Amazing Aviation Facts

I recently did an Ignite talk on Amazing Aviation. People were blown away with some of the facts I presented. Many of them are very surprising. Here’s some of the doozies in a top 10 list!

  1. Only 5% of the worlds population have ever been on an airplane.
  2. Flight is not the safest form of travel. The bus is on all measures. The motorcycle is the most dangerous on all measures.
  3. The airline industry has currently made a net loss of $31 billion dollars since 1940.
  4. The average profit per seat on a 1 hour flight is $2.20.
  5. In 1940 to fly London – New York it cost 1 years wages. Today it costs the wage of working only Monday & Tuesday.
  6. The average age of commercial aircraft is 19 years. (How safe is a 19 year old car?)
  7. Tom Stuker is the worlds most frequent flyer. He has traveled over 10 million miles.
  8. There are over 14,000 commercial flights in the air at any one time.
  9. There are over 3 million people in the air on planes at any one time.
  10. The worlds first flying car arrives in 2012. Called the Terrafugia it costs $194,000

Statistics are fun, Love Stevie.

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60 seconds on the web

The world moves fast. When we we’re unconnected the speed of change went unnoticed. Now that we all have digital footprints, we can track all that happens. This amazing and statistically rich infographic is solid reminder of the world we live in. It’s also very cool that most of these business are startups that aren’t even teenagers yet. I’ve pulled out the numbers and got the pic below.

60 seconds on the web:

  • 12,000+ new ads posted on Craigslist
  • 370,000+ minutes of voice calls on Skype
  • 98,000+ tweets
  • 320+ new twitter accounts
  • 100+ new Linkedin accounts
  • 6,600+ photos uploaded to Flickr
  • 50+ wordpress CMS downloads & 125+ plugins
  • 695,000 facebook status updates, 80,000 wall posts and 510,040 comments
  • 1,700 firefox downloads
  • 694,445 google searches
  • 168 million emails sent (of which 92% is spam)
  • 60+ new blogs & 1500+ new blog posts
  • 70+ new domains are registered
  • 600+ new Youtube videos are uploaded. 25+ hours in duration
  • 150+ questions are asked in Question forums
  • 13,000+ iPhone apps are downloaded
  • 20,000 new posts on Tumblr.
  • I new definition added to Urban Dictionary 
  • 1,600+ reads on Scribd.

And here is what it looks like:

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Why Krispy Kreme failed in Australia

No doubt you’ve heard the news about Krispy Kreme going into administration in Australia. Many people seemed surprised at the news given it was a such a successful launch. But when we look a little closer it’s pretty clear why they failed. They broke a few simple retail rules which are worth considering.

Why Krispy Kreme failed:

Firstly, they failed to understand that in this country they needed to operate as a specialty retailer. Instead they opened 50 stores in a few short years. When Krispy Kreme first opened their doors in this country (Sydney) it was a real treat and the store became a destination outlet. People would travel many miles to the store to buy a dozen doughnuts. You’d even see people returning on airplanes at Melbourne airport with big bags of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. It suggested that Kripsy Kreme had a strong novelty value in Australia. But it can be very misleading when people from wide spread geographies come you as a retailer of non essential items. Contrary to what the ‘spreadsheet’ might intimate, it’s rarely a good idea to take your retail offer to where they live.

To give you some perspective of the expansion folly, let’s consider this:

USA has 224 store serving population of 311 million. (1 store per 1.4m people)

Australia had 50 stores serving a population of 21 million. (1 store per 420K people)

The numbers are mind blowing and it doesn’t even take into account our vastly different food cultures.

The expansion was far too wide far too quick, and KK didn’t allow enough time to understand what their sustained demand would be prior to expansion. No doubt the temptation to expand rapidly during growth would be tempting, but sometimes the best decision we can make is to limit distribution and keep the brand exclusive.

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Worldometers are great

I’m really loving the worldometers website. It’s a list of global statistics which are updated in real time

Not only is it a very interesting, but it is a terrific resource for entrepreneurs and marketers alike. No matter what your business you could grab some statistics from it to open the mind of your audience in a presentation. For example:

If in the distribution, health, food business we could present this statistic:

Undernourished people in the world = 1,026,904,563

Overweight people in the world = 1,153,103,026

Which shows that there ‘is’ enough food int he world, it’s just in the wrong places. It’s a distribution issue.

If in the eco energy, or environment industry we could share the following:

Energy used worldwide today = 422,173,999 (MWh)

Solor energy striking the earth today = 39,886,999,999 (MWh)

Showing that we have the 40x the natural resources needed, we just need to harness it.

In fact, the way we could use these statistics is limited only to our imagination. And when we are presenting to audiences, it’s their imagination that we should really be trying to inspire.

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beware of averages

If we added up all the men, and all the women on our planet, we’d find that, on average, the typical adult human being had exactly one breast and one testicle. Yet how many people actually fit that description?

Statistics are used the create meaning. Yet, very often they create the opposite. In a world for of numbers, statistics and analytics (yes, even the Google kind) we are better off deciding what we want to find out, than we are looking at the available statistics and asking what they mean.

Startup Blog says: First decide what you want to find out, then devise a way to measure it.

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