A welcome policy can be embedded in a municipal authority organisation in a number of different ways. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. To be effective, the local policy makers must be clear on how they hope to make use of the welcome policy and how this will benefit or suffer from different organisational structures. No one ‘ideal’ structure will ‘fit’ all municipal situations in Europe. However, to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the organisational structure that most closely resembles the local situation can increase the chances of successful policy implementation.
Tencent is a Chinese IT company that offers a wide variety of products in the e-commerce, online advertising, online games and social network markets. Most of these services are centered around the central hubs of QQ and Weixin/WeChat. This allows for a spillover of users and a brand name that can be used for a variety of products. Most of Tencent’s software products are free to use, but allow users to buy small cosmetic upgrades. For Tencent, these value-added services are the main source of income. This differentiates the company from most of its competitors, which still rely mostly on online advertisements to monetize users of free services. Tencent focuses on ‘micro-innovation’, taking a proven concept and adjusting it to the Chinese market. The company is very strong in the domestic market, but has had trouble in foreign markets. More recently, Tencent started strategic partnerships with companies in segments where the company cannot become market leader on its own. Perhaps the company could also use this strategy for foreign market entry.
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Due to the exponential growth of ecommerce, the need for automated Inventory management is crucial to have, among others, up-to-date information. There have been recent developments in using drones equipped with RGB cameras for scanning and counting inventories in warehouse. Due to their unlimited reach, agility and speed, drones can speed up the inventory process and keep it actual. To benefit from this drone technology, warehouse owners and inventory service providers are actively exploring ways for maximizing the utilization of this technology through extending its capability in long-term autonomy, collaboration and operation in night and weekends. This feasibility study is aimed at investigating the possibility of developing a robust, reliable and resilient group of aerial robots with long-term autonomy as part of effectively automating warehouse inventory system to have competitive advantage in highly dynamic and competitive market. To that end, the main research question is, “Which technologies need to be further developed to enable collaborative drones with long-term autonomy to conduct warehouse inventory at night and in the weekends?” This research focusses on user requirement analysis, complete system architecting including functional decomposition, concept development, technology selection, proof-of-concept demonstrator development and compiling a follow-up projects.
