Athletes: Bluetooth Wireless LED panel provides a customizable display while on the move

As reported by Engadget: Light-up clothing is all the rage, and a company called Erogear is upping the ante with Fos, a Bluetooth-enabled solution for style-conscious athletes.

The brainchild of engineer Anders Nelson, Fos is a lightweight, Velcro-lined fabric strip of lights with a customizable display. 

What sets it apart from Erogear's other wearable options is the fact that it's controlled by your mobile phone. The LED grid can be programmed to double as your very own turn signal (useful for nocturnal bike-riding), advertise sponsors or even brag about how many calories you've burned while running. 

Coming it at around 32 grams (roughly the weight of a golf ball), this illuminated patch packs an LED matrix driver, 32-bit microprocessor, flash memory and a power supply in its 2mm profile. 

The Kickstarter campaign is offering a choice of three designs to backers: an 11 x 3 inch strip, an 11 x 5 inch version and a black leather belt for those times you feel like literally shining at the club. 

Though the demo package is currently Android-only, iOS and desktop versions are potentially on the horizon. 

A pledge of $125 will net you your very own Fos kit, and units are scheduled to start shipping in February of 2014, provided the campaign hits its $200,000 goal. 

What Insurers Must Do To Sell 'Pay How You Drive' Telematics

As reported by Insurance & Technology: Lexis-Nexis, which offers a telematics analytics platform for insurance companies, commissioned research to find out how consumers view usage-based insurance (also known as Pay How You Drive [PHYD]) and what would spur them to adopt it. Here are some key findings, which were reported and contrasted with a 2010 survey that asked similar questions.

Awareness of usage-based insurance (UBI) has tripled since 2010. A third of consumers are now aware of the concept, mostly Progressive's Snapshot program (78% of awareness, compares to 8% for Allstate, the next highest).

Most UBI telematics uses a device that
attaches to the vehicles OBD-II port.  These
devices provide information about location
using integrated GPS, as well as speed, braking
and acceleration.

1. Consumers are more uncomfortable with social networks (63%) than the UBI concept (48%). While more than half reported discomfort with online banking and search engines, only a third were uncomfortable with a "program sharing information leading up to an accident to determine fault." Though there was a 7% drop in the amount of respondents who said UBI "gives too much information," consumers were more uncomfortable with information sharing overall compared to three years ago.
2. Consumers value perceived control over rates highly when weighing the pros of a UBI program. They also are keen to receive discounts: 72% said they'd try it out for an automatic 10% off their premium, and 62% said they'd sign up for the potential for a 15% discount. A further 36% said they would change carriers to sign up for a UBI program with a 10% discount.
3. Consumers sign up looking for discounts, they want to be able to opt-out without penalty. That was the highest factor that would increase UBI interest, even beating out the discount itself. Consumers also reported high interest in choosing the information that they provide, and also largely want assurances that their information is only stored for a short time (70%).
4. Two-thirds of respondents with drivers age 16-25 in the household said they would sign up for UBI to get information on their younger drivers. Self-evaluation was less warmly received overall, though: while 69% indicated interest in a driving score, tips to improve that score were only valued by 56% of respondents.
5. Consumers want to use their smartphones, not black boxes: 73% said it would be easier to adopt a UBI program if it used a smartphone app.

Following the research, Lexis-Nexis says that insurers who want to get into UBI should:

• Offer discounts
• Provide control over policyholder information
• Target consumers under 35
• Offer trial period with automatic discounts for trials

The value of the data to the insurance industry is that it allows them to better calculate the accident risk of specific drivers based on their patterns of behavior and time spent on the road.

Fuel Fraud Costing More Than $4 Billion in Lost Taxes

As reported by Bloomberg: The watchman at Germany’s largest oil refinery, the MiRO plant in Karlsruhe, would wait until a fellow security guard was out of sight before sending a text message that it was safe to drive a 10,000-liter tanker of stolen diesel out the gates.

His tip-offs earned him bribes of 300 euros ($400) for each of the 87 truckloads that were stolen over a period of more than a year starting in early 2011. The scam went undetected until one of the three tank-cleaning company employees involved was fired and informed police. Combined with evidence from a toll-booth camera, the revelation landed all four in jail in June.

The heist underscored growing fuel theft, smuggling and fraud in Europe, where governments from Poland to the U.K. are losing between 100 million euros and 1.3 billion euros in tax revenue a year. The crime is spreading in the region in part because retail prices for diesel have jumped 52 percent since 2009. Executives at eight of 10 refiners surveyed by Bloomberg say their profits are suffering too.

“This criminal activity is undermining the fabric of the legitimate petroleum industry and the state, at a time when economic challenges have never been so great,” said Tom Noonan, chairman of the Irish Petroleum Industry Association and chief executive officer of Maxol Group, a Dublin-based oil retailer. “Illegal activity has been allowed to grow to such a large scale unimpeded.”

Fraudulent Share

While the European Commission, Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement agency, and Europia, the Brussels-based refiners’ trade association, don’t provide region-wide statistics on fuel fraud, data from individual governments show the extent of the crime.

Tax fraud in Poland jumped by 47 percent from 2010 to 2012, according to an audit of more than 1,000 fuel traders and retailers, Wieslawa Drozdz, a spokeswoman at the Finance Ministry in Warsaw, said by e-mail on July 24. Poland lost 3 billion zloty ($943 million) last year, according to the Polish Organization of Oil Industry and Trade.

The U.K. forfeited more than 1.1 billion pounds ($1.7 billion) to fuel fraud in the 2008-2009 tax year, according to a parliamentary committee report last year.

In Greece, the illegal fuel market has ballooned to 600 million euros a year, the nation’s Finance Ministry said, without providing figures for previous years.

Compounds Shutdowns

Europe’s black market is adding to hard times for refiners as the lowest demand in two decades saps returns, according to the International Energy Agency. An average 11.6 million barrels a day of crude was processed from January through May in the region’s richest economies, the lowest level for any corresponding period since 1989, the Paris-based IEA said in a report on July 11.

Refinery margins, the profit from turning crude into fuels such as diesel and gasoline, were about $4 a barrel in Northwest Europe last week, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That compares with $8 a year ago and a peak $20 a barrel in September 2008, the data show.

Margins will probably stay below 2012 levels for the rest of this year, OMV AG (OMV), the Vienna-based oil company that runs refineries in Austria, Germany and Romania, said in an earnings statement Aug. 13.

Fuel fraud in countries such as Austria and Germany is dwarfed by scams taking place in Eastern Europe, according to PKN Orlen SA, Poland’s largest refiner. Untaxed supplies account for more than 13 percent of Poland’s diesel market, according to industry estimates. As much as 20 percent of fuel consumed in the Czech Republic is illegal, according to government data.

Border Traffic

Smuggling is most prevalent in border areas where price gaps are the widest. Diesel, Europe’s most-used motor fuel, averaged 31.27 rubles (71 euro-cents) per liter last week in Russia, compared with 1.30 euros in Poland and 1.34 euros in Lithuania, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

In Lithuania, where one in every four consumers admits to having bought on the black market, fraudsters purchase lower-priced fuel from drivers of cars and trucks coming from Russia and Belarus and then sell it below local rates at a profit, according to the Vilnius-based Lithuanian Free Market Institute. The fuel is usually sold in parking lots, the institute said in a report.

“Tax evasion in the fuel market has taken the form of organized crime,” Marek Switajewski, the CEO at Unipetrol AS, the largest Czech refiner, said in a June interview in Prague. Fuel fraud costs the company more than 19 million euros a year, he said.

Mobile Pump

Fraud is also infecting western European markets. Police in Northern Ireland stopped a van on Aug. 13 that was equipped with a pump, storage tanks and hoses, according to HMRC, Britain’s tax agency.

As part of the investigation, a makeshift plant capable of producing about 1,000 liters (264 gallons) of fuel a week was found in a shed. Three men were arrested after 2,000 liters of illegal fuel were discovered.

Mobile pumps “are very cheap to establish; we dismantle them, they pop up again,” John Whiting, assistant director for criminal investigation at HMRC, told the parliamentary committee in London last year. “We are aware that there are queues of cars trying to get into these places.”

Fraudsters in Northern Ireland can sell illegal diesel for as much as 40 pence (62 U.S. cents) per liter less than legitimate fuel and still make a profit, according to the committee’s report. Last week, diesel was selling in the U.K. for about 1.42 pounds a liter, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Luxembourg Lowest

Differences in national tax systems are stoking the fraud. The share of tax in the pump price for diesel is 41 percent in Luxembourg, the lowest in the region, data compiled by Bloomberg show. In the U.K., tax accounts for as much as 58 percent of the price.

“There are price incentives to move fuel from one part of Europe to another,” Alan Gelder, head of the downstream oils-research service at Wood Mackenzie Ltd., a consultant to international and national oil companies, said in a phone interview from London. People from neighbouring countries often go to Luxembourg to fill their tanks, as it has the lowest fuel tax in that area, said Gelder.

Freezing weather often reveals the extent of Europe’s black market. Plunging temperatures render lower-quality fuel illegally imported from countries such as Belarus and Russia all but unusable, forcing motorists to turn to legitimate sources, according to Beata Karpinska, a spokeswoman for PKN Orlen in Plock, Poland.

Sales of diesel and gasoline at Lithuanian pumps jumped about 20 percent one week in February 2012, when temperatures dropped to an average of minus 17.8 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit), according to the Lithuanian Free Market Institute.

Government Response

European governments are trying to respond. Czech President Milos Zeman signed a law July 18 changing the country’s tax code for fuel trade. Poland’s lower house of parliament adopted similar measures on July 26. Ireland introduced an electronic system this year to monitor fuel movements, said Noonan of the Irish oil association.

“We want to start being competitive with refineries in the region,” said Switajewski at Unipetrol, which expects the illegal trade to drop 50 percent by 2017 as a result of the new laws.

Motorists can take legal advantage of cheaper fuel in neighboring countries by crossing national borders to fill up. About 3,500 Poles drive more than 10 times each month into Kaliningrad, a Russian territory wedged between Lithuania and Poland, to buy at lower costs.

Tightened Security

At the Mineraloelraffinerie Oberrhein GmbH, or MiRO, refinery in Karlsruhe, officials are tightening security after the 2011 heist, the company said in an Aug. 1 statement on its website.

The three tank cleaners began stealing diesel using 4,000-liter trucks, according to details of the case confirmed to Bloomberg by Jochen Herkle, a spokesman for the local district court. After recruiting the security guard, the thieves upgraded to 10,000-liter tankers, Herkle said. All four men confessed when caught, and the one who tipped off police received a shorter prison term than his associates, according to Herkle.

The company lost 912,000 liters of diesel and heating fuel in the theft between early 2011 and June 2012, Herkle said. That amount would now have a retail value of as much as 1.3 million euros in Germany.

Without measures to contain fuel fraud, there may be “a snowball effect, which will take years to be stopped,” the Polish Organization of Oil Industry and Trade said in an April report.

Finance Directors Eye Fleet Telematics for Fuel Cost Savings

As reported by Financial Director:  When capital expenditure demands increased productivity from corporations by implementing new technology or processes such as improving existing machinery or updating back office functionality; investing in a vehicle tracking system probably doesn't sit at the top of most finance directors’ lists of priorities.

But telematics systems have evolved into much more than simple vehicle recovery tools – it is now a service that provides detailed information on fuel consumption, driver performance, travel times and routes, all delivered in real time.

With fuel prices continuing to dominate the news – fuel has risen by, on average, more than 50% over the past five years – helping drivers to reduce fuel consumption should be at the top of the fleet agenda of any business. Indeed, a survey of about 1,000 business drivers across the UK by ALD Automotive found that 70% of fleet drivers believed they could cut their fuel consumption if they were financially incentivised to do so.

Based on a typical fleet of 50 vehicles averaging 25,000 miles a year on average fuel consumption of 40mpg, the survey suggests cost savings of £10,000 ($15.5K USD) could easily be achieved by incentivising drivers to reduce their fuel spending by 5%.

“By using data collected from systems, businesses can set up monthly performance tables for their drivers, promoting more efficient driving and making it easier to implement any fuel saving incentive schemes,” says Mel Dawson, managing director at ALD.

It is eye-opening to see how detailed this information can be. According to Steve Evans, chief executive at In-Car Cleverness, part of the Accident Exchange Group, telematics systems now use algorithms that can tell you what makes a driver good or bad.

“You can see their speed relative to time of day, relative to location,” Evans says. Not only does this allow the business to pinpoint inefficient drivers that need training, it also provides data on the performance of the car versus the routes it has taken, stopping unnecessary journeys.

“You might find the car is wholly inappropriate for the type of journey the driver is choosing,” Evans adds.

Cut fuel costs
For instance, one security company using a remote management telematics system was able to cut its fuel spending by 37% by being able to monitor vehicle movement, identify unnecessary journeys and erratic driving behavior, and incentivise drivers with monthly and annual awards.

Morelli Group, the largest automotive refinish distributor in the UK, uses the same system across all of its commercial vehicles. “The system has helped us to reduce fuel consumption and, with fuel prices still high, any measure we can introduce to drive more economically is good for our business,” says Rob Cohen, finance director at Morelli.

In addition, telematics can help highlight to drivers the need to monitor their driving style, resulting in better driver safety and consequently having a positive impact on their accident levels.

Company vehicle incidents take a lot of shine off the bottom line. Average bodywork repair bills, according to benchmark data from the body shop industry, are now nearly £1,300 ($2,000 USD) per car.

Writing for Financial Director last year, Albert Vissers, chief financial officer of fleet management and funding company Alphabet, said hidden incident costs typically come in at twice the cost of physical repairs.

“They include disruption to business and potential lost sales while vehicles are off the road. Then there are uninsured losses such as drivers’ out-of-pocket expenses, vehicle hire and insurance excesses,” he wrote.

According to Evans at In-Car Cleverness, this can help reduce insurance premiums by “demonstrating you have a measurable strategy to reduce claims”.

Though the key interest for finance directors is cost reduction, telematics can actually improve customer service levels. “If a driver is on route, we can input the customer's address and give the customer an estimated time of arrival,” says Evans.

The experience at Morelli has been the same, with Cohen claiming the business has been able to reassure its customers that their needs were being met in the fastest and most efficient way.

“[The system] helped save us time and provide a better level of customer service through accurately locating technicians and assigning jobs that are closest to them, as well as advising drivers of the most direct route to a particular job,” Cohen says.

Energy Concerns are Driving Changes in Transportation

UPS estimates a 40% savings in fuel costs by switching to
Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) from gasoline or diesel.

As reported by FleetOwner: A broad survey of transportation executives in the aerospace, aviation, trucking, maritime and railroad industries finds that concerns over energy availability, cost, and regulatory burdens are rapidly increasing, with their fears fueling changes in corporate strategy – especially in terms of supply chain management.

Most of the 209 responses to this study – conducted this summer by Forbes Insights on behalf of the CIT Group – came from freight and passenger carriers, along with manufacturers, freight brokers and dealers operating in the transportation space, and found that more than eight out of 10 (81%) believe uncertainty surrounding energy policies is hampering global economic recovery.

On top of that, 80% of those polled added that today’s higher fuel costs are reducing global economic growth, with more than six out of 10 (63%) believing that fuel prices will increase over the next 18 months. A further 78% expect prices to increase over the next three years and 69% think prices will increase over the next five years, CIT found, with 38% believing those price hikes will be “significant.”

“This study highlights the fact that transportation executives are preparing for a future of uncertainty, both in terms of fuel prices and regulations,” noted Jeff Knittel, president of CIT Transportation Finance. “In doing so, they are implementing strategic business plans in response to the potential for a protracted era of higher energy costs and growing concern regarding current and proposed emissions regulations.”

Those “strategic plans” also cover a wide assortment of areas, CIT added. For example, nearly half(47%) of carriers reported their customers are working more closely with third-party logistics groups to optimize transportation costs, with 35% noting that their customers are relocating production or warehousing for the same reason.

Another 81% told CIT that they are updating their fleets to be more energy efficient, with 79% adding that they are doing more to promote their sector’s energy efficiency relative to other transportation modes.

On top of that, more than three out of four (77%) manufacturers are working to develop vessels, trucks and rolling stock that are more energy efficient, with another 64% noting that they are investing in new plants expressly for this purpose. Finally, 84% said they are working more closely with transportation companies to “engineer” greater transportation efficiency, according to CIT’s findings.

Still, despite all of those efforts, 31% believe their customers will still encounter “financial duress” as a result of rising energy costs,

That “duress” is partly due to the greater impact of regulations on energy, especially when it comes to rules designed to control and reduce emissions, those polled by CIT reported.

For starters, 76% of transportation executives said they are “concerned” by current and proposed emissions regulations, with 47% of them adding that the state of emissions regulation is contributing to higher energy costs – a figure that rises to 64% among trucking companies. Overall, 86% say such emissions regulations are adding to operating costs, with 79% adding that regulatory actions are forcing their companies to increase spending on capital equipment.

TL carrier Werner Enterprises touched on the monetary impact upon trucking operators trying to comply with such emission rules within its second quarter earnings report issued back in July.

“It is very difficult for many smaller and medium size private carriers to replace their older, lower-value trucks with much higher cost, EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]-compliant new trucks, which significantly reduces the risk of trucks being added to the market,” Werner explained.

“We reduced the average age of our much younger truck fleet by half a year during 2011 and 2012, with net capital expenditures totaling $457 million during that two-year period,” the carrier pointed out. “The significantly higher cost of new trucks and resulting higher depreciation expense and related diesel exhaust fluid costs is not being recovered through a single year customer rate review cycle.”

Indeed, 66% of respondents to CIT’s survey felt government policies have driven energy prices higher, with efforts to combat perceived long-term climate change running counter to a near-term economic growth agenda.

NBA Teams Using GPS Tracking Devices on Players

As reported by Slam Online: Data-tracking cameras are so last week. GPS is now where it’s at in the League. The Dallas Mavericks are one of eight teams that are beginning to experiment with wearable GPS tracking devices on players, as a tool to help them better understand and train their athletes. 

Per the Dallas Morning News: “The devices track player movements and body vitals and are designed to optimize training efficiency and mitigate injury risks. ‘We just want to be able to get smarter about our players and how to train them and how to put them in a position to succeed,’ said Mavs owner Mark Cuban. ‘So that’s just one component of a lot of different things that we’re doing.’ 

Athletes wear a cell-phone sized device on the inside of their jerseys between their shoulders, and it records their every movement in all directions as well as their heart rate. This gives coaches what Catapult’s Gary McCoy describes as a ‘dashboard’ for players’ bodies. 

While the devices have only been used in practices, Cuban said that he is considering using them during the preseason and that the league has not yet prevented him from doing so. (The Spurs have used the devices in Summer League games, becoming the first team to use them in game situations. The NBA prohibits the use of the devices during regular season games.) 

For the Mavs, the technology seems to be only one part of a much larger sports science technology plan. Cuban recently fired his 10-year strength and conditioning coach and said his replacement will be ‘more of an expert in performance technology science.’

The Mavs were also one of the first four NBA teams–along with the Spurs, Rockets, and Thunder–to install SportVU cameras in the rafters of its arena in 2011 to track player and ball movements throughout games.”

The devices are similar to those being used by the NFL to evaluate performance and speed for players.

Use of GPS and other sensors to evaluate professional and amateur athletes is a growing trend ("Athletic telematics"), and may also be utilized in the other sports or venues such as the Olympics in the future.

New Clean Tech Refrigerated Trucks using Fuel Cell Technology for Cooling

As reported by Science World Report: Grocery merchants in Texas, California and New York will soon have ice cream, frozen foods and fresh produce delivered by tractor trailers whose refrigeration units are powered by fuel cells, a clean technology that makes energy silently and with dramatically reduced emissions.

The fuel cells will do the work normally done by a small diesel engine, which keeps the cargo at the proper temperature while the trucks are making deliveries. Each of the four trucks will still be equipped with a main diesel engine that actually powers the truck.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is overseeing the project, believe this will be the first time that refrigerated trucks making deliveries have been equipped with a fuel cell -- a device that creates electricity by driving chemical reactions using hydrogen and air. The only byproducts are heat and water.

"This is a great application for a fuel cell," said Kriston Brooks, the PNNL researcher leading the project. "A trailer refrigeration unit traditionally is powered by a small diesel engine or electric motor that drives compressors to provide cooling to the cargo. A fuel cell can potentially provide a clean, quiet and efficient alternative by powering the electric motor."

Two leading fuel cell manufacturers, Massachusetts-based Nuvera and Albany, N.Y.-based Plug Power Inc., will each receive $650,000 from DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The companies will provide matching funds and labor of their own. A PNNL team led by Brooks will oversee and evaluate the two-year program.

Industry officials estimate that approximately 300,000 refrigerated trucks with auxiliary power units are on the road in the United States. By replacing the small diesel engines with the more efficient fuel cell, users will see fuel savings of approximately 10 gallons a day per unit, in addition to reduced emission of pollutants and significantly quieter operation.

"Accelerated fuel cell use in this application is also expected to create jobs in the energy sector, increase fuel cell manufacturing volume, decrease costs, and catalyze a stronger domestic supplier base," said Jamie Holladay, PNNL's sector manager for fuel cell technologies.

Fuel cells are becoming more common as energy sources in buildings and in vehicles such as buses. While the devices are generally more expensive than traditional forms of energy generation, many scientists and product developers expect that as they become more widely adopted and production levels increase, their cost will come down, similar to what has happened to products like cell phones.

"One of the goals is to accelerate fuel cell use in industry," said Brooks. "In spite of their higher costs now, the higher efficiency and zero emissions from fuel cells are enough to convince many companies not to wait to implement this technology. Fuel cell products are already used widely in warehouses, and this project broadens their reach."

In one project, Nuvera will work with Thermo King to develop the refrigeration unit to keep the truck cool using Nuvera's Orion^TM fuel cell stack. That truck will make deliveries for a Sysco Corp. food distribution facility in Riverside, Calif., and for a San Antonio, Texas, food distribution center for the H-E-B grocery store chain.

In the other project, Plug Power will work with Carrier Transicold and Air Products to equip trucks making deliveries for a Sysco Corp. food distribution facility on Long Island. The trucks will be equipped with Plug Power's GenDrive fuel cell product.

Both the Sysco and the H-E-B facilities already use forklifts powered by hydrogen fuel cells, part of a trend fostered by DOE to increase the use of the technology in industry. At both companies, the infrastructure to provide hydrogen for the fuel cells is already in place; the hydrogen is generated on site from natural gas and water using Nuvera's PowerTap^TM hydrogen generator and refueling system. For the site using the Plug Power technology, the hydrogen will be supplied by Air Products using an outdoor hydrogen dispenser.

Each fuel-cell powered refrigerated trailer will run for at least 400 hours at each demonstration site, delivering goods from the distribution centers to stores or other outlets.