, Ohio, who had barely touched alcohol until he was 25. After college, he landed in Shiyan, Hubei Province where an agency found him work at Dongfeng Motors. Setzer, an IT specialist, walked away from his lucrative career and jumped into the microbrewery business because he saw a niche. “Never let a market that has a requirement go unsupplied,” said Setzer, who opened Great Leap Brewing in October 2010.

Last year, Great Leap grossed $225,000 with China’s low operating costs cutting into only about a quarter of that figure.

On a recent Saturday night, the bar’s open air courtyard and small anteroom in Doujiao Hutong were standing room only as a flustered bartender struggled to keep glasses full. “The greatest accomplishment is that people come here,” said Setzer, who recently opened a second location on Xinzhong Street

Expats originally dominated the Beijing microbrewing scene, but that is changing. The clientele has been diversifying rapidly as more Chinese return from stints abroad and with greater levels of disposable income, according to microbrewers.

The growing appeal to locals, however, may have more to do with the product itself. Great Leap infuses traditional Chinese ingredients with time-honored brewing techniques. Drinks like the “Iron Buddha,” blended with hints of Tieguanyin tea or the “Cinnamon Rock Ale” incorporating Chinese “large bark cinnamon.” The “Honey Ma Gold,” Great Leaps most popular, is infused with the mouth-numbing essence of the Sichuan Peppercorn (huajiao). All sell for between 30 and 50 RMB ($4.89 — $8.15) a glass.

Success has bred competition. Chandler Jurinka opened Slowboat brewery in February 2012 with distribution to various expat friendly hotels, restaurants and bars, and followed up with the Slowboat Taproom in Dongsibatiao Hutong in December.

“I’ve always been someone who recognized and valued quality,” said Jurinka, a former U.S. Army Sergeant from Washington D.C. Jurinka, 46, first came to China in 1994 as a student at the University of Nanjing and after an 11-year hiatus bounced around the Chinese start-up world before settling into his latest venture with Slowboat.

Offering a more traditional selection of homebrews, Slowboat’s popular brands are The Captain’s Pale Ale, Jack Tar Scottish Ale and Imperial Vanilla Stout. Jurinka, too, is looking to capitalize on soaring Chinese demand. But Slowboat uses mostly imported ingredients, catering to the popular belief that foreign food products are superior to domestic.

Microbrews in Beijing are more than just keeping glasses full. Great Leap and Slowboat are both based deep within traditional Beijing residential “hutong” neighborhoods and have paid particular attention to adapting their presence seamlessly to locals. “Strangers in hutongs are never welcome,” said Setzer. Great Leap maintains a strict midnight closing and even earlier hours in summer and during university exams, while Slowboat made their space (almost) completely soundproof. Both men too have married into Chinese families and are currently raising their own.

Community relations is just one of the unique challenges that both face as small business owners in Beijing. Laws and regulations are often ambiguous and Setzer admitted that “you have to make use of personal connections” to get things done.

For Slowboat, the biggest challenge came in the form of intellectual property. “If you’re not being copied then you’re not relevant,” said Jurinka, who said he required “constant and rapid innovation” to stay ahead of the curve. Jurinka estimated that eight to 10 new microbreweries were about to emerge. “Sometimes they come in here and they are taking pictures of the tiles on the wall.”

At the recent 2013 Beijinger Magazine Reader Bar and Club awards, it was a banner night for Great Leap which swept several categories including “Bar of the Year,” “Best Local Craft Brewing” and “Personality of the Year,” for the famously cantankerous Setzer. Not to be outdone, Slowboat received the “Best New Bar” award.

Jurinka, though, said he is focused on the big picture. “Slowboat is not in competition with any other local brewery,” he said. “There are 20 million people in this city and the more local Beijing breweries, the greater the likelihood that there will be a craft beer revolution in Beijing.”

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/cJw_VxcArRE/index.html

Uganda is Africa’s second-biggest exporter of coffee beans, currently producing around 3.4 million bags per year. Yet instead of being refined locally, the vast majority of the country’s raw beans have been traditionally exported in the consuming countries of the West for processing.

But Rugasira’s vision was to create a quality Ugandan coffee company that would be able to place a finished product on the shelves of both local and international supermarkets.

A trained economist, he devised a business model encouraging local coffee farmers to sell their beans to him at a fair price. His company would then roast, package and brand the final product, whilst the profits would be split 50/50.

These words by Rugasira planted the seeds for what went on to become Good African Coffee, a Kampala-based company that has helped transform the lives of thousands of farmers in Uganda.

Over the last nine years Good African Coffee says it has built a network of more than 14,000 coffee farmers, who are organized into 280 farmer groups. The company, which is the first African-owned coffee brand to be available in British supermarkets, has also helped local farmers to set up several savings and credit cooperatives.

“(It’s) about empowerment and it’s also about ownership,” says Rugasira. “It’s about owning the value chain, growing the coffee, processing it at source and it’s about exporting a finished product,” he adds.

“So we retain the value, which means we can employ people, we can pay taxes, we can prosper our farmers and their communities. And that’s the only sustainable way in which societies have prospered — by moving from low-value agriculture into high-value manufacturing industrialization.”

At the heart of all of Rugasira’s efforts is his strong belief in the transformative power of self-help. In trade, and not aid, he says, is where Africa’s future well-being lies.

“Every society and economy that’s prospered has done it through their own hard work, ingenuity, dedication and commitment,” he says.

“Not through charity, not through handouts, and I think that’s a powerful message and it’s a powerful model. It’s not new, but I think it’s one that I think resonates with consumers who are willing to interact with products like that.”

Watch this: Dambisa Moyo on aid

Rugasira’s philosophy is clearly defined in “A Good African Story,” his book published earlier this year chronicling all the challenges he and his enterprise faced — from gaining the trust of banking institutions to convincing foreign retailers about working directly with an African company.

He says he decided to write the book because just a handful of African businesspeople write about their experiences.

“All of us have a story,” he says. “We need to share that story; that story edifies, it encourages, it inspires others in our own way and I just found African business doesn’t really write.”

By sharing his story with the world, Rugasira wants to help create a new narrative about Africa and inspire the continent’s next generation of entrepreneurs.

“Seventy percent of our population on the continent are young people — the same young people that we want to set up businesses, become entrepreneurs, innovators in IT, you name it,” he says. “And the only way they’ll be encouraged and inspired is if they read about stories about other African business people.”

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/yuujmkxWlhI/index.html

“Yes,” claims the African Management Initiative, pointing out the continent’s “acute shortage” of high-quality, well-trained local managers.

The Johannesburg-based group wants to tackle the continent’s talent gap by creating one million skilled African managers over the next 10 years.

“The demand is there,” says Rebecca Harrison, director of the non-profit organization. “We meet business owner after business owner across the continent who tell us that, if they are growing, then getting good managers is the biggest challenge right now.”

For sure, creating one million well-trained, locally grown managers by 2023 to spearhead Africa’s business development is an overly ambitious proposition in a continent where top business schools are few and far between — there are about 90 institutions offering an MBA in Africa, according to an AMI report, whereas India has more than 1,500.

The AMI, which says it has a network of more than 5,000 African managers and entrepreneurs, estimates that there are about 10 million people in managerial and supervisory positions across the continent.

“If we can reach one in 10 of the 10 million managers out there indirectly, if we can have one in 10 African managers operating really effectively, then the continent will be a different place,” says Harrison.

Educating future managers

To achieve its target, the AMI, which gets most of its funding from the Lundin Foundation, in Canada, has started launching a series of initiatives designed to expand access to key education tools, including a virtual campus tailored specifically for African managers and entrepreneurs.

“What we want to do is leapfrog the traditional bricks-and-mortar approach to business schools and business training,” says Harrison.

“We want to leverage technology to deliver high-quality practical relevant management education at a price that people can afford, combining online content with offline peer support.”

Read this: Africa’s new skyscraper cities

On June 17, the AMI began its pilot of a two-week course where participants access free web-based practical tutorials in the form of video, audio or text to sharpen their management skills.

The “Launchpad: Success@Work in 21st Century Africa” module, which will have low bandwidth requirements and be available on mobile, will cover topics such as effective communication, goal setting and time management.

Harrison says it is part of the AMI’s efforts to eventually develop Africa’s first full-blown Massively Open Online Course (MOOC), in conjunction with three of Africa’s leading business schools — Nigeria’s Lagos Business School, Kenya’s Strathmore Business School and South Africa’s Gordon Institute of Business Science

“The idea is to partner with the business schools in the continent and get the business teachers to deliver their content online and then to support that with offline learning,” says Harrison. “So the model is the learning is free but if you want a certificate you pay a small fee.”

The AMI says about 600 people have signed up for the pilot MOOC.

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/HGNqGAv7AQ0/index.html

But the young editor Tina Brown decided to put the picture on the cover of her magazine Vanity Fair. That was 1991.

More than two decades later, that very Vanity Fair cover is one of the most memorable images of our time.

“I didn’t expect the storm that it created,” Brown, now editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast and Newsweek Global, told CNN. “It was a good risk because we put on an unbelievable amount of sales. It became a kind of iconic picture for women.”

Read: Arianna Huffington tells women: ‘Less stress, more living’

“Unfortunately taking risks comes so easily to me that you can call it reckless at times,” said Brown. “I have to hold myself back a little and think ‘wait a minute, be careful because you know you can blow it, too.’”

British-born Brown revived the fortunes of two ailing bastions of the newsstand, Vanity Fair, which she began editing aged just 30, and The New Yorker.

In the 15 years Brown edited Vanity Fair, she took its monthly sales from 200,000 to 1.2 million and is credited with saving the magazine with her signature formula of mixing serious news with celebrity culture.

She again worked her magic at The New Yorker, which she edited for six years, increasing circulation by 145% on the newsstand and 28% overall.

In 1998, she left The New Yorker to launch Talk Magazine, which folded after only three years.

Her latest venture is perhaps the most controversial of all. Brown launched news website The Daily Beast — named after the fictional newspaper in the Evelyn Waugh novel “Scoop” — in 2008 and merged it with Newsweek in 2010.

While The Daily Beast is gaining a loyal digital readership — with up to 16 million unique users a month and advertising up 30% year on year — Brown’s Midas touch has yet to work on Newsweek.

Like many weekly print magazines, circulation for Newsweek has slumped — from three million in 2007 to 1.5 million in 2012. And after 80 years on the newsstand, Brown took the stark decision to make Newsweek an all digital publication, printing its farewell edition on December 31, 2012. Twitter lit up with #LastPrintIssue, which also featured on the last cover of the magazine’s final edition.

Although it continues as an online magazine, its owner IAC has now announced it is seeking a buyer for the Newsweek brand.

Read: Lessons from Olympics can help solve financial crisis, says Greek Ambassador

At the age of 59, Brown is now running an all digital business for the first time in her career, and divides opinion on whether she can adapt her operation to meet the demands of a fickle online media world.

“Great editors have great successes and great failures,” says Ken Doctor, digital media analyst and author of Newsonomics, “[Brown] had remarkable success with Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, but Talk was a spectacular failure.

“She is a ‘tweener,’ connecting Britain and U.S. sensibilities, connecting celebrity and serious news, connecting print and digital. There are not many people who have done that.

“She has ridden with the times in creating The Daily Beast; she is someone who adapts and learns.”

Others, however, see Brown as a great magazine editor of her time, and believe she has yet to master the digital media landscape.

“She is a creature of a different age,” says Jeff Bercovici, media and technology staff writer at Forbes. “The formula she brought with her is the opposite of what works online. In the digital world, successful sites have started really small and gradually built up with unknown writers. Her line was to hire expensive writers and do something with panache, but that doesn’t work online.”

Though she has her critics, Brown marks her own success by the fact that people are still talking about her.

“I don’t think any editor wants to put out anything that falls into silence,” says Brown. “I do tend to have points of view that are sometimes counter to the wind.”

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/e6DKU3uAwIM/index.html

Uganda is Africa’s second-biggest exporter of coffee beans, currently producing around 3.4 million bags per year. Yet instead of being refined locally, the vast majority of the country’s raw beans have been traditionally exported in the consuming countries of the West for processing.

But Rugasira’s vision was to create a quality Ugandan coffee company that would be able to place a finished product on the shelves of both local and international supermarkets.

A trained economist, he devised a business model encouraging local coffee farmers to sell their beans to him at a fair price. His company would then roast, package and brand the final product, whilst the profits would be split 50/50.

These words by Rugasira planted the seeds for what went on to become Good African Coffee, a Kampala-based company that has helped transform the lives of thousands of farmers in Uganda.

Over the last nine years Good African Coffee says it has built a network of more than 14,000 coffee farmers, who are organized into 280 farmer groups. The company, which is the first African-owned coffee brand to be available in British supermarkets, has also helped local farmers to set up several savings and credit cooperatives.

“(It’s) about empowerment and it’s also about ownership,” says Rugasira. “It’s about owning the value chain, growing the coffee, processing it at source and it’s about exporting a finished product,” he adds.

“So we retain the value, which means we can employ people, we can pay taxes, we can prosper our farmers and their communities. And that’s the only sustainable way in which societies have prospered — by moving from low-value agriculture into high-value manufacturing industrialization.”

At the heart of all of Rugasira’s efforts is his strong belief in the transformative power of self-help. In trade, and not aid, he says, is where Africa’s future well-being lies.

“Every society and economy that’s prospered has done it through their own hard work, ingenuity, dedication and commitment,” he says.

“Not through charity, not through handouts, and I think that’s a powerful message and it’s a powerful model. It’s not new, but I think it’s one that I think resonates with consumers who are willing to interact with products like that.”

Watch this: Dambisa Moyo on aid

Rugasira’s philosophy is clearly defined in “A Good African Story,” his book published earlier this year chronicling all the challenges he and his enterprise faced — from gaining the trust of banking institutions to convincing foreign retailers about working directly with an African company.

He says he decided to write the book because just a handful of African businesspeople write about their experiences.

“All of us have a story,” he says. “We need to share that story; that story edifies, it encourages, it inspires others in our own way and I just found African business doesn’t really write.”

By sharing his story with the world, Rugasira wants to help create a new narrative about Africa and inspire the continent’s next generation of entrepreneurs.

“Seventy percent of our population on the continent are young people — the same young people that we want to set up businesses, become entrepreneurs, innovators in IT, you name it,” he says. “And the only way they’ll be encouraged and inspired is if they read about stories about other African business people.”

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/yuujmkxWlhI/index.html

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/8Fsny0PDJQU/index.html

The company paid a $500 million civil fine in 2012 over what federal regulators said were unlawful sales of prescription drugs over the Internet. The Justice Department said Google was on notice as early as 2003 that online pharmacies were advertising prescription drugs online to users in the United States but failed to prevent the practice.

The Mountain View, California-based company said Wednesday it has made things “increasingly difficult” for illegal pharmacies to hawk their products using its search engine.

“A variety of websites and web services are refusing ads from suspected rogue pharmacies,” it said. “Domain name registrars are removing suspect rogue pharmacies from their networks. Payment processors are blocking payments to these operators, and social networking sites are removing them from their systems too.”

But it added that its results “reflect the web and what’s online — the good and the bad.”

“Filtering a website from search results won’t remove it from the web, or block other websites that link to that website,” it said in a statement posted on its public policy blog. “It’s not Google’s place to determine what content should be censored — that responsibility belongs with the courts and the lawmakers.”

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/M04Vu0kDw2c/index.html

All disc-based games can be played without ever connecting online, and the 24-hour connection requirement has been dropped, according to an update to a May post concerning questions about the new device, due to be released this fall.

Additionally, there will be no limitations to using and sharing games, Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Business division, says in the post. People will be able to share, trade or resell their games in the same way they do for Xbox 360 games.

The changes indicate Microsoft is having second thoughts about some of its future plans with the Xbox One. The post read, “Update on June 19, 2013: As a result of feedback from the Xbox community, we have changed certain policies for Xbox One reflected in this blog. Some of this information is no longer accurate.”

The company has been taking a public berating since it announced restrictions to used games and their requirement for an Internet connection. Consumers have been reacting with anger over the policies, but the tipping point may have been when Jimmy Fallon, host of NBC’s “Late Night,” pointed out that only the PlayStation 4 could freely play used games, which created more confusion.

The flogging became worse when Sony took to the stage at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show and pointedly did not include such restrictions for the new PlayStation 4. A YouTube video produced by Sony made fun of the used-game restriction by showing how people could share games on the PlayStation 4 — by just handing them to another person.

The new Xbox One used-games policy only affects disc-based games. Titles downloaded through Xbox Live cannot be shared or resold. Also, disc-based games must have the disc inside the console to play.

The changes being made also affect its proposed family sharing policy. Since Microsoft is allowing players to have the flexibility to use games offline, it will not be launching its family sharing plan, which would have allowed up to 10 family members to log in and play games from anywhere.

However, Marc Whitten, chief product officer for Xbox, told CNN the company still believes very deeply in its digital vision.

“So much of what we’ve built around our digital ecosystem still works,” Whitten said. “It’s what we building in how you can use your games. Our online vision and the Xbox One architecture really power the complete new experience in how the Cloud changes everything and we’re massively invested in this.”

He also said the flexibility the company added for physical-disc play will not change for the life of the Xbox One.

Whitten said there are no changes surrounding the addition of Kinect with the Xbox One. He said the company believes the motion sensor/controller is critical to building out the next generation experiences gamers are craving.

The Xbox One will cost about $100 more than Sony’s PlayStation 4 ($499 versus $399), but officials at the Redmond, Washington-based company believe their console will be worth the value.

“While we believe that the majority of people will play games online and access the cloud for both games and entertainment, we will give consumers the choice of both physical and digital content,” Whitten wrote in the blog post. “We have listened and we have heard loud and clear from your feedback that you want the best of both worlds.”

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_business/~3/q4AS5AX6lC0/index.html