Day: December 10, 2021

Starbucks

With more than 30,000 cafes around the globe, Starbucks has become a well known name across the world. From its iconic and popular cups with espresso inside them, Starbucks evolved from on coffee bean shop in Seattle to a brand with $80 billion business over 48 years. Starbucks cover total of 57% sales in the cafe market.

You heard it right!!

57% is not a small number. Nearly 2/3 of the coffee sold in the U.S. comes from Starbucks. But this itself has come with real pains. With 14,000 locations in U.S. alone, Starbucks has spread itself too thin.

Having too many stores out there led to fewer transactions in individual stores. To compensate the loss of fewer transactions, the company tried to increase the prices of their products. Doing this frequently can drive the customers away.

So, what strategy did Starbucks use to attract its customers ?

This was the time of 1970. Three college friends Zev Siegl, Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker decided to go for a coffee business. They found a mentor in Alfred Peet, founder of Peet’s coffee and the man behind the custom coffee roasting to the U.S. So, with the help of Peet, the three friends founded Starbucks , a coffee bean shop and roastery at Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market in 1971. Peet helped those young entrepreneurs with coffee beans and helped them to connect with coffee brokers to provide the source to get their own roasted coffee beans until they could set up their own roastery. For the first decade, the founders opened the branches of Starbucks at 5 locations. At that time, the conventions coffee consumers found out a glaring absence that was actual coffee drinks or the actual cups made especially for coffee. There was no actual bars and no such demand for espresso based drink at that period of time. People usually take coffee beans their homes and just with simple method, they used to brew the coffee. No one had the thought of getting a beverage at a Starbucks coffee shop until 1980. Initial focus of Starbucks was the high quality coffee as customers were more focused on the canned coffee.  The company hired its first Director of Marketing and Sales, Howard Schultz. That man was very professional to the level where he became the CEO of Starbucks later.

In 1983, Schultz went To Italy and returns with an idea that was turning the coffee bean stores into cafes. Starbucks launched its first latte the next year. That experiment was a success and four years later Schultz partnered with the investors and bought Starbucks with $3.8 million. Schultz proposed a strategy of aggressive expansion.

By 1996, the company had opened the cafes in the more than thousand  locations including the international cafes in Japan and Singapore.

Growth was too rapid in the case of Starbucks that in just three years later, the company opened the café in 2000th location as well.

Schultz switched from CEO to Executive Chairman at 2000. Between 2000 and 2007, Starbucks witnessed the extreme growth that the number of its cafes got more than quadrupled like 3,500 to 15,000 cafes directly.

Sales hot up from $2 billion to $9.4 billion in that period. But then Starbucks hit a wall.

The 2007 financial crash:

The growth from that year remained constant. The stock price fell by 50 percent. So Starbucks brought back Howard Schultz.

This news alone raised the Starbucks stock by 9 percent. He laid off 6,700 baristas in the café. He wanted customers to remember his brand. Schultz ordered all the cafes in the U.S. locations to call off in the afternoon so that he could show the baristas how to make the signature espresso. He wanted to make the customers to experience real life coffee in the stores to let it remember fresh in their minds. Schultz even ordered to remove automatic espresso machines.

Schultz’s strategy worked and the company stock price soared up by 149 percent in 2009. The company has been gaining positive reviews since then.

Starbucks took the big step of opening the new kind of stores that are Starbucks Reserve Roasteries. These massive foot stores are designed to be a tourist destination. Here, Starbucks baristas experiment new and different brewing methods to come up with delicious beverages. With this , Starbucks decided to come up with something new for the customers every now and then.

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Wireless PANs

Introduction

Wireless PANs (WPANs) have caused the latest revolution in wireless technology. WPAN’s are short to very short-range (from a couple of centimeters to a couple of meters) wireless networks that can use to exchange information between devices within reach of an individual. WPANs can be used to replace cables between computers and peripherals; share multimedia content amongst devices; build an infrastructure for sensor networking applications, or establish various location-aware services. The best example represents Wireless Personal Area Networks in the industry-standard Bluetooth found in many consumer electronics such as cell phones, PDAs, wireless headsets, wireless mouse, and wireless keyboards.

Why Wireless PANs ?

Personal Area Networks(PAN’s) was first demonstrated by IBM researchers in 1996 that utilized the human body to exchange digital information. Engineers use picoamp currents through the body at very low frequencies of around 1MHz. The low power and frequencies prevented eavesdropping and interference to neighboring PAN’s. In this way, they created a new way to communicate between body-borne appliances by using the human body as a channel. The only Limitation was that some form of human contact between devices is required, which may not always be desirable or possible. To get around this problem of human contact, other alternatives such as IR(Infrared) or Far-field (radio) communications have been considered. Using wireless methods such as IR or radio frequency (RF) for PAN’s is known as WPAN, which are typically smaller, operate on battery power, and either worn on a human body or carried personally. The main design goal of WPANs is to allow either stationary or moving devices that are close to communicating and exchanging information without wires. WPANs should allow devices to create or provide data/voice access points is within a Personal Operating Space(POS) of up to 10 meters in all directions and envelops a stationary or a mobile person.

Chapter 15 Wireless LANs and PANs Outline n
The scope of various WLANs and WPANs

The WPANs systems are currently expected to provide secure modes of operation, allowing groups of personal devices to interconnect while excluding connectivity to other non-essentials. They should not affect the primary function, the form factor, and power consumption of the devices in which they are embedded. As WPANs primarily use the license-free radio frequencies (e.g., ISM band), they have to coexist with other RF technologies that make of these frequencies. A WPAN is functionally similar to a WLAN while it differs in power consumption, coverage range rate, and cost.

Advantages Of WPANs :

  • In PAN no extra space is required.
  • It is secure.
  • Connect to any device at nay time.
  • It is reliable.
  • It is easy to use.
  • It is portable.
  • It is used in TV remotes, AC remotes and so on.
  • Data can be synchronized between different devices.

Disadvantages Of WPANs :

  • It can operate only in short range of areas
  • It is slow data transfer.
  • It has limited range.
  • Infrared signal travel only in a straight line.
  • It use microwave signals in some digital devices which have and effect on the human body like rain and heart problems may occur.
  • It is more expensive.

Maroju Sanjana

Pluto

Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was the first and the largest Kuiper belt object to be discovered. After Pluto was discovered in 1930, it was declared to be the ninth planet from the Sun. Beginning in the 1990s, its status as a planet was questioned following the discovery of several objects of similar size in the Kuiper belt and the scattered disc, including the dwarf planet Eris. This led the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006 to formally define the term planet excluding Pluto and reclassifying it as a dwarf planet.

Pluto is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume but is less massive than Eris. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is primarily made of ice and rock and is relatively small—one-sixth the mass of the Moon and one-third its volume. It has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit during which it ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units or AU (4.4–7.4 billion km) from the Sun. This means that Pluto periodically comes closer to the Sun than Neptune, but a stable orbital resonance with Neptune prevents them from colliding. Light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its average distance (39.5 AU).

Pluto has five known moons: Charon (the largest, with a diameter just over half that of Pluto), Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a binary system because the barycenter of their orbits does not lie within either body.

The New Horizons spacecraft performed a flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, becoming the first and, to date, only spacecraft to do so. During its brief flyby, New Horizons made detailed measurements and observations of Pluto and its moons. In September 2016, astronomers announced that the reddish-brown cap of the north pole of Charon is composed of tholins, organic macromolecules that may be ingredients for the emergence of life, and produced from methane, nitrogen and other gases released from the atmosphere of Pluto and transferred 19,000 km (12,000 mi) to the orbiting moon.

Orbit :

Pluto was discovered in 1930 near the star δ Geminorum, and merely coincidentally crossing the ecliptic at this time of discovery. Pluto moves about 7 degrees east per decade with small apparent retrograde motion as seen from Earth. Pluto was closer to the Sun than Neptune between 1979 and 1999.

Pluto’s orbital period is currently about 248 years. Its orbital characteristics are substantially different from those of the planets, which follow nearly circular orbits around the Sun close to a flat reference plane called the ecliptic. In contrast, Pluto’s orbit is moderately inclined relative to the ecliptic (over 17°) and moderately eccentric (elliptical). This eccentricity means a small region of Pluto’s orbit lies closer to the Sun than Neptune’s. The Pluto–Charon barycenter came to perihelion on September 5, 1989, and was last closer to the Sun than Neptune between February 7, 1979, and February 11, 1999.



Although the 3:2 resonance with Neptune (see below) is maintained, Pluto’s inclination and eccentricity behave in a chaotic manner. Computer simulations can be used to predict its position for several million years (both forward and backward in time), but after intervals much longer than the Lyapunov time of 10–20 million years, calculations become unreliable: Pluto is sensitive to immeasurably small details of the Solar System, hard-to-predict factors that will gradually change Pluto’s position in its orbit.

Rotation:

Pluto’s rotation period, its day, is equal to 6.387 Earth days. Like Uranus, Pluto rotates on its “side” in its orbital plane, with an axial tilt of 120°, and so its seasonal variation is extreme; at its solstices, one-fourth of its surface is in continuous daylight, whereas another fourth is in continuous darkness.The reason for this unusual orientation has been debated. Research from the University of Arizona has suggested that it may be due to the way that a body’s spin will always adjust to minimise energy. This could mean a body reorienting itself to put extraneous mass near the equator and regions lacking mass tend towards the poles. This is called polar wander. According to a paper released from the University of Arizona, this could be caused by masses of frozen nitrogen building up in shadowed areas of the dwarf planet. These masses would cause the body to reorient itself, leading to its unusual axial tilt of 120°. The buildup of nitrogen is due to Pluto’s vast distance from the Sun. At the equator, temperatures can drop to −240 °C (−400.0 °F; 33.1 K), causing nitrogen to freeze as water would freeze on Earth. The same effect seen on Pluto would be observed on Earth were the Antarctic ice sheet several times larger.

Atmosphere:

Pluto has a tenuous atmosphere consisting of nitrogen (N2), methane (CH4), and carbon monoxide (CO), which are in equilibrium with their ices on Pluto’s surface. According to the measurements by New Horizons, the surface pressure is about 1 Pa (10 μbar),roughly one million to 100,000 times less than Earth’s atmospheric pressure.

It was initially thought that, as Pluto moves away from the Sun, its atmosphere should gradually freeze onto the surface; studies of New Horizons data and ground-based occultations show that Pluto’s atmospheric density increases, and that it likely remains gaseous throughout Pluto’s orbit. New Horizons observations showed that atmospheric escape of nitrogen to be 10,000 times less than expected.Alan Stern has contended that even a small increase in Pluto’s surface temperature can lead to exponential increases in Pluto’s atmospheric density; from 18 hPa to as much as 280 hPa (three times that of Mars to a quarter that of the Earth). At such densities, nitrogen could flow across the surface as liquid.Just like sweat cools the body as it evaporates from the skin, the sublimation of Pluto’s atmosphere cools its surface.The presence of atmospheric gases was traced up to 1670 kilometers high; the atmosphere does not have a sharp upper boundary.

Satellites:

Pluto has five known natural satellites. The closest to Pluto is Charon. First identified in 1978 by astronomer James Christy, Charon is the only moon of Pluto that may be in hydrostatic equilibrium. Charon’s mass is sufficient to cause the barycenter of the Pluto–Charon system to be outside Pluto. Beyond Charon there are four much smaller circumbinary moons. In order of distance from Pluto they are Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. Nix and Hydra were both discovered in 2005, Kerberos was discovered in 2011,and Styx was discovered in 2012.The satellites’ orbits are circular (eccentricity < 0.006) and coplanar with Pluto’s equator (inclination < 1°),and therefore tilted approximately 120° relative to Pluto’s orbit. The Plutonian system is highly compact: the five known satellites orbit within the inner 3% of the region where prograde orbits would be stable.

Origin:

Pluto’s origin and identity had long puzzled astronomers. One early hypothesis was that Pluto was an escaped moon of Neptune knocked out of orbit by Neptune’s largest current moon, Triton. This idea was eventually rejected after dynamical studies showed it to be impossible because Pluto never approaches Neptune in its orbit.

Pluto’s true place in the Solar System began to reveal itself only in 1992, when astronomers began to find small icy objects beyond Neptune that were similar to Pluto not only in orbit but also in size and composition. This trans-Neptunian population is thought to be the source of many short-period comets. Pluto is now known to be the largest member of the Kuiper belt,a stable belt of objects located between 30 and 50 AU from the Sun. As of 2011, surveys of the Kuiper belt to magnitude 21 were nearly complete and any remaining Pluto-sized objects are expected to be beyond 100 AU from the Sun. Like other Kuiper-belt objects (KBOs), Pluto shares features with comets; for example, the solar wind is gradually blowing Pluto’s surface into space.It has been claimed that if Pluto were placed as near to the Sun as Earth, it would develop a tail, as comets do.This claim has been disputed with the argument that Pluto’s escape velocity is too high for this to happen. It has been proposed that Pluto may have formed as a result of the agglomeration of numerous comets and Kuiper-belt objects.

The end….