WHY 58×38 & now Why 37×24

The French fashion house Hermes has joined the Italian yacht builder Wally to create a new class of innovative and luxury yacht, the WHY 58×38.

This revolutionary yacht with enormous proportions, 58m long (190 ft) & 38m (125 ft) wide, an area of 3400 m2 with seating for 12 passengers and 20 crew members, represents the concept of a “floating island” ( a moving Villa on a piece of land”) and is developped with the latest and the most advanced sustainable technologies :
- a revolutionary photovoltaic roof panels of 900m2 (9687 sqft) producing a daily output of 500 kW,
- a thermal energy recycling system allowing to save 20 to 30% in fuel and 40 to 50% in electricity consumption on board
- as well as an organic/inorganic waste recycling system.

The main equipments proposed by the WHY are:
- 3 decks connected by stairs but there is also an elevator,
- a 25 meter pool,
- a spa helicopterpad a 100m2 with hammam, sauna, gym and massage room,
- a promenade of 130 meter,
- a music room, a dining room, a cinema, sun decks, suites, terraces, a lounge, a bibi.

The suite of the owner is an area of 200m2 and completely covers the third deck with a great sea view on a private terrace of 25 meter long.

The WHY 58×38 was unveiled on september 2009 at the Ancona site of the Italian manufacturer and presented in October 2009 at the Monaco Yacht Show. A full sized model of the WHY was displayed, at the 2010 Abu Dhabi Yacht Show.

The WHY 58×38 is expected to have a price tag of $160 million.

Few weeks ago, following its success, the brand WHY, Wally Hermès Yatchs, has just officially launched his little brother, WHY 37 × 24, smaller and lighter but just as comfortable and impressive.

Have a look on the photos gallery and the video.

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Aerobatic Cri-Cri

During the Green Aviation Show (June 18-22 2010 in Le Bourget), EADS Innovation Works, partnered by Aero Composites Saintonge and the Green Cri-Cri Association, will present Cri-Cri, the first-ever four-engined all-electric aerobatic plane.

The aerobatic aircraft includes several innovative technologies such as:

• Lightweight composite structures, that lighten the structure and compensate for the overweight batteries,
• Four brushless electric motors with counter-rotating propellers providing propulsion without CO2 emissions and a significant noise reduction compared with the thermal propulsion,
• High energy-density Lithium battery.

The cumulative use of these technological innovations that respect the environment also provides Cri-Cri with new performances:

• 30 minutes of autonomy at 110km/h in cruise flight,
• 15 minutes remaining in aerobatics, with peaks of speed at 250km / h,
• A climb rate of about 5.3 m/sec.

Set to undergo its first flight tests in the next few days, this four-engine electric plane paves the way for a new generation of environment-friendly high-performance aircraft.

Ekranoplane vs Eyjafjöll

Few days ago the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud completely paralyzed the European airlines companies for several days,  grounding mainly all the aircrafts in Western Europe, blocking all around the world people who wanted to get back home or traveled over Europe for winning business opportunity in the rest of the World. It will maybe happen again as we never know with volcano behavior, maybe not this volcano but its neighbor.

With this big mess in the skies created by one Iceland volcan ashes cloud, it is maybe time for engineers to:

• either rethink the design of aircraft engines for being less sensitive to any ash/cloud and being greener by mitigate their own pollution/carbon footprint at the same time,

• or think to increase the fundings for designing and developing new type of aircraft propulsion systems using different concept such as the MHD-gas (MagnetoHydroDynamic in ionized gas) and the Coandã effect or the WIG (Wing In Ground) concept or both.

Soviet Union/Russia  during the Cold War (and maybe recently China in Qingdao naval base) has developped and built  some weird birds, huge birds using the WIG concepts named Ekranoplanes. One of them was famous and was called the Monster of the Caspian Sea.

In the Tom Clancy’s novel and also the movie “The Hunt for Red October”, the most advanced Russian nuclear submarine is using MHD concept as Stealth propulsion technologies.

Design and manufacture a new sustainable Ekranoplane or Avrocar is one of the solution against Eyjafjallajökull and others or really invest in a technology such as the MHD and Coandã effect (as the French physician Jean-Pierre Petit did with his MHD Aerodynes).

more ekranoplane pictures here and there

High-Tech on Board

A superb 15.3m long yatch with all the latest high-tech equipment will release in 2010 by  the Austrian Design Studio focused on naval construction and industrial design, Motion Code: Blue.

source:  Yanko Design

Augmented Advert

A couple days ago, Brightkite has launched what it calls the first augmented reality advertising solution (only in the U.S. for now). Brightkite has partnered with Best Buy to run augmented reality advertisements within the Brightkite app for Android and the iPhone through the end of December.
Augmented reality and geo-location are really starting to gain steam this year, I believe we will see even more developments in 2010.

Mobile tweeted Augmented Reality

Check this out! Another application of augmented reality.

Tweet in Augmented Reality, being Geo-tagged on your iPhone 3GS: Twitter 360

source: Raym

The New Eco-Friendly Black Pearl of the seas

I was watching this summer Whale Wars, a one-hour weekly American documentary-style reality television series on the Animal Planet cable channel. This TV program follows Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, as he and his crew aboard the MV Steve Irwin attempt to deter Japanese ships that hunt minke and fin whales off the coast of Antarctica.
I was amazed by this group that stands between a 750-ton whale-killing machine and its prey even going to crash their ship to the japanese whaler.

With the arrival of the austral spring, the Japanese whaling fleet prepares to sail again in a few days to begin a new season of hunting in Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary waters. So the association unveiled few weeks ago in L.A. its new ocean defense vessel for supporting Steve Irwin to interpose between Whales and whalers, the Ady Gil.

The vessel, previously known as the Earthrace, is a fast, futuristic looking trimaran that set the world record for global circumnavigation in June 2008, crossing the globe in less than 61 days. The vessel renaming reflects the ship’s benefactor, Ady Gil, who helped acquire the vessel.

This is an amazing powered trimaran capable of moving at 45 knots (53 mph, 83 km/h), if necessary to navigate a few meters under water to avoid waves.
It was made resistant to ice of Antarctica through shell-covered Kevlar.
With biofuel, the trimaran is also announced as one of the most environmentally friendly ships in the world.

source: Raym

Mattel, 3D & Avatar

Mattel, the famous toys & games company, will merchandize in parallele of the launch of AVATAR, the new James Cameron’s movie (using massively new 3D technologies designed by James Cameron himself),  a new game/toy based on Augmented Reality.

Mattel has developped a new toy based on a card with an i-Tag and a webcam that generates a 3D session for playing with an army pod from the movie using Total Immersion technologies (a French company).

It looks as promising as the AVATAR movie….

source: a Skype call with my friend Gérald, CEO of 3D California

New kinds of Wave-let

Since its announcement early this year, Google Wave generates a lot of interest and even more since September 30th as Google opens the “public” beta testing phase for a 100,000 “lucky dudes”.

I think Google Wave is a very interesting, ambitious and promising project which wants to create an online collaborative platform by mixing, and aggregating various services such as emails, instant messaging, documents sharing, photos sharing and some others…

Some of our competitors such as SAP and SalesForce.com seem to take this wave and want to surf over. Both of them have presented today their prototypes of new applications based on the Google collaboration platform.

The SAP NetWeaver development team has implemented “Gravity” that allows to develop Processes Modeling of a two company merge (for instance, an insurance company and a bank). The models are then exported to the SAP BPM solution to be refined. More details on the SAP Network Blog…

Salesforce.com has developed a kind of Wave add-on for the Customer Service on top of its CRM SaaS offering. The use case in the demo is representing a customer who contacts a support service using Wave to initiate a “chat” with a net agent. In the same time, the Wave application opens an incident report in Salesforce.com platform. If the “robot” can’t answer the question, the client has the opportunity to get in contact with a Customer Support Representative who will join the “discussion”. More details and video on the SalesForce.com Blog…

More info also on these two concepts on the Google Wave Developer Blog.

3 more use cases in different segments are also presented here

It seems Wave can address any type of industry or service…

source: Raym

Design Discussions in 3D

Check this out, a online collaborative discussion platform integrated into a CAD software, in SolidWorks 2009 for instance. A kind of Social Innovation solution…
And it’s already available. Also integrated with Pro/E, Excel & wordPress now….

Vuuch for SolidWorks

Here is also an interview of the CEO that some of us knows pretty well: Chris Williams

source: Raym