Yes, they sure do, just got the latest issue by mail this week. If I'm not completely mistaken (the magazine is at home) it shows phones that were taken out of business.
They also still have picture prominently featuring '2600' somewhere.
You may want to rethink the use of hyphens in your domain name. I can't tell you how much I came to regret my choice of using a hyphenated domain after a while. I promise that you will quickly tire of telling people "Check out the site at The dash local dash kitchen dot com."
LocalKitchenKit.com is available... I'd just steer clear of those hyphens if I were you ;)
Thanks for your advice. I am pretty sure I wont use the name for the final launch of the product. I believe localkitchen also doesn't represent the service and product to its full extend.
I am still searching for the 'best possible' name. ;)
I think you hit the nail on the head. With all of the resources that are currently available on the internet, it is easier than ever for a non-technical person to learn enough about programming for them to piece together a programatic solution to a wide variety of problems.
In an age where many people spend 40+ hours per week in front of a computer screen, even a small marginal increase in a computer user's productivity could save them hundreds of hours a year. As a result, it seems like a completely reasonable investment of a non-technical person's time and energy to learn enough about programming to enable them to scrap together a program that allows them to accomplish simple tasks more efficiently.
Would a professional programmer be able to write better code more quickly? Of course. But would a person with zero programming knowledge even recognize when a particular task they are spending hundreds of hours each year manually performing could easily be automated? Probably not.
Shipping consolidators pick up a shipper's parcels, sort and route them, then enter them into the Postal system for final delivery.
A shipping consolidator startup would be able to offer many of the value-added services on your wishlist without facing the barriers of starting a stand-alone national carrier or the limitations associated with local/regional carriers.
Of course, you lose control of the actual handling of the package after turning it over to a 3rd party carrier. Still, I'd imagine that a shipping consolidator using RFID data could develop a sufficiently sophisticated predictive model capable of providing much more accurate delivery estimates than those provided by the UPS, FedEX, et al.
But I don't want to go to FedEx Kinkos to ship a package. I live in the city and its a pain in the ass to walk 5 blocks with a couple of big packages and stand in line at a Kinkos. I want shipping a package to be as simple as receiving a package. Then, I want to be able to receive more useful information on the package's status delivered in real time to my smartphone.
If there are enough low-volume customers willing to pay a premium for a higher level of service, then it might might economic sense. Sure, a small individual customer isn't giving them enough business to be worth making all of these expensive changes, but the aggregate of all small customers combined might.
It isn't quite like replacing the meat section with a vegetarian section... its more like adding an organic foods section to a supermarket. Those supermarkets still might make most of their money on things like the meat, but certain people willing to pay a premium for perceived quality take advantage of the organic section. People who want meat can still buy meat, but there are enough people who buy organic to make it worth dedicating the shelf space.
Edit: I wonder if the reason we don't see this level of service in the market yet is because the type of players who would benefit most from these features are likely to be small local/regional carriers who lack the expertise/resources to develop and implement the technology. If I'm in Chicago and I need to get some time-sensitive documents to a law firm by the end of the day, I call a small local courier.
Perhaps the best solution would be a third-party SaaS platform that offers these advanced logistics/tracking/service features and targets smaller local/regional carriers. A single third party developer could spread development costs over a large number of customers in order to build a much more robust platform than would be economically feasible to develop in-house.
I don't anything about couriers' systems to have an idea whether or not it would be feasible to build something that integrates with them (or how difficult it would be to design one end-to-end).
If you could design the thing end-to-end, I wonder if switching barriers would make adoption difficult.
Section 7(a)(G)(ii)(IX) would require that crowdfunding intermediaries require "each potential investor to answer questions demonstrating competency in" understanding various types of risks involved in such investments. Should the SEC be required to provide a list of questions which, if answered correctly by potential investors, would provide a safe-haven to the intermediary? If not, should the bill be more specific with regard to the level of competency to be demonstrated?
Sec. 7(a)(G)(ii)(XI) requires intermediaries to carry out a background check on the issuer's principals. What must such a background check consist of in order to satisfy this criteria? How is this information to be used? (kept on file by intermediary? Disclosed to potential investors? Filed with the commission?)
Dennis Chookaszian, former CEO of CNA Insurance Companies, recently told me "Pick Two: Work, Family, Personal. I have never known anyone to be successful at all three." This message resonated with me.
Chookaszian has chosen work and family. By all accounts, he has been very successful professionally and the stories he recounts about his family, casually woven into almost every conversation I've had with him, I am lead to believe that he has also managed to maintain great relationships with his wife and children.
In order to pursue successful and meaningful work and family lives, he had to give up his personal interests. As a young man he loved working on cars. He got a great deal of enjoyment out of fixing up old Porshes. About 30 years ago he purchased a Porshe that needed an engine rebuild. He took the engine out of the car and began working on it. Meanwhile, he got married and had children. Where is that engine today? It sits, neglected, in the same place and condition that he left it in 30 years ago. "I now know that engine will still be sitting there long after I am gone," he quipped.
In that same conversation, he also made another keen observation: "When someone says that they want 'work/life balance,' what they really mean is that they don't want to be in an executive position." For CEOs of successful companies, there isn't such thing as work/life balance. If you want that balance, you can be successful in middle management, but only those who are truly passionate and dedicated to their work make successful CEOs.
To illustrate the point, he mentioned a recent email he received from the CEO of a company. Chookaszian is a director on the board of the firm, and the company was dealing with a crisis. The CEO wanted to let him know that he would be out of town for about a week on vacation. The notion that someone would follow through with vacation plans in the midst of a company crisis was, in his view, absurd. "As a director, when I heard news of the company crisis, I cut short my ski trip with my wife and flew home on the next flight in order to deal with the issue." If the CEO felt that his vacation plans superseded his obligations as a CEO, it wasn't likely that he would have a job to come back to after his trip.
This doesn't mean that you can't have a solid relationship with your family. However, success in business requires that you first fulfill your obligation to the company and its constituents. That duty will require sacrifice. It will require long hours at the office, vacations cut short, and kids' soccer games missed. When there is a critical decision to be made at the company, that must come first. The additional difficulty in the start-up context is that, in a company's infancy, critical decisions are being made almost constantly.
However, it also doesn't mean that you can't maintain happy relationships with your family members, but something has got to give. Namely, personal interests must be sacrificed.
