A Self Driving Delivery Car Needs To Look Different

The car needs to be redesigned. A self driving delivery car does not need a windscreen. It needs to be shaped different, more like a box, a box with aerodynamics. The receiver should be able to scan a code and the car should spit out that particular package. In the back. This could be the next big thing since, well, online delivery itself.

Shake That Thing: Does Amazon Have No Limits?

In 2003, #Amazon & #RadioShack each had about $5b in sales". In 2013, $AMZN was $75b to $RSH at $3.5b. http://t.co/kgK64VrBA2 #Retail #Tech
— Michael Parekh (@MParekh) March 4, 2014

The Atlantic: RadioShack Is Doomed (and So Is Retail)

RadioShack's long slide coincides the steep ascendance of Amazon as America's great brick-and-mortar destroyer. In 2003, Amazon and RadioShack each had about $5 billion in sales, as WSJ business editor Dennis Berman pointed out. Last year, Amazon had $75 billion to RadioShack's $3.5 billion. ....... At the end of 2013, RadioShack had 5,000 brick-and-mortar stores with 27,500 employees and $3.5 billion in sales, which is $127,000 in sales per employee. Its website is the 1,066th most popular in the world. At the end of 2013, Amazon had zero brick-and-mortar stores with 117,300 employees (full- and part-time) and $75 billion in sales, which is $640,000 in sales per employee. Its website is the 5th most popular in the world. ..... The company's biggest sales category is the wireless market, and that's some of the worst news for RadioShack. “The mobile phones category was very weak, and mall traffic is very weak,” analyst David Schick said. “The majority of folks have their mobile phones. We are past adoption.” ...... the confluence of e-retail and increasingly efficient global sourcing and stocking (i.e.: the Amazon & Wal-Mart Effect) would eventually gut retail employment ...... With $600,000 in sales per employee, Amazon is 3X-4X more efficient than the stores it's eating.

Does Amazon.com have no limits? It does. It has severe limits. (1) It is not even attempting to do High Touch. Health and education are all about High Touch, it seems. That same principle can be applied to traditional retail. (2) You can piggyback on Amazon infrastructure and do retail. You can use their warehouses.

Stores like RadioShack do have the option to rise from the ashes. But I doubt they will. The rethink that is required, I don't think they will go for it. RadioShack is like the New York Times. It has taken a Huffington Post to "get" digital. News is not going away. Neither is retail. If anything it is getting bigger than ever. RadioShack has to move from being a poorly stocked itty bitty warehouse to being an experience.

Hey @DKThomp I don't @amazon is the final word on retail, if there ever was http://t.co/MuFZ030eDl — Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) March 7, 2014

Hey @MParekh I don't think @amazon is the final word on retail. http://t.co/MuFZ030eDl — Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) March 7, 2014

Hello @RadioShack http://t.co/MuFZ030eDl — Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) March 7, 2014

Do Amazon's Lockers Help Retailers? Staples and Radio Shack said no while coffee and copy shops say yes. http://t.co/pWGJY04xxh via @BW — Brad Stone (@BradStone) September 20, 2013

Amazon lockers are one step beyond delivery by van. It is a little more High Touch, but not all the way still.

BusinessWeek: Do Amazon's Lockers Help Retailers? Depends on What They Sell

The incentive for any business hosting an Amazon locker isn’t the monthly stipend the online retailer pays—”not even worth it,” says the manager of a Manhattan copy shop—but the lure of higher store traffic given the online retailer’s enormous sales volume and the gazillions of brown boxes sent across the nation each day...... many people who can’t reliably get their online purchases at work or at home ..... Coffee shops, parking garages, supermarkets, pharmacies, and copy-printing stores don’t have Amazon as a rival, whereas a retailer such as Staples will quickly realize that Amazon sells virtually everything it does—and possibly cheaper. ...... one reason 7-Eleven, home of the microwave burrito and gargantuan Slurpee—neither sold fresh by Amazon—seems to like its lockers just fine. (You can purchase a $24.99, 7-Eleven-branded Slurpee Maker machine on the site, however.) .... Bonhomme says his copy shop’s traffic has gradually picked up over the six months that the business has had a locker.

Disney Bets $1 Billion on Technology to Track Theme-Park Visitors

Walt Disney’s (DIS) $1 billion experiment in crowd control, data collection, and wearable technology that could change the way people play—and spend—at the Most Magical Place on Earth. ..... If the system works, it could be copied not only by other theme parks but also by museums, zoos, airports, and malls. ...... MyMagic+ promises far more radical change. It’s a sweeping reservation and ride planning system that allows for bookings months in advance on a website or smartphone app. Bracelets called MagicBands, which link electronically to an encrypted database of visitor information, serve as admission tickets, hotel keys, and credit or debit cards; a tap against a sensor pays for food or trinkets. The bands have radio frequency identification (RFID) chips—which critics derisively call spychips because of their ability to monitor people and things. ..... Disney’s $14.1 billion theme park and resort business. ...... “a more immersive, more seamless, and more personal experience”—allowing Disney employees to address a child by name, for example, or wish someone a happy birthday. “The implications for big data and for personalization are extraordinary,” says Quinby. “It could radically change interaction between customers and the company.”

Apple's Location-Tracking iBeacon Is Poised for Use in Retail Sales

a new technology called iBeacon that can pinpoint your location to within a few feet. ...... Prior to iBeacon, iPhones and other Apple mobile devices relied on GPS and Wi-Fi tower triangulation to track their location. Those are great technologies and remain part of iOS, but they’re only precise within 30 feet or so. That’s fine if you’re walking into an airport; iOS Passbook users already see their boarding pass pop up when they arrive at their terminal. GPS and Wi-Fi are less useful in smaller spaces such as stores. IBeacon can nail down device location more precisely because it uses Bluetooth Low Energy, a new version of the ubiquitous wireless standard. ...... Bluetooth LE can run constantly, announcing your phone’s presence to nearby devices with the short-distance accuracy of a conventional Bluetooth at little cost to battery life. ........ IBeacon’s range is about 84,000 square feet, Gottipati says. A typical Macy’s store of 175,000 square feet would need two or three iBeacon transmitters. Third-party manufacturers such as Estimote sell a three-pack for $99 ...... That’s another advantage iBeacon has over NFC: It’s not just a payment system. “There are opportunities for marketing and selling that don’t play in the NFC world”

Dell's Pitch: You Can't All Use Amazon Why Amazon Is on a Warehouse Building Spree

For a company whose showrooms are all online, Amazon.com (AMZN) spends a staggering amount on bricks and mortar. The e-commerce giant has invested roughly $13.9 billion since 2010 to build 50 new warehouses, more than it had cumulatively spent on storage facilities since its 1994 founding, bringing the total to 89 at the end of 2012. ..... Software that can sort items by delivery date and optimize storage space has helped Amazon roughly double the number of items it can ship per facility, says Clark. The warehouses are operational within 10 months, down from two years before the building spree started. ..... as the company adds 5,000 full-time jobs in 17 U.S. warehouses to its 20,000 existing employees, along with 2,000 customer service workers ...... Upstarts such as online grocery deliverer Instacart are moving in the opposite direction. “We don’t have to build warehouses, lease a fleet of trucks, or manage perishable inventory,” says Instacart Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta, a former Amazon employee. Unlike AmazonFresh, which ships groceries in Seattle and Los Angeles, Mehta’s San Francisco-based startup guarantees delivery in less than two hours, using contract shoppers who drive their own cars to customers. ..... Since the start of 2010 the company’s stock has more than doubled.

To Tout Good Jobs, Visit Main Street, Not Amazon

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Grocery Is Trickier

Amazon plans big expansion of online grocery business: sources

Wal-Mart is testing same-day and next-day delivery of online grocery and general merchandise orders in the San Francisco Bay Area and operates a grocery delivery business in Britain..... FreshDirect delivers food to homes and offices in some parts of New York City and its trying to expand its service into the Bronx. .... If online orders also include higher-margin general merchandise such as digital cameras ..... "Grocery is a frequency business. If Amazon can deliver to consumers' homes two or three times a week, they can up-sell other items" ..... Amazon offers same-day delivery in several cities including New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago, and since last year the company has been building new distribution warehouses on the outskirts of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

Amazon Reportedly Looking To Expand Grocery Business, Roll Out AmazonFresh Beyond Seattle

Amazon has had an ongoing experiment for the past half decade called AmazonFresh, which offers grocery service and delivery of fresh produce to customers in its home base of Seattle. That program is on the verge of a significant expansion .... grocery has proven relatively impervious to attempts to turn it into an online business thus far, mostly because of immense costs of keeping inventory on hand, factors like spoilage that don’t affect other goods, and delivery complications (refrigerated trucks, for instance).

But no telling how adding intelligence does not make it a better experience.

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Amazon, Walmart And Same Day Delivery

Amazon was going to go offline, or Walmart was going to go online, or both. The relationship between Walmart and computers is nothing new. That corporation early was one of the heaviest users of computers in its operations. I am talking 1970s.

Walmart Begins Testing Same-Day Delivery In Select Markets

Northern Virginia (outside D.C.), Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and San Jose/San Francisco. .... toys, electronics, sporting goods and other gifts .... a $10 fee for an unlimited number of items, with no minimum purchase required, and is working with UPS to deliver the orders ..... it’s not the entire Walmart online catalog that’s becoming available. The eligible items will be priced the same as those in the local stores. ..... Customers can place orders up until noon in their timezone, and then choose a 4-hour windows to take delivery that same day (i.e., 4-8 pm, 5-9 pm, 6-10 pm). For returns, customers can choose to take the item back to the store, refuse delivery, or schedule the courier to retrieve the time. .... the retail giant leveraging its local stores, not distribution centers ..... customers .. said that electronics, toys, video games, movies, music, books and groceries would be those items that they wanted to order in this way the most.

Same Day Delivery is a big deal. That will allow Walmart to reach the New York City market, for example. It has stores in New Jersey that are not allowed in the city by law. But there is no stopping delivery vans.

This experiment does not feel IT intensive enough. Or UPS might not be in the picture. More or all stores would be involved. Warehouses would be involved.

$10 is not a bad price. Consider that your hourly wage for making the trip to Walmart.

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Can You Taste It?

Image via CrunchBase

This kind of data mining might make Facebook a lot of money. LinkedIn is doing it, Facebook is not doing it.

Social Media Are Giving a Voice to Taste Buds

Visitors to the new Lay’s Facebook app are asked to suggest new flavors and click an “I’d Eat That” button to register their preferences. So far, the results show that a beer-battered onion-ring flavor is popular in California and Ohio, while a churros flavor is a hit in New York. ..... sets up Facebook chats between engineers and customers to help refine products. “It’s amazing that we can get that kind of real feedback, as opposed to speculating” .... Wal-Mart acquired the social media company Kosmix last year for an estimated $300 million, chiefly because of Kosmix’s ability to extract trends from social media conversations. .... “There’s mountains and mountains of data being created in social media” ..... @WalmartLabs found that cake pops — small bites of cake on lollipop sticks — were becoming popular. “Starbucks had just started getting them in their cafes, and people were talking a lot about it” ..... @WalmartLabs found that enthusiasm for “The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight Rises” was surging before the movies were released, and suggested that stores increase their orders of related merchandise. And after Walmart started carrying a spicy chip called Takis, @WalmartLabs found that most of the positive chatter about it was coming from California and the Southwest. .... Frito-Lay has already run the contest overseas, resulting in chip flavors like hot and spicy crab in Thailand and pickled cucumber in Serbia. ..... “Data can’t tell you where the world is headed” ..... using data from social media said the ability to see what consumers do, want and are talking about on such a big scale, without consumers necessarily knowing the companies are listening in, was unprecedented. “This is like the biggest focus group someone could ever imagine”

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More Sam Walton Than Bill Gates

My startup is a tech startup, sure. But it is first and foremost a high touch startup. Face time is key to my operations to be.

I keep thinking in terms of companies like Zappos. Zappos sells phone calls, not shoes. Customer service is key to how Zappos rolls. I also end up thinking about the offline components of companies like GroupOn.

Walmart early on became a major user of computer technology. Walmart collects so much data. Every transaction is valuable data. And you can only hope to make meaningful sense of all that data if you employ computers. So that's there.

But in microfinance, you can do all the tech trick in the parlor, but it still boils down to face time. The most precious time you will spend with your customers will be in person. Technology helps, but technology can't be front and center, that space is reserved for flesh and blood people.

Who Hired You?

Image via WikipediaSam Walton is an inspiration of mine. I find Walmart, Dell and the dollar pizza places fascinating. I admire those who can keep the costs down.

Sam Walton had plastic chairs at his Arkansas headquarters. And this was after Walmart had gone public, and Sam Walton was a billionaire already. His logic was obvious. If we buy expensive chairs, the costs get passed on to the customers. It made perfect sense to buy plastic chairs. When he traveled for business, he made a point to stay in cheap motels.

I read his autobiography a long time ago. It is a slim book, a great read.