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We have a few items today on new ways to shop. We refer to the online shopping and door to door delivery services that are in our future. We start with Amazon’s efforts as portrayed by Wired.
Amazon’s reinvention of the warehouse is a logistical advance on par with the shipping container or the bar code. Convenience stores are a trillion-dollar industry worldwide, despite the fact that they’re not actually very convenient. …
… True convenience shopping is on its way, though, and we won’t need to drive at all to enjoy it. Instead, the store will come to us: Within five years, the majority of items we crave on short notice—ice cream, books, umbrellas, lightbulbs—will be available for delivery the same day.
…It’s hardly a surprise that Amazon is the farthest along in building this future. Back in the early days of the web, when everyone else was trying to figure out how to make the Internet work better in and for itself, Jeff Bezos was already trying to make it work for the world of physical retail. To move stuff at the speed of the Internet—that is, as fast as possible—the Amazon founder realized he needed to think algorithmically about order fulfillment. …
… But the ambition of what Amazon has done inside its warehouses is nothing compared to what it’s now trying to do beyond those walls. On the streets of several US cities, lime-green trucks emblazoned with the AmazonFresh logo deliver groceries the same day they’re ordered. And food is just a wedge product that, if it catches on for Amazon, could turn the company’s trucks into roving nodes on a logistics network that’s able to deliver nearly anything.
Over the past several years, Amazon has foregone profits to fund massive new “fulfillment centers” within range of the largest metro areas in the US. …
And the Wall Street Journal writes about Google’s efforts in this area.
Google Inc. is expanding its delivery service and will start charging a membership fee, intensifying its battle with Amazon.com Inc. for consumer spending.
Starting this week, Google will charge $10 a month, or $95 a year, for unlimited same-day or overnight delivery on orders over $15. Nonmembers will pay $4.99 an order, or $7.99 if the order costs less than $15. Until now, the deliveries had been free.
The service, initially named Google Shopping Express but now known simply as Google Express, lets customers place orders online for products from physical stores run by retailers including Costco Wholesale Corp. , Staples Inc. and Walgreen Co.
Google said it is expanding the service to Washington, D.C., Boston and Chicago on Tuesday. It previously served the San Francisco Bay Area and parts of New York City and Los Angeles. …
Now according to Wired, Uber is getting in on the act.
Uber is already an expert in getting you from door-to-door. Now, the company wants to figure out how to deliver stuff to your door as well.
On Tuesday, Uber announced a pilot program for what it calls Uber Corner Store, a service that would allow Uber users in the WashingtonD.C. area to get staple items like toothpaste and bandages delivered from local stores. According to a blog post, the program will only last a few weeks, but it hints at CEO Travis Kalanick’s long-term vision for Uber, which is to transform the company from a pure transportation play into a full-fledged logistics company.
Uber has never been one to back down from a fight. Since its earliest days, it has wrestled with regulators and fought dirty with competitors like Lyft. But all of that may be child’s play compared to what could come next. With Corner Store, the five-year-old startup could be setting itself up for an all-out war with two of tech’s superpowers: Google and Amazon.
It hints at CEO Travis Kalanick’s long-term vision for Uber, which is to transform the company from a pure transportation play into a full-fledged logistics company. …
The country of Nigeria continues to impress with its containment of the Ebola scare. Scientific American covers Nigeria’s success.
… The swift battle was won not only with vigilant disinfecting, port-of-entry screening and rapid isolation but also with boot leather and lots and lots of in-person follow-up visits, completing 18,500 of them to find any new cases of Ebola among a total of 989 identified contacts.
Such ground-level work may sound extreme, and the usually measured WHO declared the feat “a piece of world-class epidemiological detective work.” But as William Schaffner, chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine and an infectious disease expert at VanderbiltUniversity, says, “Actually what Nigeria did is routine, regular—but vigorous and rigorous—public health practice. They identified cases early—fortunately they had a limited number—and they got a list of all of the contacts, and they put those people under rigorous surveillance so that if they were to become sick, they wouldn’t transmit the infection to others,” he says.
Art Reingold, head of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health agrees. The steps are basic: “isolation, quarantine of contacts, etcetera,” but governments must “get in quickly and do it really well.” It was Nigeria’s vigorous and rapid public health response that really stopped the spread. Because when Ebola lands one August afternoon in a city of 21 million, things could go very, very differently. …
And the Financial Times says Nigeria’s Twitter followers participated.
Dr Lawal Bakare broke a world record last year when he corralled 200,000 school children in Lagos into brushing their teeth at exactly the same time. This year, the 31-year-old dentist and social media activist felt compelled to lend his organisational savvy to the campaign to fight Ebola.
Alongside other volunteers from Nigeria’s rapidly expanding information technology sector, he played a central role in the public awareness campaign that helped federal, state and non-governmental agencies contain the deadly virus before it could spread out of control. …
… “When community action is heightened the story changes,” says Dr Bakare. “We are spreading on Twitter much faster than the Ebola virus. Part of what we are going to do now is to see how we can transfer this to other sectors of society.”
According to the latest data there are 114m mobile phone subscriptions for Nigeria’s 170m population. There are 55m internet users and 11m people are signed up on Facebook. Yet only 13 years ago the country had no functioning mobile phones, internet was by painfully slow dial-up and only 1 in 300 Nigerians had access to a landline. …
Compare the government of Nigeria to the idiots in DC. NY Post writes on how the feds block Ebola cures.
We have technology to potentially control Ebola and other viral outbreaks today. But the federal bureaucracy refuses to catch up with 21st-century science.
For example, diagnostic startup Nanobiosym has an iPhone-sized device that can accurately detect Ebola and other infectious diseases in less than an hour.
Two other companies, Synthetic Genomics and Novartis, have the capacity to create synthetic vaccine viruses for influenza and other infectious diseases in only four days. Both firms can also share data about outbreaks instantaneously and make real-time, geographically specific diagnosis and vaccine production possible.
These companies could start producing Ebola vaccine/treatments tomorrow — except that the Food and Drug Administration’s insistence on randomized studies and endless demands for more data means firms have to spend millions on paperwork instead of producing medicines.
And for every small company drained by such tactics, many others conclude it’s not even worth trying.
These advances aren’t available because the FDA is using 19th-century science to decide which medical technologies should be used in the 21st century. …