Mr A; since you dont post often, I thought I'd drop this to you...
Here is an idea, set up FedX as a anchor tenant. Let them be a loss leader. Give away the air time! Plaster a G* ad on the side of each van or truck. (This comes under the title of: GET ANYBODY on the network!)
Jeff Vayda
Where we will be in2005
darpa.mil
Context Setting: Society in the Year 2005
1. Commercial Industry
Winn Stephenson, Vice President for Network Computing at Federal Express, led off the
discussion of "Society in 2005" by describing a large-scale application - the delivery of
parcels. Federal Express employs 125,000 people, employs 560 aircraft, uses 40,000
vehicles, generates 50 million electronic transmissions per day to deliver 2.5 million
packages per day. Federal Express employees are equipped with over 80,000 "super
trackers" - a hand-held unit with a Mbyte of memory, an 8-bit processor and a bar code
scanner that costs approximately $350. Currently, the Federal Express employee scans
information from the package and inserts the super tracker into a dock which uploads the
information and can retransmit it over a wireless network. In the near future, Federal
Express would like to remove the manual task of data entry and transmission by
extending the wireless network out to the courier.
Future challenges to Federal Express include an order of magnitude growth in package
volume and increased complexity of the services provided (i.e., there are currently 75
different products offered which have different delivery/deadline commitments).
Technologies which would help Federal Express include: low-cost radio frequency tags
(i.e., less than one cent) for locating and identifying packages; cost-effective wireless
communication environment; high-performance processors requiring small amounts of
energy (i.e., a picowatt Pentium processor), a disposable battery with a two-year
operational life, and optical character recognition/CCD imaging/scanning technologies. |
