Amazon this month launched the first of what it plans to comprise a fleet of 40 cargo planes to support its Prime delivery service. From their blog:
Now, we see the same opportunity to innovate in transportation. I'm very excited to introduce Amazon One, a Boeing 767-300 that is our first ever Amazon branded plane which will serve customers by adding capacity to support one and two day package delivery in the US. Adding capacity for Prime members by developing a dedicated air cargo network ensures there is enough available capacity to provide customers with great selection, low prices and incredible shipping speeds for years to come. Over the next couple of years, we’ll roll out 40 planes just like this one.
Fortune spells out the effects on Amazon's business:
For Amazon, the main benefit of owning the shipping network could be significant for its bottom line amid soaring shipping costs. The company spent over $8.7 billion on shipping in 2014, up from $6.6 billion in 2013. Creating a logistics service could dramatically lower those costs.
Amazon will lease the airplanes from Atlas Air Cargo, potentially owning almost 20% of Atlas's fleet.
(Photo: Amazon)
New York Times business columnist James Stewart thinks it through:
Unless Britain finds a way to undo its decision to leave the European Union, London’s days as the pre-eminent global financial capital, ranked even ahead of New York, may be numbered.
Who might win this high-stakes financial sweepstakes?
Here are the criteria most frequently mentioned: English-language facility, which is essential for attracting a global work force; a favorable regulatory environment, especially regarding employment; excellent transportation and communications infrastructure; availability of prime office space and luxury housing; good schools; good restaurants and cultural offerings; and finally, an intangible quality that includes a certain energy level and openness to an influx of highly paid, competitive City of London-Wall Street types.
I scored numerous cities in the European Union on a 60-point scale: five points for office space and housing, five points for restaurants and cultural offerings — because it’s easier for any city to build new offices and housing, and import talented chefs and entertainers — and 10 points for each of the others.
So who's on top? I'll let you read it, but for my money, I'd live in any of Stewart's top 3.
Canadian writers Pat Kelly, Peter Oldring, and Chris Kelly nail it:
Startup founder Tim Romeo decided to kill his startup right before they would have gotten a check for $500,000. Sounds crazy? No; he did the right thing:
[S]omething was wrong. It seemed trivial at first, but it bothered me. Despite glowing praise, our users were only using ContractBeast to create a small percentage of their total new contracts.
I spent the next two weeks visiting our beta users, looking over their shoulders as they worked, and listening to them explain how they planned on using the product. Pressing them directly on why they were not using ContractBeast to create all their contracts resulted in a lot of feature requests.
Now, talking with customers about features is tricky. Often you receive solid and useful ideas. Occasionally a customer will provide an insight that will change the way you look at your product. But most of the time, customers don’t really want the the features they are asking for. At least not very badly.
When users are unhappy but can’t explain exactly why, they often express that dissatisfaction as a series of tangential, trivial feature requests. ... These aren’t necessarily bad ideas, but they had nothing to do with why they were not using ContractBeast more extensively.
His blog post is good advice not just for startup founders, but for anyone writing software.
The Swiss have built a 57 km tunnel under the Alps, and it opens June 1st:
[T]he new Gotthard Base Tunnel burrows deep beneath the mountains to connect Switzerland’s German- and Italian-speaking regions, ultimately linking the Swiss lowlands with the North Italian plain. It exceeds the length of its longest predecessor, Japan’s Seikan Tunnel, by a little over three kilometers (1.9 miles). Running at up to 8,000 feet below mountain peaks at times, it also runs deeper below ground level than any other tunnel yet built. So great is the amount of rock and rubble created by the excavation—over 28 million tons—that steep artificial hills have been created in the valleys at the tunnel’s mouth.
Now that trains will run on a specially constructed, almost entirely flat track, trains through the tunnel will be able to reach speeds of 150 miles per hour. This will slash the journey time between Zurich and Milan to just two hours and 30 minutes, considerably faster than the current four hours and 40 minutes. While that’s impressive, shorter hops between sub-Alpine cities aren’t really the new tunnels main raison d’etre, and wouldn’t alone necessarily be worth an injection of over $10 billion.
Why is Europe in generally better shape even though their economy is technically in worse shape? This might be an example.
Yes, I've posted a few things about the killing of Sears lately, because Eddie Lampert's investor call the other day was a train-wreck.
Well, Crain's has attempted to tote up the damage, and it turns out Lampert has reduced the value of Sears stock by over 90%—not counting the dead spin-offs:
Since he combined Sears Roebuck with Kmart in March 2005, Sears Holdings stock has lost roughly 90 percent of its value, dropping to an all-time low of $11.53 a share yesterday. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index has risen 75 percent over that same span.
But Sears Holdings doesn't tell the whole story. Since 2011, Lampert has carved out five investment vehicles from Sears. He spun off department store chain Sears Canada, hardware retailer Orchard Supply, hard-goods chain Sears Hometown & Outlet Stores, apparel company Lands' End and real estate investment trust Seritage Growth Properties. In some cases, Sears gave shares in the new company to shareholders in a direct spinoff; in others the shareholders got rights to buy stock in the newly independent company.
The total value of all these transactions to various shareholders depends on several variables, including when they bought into Sears, how many Sears shares they owned at the time of each spinoff, whether they exercised all subscription rights and how many shares of each company they still hold. But one thing is clear: Investors who stuck with Sears throughout Lampert's tenure would have done better with an S&P 500 Index Fund.
Yeah. How he's remained CEO of Sears boggles the mind.
After announcing yesterday that Sears will close its oldest retail store in the U.S. in the wake of a $1.13 bn loss last year, CEO Eddie Lampert told investors that he intends to return the chain to profitability in five years. Apparently their loyalty program is the problem:
Shop Your Way members sign up to receive coupons, and free shipping, and earn points that can be converted into dollars. Membership also provides access to a “social commerce” community on shopyourway.com that lets shoppers see what merchandise their friends have "liked" or purchased. Sears, in return, receives rich data about these customers that helps it adapt more quickly to serving them.
The program has been Lampert's pet project of the last five years. But after defending it and explaining that building such a platform and changing customers' behavior requires a lot of patience, he admitted what a lot of skeptical observers have long assumed: Shop Your Way just isn't getting people to spend enough money.
He said the platform has an enormous number of registered members, but many of them are not as active as he would like. Three-quarters of Sears' revenue comes from registered Shop Your Way members, but many of them are not frequent buyers.
"Getting people engaged and interested is super-important," he said. "We've built the platform, (but) we've fallen short on getting them engaged. Are we really getting the bulk of their purchases? We want to serve our members deeper. If you shop with us 10 times a year and spend $300, we'd like you to shop 100 times a year and spend $3,000."
NO, you putz, the problem isn't your loyalty platform; it's that you, personally, have spent ten years turning Sears into someplace no one wants to shop. Have you even been inside one of your stores lately?
A few years ago I spent two days inside a Sears store that had been converted into a health-insurance company's head office. I have never worked in a more depressing environment, and I'm including in "never" the time I worked graveyard shifts in a dorm security booth in college.
Eddie, the only way the company can return to profitability in five years is if you terminate retail operations and sell the remaining assets to Seritage. But face it: you killed one of America's greatest brands, all by yourself.
This is Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s very first brick-and-mortar store, located just a few blocks from my house:
The store opened in November 1925, and is closing this summer, as a consequence of Eddie Lampert's rape and involuntary homicide of the company.
Our local NPR affiliate, WBEZ, has the complete story.
The driving reason behind ordering a new kick-ass development computer is that I am no longer the CTO of Holden LLC. The company and I worked together over the past two months to shift their technology support to a new partner organization and eliminate the CTO role entirely.
After leading the development of their flagship software product, I joined Holden, with the goal of transforming the technology side of the business into an quasi-independent product-development center. But over the past year, we realized that Holden's sweet-spot is in professional services, with software as one in a suite of tools to help enterprise customers sell better. So we decided as a team to retrench and concentrate on the areas where the company has traditionally done well.
It's been a fun ride the past 15 months, and I'm glad to have had the experience.
Meanwhile, I've been working on a number of possibilities, and I expect some exciting news sometime this quarter. Until then I'll be working under the Inner Drive Technology umbrella and building some tech skills I've put off for a while (I'm looking at you, Ruby).
Finally, the About This Blog page has changed a bit, which can be expected.
So watch this space. And no, despite the date of this announcement, this is real.
Not surprisingly, he behaves like a dick:
Though Trump is pitching himself to voters as a dealmaker who wins, the 12-year drama of the Trump International Hotel & Tower offers a more complicated narrative. While it reinforces his preferred image as a bold risk-taker and consummate salesman, it underscores his darker reputation as a bullying businessman willing to back out of deals and trash the competition when it's convenient. And that big TRUMP sign on the front of the building fits perfectly with the caricature of the developer as a narcissist and braggart.
Altogether, buyers of 43 condos—32 residential units and 11 hotel units—took advantage of [a 10% discount "friends and family"] deal, a group that included attorneys at DLA Piper, Trump's law firm, and architects at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, which designed the skyscraper. Some buyers demanded that Trump honor his original deal, and Trump backed down. Others were unwilling to jeopardize a valuable business relationship and simply accepted Trump's new terms without a fight.
Trump took on another group—his financial backers. Unable to pay off a maturing construction loan from a bank group led by Deutsche Bank, he sued them in 2008 for more time, citing a “force majeure” clause in his loan agreement. Such clauses are designed to give borrowers relief in the case of unforeseen, cataclysmic events, like floods or wars, but Trump argued that the financial crisis qualified. He also sought $3 billion in damages.
That a good 25% of American voters support this guy turns my stomach. But evidence about how he behaves, and how he repeatedly tries to screw his counterparties on deals, actually boosts his standing among those voters. Regardless of the outcome of this election—I'm hoping for something like the Whig implosion of 1852—it speaks poorly of our country that he's got this much support.