An Air Tesla? JetBlue-, Boeing-Backed Startup Zunum Aero Plans Cheap Electric Flights

Boeing Co BA 0.16% and JetBlue Airways CorporationJBLU 1.65% are investing in a radical new startup that plans to use electric-hybrid planes and smaller regional airports to offer regional air travel at about 80 percent of current costs.

Starting in the early 2020s, the Kirkland, Washington-based Zunum Aero said it aims to build aircraft with seating for 10 to 50 people and a range of at first 700 miles, then up to a thousand miles the following decade.

“Simply drive to a nearby airfield and walk to your aircraft with bags in tow, for a trip that will take half the time and at a much lower fare,” the company said on its website announcement.

Zunum, The Tesla Of Aircraft

“Zunum Aero could be the Tesla [Tesla Inc TSLA 1.25%] of Aircraft,” Forbes trumpeted Thursday morning.

The company plans to build aircraft that serve densely traveled regional routes such as San Francisco to Los Angeles or Boston to Washington, D.C., with round-trip fares as low as $100.

Zunum has received backing from Boeing and JetBlue Technology Ventures, a subsidiary of JetBlue Airways.

The company says its operating costs will be low and its carbon footprint far smaller than gas-guzzling jetliners. It promises drastically reduced wait times.

Finding And Utilizing The Underused

Zunum Aero is looking to take advantage of underused airport inventory.

“Our stock of 13,500 airports is the largest in the world, yet just 140 of the largest hubs carry over 97 percent of air traffic,” the company’s website reads. “This has left many of us with long drives to catch a flight, while on shorter trips we skip air travel altogether. Communities without good air service also struggle to attract investment and create jobs.”

The company claims that 40 percent of airline emissions come from regional routes.

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Zunum was founded by CEO Ashish Kumar, a former executive at Microsoft Corporation MSFT 0.26%, Google (Alphabet Inc GOOG 0.42% GOOGL 0.45%), Dell Inc. (previously traded NASDAQDELL) and McKinsey & Company, Inc. His online biography says he has a doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Cornell University and spent his early career as an engineering professor at Brown University.

The chief engineer is Matt Knapp, lead designer of the ATG Javelin, a small, high-speed jet developed by Aviation Technology Group, which declared bankruptcy in 2008 after financing dried up.

By Mark Fritz

Source:https://www.benzinga.com/news/17/04/9271116/an-air-tesla-jetblue-boeing-backed-startup-zunum-aero-plans-cheap-electric-flight

Opinion: This tiny country is the most technologically advanced in the world

Estonia, in the Baltics, has completely transformed its economy by supporting startups

Have you ever been to Estonia? Could you find it on a map?

The Baltic nation of only 1.3 million citizens stands out from its Eastern European neighbors in that it has an advanced economy and a high standard of living. And it’s a technology paradise. You may know it as the home of Skype. But there’s a lot more to the tiny country than that.

In Estonia, voting, signing documents and filling out tax returns is done online, thanks to X-Road, an online tool that coordinates multiple online data repositories and document registries. X-Road provides all Estonians — ordinary citizens, enterprises and government officials — with unparalleled access to the data they need to do business, get licenses, permits and other documents that would take days, weeks or even months in other countries.

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X-Road is built with scalability in mind, so that the growing number of services and repositories can easily be attached to the system. Although this digital backbone alone is rather impressive, it’s just one of many products in tech-forward Estonia.

Instead of being held back by its past and falling victim to ailments that plague many post-communist countries, such as corruption, a bloated government and an obsolete education system, Estonia has decided to start with a clean slate and invest in its future. To transform its society into a community of tech-savvy individuals, children as young as 7 are taught the principles and basics of coding. (In comparison, only one in four schools in the U.S. teaches computer programming.)

Such strong foundations have yielded impressive results: Estonians are driven, forward-thinking and entrepreneurial, and the same goes for the government. It takes only five minutes to register a company there and, according to The Economist, the country in 2013 held the world record for the number of startups per person. And it’s not quantity over quality: Many Estonian startups are now successful companies that you may recognize, such as Skype, Transferwise, Pipedrive, Cloutex, Click & Grow, GrabCAD, Erply, Fortumo, Lingvist and others. By the way, Estonia uses the euro.

If all this sounds enticing and you wish to become an entrepreneur there, you’re in luck; starting a business in Estonia is easy, and you can do it without packing your bags, thanks to its e-residency service, a transnational digital identity available to anyone. An e-resident can not only establish a company in Estonia through the Internet, but they can also have access to other online services that have been available to Estonians for over a decade. This includes e-banking and remote money transfers, declaring Estonian taxes online, digitally signing and verifying contracts and documents, and much more.

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E-residents are issued a smart ID card, a legal equivalent to handwritten signatures and face-to-face identification in Estonia and worldwide. The cards themselves are protected by 2048-bit encryption, and the signature/ID functionality is provided by two security certificates stored on the card’s microchip.

But great innovations don’t stop there. Blockchain, the principle behind bitcoin that also secures the integrity of e-residency data, will be used to provide unparalleled safety to 1 million Estonian health records. The blockchain will be used to register any and all changes, illicit or otherwise, done to the health records, protecting their authenticity and effectively eliminating any abuse of the data therein.

While there are many lessons that the U.S. and the rest of the world can learn from Estonia, these are especially important: A country must be willing to adapt and change the infrastructure of both the government and the economy if needed, and to continually optimize them. A nation needs to understand that a change of mindset should be thorough and start with the young. An education system should be designed in a way that doesn’t cripple young minds, or overburden them with too much irrelevant information. And, finally, if you want entrepreneurship to thrive, it is necessary to remove bureaucratic and technical obstacles at all levels.

How close is your country to Estonia in technology? Let me know in the comment section below.

By Jurica Dujmović 

Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-tiny-country-is-the-most-technologically-advanced-in-the-world-2016-05-05