In Dubai, Makani numbers help taxi drivers reach customers

Source: RTA. Cabs in Dubai are now linked to Dubai city via Makani.

The Dubai RTA’s Public Transport Agency has completed linking 4,500 taxis from franchise companies operating under the RTA with the Dubai Municipality's Makani System. The system uses unique coordinates, or Makani numbers, to locate buildings.

Adel Shakri, Director of Transportation Systems, RTA’s Public Transport Agency, said: “Thanks to the sharp accuracy and the easy use of the Makani System as well as its 100% coverage of (the) Dubai Emirate, the system has played a vital role in executing booking and despatch orders by cab drivers. It has made it easy for clients to reach to their intended destinations in Dubai, thanks to its highly accurate positioning feature using interactive e-maps."

Benefits of the new arrangement include being able to make a taxi booking with a Makani number through a call to the Booking & Dispatch Center. The Booking & Dispatch Center can now communicate between the customer and the taxi, receiving booking requests and forwarding them to taxi drivers.

“This initiative brings back multiple benefits to RTA’s Booking & Dispatch System. It facilitates the dispatch of taxicabs to clients using Makani number, and eases the booking process for customers by just citing Makani number. It also reduces the number of complaints related to taxis and cab drivers such as the late arrival, and the poor knowledge of Dubai geographical zones on the part of drivers,” Shakri noted.

“The coverage of (the) Makani System of Dubai Municipality spans the entire Emirate of Dubai. About 137,000 addresses have been registered in the Booking & Dispatch System of taxis and 4,500 taxi cabs have been linked to the system.”

TalentBin by Monster trawls social networks to locate talent for recruitment

Source: Monster website.

Monster has launched TalentBin by Monster regionwide to aid companies to find, attract, and access professionals with the right skills. The software acts as a 'talent search engine' to provide recruiters with access to previously 'invisible' candidate profiles through harnessing the professionally relevant information people share across social platforms.

TalentBin by Monster not only automates and streamlines the talent discovery process via site monitoring, interpretation and matching, but also simplifies the hiring process to allow recruiters do more in less time. “Skilled technology talent is hard to find and we have found that many potential candidates are not active job seekers and are less likely to have, and regularly update, a resume or a professional online profile. However, the talent recruiters are trying to find are online in many ways, leaving bits of information demonstrating the professional skills that make them desirable candidates,” explained Sanjay Modi, Managing Director, Monster (India, Middle East, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong). 

“TalentBin by Monster is a solution to the evolution of online and social recruitment. It has an intuitive and specialised communication template that can assemble candidate profiles from publicly available sources, limited to professionally relevant information. This will ensure the ‘unfindable’ can be found." 

TalentBin by Monster is now available in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Philippines and the Gulf region. 

Accor hotels to deliver newspapers and magazines digitally in 2015

Accor, in partnership with PressReader is making a new free-of-charge information delivery service available in all Group hotels by the first quarter of 2015. This commitment is part of Accor’s Leading Digital Hospitality plan, which aims at integrating and redesigning digital at every step of the customer journey.


With Accor Press by PressReader, customers of the group’s hotels can read more than 3,000 international and local newspapers and magazines on their smartphone, laptop or tablet, in every digital environment (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows).

Accor Press by PressReader is accessible via hotel’s Wi-Fi for guests to download articles, newspapers and magazines, and then read them whenever and wherever they wish. This digital platform is intuitive, customisable and offers various features such as content sharing on social media, online commenting, content translation into 17 languages, and more.

Accor offers 470,000 rooms in 3,600 hotels across 14 trusted brands in 92 countries. The Accor brands include Sofitel, Pullman, MGallery, Grand Mercure, and The Sebel in the luxury-upscale segment; midscale names such as Novotel, Suite Novotel, Mercure and Adagio, and in the economy segment, ibis, ibis Styles, ibis budget, adagio access and hotelF1. 

Book promises to rescue presentations from missing the point completely

With presentations commonly used today to convey important information, manage projects, and for planning, it is not surprising that a significant proportion of the work week is spent on presentations. Yet presentations often end up being a total waste of time and resources for all concerned. 

Belgian communications expert Ed Gruwez, CEO of Ogilvy Internal Communications and Founder of presentation design company To The Point at Work, says most presentations are “simply appalling: unclear, bloated and boring exercises that completely miss their objectives and lead nowhere despite the long hours of preparation.” 

Gruwez said: “It's hard to imagine our daily, professional lives without presentations. Yet money and many hours of useless work are lost in presentations that lead nowhere. There has been far too little research in this field but the little that is available indicates that presentations are not only often a waste of time but they also impact the quality of corporate decisions, and even the general employee job satisfaction. 

“Managers and organisations would therefore be well inspired to stop and think about the quality of their presentations and how to handle them better.” 

Gruwez has created a simple, effective method to get the message across. Concerned that organisations are losing “handfuls of cash and man-hours” through bad presentations, at a time when reducing expenditures has never been more important, he has penned the first step-by-step guide of its kind to getting presentations right. 

Presentation, Thinking & Design: Create better presentations, quicker – newly released by Pearson, a major education publisher, through their FT Publishing International imprint – is an easy-to-follow, pinpointed manual to mastering the content, structure and logic behind the presentation, and sharing a message with impact. It also covers the theory underpinning good practice, explaining how the human mind works in terms of receiving, processing and storing information, and how to harness it. 

Across 240 pages, this highly-visual, full-colour book reveals how to: 

• Prepare an excellent presentation in limited time 
• Structure ideas to make them clear for those less familiar with the subject 
• Make a presentation as short as possible, yet still complete 
• Make ideas attractive to an audience  
• Get the audience to remember the key points 

Although aimed primarily at those who typically do a lot of presentations, the book is relevant to anyone interested in improving their communication skills and will help sharpen up reports, important emails and keynote speeches. 

The book costs S$45.95 inclusive of GST in Singapore, and can be purchased at major retail outlets such as MPH, Times and Times Newslink. It is also available online here.

*Image from Pearson.

Kodak Alaris launches KODAK CapturePro Software v5.0

Mid-to-large sized enterprises are always searching for ways to boost efficiency and productivity in information management. Scanning and extracting data for use in business processes and exporting information into repositories can be a productivity bottleneck, with serious implications on the cost of back-office operations and customer satisfaction. 

Source: Kodak Alaris.

"As organisations become increasingly dependent on e-business platforms to drive profitability, it’s clear that the remaining paper-based information must be managed more effectively,” said Harvey Spencer, President of Harvey Spencer Associates, a leading analyst firm in the capture software market. “The best way to do this is to convert paper to usable electronic information as fast as possible."

To address the increasing demand for fast, efficient capture solutions, Kodak Alaris has introduced KODAK CapturePro Software v5.0, software that enables businesses to enjoy greater accuracy, efficiency and cost effectiveness within their document scanning processes. Capture Pro Software v5.0 enables users to simplify scanning, automate indexing and enable users to streamline the process of transforming paper into information. Its advanced indexing capabilities automate data extraction and deliver critical information to enterprise content management (ECM) systems and Microsoft SharePoint, as well as business applications.

“With Capture Pro Software v5.0, Kodak Alaris continues to make it quick and easy for end users to scan documents and index information, helping businesses save costs and improve productivity,” said Spencer.

Capture Pro Software has proven impact in many business applications. Examples include:

· A government department that digitises client records in different locations. Case workers can now access records faster, provide better customer service and reduce the risk of fraud.

· A healthcare provider eliminated manual indexing and improved accuracy in the management of patient records. Pertinent data including patient name, ID, time, and reason for visit are now auto-filed in forms. The result is lower costs and error rates, smarter resource allocation and improved patient care.

· A service bureau uses drag-and-drop optical character recognition (OCR) on specific client data to check the database and reduce data entry time by 50%. Capture Pro Software is enhancing the accuracy of data entry by eliminating the need to manually key in data twice.

“Our customers can be found in literally any vertical and horizontal paper-based business application. They use Capture Pro Software to turn documents into shareable, searchable data across their organisation,” said Susheel John, Managing Director, Document Imaging, Kodak Alaris Asia Pacific. 

“With each version, we have enhanced the functionality to address the changing demands of information capture. Based on valuable feedback from our Voice of the Customer programme, we have made a number of improvements in Capture Pro v5.0, including a simpler user interface and several productivity enhancements.”

Key new features in Capture Pro v5.0 include:

· A quick start user interface that allow users to initiate a scan job with a single click. The GUI is more intuitive and eliminates the learning curve for knowledge workers who only occasionally use a scanner.

· Support for Windows 8.1 

· Expanded support of new scanners from Kodak Alaris, as well as additional third-party scanners.

Capture Pro Software earned a 2014 Summer Pick Award from Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI), the world's leading independent evaluator of document imaging hardware and software, in the document imaging solutions category. BLI cited Capture Pro’s breadth of functionality and ease as key selling points, plus the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) feature, which accurately indexed checkboxes on every test document that BLI evaluated.

For a free trial of KODAK Capture Pro Software v5.0, please visit kodakalaris.com/go/capturepronews.

Real-time collaboration tips for communications nirvana

Source: Tata Communications. Bartolo.

Today’s employee is expected to leverage on information to be more productive and make better decisions, but the sheer volume of information available and the lack of tools which can easily locate and make use of that information are twin challenges that need to be addressed, says Anthony Bartolo, Senior Vice President, Unified Communications & Collaboration, Tata Communications.

“While enterprises don’t lack tools for communication, very often, the problem is fragmentation at the level of the individual desktop. No single application or platform encompasses all needs: search, knowledge management, workflow and collaboration. In addition, where collaboration tools do exist, they frequently stand alone or are proprietary tools,” he explained.

Unstructured data remains locked up in documents like emails and images that cannot easily be located or used, Bartolo added. “Whether it involves locating a document or an excerpt, searching for information is often a deeply frustrating process,” he said.

There is a lot of potential for solutions that help workers become more productive with access to the right information, in the right context and at the right time, Bartolo observed. “The potential for ubiquitous real-time collaboration inside enterprises as well as with customers and partners, using voice, video calling, instant messaging and data, remains vast,” he said, listing several examples:

i) Global collaboration: collaboration platforms allow enterprises to bring together internal teams and to work together more effectively with their partners and customers, regardless of location constraints

ii) Bounded co-creation: companies can solve more challenges and do so rapidly, by integrating trusted partners, customers, collaborators, contractors and freelance workers into tightly-knit, ad hoc teams

iii) Workflow collaboration: giving employees the ability to discover internal experts and partners who can improve their performance by sharing knowledge on the go

iv) Sharing tacit strategic knowledge: by allowing access to recordings of past meetings and presentations, companies can make life easier for team-mates, new employees and newly promoted employees alike

v) Sharing tactical knowledge: for example, by popularising wikis containing employee-generated guidelines, workarounds, what-if scenarios, hints and tips

vi) Recognition: widely-used collaboration platforms can be used to recognise and thank colleagues and partners for their work

vii) Recruitment: social media is a great external recruitment tool. Social collaboration platforms inside the enterprise can help managers and HR executives to identify candidates for staff projects or promotion

viii) E-learning: in the academic world, universities are starting to capitalise on the potential of massively open online courses (MOOCs), to extend teaching activities far beyond campus-based lecture halls. Enterprises can do the same, developing their own collaborative learning courses, free from the constraints of time zone and location
“All these elements together create my kind of communications nirvana,” said Bartolo. "While we do not have the tools to achieve all this today, it truly is within reach now."

Find out more about turning communications nirvana into reality here.