The following is an excerpt from an article in:
The New York Times
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Amazon, Forced to Collect Sales Tax, Aims to Keep Its Competitive Edge
By DAVID STREITFELD
PATTERSON, Calif. — At the moment, it is little more than dirt and gravel. But a sunbaked field at the edge of this farming town will play a significant role in one of the most ambitious retailing ventures of the era: the relentless quest by the online mall Amazon.com to become all things to all shoppers.
A million-square-foot warehouse stocking razor blades and books, diapers and dog food will soon rise on this spot, less than a mile from the highway that will deliver these and just about every other product imaginable to customers 85 miles away in San Francisco. It is hundreds of miles closer to those consumers than Amazon’s existing centers in Nevada and Arizona.
A similar distribution center is being built on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Others are under way in Indiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
This multibillion-dollar building frenzy comes as Amazon is about to lose perhaps its biggest competitive edge — that the vast majority of its customers do not pay sales tax. After negotiations with lawmakers, the company is beginning to collect taxes in California, Texas, Pennsylvania and other states. But Amazon hopes that the warehouses will allow it to provide better service, giving it the ability to up-end the retailing industry in an entirely new way.
Amazon will soon be able to cut as much as a day off its two-day shipping times, said Jeff Bezos, its chief executive, in an interview. This will put the much-rumored same-day delivery — the elusive aspiration of every online merchant — potentially within reach in some metropolitan areas.
“We want fast delivery,” Mr. Bezos said. At a minimum, “we can work on making it the next day.”
It is a monumental bet, even for a company that consistently defied skeptics on Wall Street and Main Street as it rose to become one of the country’s largest retailers. Amazon’s delivery of everyday objects needs to be fast enough and cheap enough to wean customers from their local stores. Yet it also must be economically feasible for the retailer, which is investing so heavily in the warehouses that it is barely profitable.
For more, visit www.nytimes.com.
Showing posts with label compete. Show all posts
Showing posts with label compete. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
New Report from Oracle Shows that Investment in Student Services Will Significantly Enhance the Educational Experience for College Students
Oracle Press Release
New Report from Oracle Shows that Investment in Student Services Will Significantly Enhance the Educational Experience for College Students
Study Finds Only 19 Percent of Administrators Feel They Have a 360-Degree View of their Students; Technology Brings New Opportunities to Engage and Compete
Redwood Shores, Calif. – August 28, 2012
News Facts
Today Oracle announced the results of its “Making the Grade: Optimizing the Higher Education Student Experience” report, which surveyed more than 1,000 undergraduate students and 180 higher education administrators to examine where student services stand today, the impact those services have on overall student satisfaction and how higher education institutions can improve services and address opportunities like social media and mobile apps.
Oracle will host a Webcast on Wednesday, September 19 at 2 p.m. ET to discuss the study’s findings and provide real-world examples of how technology can improve student services. Panelists will include Bill Carter, vice chancellor of information technology, Houston Community College, and Cole Clark, global vice president, education and research industry, Oracle. To register for the Webcast, click here.
Key Findings
Student Services Matter: Sixty-six percent of students say the service they receive has a direct impact on their overall satisfaction with their school. Students who are satisfied with their school’s student services are significantly more likely than those who are not to recommend their school to other potential students and donate following graduation.
Lagging Behind the Top of the Class: Only 60 percent of students say their school meets their customer service expectations and 57 percent say their school treats them as valued customers.
Missing a Birds-Eye View: Only 19 percent of administrators feel they have a 360 degree view of their students. A majority of administrative respondents note they either have multiple views of students and have to piece that information together (31 percent), or have multiple views of students and find the information conflicting (20 percent).
Expanding Communication Frontier: New forms of communication offer additional avenues for schools to engage students. Currently, only 39 percent of students and 27 percent of administrators rank their student services’ mobile access as very good. In addition, just 15 percent of students and 10 percent of administrators say their school is very successful at leveraging social media to keep students informed.
Fundamental Focus: When asked which areas their school should focus on to improve services, 54 percent of students and 61 percent of administrators noted their schools should make it easier to determine where to go for answers. Other top responses included provide consistent information (24 percent of students and 49 percent of administrators) and improve response times (37 percent of students and 27 percent of administrators).
To access the full report – which highlights the importance of services on a student’s educational experience and how institutions can use technology to enhance those services –visit here.
Supporting Quotes
“While administering class registration or processing financial aid isn’t as headline grabbing as constructing a new building, the student services a school provides have a significant impact on a student’s educational experience. This report demonstrates that investments in student services’ technology pay long-term dividends. Schools that focus on the basics – such as ensuring information accessibility, providing multiple contact points for students and delivering consistent processes – and leverage mobile and social media platforms to engage students, will provide an unforgettable positive educational experience, and in turn, make institutions more competitive,” said Cole Clark, global vice president, education and research industry, Oracle.
Supporting Resources
About Oracle
Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.
About Oracle in Industries
Oracle industry solutions leverage the company's best-in-class portfolio of products to address complex business processes relevant to the education and research industry, helping speed time to market, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge.
Trademark
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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Friday, March 30, 2012
U.S. Chamber Calls for Tax Reform as U.S. Corporate Rate Becomes Highest in the World
U.S. Chamber Calls for Tax Reform as U.S. Corporate Rate Becomes Highest in the World
Says United States Should Adopt Simpler System with Lower Corporate and Individual Rates and Territorial System
WASHINGTON, D.C.—U.S. Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President for Government Affairs Bruce Josten issued the following statement today ahead of the U.S. corporate tax rate becoming the world’s highest on April 1, 2012:
“In just a few days, the United States will hold the dubious distinction of having the highest corporate tax rate in the world. By simply standing still, we are falling behind. We need fundamental, comprehensive tax reform to improve our tax system, strengthen the economy, and help American companies compete and win.
“The United States tax system is increasingly out of step with the world economy and its competitors’ tax systems. As countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom have moved to reform their tax systems and lower rates to encourage economic growth, America’s inaction puts American worldwide companies at a competitive disadvantage and threatens our economic recovery.
“The Chamber believes now is the time for comprehensive, fundamental tax reform that lowers the individual and corporate rates and keeps them synchronized. Reform should also shift to a territorial tax system, bring taxpayers certainty, simplify the tax code, and provide adequate transition rules to get our tax code from where it is now to where it should be.
“Ultimately, the marketplace, and not the tax system, should allocate capital and resources. We can’t allow our tax code to continue to punish American businesses and taxpayers. We need reform and we need it now if we are serious about driving economic growth, creating jobs, and enhancing American competitiveness.”
“The United States tax system is increasingly out of step with the world economy and its competitors’ tax systems. As countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom have moved to reform their tax systems and lower rates to encourage economic growth, America’s inaction puts American worldwide companies at a competitive disadvantage and threatens our economic recovery.
“The Chamber believes now is the time for comprehensive, fundamental tax reform that lowers the individual and corporate rates and keeps them synchronized. Reform should also shift to a territorial tax system, bring taxpayers certainty, simplify the tax code, and provide adequate transition rules to get our tax code from where it is now to where it should be.
“Ultimately, the marketplace, and not the tax system, should allocate capital and resources. We can’t allow our tax code to continue to punish American businesses and taxpayers. We need reform and we need it now if we are serious about driving economic growth, creating jobs, and enhancing American competitiveness.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Online Advertising Startup Competes More Effectively, Spends Less on IT With Cloud-Based Windows Azure
News Press Release
Online Advertising Startup Competes More Effectively, Spends Less on IT With Cloud-Based Windows Azure
Online Advertising Startup Competes More Effectively, Spends Less on IT With Cloud-Based Windows Azure
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| Fast-growing Crumbtag adopts Windows Azure to meet its massive data-processing needs without buying costly IT infrastructure. |
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THE HAGUE, Netherlands — March 26, 2012 — To target its customers’ online advertising efficiently, Netherlands-based startup Crumbtag has adopted Windows Azure, a cloud-based platform that provides the firm with cost-effective processing power and agile scalability. Crumbtag had a novel idea for Internet ad placement that involved analyzing Web visitor behavior in real time, but this operation required massive data-processing capability. Since tapping into cloud services with the Windows Azure platform, the young company scales processing power and storage on demand, serves the needs of very large customers, and offers more competitive rates for online advertising. “Because we are not spending millions on IT infrastructure, we can pass those savings on to customers,” said Crumbtag Founder and CEO Jan Kopmels. “As a small startup, we’ve been able to compete successfully for multinational customers and also demonstrate to them that we use cutting-edge technology.” Kopmels estimates that with the cloud-based Microsoft Corp. solution, Crumbtag has avoided a $10 million (U.S.) outlay for on-premises infrastructure. Typically, online advertising firms match ads to users’ interests through the use of cookies, which are deposited covertly on a user’s computer during website visits. Cookies help determine the user’s online behavior, such as sites visited, paths to sites visited and shopping cart contents. However, privacy concerns have prompted many countries to outlaw them. From an advertiser’s perspective, cookies have limited value because they cannot be stored centrally for analysis. Kopmels wanted to capture user behavior and process it in a giant statistical database. This would allow customers to place ads without relying on cookies and also adjust and refine their placements dynamically with every Web page view and click. With a small but committed team, Kopmels launched Crumbtag in 2009 and spent two years developing technology for the ad-placement application. He came to the discouraging realization that the tiny firm would have to spend millions on datacenter infrastructure to process the prodigious amounts of data involved. “We needed a whole new infrastructure and business model to make Crumbtag viable,” he said. In December 2010, the company explored several market-leading cloud services. Because they’d developed the ad-placement application using the Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software, Crumbtag opted to go with the Microsoft cloud-based solution. “We looked briefly at Amazon cloud solutions but felt they were too immature,” Kopmels said. “Plus, we were a committed user of Microsoft technology.” It took Crumbtag just six weeks to move the application to Windows Azure — about 20 minutes of which was required to migrate the database to SQL Azure. “For an experienced .NET developer, moving to Windows Azure is a piece of cake,” Kopmels said. Crumbtag uses Windows Azure Compute to supply on-demand processing power for its application, which processes about 4,000 requests per second and provides a 20-millisecond response time to well-known Dutch companies ranging from small to multinational. Crumbtag also uses Windows Azure Caching to provide high-speed communication between virtual machines. As it pursues plans to expand across Europe in 2012, Crumbtag is using Windows Azure to scale up quickly to serve its growing customer base. Cloud computing enables the small company to offer a more cost-effective solution that helps it win business against larger, more established players that are saddled with aging on-premises IT setups. More information on Crumbtag’s move to Windows Azure is available in the Microsoft case study,Microsoft Showcase and Microsoft Customer Spotlight News Center. Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. |
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Trademarks Take On New Importance
Excerpt from an article in The New York Times
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Trademarks Take On New Importance in Internet Era
By STEPHANIE STROM
PRINCETON, N.J. — As a serial snack-food entrepreneur, Warren Wilson is no stranger to the challenges of running a business.
In the early days of his first enterprise, selling funnel cakes at fairs, there was the time when, tired of losing money on inclement days, he bought weather insurance — and proceeded to lose even more money than he had when it rained. In the 1990s, he and his wife and business partner, Sara, once had to mortgage their house and sell off investments to make their company’s payroll.
But it still came as a bit of a shock when the Wilsons made what they thought was a routine move to register the trademark of their hot product — a flat pretzel snack called Pretzel Crisps — and it was contested by none other than Frito-Lay, the 800-pound gorilla of the snack food market owned by PepsiCo.
“This is so different from anything else we’ve faced because we’re not fighting a product in the supermarket, we’re not fighting against an institution like a bank, we’re not dealing with an act of nature,” Mr. Wilson said in an interview at his company’s headquarters here. “This fight is about a big company that wants to dominate the snack food category by crushing a little company like ours rather than by competing with us.”
Frito-Lay, whose Rold Gold pretzel products and Stacy’s Pita Chips compete with Pretzel Crisps, declined to discuss the case, citing the pending dispute with the Wilsons’ company, Princeton Vanguard.
But in its filings with the Patent and Trademark Office, Frito-Lay contends that Pretzel Crisps cannot be registered as a trademark because it is a generic term. “Like ‘milk chocolate bar,’ the combination of ‘pretzel’ and ‘crisp’ gains no meaning as a phrase over and above the generic meaning of its constituent terms,” the company wrote in a 2010 motion.
The dispute is still pending with the trademark office’s trial board.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Trademarks Take On New Importance in Internet Era
By STEPHANIE STROM
PRINCETON, N.J. — As a serial snack-food entrepreneur, Warren Wilson is no stranger to the challenges of running a business.
In the early days of his first enterprise, selling funnel cakes at fairs, there was the time when, tired of losing money on inclement days, he bought weather insurance — and proceeded to lose even more money than he had when it rained. In the 1990s, he and his wife and business partner, Sara, once had to mortgage their house and sell off investments to make their company’s payroll.
But it still came as a bit of a shock when the Wilsons made what they thought was a routine move to register the trademark of their hot product — a flat pretzel snack called Pretzel Crisps — and it was contested by none other than Frito-Lay, the 800-pound gorilla of the snack food market owned by PepsiCo.
“This is so different from anything else we’ve faced because we’re not fighting a product in the supermarket, we’re not fighting against an institution like a bank, we’re not dealing with an act of nature,” Mr. Wilson said in an interview at his company’s headquarters here. “This fight is about a big company that wants to dominate the snack food category by crushing a little company like ours rather than by competing with us.”
Frito-Lay, whose Rold Gold pretzel products and Stacy’s Pita Chips compete with Pretzel Crisps, declined to discuss the case, citing the pending dispute with the Wilsons’ company, Princeton Vanguard.
But in its filings with the Patent and Trademark Office, Frito-Lay contends that Pretzel Crisps cannot be registered as a trademark because it is a generic term. “Like ‘milk chocolate bar,’ the combination of ‘pretzel’ and ‘crisp’ gains no meaning as a phrase over and above the generic meaning of its constituent terms,” the company wrote in a 2010 motion.
The dispute is still pending with the trademark office’s trial board.
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