Life as we know it has changed since the coronavirus outbreak. We have been forced to rethink simple things that could now contribute toward the spread of the virus.
From handshakes to open-floor offices, here are eight things listed by Insider that could become obsolete once the worst of the pandemic has passed:
Continue reading… “Things that may become obsolete after Coronavirus”
Economic crisis and pandemics like these breed incredible opportunities and this is one such opportunity for the OOH advertising industry to relearn and transform.
Who would have thought while welcoming 2020 that it would change the definition of life, from fighting the daily rat race, combatting Monday blues to being confined in our homes with our families having real conversations, and cherishing those little things that we all took for granted in a free world. The ongoing pandemic has slowed us down, given us time to introspect on a lot of things and re-imagine our lives and businesses.
Looking back at my 12 years of entrepreneurship in the out-of-home (OOH) advertising industry, reading well-articulated pieces on digital transformation and its impact across various sectors and our daily lives, as Reliance says “JIO Digital Life”, I feel it’s time when technology is going to transform old businesses and give life to new innovations creating a world which is more digital and connected than ever before.
Continue reading… “COVID-19 Transforms Out-Of-Home Advertising”
Self-drive scooter businesses like Bounce, Vogo, and Yulu expect to see an uptick in adoption, with public transportation utilization capped at less than 50% due to social distancing norms.
Self-drive scooter businesses like Bounce, Vogo, and Yulu expect to see an uptick in adoption, with public transportation utilization capped at less than 50% due to social distancing norms and disposable incomes taking a hit owing to salary cuts and lower earnings, these firms tell ET.
The nationwide lockdown has forced state governments to significantly cut public transportation services, restricting commute options for healthcare workers, civic authorities, and delivery executives.
Shared two-wheelers are more efficient and provide low-cost rider-friendly alternative to public transport. “With the movement of people being staggered out, self-drive shared scooters can help drive down the prices through economies of scale and pass on the benefits to the end consumer, in this case—commuters,” said Vivekananda Hallekere, CEO of Bounce.
These businesses, however, say that state governments and businesses need to jointly build newer ways of shared and public transport to cater to safer mobility solutions. “We need to ensure adequate preparedness of cities to cater to these new requirements in the most efficient manner possible,” Anand Ayyadurai, CEO at Vogo, said.
K-12 students have been educated online since March, and parents fear they are falling behind.
With most schools across the US closed since March to slow the spread of the coronavirus, some ultrawealthy parents are hiring private educators to make sure their kids don’t fall behind.
Some of these educators are former teachers or people who have degrees in education, and they charge between $25 and $60 an hour for their services.
Some parents may continue to employ these professionals to homeschool their kids even after schools reopen in the fall in case the US experiences a second wave of the coronavirus, as some experts expect.
Educators are concerned that lower-income families’ lack of internet access will further widen the achievement gap between rich and poor students when schools eventually reopen.
If a hospital in Huntersville, North Carolina, needs to quickly replenish its supply of surgical masks and gowns as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, it will now be able to summon a drone to make a delivery. Novant Health, the nonprofit that runs the hospital and hundreds of other facilities in the Southeast, just became the first hospital system to be granted a drone operator permit from the FAA. The system will begin the first long-range, ongoing drone deliveries in the U.S., using technology from Zipline, a startup that first launched its services in Africa.
“We believe this will allow us to, in a very precise, on-demand way, get supplies to where they need to be exactly when they need to be there,” says Angela Yochem, executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer at Novant Health. The organization already has a well-tuned distribution system, and has calculated that if coronavirus cases surge in the region, it has enough personal protective equipment to cover the need. But it also wanted to do everything possible to prepare for the crisis—and will eventually use the same system to make more routine deliveries.
With the president pushing for children to return to the classroom and a number of states intent on pursuing phased reopenings, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released guidance for reopening schools. But a new Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of USA Today has found that if schools reopen in the fall, they may find attendance down as many parents will likely continue at-home learning.
While more than half of Americans polled, just more than 2,000, said they supported a range of suggested proposals for reopening schools for in-classroom learning in the fall, a majority of the parents surveyed appeared hesitant to return their children to school before a vaccine had been found. A total of 59% of parents surveyed who had at least one child in a K-12 grade said they would “likely” pursue at-home education options such as homeschooling or remote learning instead of sending their children back into the classroom. Another 30% said they were “very likely” to continue to pursue at-home learning.
Continue reading… “Many parents will likely continue at-home learning in the fall, poll finds”
The CEO of Skylum notes that we will now understand how things can work when people are purely focused on productivity and communication, and that is going to change everything.
To say the coronavirus has had an impact on the way the world “works” would be an understatement.
In a matter of weeks, we’ve gone from a society that sees remote work as a luxury, or even a “freelancer lifestyle,” to realizing the vast majority of jobs today can be done from home. Companies that hadn’t moved the majority of their assets to the cloud are now doing so at a rapid rate. Video calls have gone from being a suboptimal alternative to a core function of the way we communicate. The list goes on and on—and the impact is here to stay.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve noticed several shifts in our company, Skylum, as more than 100 of us around the world have adjusted to the new rules of society.
Many have never worked from home before, which comes with a unique learning curve. Many have never had the opportunity to connect and collaborate with other employees who work out of offices on different continents—which is now easier since everyone is “remote.” Many have also never viewed their job descriptions through the lens of being quarantined, where tasks left unfinished become more obvious to the rest of the group (in an office setting it’s easier to appear “busy”).
Continue reading… “4 ways work will change after the COVID-19 pandemic”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say that over a third of Americans who took its survey reportedly misused household cleaners by using them on their fruits and vegetables in the attempt to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Calls to poison control centers regarding disinfectants and household cleaners reportedly went up since the beginning of the pandemic.
“Thirty-nine percent of respondents reported engaging in non-recommended high-risk practices with the intent of preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, such as washing food products with bleach, applying household cleaning or disinfectant products to bare skin, and intentionally inhaling or ingesting these products,” the CDC report read.
Working from the office could become a relic of the past in the post-COVID-19 world.
Millions of people around the world have been working remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic and now experts are asking whether this “business as unusual” could be the future of work, at least for those people whose job doesn’t require them to be tied to a particular location.
UN News spoke to Susan Hayter, a Senior Technical Adviser on the Future of Work at the Geneva-based International Labour Organization, about how COVID-19 could change our working lives.
A few large companies have said employees need not commute to work again Susan Hayter, Senior Technical Adviser on the Future of Work, ILO
What are the longer-term effects of the pandemic on the workplace in developed countries, once the immediate crisis is over?
Continue reading… “‘Business as unusual’: How COVID-19 could change the future of work”
The coronavirus outbreak has taken the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans. Yet since the start of the outbreak, the death toll has been concentrated in a just a few places – mostly large metropolitan areas, especially the New York City area.
The places hit hardest by the coronavirus outbreak – which have relatively large shares of ethnic and racial minorities and residents living in densely populated urban and suburban areas – are almost all represented by congressional Democrats.
A new Pew Research Center analysis of data on official reports of COVID-19 deaths, collected by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, finds that, as of last week, nearly a quarter of all the deaths in the United States attributed to the coronavirus have been in just 12 congressional districts – all located in New York City and represented by Democrats in Congress. Of the more than 92,000 Americans who had died of COVID-19 as of May 20 (the date that the data in this analysis was collected), nearly 75,000 were in Democratic congressional districts.
In a time of COVID-19 disruption, futurists can accelerate organizational recovery and capacity. When partnered with purpose-built AI, augmented intelligence can also spur radical innovation.
Machine learning, task automation and robotics are already widely used in business. These and other AI technologies are about to multiply, and we look at how organizations can best take advantage of them.
COVID-19 disruption has left enterprises with no choice but to reassess digital transformation investments and roadmaps. While less important projects are delayed, transformation projects involving AI and automation are receiving a lot of attention right now. In just the last 60 days, the adoption of varying levels of AI technologies across the enterprise surged with an incredible sense of urgency.
One area where AI can make a tremendous impact — yet one we’re not really talking about it — is modeling future scenarios based on myriads of new data stemming from pandemic disruption. Beyond automation, adding an AI Futurist as a virtual strategic advisor to the C-Suite can help executives navigate this Novel Economy as it takes shape over the next 36 months. In a time when no playbook, expertise, or best practices exist, perhaps this is AI’s moment to shine.
Arrested during the crisis, Roslyn Crouch feared she wouldn’t leave jail alive.
Community groups have pointed out the social costs of the prison system for decades. Now the pandemic has exposed its public-health risks.
On March 14th, Roslyn Crouch, a mother of twelve, left her house in New Orleans to stock up on toilet paper and canned goods, and didn’t return. Crouch, who is forty-two, with slender braids down to her knees, had been feeling anxious about the spread of the coronavirus. At home, she cared for her elderly mother, and for a half-dozen children, including a son with sickle-cell anemia, a blood disorder. She herself had chronic bronchitis, and worried that it put her at risk. Many people in her neighborhood lacked access to high-quality medical care. (Black residents of Louisiana have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic; they make up about thirty per cent of the state’s population, but account for almost sixty per cent of documented deaths from the virus.) She thought, This is some serious stuff. After scrolling through a few too many coronavirus stories on her phone that Saturday morning, she got dressed, spritzed herself with her favorite perfume, A Thousand Wishes, and drove to a dollar store with her two-year-old son, Kyi, to buy shelter-in-place supplies.
On the way, Crouch failed to stop at a stop sign in Jefferson Parish and was pulled over by the police. She was then arrested for a string of petty crimes, including driving without proper registration and with a stolen license plate that police valued at twenty-five dollars. The most serious charge resulted from a nine-year-old warrant for possession of marijuana. As Crouch was put in the back of a police car, with Kyi, she pleaded with the arresting officers to call her daughter Tae, who worked as a security guard. Tae sped across the Mississippi River, arriving just in time to pry her sobbing little brother from the police car and prevent him from being turned over to child-protective services. “I call him Hip Baby, because he’s attached to my mom’s hip,” Tae told me. She took Kyi home, but it was “hell on earth trying to tame him without her.” The cops drove Crouch to the Jefferson Parish jail.
Continue reading… “Will the Coronavirus make us rethink mass incarceration?”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
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