Eight years in the making and two years overdue, there was celebration in French Guiana, Thailand and Australia this week as Shin Satellite's iPSTAR satellite was launched from French Guiana. The launch heralds the emergence of a new era of satellite broadband across regional and remote China and India, south East Asia, Australia and New Zealand. There were some anxious moments for Arianespace and Shin Satellite officials when a "premature ground segment measurement" forced a delay in the countdown to less than 18 minutes before the end of a two-hour launch window. But the countdown was revived at 5.14 and the launch went ahead. The 6,500kg iPSTAR promises 45Gbits of throughput targeted at most of east Asia and Australia from a geostationary position. The bird isn't the first promising broadband service - Inmarsat, for example, offers a broadband service via its BGAN service to almost all of the iPSTAR service area. But iPSTAR is the first to provide connectivity at prices pitched at close to terrestrial wireless or fixed prices - less than US$50 monthly with terminals starting at $1,000 and set to come down to around $500 as volumes rise.
Enterprise marketing faces a critical turning point in 2024, mirroring the shift from traditional outsourced media buying to digital marketing practitioners. A rapidly changing landscape of technological advancements demands a similar leap forward. Just as digital disrupted legacy media strategies, these trends render current enterprise marketing methods inadequate. Embracing a data-driven, agile, and purpose-driven approach isn't a suggestion, it's the imperative for survival and success in today's dynamic market. Applying generative artificial intelligence ( GenAI ) to a range of enterprise marketing tasks will result in a significant productivity increase by 2029, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Marketing GenAI Apps Market Development "In the next five years, GenAI will advance to the point where it will handle more than 40% of the work of specific marketing roles," said Gerry Murray, research director at