Seeking the next gen supply chain technology breakthroughs
The same day delivery space keeps on growing, now in the grocery space…
San Francisco-based same-day grocery delivery startup Instacart raised a $8.5 million series A round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Canaan Partners, Khosla Ventures, Paul Buchheit, and SV Angel. Instacart plans to expand outside of San Francisco by the end of 2014 and increase its current inventory of 70,000 items. Founded in 2012, Instacart has raised $10.8 million.
Image via CrunchBase
Google wants to do to physical
goods what it does with information: Get it to you fast.
To that end, Google is working on
a same-day shipping service dubbed ”Google Shipping Express, which will
compete with services like Amazon Prime and eBay Now, TechCrunch reports.
Besides being a data problem,
same-day shipping is a much larger infrastructure problem. How can Google
possibly match the network of shipping centers that Amazon has already built
up? The key, TechCrunch’s sources say, are local Target, Wal-Mart, and
Safeway stores, which would essentially serve as Google’s own
distribution centers (as vague and outlandish as that sounds).
There was once a time when I
would have been surprised to hear that Google is working on a same-day shipping
service — “Why would an information company care about shipping speed?”– but
that time is long gone. This is a company that’s working on self-driving cars
and wearable computers, after all. Nothing Google does surprises me much
anymore.
But I’m thinking same-day
shipping won’t be enough for Google, a company that repeatedly stresses that
its goal is to get you information before
you want it, not as you want it. “When we started Google 15 years ago, my
vision was that information would come to you as you need it. You wouldn’t have
to search query at all,” Sergey Brin said just last week .
While same-day delivery obviously
fits in with the Google of today, it’s not particularly tough to envision a
future iteration of the program that would ship you things before you need them.
“Pre-day shipping” would solve all the problems of shopping online that we
didn’t know we had. Make it happen, Google.
US City Sustainability (Photo credit: whiterice)
I have been looking at sustainability investments in the supply chain space for the last few years, ranging from Sustainable Minds, which is focused on designing greener products right from the start, to ecoshift, whose technology lets you determine the sustainability of your existing supply chain–as well as many other start ups in between.
The space is emerging for sure, witness the number of companies announcing sustainability initiatives. My primary issue with the start-ups is a lack of buyers inside companies. Lots of PR, but minimal executive level support, single person sustainability offices and no budgets–yet.
I am sure that the space will eventually take off. The question is when and the answer is above–when senior executives get on board, more people are involved, real sponsors and budgets emerge.
Until them, I remain on the sidelines…
Growth in Social Network Patent Applications (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Patent searches by startups looking at whether they can file new applications can be expensive and time consuming. While hiring a patent attorney is the best way to avoid pitfalls, one can reduce the costs by being smart up front on competitive patent applications.
Called Patent Advisor, service provides strategic insight based on analyzing more than 5 million patent applications.
The system also enables users to utilize a number of dashboard services related to IP assets and application statuses. Reed is a subsidiary of law service LEXIS-NEXIS.
Image via CrunchBase
According to TechCrunch, Google is stealthily preparing to launch an Amazon Prime competitor called “Google Shopping Express.” According to one source the service will be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime, so $69 or $64 a year and offer same-day delivery from brick-and-mortar stores like Target, Walmart, Walgreens and Safeway (though no specifics were mentioned by our sources).
When and if it launches, the product will be a competitor to Amazon Prime, eBay Now, Postmates’“Get It Now” and even smaller startups like Instacart.
The project is being run by Tom Fallows, an e-commerce product manager at Google, and is an effort to focus Google’s e-commerce initiatives. Google Wallet and Google Shopping need a focal point, and serving as a “store shelf” to big-name retailers could be that in. Google has been scrambling for a way to capitalize on its advantages in the space — the fact that it’s arguably one of the first places people visit when they want to find a product — for a while.
If the Google Shopping Express service debuts publicly, and we have no reason to think that it won’t, this would mean that the company could capitalize on its recent acquisitions of bothBufferBox and Channel Intelligence to dominate the online-to-offline retail market. Google could possibly use its BufferBox delivery lockers to facilitate the ease of shipment — like what Amazonhas been testing in Seattle, New York and the UK. It could use Channel Intelligence’s data-management platform to coordinate sales and delivery.
Fresh Vegetables Supply Chain, Assam Style! (Photo credit: Koshyk)
Here is an interesting startup in Seattle, building tablet apps to better manage supply chain networks.
In their own words, "We created Mercury to fix what was limiting suppliers, manufacturers and retailers. As we see it, all products and players in the supply chain need to be connected and easily accessed. Our number one goal is to create efficiency for our clients by providing an app that forms a lean, mean streamlined sales process to make those connections, while also reducing costs and eliminating order errors."
We'll keep an eye on them…
Image via CrunchBase
According to TI Weekly, the vast Chinese e-retailing business, Alibaba has begun to develop its logistics infrastructure with the announcement of a joint venture called 'Cainiao Network Technology' (translated as 'Rookie Network Technology'), which in turn will manage the 'China Smart Logistics Network'.
The new company will reportedly have a capitalisation of over US$16bn and will look to invest US$48bn in assets. 10% of the joint venture will be owned by the Shanghai-based investment company, Forsun International, with other partners reported to be the Intime Department Store Group and the logistics companies Shentong Express, ZTO Express and YTO Express, as well as other investors. However, it is not known if the latter group of express companies will be involved in the management of the new company.
Alibaba has already stated that it wished to invest in logistics in China; with its founder Executive Chairman Jack Ma saying that both the prices and the quality of service were inadequate to support the growth of his business. The objective of the new company will be to provide a 24-hour response time for e-commerce to 2,000 cities in China. The company will also look to develop internet tools to offer logistics capabilities to other companies looking to enter e-commerce in China. These tools appear to be in the area of order tracking and visibility.
Mr Ma said earlier in the year that he expected internet retailing volumes in China to increase eight-fold within ten years, seeing parcel activity of around 200m items a day.
Alibaba is also rumoured to be planning to float its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange in the near future. The company, which is possibly worth as much as US$70bn, is partly owned by Yahoo, the US based internet service company.
Bloomingdale's (Photo credit: vpickering)
In Charles Morris' excellent book, The Dawn of Innovation, he observes that "the 1866 Bloomingdale's catalog–160 pages containing 1,700 products from ladies' corsets to pistols–advised clients to send a follow-up inquiry if they had not received an order confirmation within ten days after they had posted the order, but to allow fifteen days if they lived on the West Coast. As Morris points out, billions of dollars in supply chain investments underlay that offer. Just twenty years before, at the end of the CIvil War, there were only a few hundred miles of railroad track west of the Mississippi. Even by the 1870s, vast regions of Bloomingdale's 1866 catalog market had been reachable only by wagon train.
But by 1866, the backbone of the national rail system was already in place, along with fast-freight forwarding companies, telegraph-based delivery tracking and financial settlement systems, insurance and newly invented bills of lading that guided a delivery through the railroad maze.
And therein lies the secret of the American surge in per capita growth. It wasn't advanced technology. Throughout the nineteenth century, American were students to the British in steel making and most other science-based industries. Where the American wrote the rulebook, however, was in mass production, mass marketing, and mass distribution. The great nineteenth century American economic innovation, in short, was the first mass-consumption society."
So in the twenty odd years from 1870 to 1866, we see the birth of America's supply chain as we know it today–mostly rail and water then, but providing the ability deliver packages coast to coast. I can remember driving into Boston to pick up a TV shipment that came from Sears by Railway Express in 1969. The agent walked out the door and retrieved it from a box car on the siding. How far we have come…
English: Main locations of the War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom Français : Principaux théâtres d'opérations de la Guerre de 1812 entre les États-Unis et le Royaume-Uni. Español: Principales teatros de operaciones de la Guerra de 1812 entre los Estados Unidos y el Reino Unido. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Charles Morris' The Dawn of Innovation chronicles the first industrial revolution in the United States. In the first decades of the 19th century, America went from a largely rural economy, with little internal transportation infrastructure, to an industrial powerhouse. Morris details three uniquely American innovations–universal male suffrage, the shift of political power from the elites to the middle classes and the move to mechanized mass production–that resulted in the world's first democratic, middle class, mass consumption society.
He starts his narrative in an unusual place–the Great Lake at the brink of the War of 1812. America and England are locked in a battle of oneupmanship, seeing who can build the biggest and most powerful fleet of ships to control the lakes. The wierd thisng is that the navies rarlely battle, due to a combination of weather, unfair advantage and conservative commanders. But the shipbuilding boom does set the stage for many innovations, including mass production of warships, that served as a precurser for industry changes that set the stage for the revolution.
Morris crosses a wide range of industries in his journey–the role of steam engines in the mill waterworks in Lowell, Massachusetts, the global markets won by American gun makers, like Samuel Colt, building western steamboats to open midwest agriculture to new markets and mass produced clocks by Henry Shreve, which quickly took over the English market due to low cost and high reliability.
Publisher's Weekly summarizes his primary lessons well: “Morris's analysis shines brightest in the final chapter as he compares the United State's past economic growth with the current hyper-expansion of China. Only then, by examining the hurdles China faces in its ascendance to economic superpower, does Morris show how truly innovative the transformation of America was and why it will be impossible to repeat in the future.”
Business Model Triangle (Photo credit: Alex Osterwalder)
I often get asked for a simple template for developing a business model for a start up.
Here's one that makes you get your idea onto one page–an important reality check for any new idea:
http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas
A VC in Vacationland 