Image via WikipediaI am going to dig up on this and blog about it more later. But I have been circling Zappos, and my hunch is selling Zappos to Amazon was a very, very bad idea. Zappos was IPO material. I am going to learn the details. And comment more later. Entrepreneur: Change: The advent of social connectivity means consumers are shaping strategies and influencing brands like never before. Old notions of demand are out. ..... Crowley advocated the concept of geo-location for social networks and the idea of using mobile technology to "check in" at physical locations in 2000 ..... In just a year and a half, Foursquare skyrocketed to nearly 4 million users, with more than 20,000 new users checking in every day ..... opened the doors for businesses to see a whole new way of seeing their customer. .... Combined with the Square software app, smartphones and iPads become mini card-processing centers. .... To Tony Hsieh, it doesn't really matter what's being sold. What matters is the experience of selling it--and, of course, the customer's experience of buying it. ..... a company culture that would produce a new standard of customer satisfaction. ..... "We never really paid much attention to what other companies were doing," Hsieh says. "We never knew that the decisions we made were in direct contrast to those of our competitors." ...... "Customer service is about making customers happy. Company culture is about making employees happy," he says. "So let's just simplify it and, at the same time, amplify our vision for our customers, employees, vendors and peers."
Image via CrunchBase .... The e-tailer hit the $1 billion revenue mark by 2008 and ended 2009 with $1.2 billion in sales. Amazon acquired the company in a deal that ultimately was valued at $1.2 billion when it closed in November 2009. ..... immersion workshops on happiness, culture and service. .... 499 Zappos employees of more than 2,400 employees use Twitter, including Hsieh, who himself has 1.7 million followers. .... "Customer service shouldn't just be a department--it should be the entire company." Hackertopia: Creating a City as a Startup (Via Jim Gilliam)
the price of building a home can be as low as 70K .... the deterioration of public schools, the growth of guilds and cartels in the health care industry .....dense enough that you can get everywhere by walking, but not so dense that the noise and stench bothers residents. ....... The front of the house in each block opens onto a large front yard. Instead of a street with cars, a bike path runs between the front yards. Cars are relegated to narrow back alleys. These alleys have speed bumps that limit the max speed to under 10 MPH. Normal two way streets run every five blocks. Multi-lane arterial roads run every 20 blocks. ..... The bike paths are designed so that you could bike from one end of the city to another without ever having to worry about running into cars. ..... Cars would only be used for inter-town travel. .... By using the space normally occupied by a large street for a front yard, families enjoy suburban sized yards, with city-like densities. Larger parks containing neighborhood soccer fields and swimming pools sit every few blocks. ...... The typical city government taxes adults at high rates to fund central schools. The adults must then must work long hours to pay the taxes. This forces adults to be away from their children, thereby creating the need for schools and child care. ...... Most suburbs could be described as giant private boarding schools where the parents live too. ...... a good school consists of smart kids and teachers unencumbered by bureaucracy. ..... spending $3K per pupil, per year. ..... city will be divided into neighborhoods of 1,000 to 2,000 people, and villages of around 10,000. .... Buses are far more economical than trains as they can use the same roads as cars. ..... Americans spend an insane amount of money on health care - over $6K per capita. Meanwhile Singapore spends $1.5K per capita, yet boasts a higher life expectancy.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife American health care is neither socialist nor a free market. It is a guild and cartel system. The doctors associations restrict entry and drive up costs and wages. Big hospitals lobby for laws banning competitors. Insurance companies exist in a web of regulations and mandates that prevent them from developing creative structures.
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