Ebay Adds Same Day Delivery In Dallas

Ebay Adds Same Day Delivery In Dallas
Startup Story: Finding Gaps in a Market Can Happen Purely by Chance
The Solution Revolution: How Organizations Are Solving Society’s Problems

Posted: 15 Dec 2013 01:00 PM PST

For now, it’s probably only important to consumers and large retailers. But there’s a faster way to get home delivery of online purchases than Amazon — at least in some cities.

The service is called Ebay Now. For a $5 fee, Ebay will deliver merchandise ordered over its Web or mobile Ebay Now platform the same day — often within the hour.

To accomplish this, Ebay is working with local retailers in the cities where the service is offered. Ebay’s local partners offer the merchandise for sale on Ebay’s platform. Then a courier delivers the merchandise from the local retailer to the customer.

It’s a new venture for a company up until now associated with online auctions. But it may end up being a real shot in the arm to brick and mortar businesses too. And that could even include small businesses someday.

Ebay Service Continues to Expand

Ebay added Dallas to the list of communities it serves with its same day delivery program this month. The company is touting its service as giving customers an opportunity to “shop locally.”

However, all the partners it is working with so far — Home Depot, Best Buy, Target, Office Depot and Macy’s to name a few — are national chains, reports The Dallas Morning News.

But it may not be that way indefinitely.

Will Small Businesses Benefit from Ebay Now?

In a post on the official Ebay Inc. blog in July, the company explained:

“Through eBay Now and other innovations coming later this year (such as the integration of in-store pickup onto eBay.com and a new shopping experience that connects consumers to small businesses in local neighborhoods), eBay is providing another channel for retailers to reach customers, while giving consumers additional choice in where, when and how they shop.”

So this suggests local small businesses might also someday be able to offer their merchandise for sale and speedy same day delivery through Ebay’s new service.

On the Other Hand…

Recently Ebay CEO John Donahue called Amazon’s plan to deliver packages by aerial drone a long-term fantasy, Bloomberg TV reported.

Ebay’s plans may be a bit far out too.

Consider that Ebay has currently launched its new service in five communities — Manhattan and Brooklyn, NYC Queens, the San Francisco peninsula, Chicago and Dallas.

There’s a goal of reaching 25 next year. However, the company had hoped to launch the service in Dallas and another city earlier this summer, so roll-out is clearly taking longer than expected.

The same may be true of launching partnerships with more than a handful of really big chains. So it could be a while before Ebay works with your business — or even comes to your town.

Image: Wikipedia

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Startup Story: Finding Gaps in a Market Can Happen Purely by Chance

Posted: 15 Dec 2013 09:00 AM PST

startup story

Successful entrepreneurial ventures are often based on business solutions and ideas that strive to plug a gap in the market. Once you identify the gaps and pain points, you work towards solutions and formulate a business idea.

And most often, finding the gaps in a market happens purely by accident rather than by design. It was also by chance that Ronnie Guha came upon the market for GeoLoqal, a mobile platform-as-a-service for location-specific applications.

Ronnie Guha, the co-founder of GeoLoqal, is a Chemical engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology. He is a self-confessed geek and has spent more than half of his 15-year career selling professional services and solutions at companies like IBM, Informatica, Oracle/BEA, and VMware.

Ronnie’s Startup Story

The story begins when Ronnie was testing out his parking finder app, SpotNPark. This real-time, geolocation-dependent app would crowd source street intelligence about parking and sell the info to drivers looking for parking. This app was targeting the biggest cities in the world where parking is a nightmare. While programming this app, Ronnie had to constantly walk/drive around the streets to "field test" the app – a major waste of time and money.

Ronnie realized that while millions of apps were being developed, none of the platforms provided a robust, scalable way to simulate and test user motion or geolocation worldwide. There is a distinctive shift towards location-relevant services, products, and apps. And before releasing, location-based apps had to be field tested. TeleNav and a few large Indian outsourcing firms he talked to confirmed that they either invested in field testing or won large field testing contracts.

He saw a gap in the market that he could capitalize on.

What Ronnie Did Next. . .

Ronnie next reached out to a former colleague, Amiya Mansingh who was the founder of Cobi, a consulting firm. They had both worked together for four years at a consulting firm. Amiya had built about 40 mobile apps and GIS (Geographical Information Systems), big data and fast data related fields with some fortune 500 companies. He had built the GIS extension for Aster Data and had a very good grasp of the complexities involved with GIS computation/calculations. He was one of the few that had worked on projects that involved segmenting the entire USA in 100X100m geolocation tiles and running risk calculations based on such tiles.

He understood the concept and the need for a platform like GeoLoqal – that is how GeoLoqal was born.

Amiya and Ronnie financed the company for the first couple of months with their own funds. They then took on big data consulting projects to bootstrap the company with services revenues. They went live with the product in January 2013. With a freemium model, they soon had about 300 users. As conversions became a challenge, they transitioned to a per device pricing model.

Moving Towards Customer Acquisition

Currently, GeoLoqal is focusing on enterprise customer acquisition. After the first few enterprise sales, it will aggressively target the profitable verticals through partner channels and OEMs. Its current revenue is at $100,000 and it expects to be profitable in the first quarter of 2014.

The main value-add that GeoLoqal offers is that powerful location-based solutions can be developed without investing in development/testing, which in turn significantly reduces the time to market for mobile application developers. Although iOS and Android provide geolocation simulation, they provide limited capabilities. Developers would still need to understand complex fundamentals like KML, GPX files to simulate locations.

GeoLoqal hopes to remove these complexities and reduce the cost as well as effort involved in field testing of location-based applications.

GeoLoqal is also working on a location-based marketing platform that will allow marketers to create hyperlocal, geotargeted SMS marketing campaigns. According to a JiWire report approximately 50% of mobile, on-the-go users are willing to exchange location tracking for more relevant content and better information and about 80% of mobile users prefer locally relevant advertising.

This indicates that the SoLoMo (Social Local Mobile) trend has been gaining popularity. With Apple's latest OS and iPhone release with iBeacon, this market is expected to pick up further and lead to increased demand for proximity marketing solutions.

As mobile gets more social and local, location-based platforms will be in play – and so will GeoLoqal that focuses on this niche.

Startup Photo via Shutterstock

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The Solution Revolution: How Organizations Are Solving Society’s Problems

Posted: 15 Dec 2013 06:00 AM PST

Solution Revolution The recent U.S. government shutdown may have caught headlines, but for a real look at government-private enterprise trends, look at how large cities like Chicago and New York are courting developers and start ups to access public data APIs to build applications to serve citizens better.

For example, I attended a Social Media Week Chicago panel that talked about an app meant to help better locate cars towed by the city.

William D. Eggers (@wdeggers) and Paul MacMillan, authors of The Solution Revolution: How Business, Government, and Social Enterprises Are Teaming Up to Solve Society’s Toughest Problems, has a phrase for this kind of tech environment – The Solution Economy. The book illuminates where government, business and organization are working together to build services that truly better society.

Eggers is an authority on government reform while MacMillan is a public sector management consultant and strategic advisor based in Canada. I learned about The Solution Revolution from Harvard Business Review and asked for a review copy.

My experience at Social Media Week Chicago offered a small glimpse into the current global trends Eggers and MacMillian reveal among enterprises. Budgets are strained, as Water Isaascson, author of Steve Jobs notes in the praise comments for The Solution Revolution:

“We all know that government can't afford to do everything these days…”

But with the need to spur economies forward despite budgetary concern, governments all over are investing in technological initiatives with private enterprises that hold the best promise in:

"We're still learning how government, business, investors and philanthropists can best create and expand flourishing markets in the solution economy. In India, the government has created a $1 billion "inclusive innovation fund" to spur private-sector solutions to some of the country's knottiest problems. Meanwhile, the Cameron government in the United Kingdom launched a £600 million fund in 2012 to help fund new societal problem solvers. . .Across the Atlantic, the Obama administration introduced a bevy of initiatives to support a growing solution sector, including a $50 million social innovation fund and a new Office of Social Innovation."

The solution economy, asserts Eggers and McMillian, is defined by 6 principle features:

Wavemakers, who solve problems.
Disruptive technology.
Business models.
Impact currencies.
Public-value exchange.
Solution ecosystems.

Solution Revolution
According to Eggers and MacMillan, it's not enough to have one or even each of the six. They note the environment in which the principles unleash economic value:

"…the real breakthroughs come from deftly weaving the elements together – doing so can make even the thorniest problems solvable."

Eggers and MacMillan hold the Gates Foundation as a Wavemaker example, noting how its substantial $37 billion endowment emboldens it to address large global concerns in a way that dwarfs the ambitions of well-known institutions such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

From examples like the Gates foundation, the authors do well in explaining the scope of the principles. Others are eye opening, such as Recyclebank, an organization that uses a form of gamification. It give households points for prizes in return for their recycling operation, using RFID chips on recycle bins to credit households based on weight.

Co-Founder Ron Gonen shared why inefficiency in transporting garbage spurred his choice for innovation:

“As I started looking at the recycling industry, I saw massive inefficiencies. Cities were sending tons of garbage far away and paying for transportation to landfills that were very expensive, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Anywhere there is such inefficiency, there is an opportunity.”

Other chapters teach the impact on world economies and are a good read on social issues. An eye-raising chapter include the topic of human trafficking. Many human trafficking schemes lure workers with the promise of honest jobs. Instead, workers are isolated from their families and friends, trapped in modern-day slavery from mining workers to nightwalkers.

A Brazilian worker highlighted his conditions such as drinking the same muddy water as the cattle he worked with. Agencies that fight these conditions are not well coordinated, though corporations are combating the issue through vetting their supplier base. Eggers and MacMillan note the importance of cooperative partnerships among other influences to better coordinate how social solution are deployed across governments:

"Government's willingness to forge partnerships (and vet those partners with accurate metrics), to make data more open, to contract for outcomes, to reduce regulatory minefields, and to convene diverse groups of contributors will hold tremendous sway over the scale of the solution economy within its borders."

I liked that the authors highlight societal concerns without reducing all aspects to just the number and facts.

To me, The Solution Revolution’s global economic viewpoint offers a broader view than Anna Bernasek's book The Economics of Integrity. But its purpose is meant for a different purpose. While Bernasek focuses on the correlation of branding and trust from a macroeconomic perspective, The Solution Revolution is meant to show how that perspective is enacted through the coalitions and enterprises being formed.

The Solution Revolution will instead shed light as to how to best approach concepts that can spur unique aspects of your business model like Recyclebank. This is especially valuable as technology widens its influence beyond a laptop and into other devices.

Get this book to broaden your view of the economy, and as a result, start a revolution in your field.

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