Amazon warehouses have more square footage than 700 Madison Square Gardens put together. The company does so many sales that in 2012, when its homepage went offline for 49 minutes, it lost approximately $5.7 million. Today that number would be higher: roughly $8.2 million for missing less than an hour of sales as a 24/7 e-commerce store. [Read more…]
The Taxi Cab Cartel – Round Two
Think about all the products and services we use all the time. TVs, phones, computers, cars, cameras, fast-food restaurants, coffee shops. How have they changed over the past 10 years or more? A lot or a little? You’d probably say a lot. And you’d be right. Flat screen TVs that hang like picture frames, touchscreen phones that work like mini computers, actual computers that are smaller and more powerful than the ones that put man on the Moon, cars that run on a mixture of gasoline and electricity, and cameras the size of a fingernail to name several. [Read more…]
The Taxi Cab Cartel
Take a trip down memory lane and try to recall the last time you had a great experience in a taxi…and were sober. Maybe the seats were unusually comfortable and the interior impeccably clean. Perhaps you were offered a chilled bottle of water or provided a generous selection of reading material to pass the time. Maybe, a bad experience was turned into a great one–your driver got a little lost along the way, making you late to your destination, so he waived the charge and said “This one’s on me.” [Read more…]
The Good Fortune of a Missed Flight
When I got to the end of the jetway at the sprawling Changi Airport in Singapore, a cart was waiting for me. The Singapore Airlines employee sitting behind the wheel knew he’d spotted the passenger he’d been waiting for when he looked at me and said, “San Francisco?” I nodded, knowing that my connecting flight from Kuala Lumpur had arrived late, and I was at risk of missing my connection—an 18-hour marathon of a flight back to the U.S. [Read more…]
Tesla vs the Man
Tesla doesn’t play nice. When it comes to industry neighborliness, Tesla is the one guy in the cul-de-sac who insists on painting his house an association-prohibited shade of green. But if you thought homeowner’s associations were power hungry, try state dealer associations. [Read more…]
