shipping

Shipping, Anyone?

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You may have missed the news that eBay is trying a limited (as in San Francisco) same-day delivery service.  It makes sense considering Amazon is going that way anyway, but I want to mention career opportunities.

Supply, supply chains, and shipping are big.

I had relavites in supply chains and shipping.  I nearly moved into supply chain technology when the opportunity arose.  Supply Chain Project Managers do really well in the market.  Let’s face it people need to get stuff to places, and that doesn’t change in any economy.

The Shipping, moving of good, providing of transport is an area that is heavily geeky.  It’s a ballet of technology, coordination, and more, and one we’re really not aware of.

As it looks like it’s getting new attention now from big internet names, I recommend you consider it for your career.  It may not seem glamorous, but it’s profoundly high-tech and wide-reaching . . . and probably on the grow.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/

Big Pile Of Ship

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Wait, news analysis?

Yeah, we over here at Fan To Pro have been dreadful busy, moving, getting new jobs, sick of old jobs, sick period, etc.  So the news analysis has kind of declined – and we do dump interesting articles to Ye Olde Twittere Feede.

So we didn’t get in a lot of news analysis, which of course was because all the great news happened at once.  I think if I were to sum it up, Apple’s new operating system is based on the Penny Arcade kickstarter, which is run in Windows 8 by Amazon, which is crouching over the burning corpse of Best Buy.  Or something.  Oh, and RIM is a disaster, but we knew that.

But out of the news articles, and all the crazy, something stood out:

Amazon is pushing to make same-day service.

Sure, it doesn’t come as any surprise, but there’s some takeaways:

First, this is going to be a challenge to lots of local retailers and not-so-local retailers.  Let’s face it, when you can get it from Amazon, people tend to.

Second, what’s being missed here is that Amazon is probably going to develop some revolutionary storage and shipping technologies.  People will want to help it happen, look at it, copy it, etc.  If you’re into shipping tech, this is revolutionary.

But there’s one thing that’s being missed among the Amazon-will-crush-all and so forth.

Amazon also has their amazon storefronts and the like.  What the hell are they going to be able to do when they have this mass shipping/recieving system set up? What kind of service can they offer to others?

Think of what it can mean for small businesses.  Think of how many other small companies providing services like this they may crush.  Think of what it will do if they use this to try to help people ignore the fact they’re sort of undermining other businesses . . .

Imagine if Amazon faces limiting lawsuits?  They could scale back – but keep the shipping business as a business.  An amazing about of people use their EC2 cloud service.

So, no, there may be much more to this than simply crushing others.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/