Innovating in an Age of Personalization

While most of us continue to make fun of smart cup Vessyl, it keeps on going. After selling $1 million in pre-orders and hiring former Apple andNike execs, Mark One, the company behind Vessyl, is revealing today that investors gave it money before any of us even began to write our “smart cup” jokes.

Mark One announced today that it closed $3 million in seed funding to make some new hire and to help with the manufacturing process.

Vessyl, Mark One’s first product, is a cup equipped with sensors that detect what is inside the cup, and it displays a variety of data about the cup’s content both on the cup itself and through a mobile app. Pre-orders opened in mid-June, and it has since sold out. The cup is slated to ship in “early 2015,” founder and chief executive Justin Lee told me.

But as I’ve written before, however silly this all sounds, something must be brewing under the smart cup’s cap as it keeps attracting top talent and investor interest. Mark One enlisted Felicis Ventures and Horizons Ventures to co-lead this funding round, along with participation from Collaborative Fund among others.

Disclosure:  Felicis Ventures founder Aydin Senkut is one of VentureBeat’s investors.

Collaborative Fund founder and partner Craig Shapiro actually has a personal interest in the Vessyl. Lee told me that he met Shapiro back in 2011 when he was still in the research and development phase, and Shapiro immediately took interest as he was already in the habit of carrying a water bottle around, largely to stay well hydrated at all times. He also shared with Lee how much better regular hydration has made him feel, especially as an avid runner.

China is on Mark One’s map

Companies choose their investors for a variety of reasons, but Mark One was particularly interested in Felicis Ventures, which recently closed a new fund, and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures because of their investors’ experience with markets outside of North America.

“One of the things that we’re noticing is that international is becoming more and more important as we look at the data,” said Lee.

Although Mark One closed the round before it launched its pre-orders campaign, Lee told me that the company has gotten orders from more than 75 countries. This international interest is largely the reason why the company has decided to ship a second batch and widen the opportunity to customers in as many countries as possible. It’s also why investors with international experience will come in handy. Felicis Ventures has invested in Finland’s Roku and Canada’s Shopify, among other international investments, and Horizons Ventures, Li Ka-shing’s venture capital firm, has invested in a number of countries.

Ka-shing and Horizons also have a particularly strong foothold in China, where Ka-shing is chairman of Cheung Kong Holdings, an multinational conglomerate whose portfolio includes retail.

“Li Ka-shing has some great relationships in China. And we’ll think about when the right time is to make China a big focus of ours. For any company, China is important, and that’s some conversations we’re having with Horizons about what we should do there,” Lee told me

Frankly, it’s not hard to imagine Mark One getting on retail shelves in China and other parts of Asia as quickly as it can in North America with those relationships.

Lee also told me that Horizons Ventures’s Bart Swanson is also personally interested in the Vessyl and its purpose, though he wasn’t quite sure if Swanson has pre-ordered his own yet. “I would think so,” he said.

The news that the average cost of a Facebook ad had jumped 123 percent compared to a year ago was disheartening for small businesses.

Until recently, growing businesses and startups had found the social media site an affordable place to post ads. But competition for Facebook’s limited ad space had become fierce, prompting the company to look for ways to offer more effective ads for a premium price.

Since many small businesses have limited ad budgets, blowing an entire month’s advertising budget on one Facebook ad is likely not an option. Because Facebook advertisers pay for each click, the extra expense snuck up on many of them, appearing on their monthly statement gradually over the past few months.

What’s more, brands haven’t exactly been enthusiastic about the results they get when advertising through the site, claiming little ROI.

If your small business is looking for an alternative to Facebook, here are a few options to explore.

Twitter

While Twitter still hasn’t passed Facebook in popularity, the site has 271 million monthly active users. The micro blogging site tries to attract SMBs through the Twitter Ads program, which allows businesses to set their own campaign objectives. Once those are in place, businesses pay only for user actions that specifically align with those objectives, helping save money on wasted clicks. The fact that campaigns are based on a business’s overall objectives also ensures each ad placement is as effective as possible.

Reddit

With more than 17 million unique visitors each month, Reddit is a serious contender for small business ad dollars. The company is specifically reaching out to SMBs with ad prices as low as $5 with a CPM of $0.75. The site has Subreddits, where users are divided into categories based on their specific interests, and businesses can take advantage of that by placing ads to users in categories relevant to their products or services.

Pinterest

This scrapbooking-style website has a customer base that enjoys sharing information about unique products with other members. Its business model makes it ideal for small business advertisers who are often interested in introducing new products to consumers. Pinterest allows advertisers to bid on ad units specific to various categories, such as home décor or fashion.

LinkedIn

For B2B brands or companies that target professionals, LinkedIn can be a great resource. The site offers ad prices beginning at $10 per day. With LinkedIn, businesses get to choose which of the site’s members see the ad and where ads are displayed. Advertisers also set a budget for their campaigns, including how much they’re willing to pay for each click. Because ads are targeted to only those members you want to see them, you’ll reduce the amount you pay on wasted clicks from people who wouldn’t be interested in your brand.

The rising costs of advertising on Facebook are sure to send many small businesses in search of alternatives. There are many other similar sites that can offer a better ROI while still allowing you to remain within your advertising budget. Find the demographics that are right for your brand and choose your ad strategies accordingly.

Purveyors of hidden investment fees have reason to be concerned today.

FeeX just announced it raised $6.5 million in a second round of institutional funding, which will be used to continue expansion across the U.S. and to extend the company’s services beyond finding those pesky hidden investment fees on all kinds of accounts including IRA, 401(k), 403(b), 457, and brokerage accounts. The service evaluates a customers’ investments and presents a big picture view of all of their fees using its proprietary algorithms. From there, FeeX gives customers ideas as to how to reduce their fees.

With the new funding round, the company will be able to expand its service offerings to find hidden fees in banking, credit cards, mortgages, and other markets.

Horizon Ventures led the round, with previous investor Blumberg Capital also participating. This latest injection of capital raises the total funds raised to $9.6 million.

FeeX estimated that people pay as much as a third of their savings in hidden fees over their lifetimes, said Yoav Zurel, CEO of FeeX, in a press release.

FeeX was founded in August 2012 and launched in the U.S. in March 2014. It already has more than 60,000 users and protects $1 billion in assets. It also has identified $277 million in savings for its customers. The company previously received $3 million funding in August 2013 in a round led by Blumberg Capital. It’s currently based in New York.

By design, the Internet trends towards monopoly: There’s one major social network (Facebook), search engine (Google), encyclopedia (Wikipedia) business network (LinkedIn), classified-ads website (Craigslist), retail site (Amazon), auction site (eBay), and micro-blogging service (Twitter).

“Over the long haul, competition has been the exception, monopoly the rule,” explained father of Net Neutrality, political candidate, and law professor Tim Wu.

In the tech crash of the early 2000s, on-demand delivery services like Kozmo and Webvan weren’t just among the most colossal failures. They also became a sort of grim joke, symbolizing the excess that portended the bust. Afterward, conventional wisdom hardened: Web-enabled delivery was not a good business because it simply cost too much to build warehouses, manage an inventory and pay drivers. There was too little opportunity to recoup expenditures in delivery fees; people will pay only so much for toilet paper to be delivered before they decide to fetch it themselves.

But something is in the air of late, making hindsight blurry. Despite the early demise of Rewinery and the shrunken ambitions of others, such as eBay Now, similar start-ups with names like Caviar, SpoonRocket and DoorDash have raised half a billion dollars in investment in the last year, according to CB Insights, which tracks venture capital. Even Louis Borders, the founder of Webvan (as well as the Borders bookstore chain, another Internet casualty), is at work on a grocery delivery start-up. Uber is using the $1.4 billion it just raised to expand beyond delivering people to delivering things. Meanwhile, venture capitalists joke that every other entrepreneur they meet pitches an “Uber for X,” bringing goods and services on demand: laundry (Washio), ice cream (Ice Cream Life), marijuana (Eaze) and so on. Investors are stuck wondering whether this is 2000 all over again, or whether this new breed of delivery start-ups can succeed where the last crop so famously failed.

John A. Deighton, a Harvard Business School professor who wrote a case study on Webvan, likes to compare the delivery business to shining shoes. “You make as much profit on one shoe as you do on a thousand shoes,” he said. “There’s just no scale.” In years past, it was difficult for Deighton to even teach his students about Webvan, because its fatal flaws were so obvious. They didn’t understand how the euphoria of the dot-com boom could have obscured its shortcomings. But in the last year, he has been asked to teach it three times. “Something has changed,” he said.

The biggest change is that the companies are trying to improve same-day delivery with software — and, at the same time, are distancing themselves as far as possible from the physical supply chain that killed their ancestors. They have dispensed with warehouses, trucks and full-time drivers and instead have become middlemen, whose sole role is to connect customers with couriers. But the one piece of the puzzle they have failed to eliminate is the hardest part of logistics, and the one Deighton says makes the entire business model unravel: the last few miles of the journey, getting small-ticket orders to far-flung houses.

“The reason it is such a good idea now is the exact same reason it was so horrible before: the network effect,” said Nabeel Hyatt, a venture partner at Spark Capital, which has invested in Postmates, a courier service that delivers from any store or restaurant. Not even half of American households had an Internet connection in 1999; today 98 percent have access to a connection. And it certainly helps that customers and couriers all have smartphones. This means a higher density of users and potential users, who can instantly reach couriers whenever they are in need, eventually leading to scale.

In the ’90s, Webvan built several $35 million, 350,000-square-foot distribution centers. By contrast, Instacart, which offers one-hour grocery delivery in 12 cities, has just 70 employees in a small office in San Francisco, all of them engineers and administrators. They never touch the food — instead they contract with “personal shoppers.” “We literally don’t have any warehouses, we don’t have any trucks,” said Aditya Shah, Instacart’s general manager.

Of course, the couriers still need to be paid. “The complicated part is not getting customers, it’s getting the product to the customers,” said Paulo Lerner, Rewinery’s founder, who fled San Francisco for Brazil. “If they charge a lot, it loses the appeal. If they charge less, it has a lot of appeal, but at the same time, they are running on losses.”

Instacart charges as little as $3.99 for grocery shopping and delivery. Yet Shah said its shoppers make about $20 an hour, plus tips, which makes profitability seem unlikely, even with the smartest algorithms routing shoppers through grocery stores and city streets. When I told him that, he sounded a lot like Borders back in Webvan’s heyday: “We’re really well funded, so that is not something we’re as worried about,” Shah said. “Growth is the most important factor.”

That growth-first philosophy is hardly unpopular in Silicon Valley, where a focus on expansion at the expense of profit has worked well for web businesses. Delivery start-ups are trying to bridge the digital and physical worlds — and that’s when things get expensive. “It’s a hard category — outside the Internet, where everything magically happens,” said Lerner, the Rewinery founder. “This is real work, hard work. ”

Josh Lerner (no relation to Paulo), who runs the entrepreneurial management unit at Harvard Business School, is similarly dubious. “Someone is paying for it, but it’s definitely something that seems to defy the laws of introductory economics,” he said.

The question comes down to how much people are willing to pay to be lazy. To economists, laziness isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To the sympathetic onlooker, these companies could be a step on the path to the world prophesied by John Maynard Keynes (and even “The Jetsons”), in which technology advances to the point that chores are replaced by leisure time. But even this suggests a gloomy outcome: On-demand delivery could create a two-tier economy — the people who can afford to hire others to do their errands and the people who do them. That is, unless Amazon succeeds in automating grunt work out of existence. (It already has robots that pick items off shelves and pack them in boxes; it wants to have a fleet of delivery drones.)

Or it might be useful to listen to Fred Wilson, the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, who lost a lot of money on Kozmo. “I wish we knew the answers to these questions, but we don’t,” he told me. “That’s what’s kept us out of this market.” He still signs up for new delivery start-ups as a customer, though. After all, the worst case is that we’ll go back to doing the same thing I did when Rewinery went under — running out to the store.

As we celebrated the importance of fathers yesterday, I wished “Happy Father's Day” to LinkedIn. I find thinking of LinkedIn as a symbolic father figure. LinkedIn will not hesitate to reprimand me for not listening or reward for being an upstanding citizen it expects me to be. LinkedIn is like my dad has a set of rules to abide by to help me be a better person.

1. 'Don't talk to strangers' rule: the number one rule of LinkedIn is to only send invitations to people you know and who know you. This is where a personalized invitation comes into play to set a proper context of your relationship with the invitee.

2. 'Be presentable when in public' rule: it is of vital importance to have a professional profile accompanied by a professional headshot that shows what an accomplished professional you are. LinkedIn wants you to put your best foot forward and have an optimized profile that works as your digital resume.

3. 'Be mindful of what other people find interesting' rule: when posting updates to the audience at large or in groups, LinkedIn recommends sharing topics of relevance and value. Self-promotional and salesy updates are frowned upon.

4. 'Spend your money wisely' rule: LinkedIn membership is free for everyone who wants to join. If you don't want to be like everybody else, you can become a Premium member with access to more features and insider information. With the introduction of the Premium Spotlight membership, you can't go wrong.

5. 'Think of your future' rule: LinkedIn wants you to position yourself the way you want people to see you. The personal branding will make or break you.

Every time I am on LinkedIn, I think of my dad and it is a good thing. LinkedIn has guided me and helped me grow professionally and personally. I got reprimanded a few times too. All is part of my professional evolution and testing the boundaries just like I did with my dad.

The software industry may be building apps for mobile devices, but its employees are the least mobile. While software companies create and consume significantly more content than companies in the other four industries we studied, they’re not doing so from mobile devices. In fact, employees at construction firms are 40 percent more likely to use smartphones and tablets to access and share information.

The flow of information in financial services is strikingly centralized. This pattern is most visible in a collaboration graph depicting the work pattern among workers at a financial services firm. The map shows a highly centralized organizational structure with little cross-organizational interaction when working with content. Underscoring the depth of contrast, employees at media and entertainment firms are twice as likely as those in financial services to be sources of information for their colleagues and partners.

Construction firms are the most collaborative in working with people outside their business. Predictably, our study revealed a wide spectrum in how often companies in different verticals collaborate with external parties. However, we were surprised to discover that construction firms leverage the cloud to collaborate with outside partners roughly twice as much as companies from any other sector. Combined with this sector’s high degree of mobility (as construction ranks first for mobile access), it’s likely that this industry’s lack of technology use in prior eras enabled it to leapfrog its formerly more tech-savvy peers, which are still making the transition from legacy tools.

When studied carefully, innovative organizations are consistently able to do the following:

LISTEN

Members of an organization’s internal and external community often have tremendous insights and ideas that lead to new innovations.

STAY OPEN

Ideas don’t always come from experts. Sometimes the greatest innovations come from novices and backroom tinkers. Open-minded organizations often convert off-the-wall ideas into marketable products.

COLLABORATE

No organization holds all the cards in developing new innovation. Collaboration with outside groups--complementary corporations, universities, government agencies, and think tanks--often brings new perspectives and ideas to the innovation process.

GO FLAT

A flat management structure doesn’t have the long approval processes and disjointed lines of communications that impede innovation. Organizations that can’t go flat in management can achieve the same results by empowering workers to act independently.

EMBRACE FAILURE

Many of the greatest innovations’ leapfrogs were unintended results and, oftentimes, created by accident. Breakthroughs such as the discovery of penicillin or the power of microwaves were the result of accidents.

An innovative culture begins with the organizational attitude of accepting that the world really has changed. It’s about cultivating a mindset to learn to see the world in new ways.

Don’t you hate watching someone work on a ‘solution’ to fix a problem that has already been solved? This is what’s currently happening in the digital media space for television with audience measurement and tracking.

Even though today’s TV everywhere deployments seem fresh and new, the reality is that the ad industry has been laying the foundation for years. Today, there are robust and vibrant means though which audiences are measured, tracked, and targeted. Take audience measurement as an example — today’s digital media players on devices, in apps, and on webpages are just as capable of measuring precisely how long a viewer is connected in the same way Nielsen measures television viewing in the home. But when it comes to advertisements, TV everywhere experiences shine.

In the digital media world, ads can be personalized in a much more relevant, efficient and applicable fashion (think location,  viewing history, one-to-one connection with the cloud).  For measurement and effectiveness of ads themselves, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released a specification known as the Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) to standardize the communication requirements between video players and the ad servers.  Using this technology, we are able to measure audiences, advertisements and impact as well, if not better than broadcast.

Enter the new Nielsen ad measuring software development kit (SDK), which is touted as a single point of measurement for broadcasters (aka those running a traditional linear TV experience) to track additional viewers during programming and the ads included with it. The problem with Nielsen’s SDK is that it’s a “television 1.0″ solution that is late in arriving to the scene for a “television 2.0″ that is just now beginning to hit its stride.

Those running an on-demand or TV everywhere content platform have already solved the measurement problem, and can, in fact, measure audiences in a much more informed manner than broadcast. They do this via individualized internet delivery, which enables much more robust targeting and delivery of programming and ad payload to the user. This method also allows for leveraging metrics like viewing behavior, location, device, and authentication. Yet, there is still a disconnect between these different viewing screens and platforms.  The solution here would be for both platforms — broadcast and digital — to synchronize on a standard which leverages the best of both worlds.

Digital ad models don’t account for over-the-air payloads, and traditional television ads still fetch the highest percentage of advertising spend. Yet, trends show us that advertiser spending on digital ads is increasing with amazing velocity. Over time, brand advertisers will eventually pay higher rates (called CPM) to reach the highly targetable viewer I mentioned earlier. Both models can and should adjust to account the growing number of TV everywhere eyeballs.

Rather than old dogs trying to learn new tricks and pushing a non-standardized way of measuring programmatic content and the ads that exist there, I submit that a more federated approach should be considered.

Programmers and content creators agree that support for all screens is a must have, and revenue patterns are emerging. During a TV Everywhere panel recently at The Independent Show, a trade show for cable operators and programmers, BJ Elias, vice president of advanced services at Fox Networks, said that they derive revenue from both subscription (traditional cable and DBS distribution) and advertising (over-the-top) delivery models. As we’re all well aware, most of the money networks make is driven by those distribution relationships with cable and satellite providers.

However, as TV everywhere becomes simply ‘television’ (independent of the screen on which it is viewed) the ad spend will normalize across both platforms. And the means through which we measure viewership and ad consumption will matter even more. The choices we make and solutions we deploy now will bear more fruit in the days ahead. But only if we don’t apply multiple solutions to the same problem.

A new survey from TrustRadius shows that conversion rate optimization software (CRO) is on the rise but that no one vendor is able to provide customers with all the tools they need.

“CRO is becoming more important as companies look for ways to improve their website’s effectiveness,” TrustRadius CEO Vinay Bhagat said in a statement. “Low-cost, easy-to-use tools have propelled a broader spectrum of companies to analyze website traffic and experiment with website changes. It’s therefore no surprise that companies of all sizes are increasingly investing in CRO software and skillsets.”

But the results of TrustRadius’ survey, which was conducted throughout July and August, show that organizations are using several tools for their CRO needs. In fact, the report paints a complex and fragmented picture.

91 percent of respondents are using two or more tools for digital analytics, including Google, KISSmetrics, CrazyEgg, and WebTrends. Nearly half of respondents said they are using two or more tools for A/B split testing, such as Optimizely, Unbounce, and SiteSpect.

 

Interestingly, while you might expect those that have more mature CRO processes to use fewer tools, the opposite is true. The longer a company has been working on CRO processes, the more software solutions it employs.

To help navigate the available software solutions, which include analytics and A/B split testing products, TrustRadius has announced a new Buyer’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization Software, downloadable from its website without charge.

The study also shows that CRO software spend is going to increase next year, a potential indicator that CRO solutions are seen as worthwhile and adding to the bottom line.

44 percent of the companies surveyed spend more than $10,000 annually for A/B split testing solutions, and 19 percent spend more than $50,000. Almost half of all respondents said they are going to spend more money on those tools in the coming year.

As we reported recently, analytics features are among the most popular additions to marketing automation suites. I wondered if this drive for analytics is helping to increase the popularity of CRO solutions or if it is the other way around.

“I think those features are actually the result of an increase in CRO interest,” Bhagat told me. “The bigger driver is the proliferation of low-cost and, in some cases, free tools in both A/B testing and analytics and an increasing realization that driving traffic is expensive, and therefore sub-optimal CRO is costly.”

So while the larger marketing suites get in on the analytics act, it is the smaller, more cost-effective tools that appear to be winning customers over.

With so many solutions in the CRO world and the lack of a clear winner in the space, what does Bhagat think the future will hold?

“In analytics, there’s a trend towards tracking behavior at an individual level in order to track customers across channels and devices, connecting analytics data to customer or even third-party information. All of this helps drive dynamic personalization of content, but that’s only among the most advanced,” Bhagat said.

CRO remains a more business to consumer–centric space at present, and Bhagat notes that retail, financial services, travel, and hospitality are the main verticals served. CRO may require a selection of disparate tools at present, but one thing is clear; organizations are benefiting from the process and expect to increase their investment in these tools going forward

With hospital chain Community Health Networks becoming a victim of major data theft yesterday, the problem of securing health data is serious.Healthcare organizations really aren’t very good at setting up strong security against attacks, as the FBI has pointed out. This might also apply to the thousands of digital health companies that will be handling and storing health data in the future.

Go to Amazon.com and the link is right there at the top, nestled between “Gift Cards” and “Help.” Chances are, you haven’t noticed it in your frenzy to find the perfect potato peeler. But if you click it, a whole different world of Amazon opens up, one where stuff flows away from you rather than to you. That link reads “Sell.”

Last year, about a billion items sold on Amazon weren’t sold by Amazon itself but by other sellers who make their merchandise available on the site. One of them is Bernie Thompson, a former Microsoft engineer who worked to ensure the Windows operating system played nicely with USB, the standard means of connecting peripherals to PCs and laptops. Thompson now runs his own business, Plugable Technologies, which makes a variety of USB and Bluetooth hardware, from charging stations to docks that connect tablets to desktop monitors. With fewer than 100 employees, the company isn’t huge. But Thompson has no trouble running a truly global business.

In 2006, Amazon launched a service that allowed US sellers to use its network of warehouses to ship their goods. More recently, Jeff Bezos and company have rolled out the Fulfillment by Amazon program globally, enabling entrepreneurs like Thompson to move goods through fulfillment centers in other parts of the world. “It really changes the paradigm when you’re able to ship the goods in bulk to a warehouse in Europe or Japan and have those goods be fulfilled in one day or two days,” Thompson says.

While not all merchants are thrilled with their experience selling on Amazon, the company’s logistical network has enormous reach and breadth. A guy like Thompson can click that “sell” link and—without much time or effort—get his hardware nearly anywhere in the world. In effect, he becomes a “micro-exporter.”

Small Goes Global

Amazon’s global selling program, which has evolved along with the rest of its international footprint in recent years, works much like its domestic counterpart in the US. Merchants can use the site to make their inventory available to purchase anywhere Amazon sells. But the real power of the system doesn’t come into play until merchants also opt to use Amazon to fulfill and ship its orders, as Thompson does.

Merchants in the US who want to expand globally can list their products in Amazon’s nine international Amazon marketplaces—the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, India, China, Japan, and Canada. As they do domestically, sellers can export their goods in bulk to Amazon warehouses in those hubs. From those, Amazon says it ships goods to about 180 countries around the world. “The small seller suddenly has access to the global marketplace,” says Tom Taylor, Amazon’s vice president of seller services.

Taylor says the power of global selling and shipping is huge. Goods from sellers targeting only US consumers can be seen by about 100 million potential customers. Expand that reach globally and the number of potential customers grows to 250 million. And it’s not just US merchants selling globally. Taylor says sellers from 89 countries use Fulfillment by Amazon to sell goods to US customers.

But the advantages Amazon gains by enabling micro-exports extend beyond the fees charged for its services. As Taylor puts it, a global network of small sellers can be incredibly nimble in response to shifts in demand around the world. Sellers can move their inventory from one hub to another according to their perceptions of where demand is greatest. The result is a global agility for Amazon without the need to pull levers itself. An army of sellers becomes deputized to build out the long tail of global retail. “We often can see patterns in what they’re doing faster than what we see in our own business,” Taylor says.

What the World Wants

For Thompson, the ability to send bulk inventory to cross-border hubs saves money compared to shipping individual packages overseas, an approach he says is less error-prone than shipping piecemeal. “We basically get the leverage, the huge scale that Amazon has in negotiating with shipping partners,” he says. Outsourcing everything from taking and shipping orders to converting currencies, accepting payments, and handling taxes lets Plugable focus on customer service, which Thompson calls a key way to set itself apart in the crowded gadget market.

Turnkey global selling and shipping also lets Plugable take the temperature of truly global demand before committing to any inventory at all. Thompson runs ideas for new products through Kickstarter, which not only allows Plugable to see what consumers want but where in the world demand is strongest. If the Kickstarter campaign succeeds, he says, he divides up the inventory of new products rolling off the assembly line according to relative demand in different parts of the globe.

Instead of sending individual orders all over the world, Plugable ships in bulk to the international hubs where Amazon has facilities. From those locations, most of the world opens up to Thompson and his business—a scale he says his business needs in order to make it. “They’re very cool products and very cool technologies, but there a bit niche-y,” Thompson says of his USB lines. “If you were selling on just local channels, there’s not enough of a market to justify the costs.”

At the end of the 2014 fiscal year (January 2014), Walmart had 3285 Supercenters in the United States that vary in size from 180,000 square feet to 230,000 square feet. They also had 508 discount stores that were around 140,000 square feet, smaller than the supercenters because they sell very little food. There were also, according to Walmart’s annual report, 407 even smaller units of which 359 are the Walmart Market Place concept. These stores average around 43,000 square foot in size and have been around since 1998.  A previous Walmart management team assured me that, while they liked the concept, Walmart customers preferred the larger assortment in the superstores and discount stores.  Despite management’s lukewarm endorsement at that time, every year a few more unites were added.

Uber is revolutionizing the delivery of what we conventionally think of as taxi service. Customers can use its mobile app to call a car, pay for the ride and even rate the driver. It has given drivers an easy way to go into business for themselves, and exploited a considerable stock of private cars looking for a secondary use. . .

Reasonable people disagree on who is right. Some welcome Uber’s more efficient technology and consider the traditional cabbies to be Luddites. Others argue that Uber should be subject to the same licensing and regulatory requirements as taxis, to level the playing field.

...

While Uber should be subject to more appropriate taxation, governments would be foolish to deny that its approach enables a level of service that makes many traditional taxi regulations unnecessary. Customers, for example, can know in advance how much their ride will cost, and use reviews to assess the quality of drivers -- offsetting the need for rules aimed at preventing drivers from taking advantage of uninformed riders. So rather than subject Uber to heavy regulation, European governments should limit their interventions to basic safety issues and better tax coverage.

This is not the end of the traditional taxi industry, which will continue to play an important, albeit smaller, role in the provision of urban transportation. The industry will change, though, with more taxi drivers eventually signing up with Uber, broadening and improving the services they provide to riders.

Mistake 1. Avoid responsibility

“The price of greatness is responsibility.” –Winston Churchill

One of the first things you will notice that successful people don’t have is a blaming or victim mentality. When things go wrong, what is your first response? Successful people won’t say, “I couldn’t succeed because of X, Y, and Z” or “It’s actually this person’s fault.” They’re much more likely to own a mistake rather than blame others for their failure or misfortune. I believe the key here is that by owning a mistake, we are more likely to learn from it and much less likely to repeat it.

Mistake 2. Procrastinate

"Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday." ~Napoleon Hill

Successful people tend to take action, regardless of whether it is the “perfect” time or not. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, the literacy rate was almost nonexistent—not exactly perfect market conditions for mass producing books. And no one knew they needed a “smart” phone until Apple invented one. Don’t wait for the perfect time to do something. Work hard and don’t give up—regardless of what might be going on around you. Success is very often the accumulation of many small achievements over a long period of time.

Mistake 3. Follow the trends

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion”. –Jack Kerouac

Every day we produce 2.5 quintillion (1018) bytes of data. In that flood of information, it’s tempting to think that we have to jump at every new development, try every new thing. (We sometimes call it “shiny object syndrome.”) But jumping at every new thing will leave no time to develop the deep understanding that pursuing lifelong learning might. Focus your energies on understanding the root of what you hope to succeed at and ignore the rest. For example, if you hope to succeed in sales or marketing you might choose to study human psychology rather than the latest social media marketing schemes.

Mistake 4. Try to go it alone

“Life is not a solo act. It's a huge collaboration, and we all need to assemble around us the people who care about us and support us.” –Tim Gunn

One of the most vital things successful people do is to surround themselves with other successful people. No man is an island, and having a network, a mastermind group, surround oneself with clever people can make all the difference between success and failure. This is true whether you hope to succeed at a personal goal like weight loss (studies show people lose more weight in a group than alone) or a business goal.

Mistake 5. Lack of belief

“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” –Norman Vincent Peale

This isn’t about positive affirmations or visualizing success, but rather, as Peale says, “a humble but reasonable confidence” that you can achieve what you set out to achieve. Think about it the other way round if you are skeptical; if you don’t believe that you can succeed, why would you even try? You must cultivate a strong belief in yourself even in the face of setbacks or adversities if you hope to ultimately be successful.

Avoiding these mistakes will help you succeed at work or a single goal or task, but to be truly successful, we also need to be happy. The sixth mistake I see unsuccessful people make is not seeking a health balance between work that fulfills, family life, friends, and health. Only when you make happiness and balance a goal can you truly succeed in any other area of your life.