Tag: small business for sale

Look out, Amazon. Asia-based companies such as Coupang are leading the next e-commerce revolution

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If you want to understand the future of e-commerce, look to Asia. Today, Coupang went public on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $4.6 billion in the biggest U.S. IPO of the year (so far). The South Korean e-commerce giant’s success is a compelling reminder that many Asian companies are among the world’s leading innovators in digital retailing and beyond. In the U.S., we have all been amazed by the speed, ease, and selection of Amazon. In reality, we are three to five years behind Asia. Americans are familiar with e-commerce giant Alibaba, but a new wave of companies such as Coupang, Pinduoduo, and Bytedance are quickly transforming the online shopping experience for millions of consumers. (Softbank Investment Advisers, my firm, is an investor in Bytedance and Coupang, and Softbank Group is Alibaba’s largest shareholder.) Here are the four prominent e-commerce trends in Asia that I predict will take hold in the U.S. and around the world: From e-commerce to “AllCommerce” using social media Asia’s brick-and-mortar companies were making the transition to digital well before COVID-19 forced businesses to shut their physical footprints. South Korea’s high-density urban landscape, high mobile penetration rate ( 95 percent of adults have smartphones, more than anywhere else in the world), and culture of late-night shopping have enabled the rapid growth and success of e-commerce by connecting local brick-and-mortar businesses to the online world.   In 2020, technology platforms such as Flipkart in India and Tokopedia in Indonesia added new offerings to support the digitization of small businesses and “solopreneurs.” (I am an investor in Tokopedia and backed Flipkart, which Walmart now controls.) Tokopedia launched TokopediaByMe, which allows influencers and individuals to build their own affiliate businesses via social media. These easy-to-use tools brought an extraordinary array of businesses online, from the local warung (family-owned) shop to the neighborhood restaurant. Tokopedia also offers logistics support to help sellers deliver products and services to their customers.   I expect we’ll see more e-commerce companies integrating with social media platforms to make it easier for small merchants to sell their wares without having to build a website or digital storefront. A great example close to home is a new feature from Shopify that adds shopping functions to Facebook and Instagram pages. Look for future marriages of e-commerce tools with social platforms such as Facebook and Bytedance’s TikTok. The upshot is a future in which every social post becomes an opportunity to make a sale. It’s not e-commerce, it’s “AllCommerce.”   Live commerce Though not a term yet familiar to most Americans, live commerce is a very simple but powerful modality that has seen explosive growth in Asia. Live commerce enables purchase engagement between a customer and seller through live video and chat. For Americans of my generation, this format is best understood as the next generation of HSN or QVC on mobile platforms. Read More …

Biden and Trump supporters see two different Facebooks, and here’s proof

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The nonprofit news organization The Markup launched a new tool on Thursday that compares side by side the Facebook “filter bubbles” of Biden supporters versus Trump supporters. They are two very different worlds. The new tool, called Split Screen , is one of the first fruits of The Markup’s Citizen Browser Project , in which the group paid 2,601 people to report—via a special browser—the unique mix of content Facebook’s algorithm serves them based on their demographics and political leanings, among many other factors The tool can compare the news posts, group recommendations, and hashtags that are likely to be suggested to Biden voters (on the left) versus Trump voters (on the right): For the Biden crowd, Facebook was more likely to show content from NPR, The New York Times , NBC News, and The Washington Post . It was far more likely to serve the Trump crowd articles from The Daily Wire and Fox News, and somewhat more likely to serve them articles from CNSNews.com and Newsmax . According to Split Screen, Biden voters were far more likely to see recommendations for groups about Star Trek memes compared to Trump voters. The algorithm was modestly more likely to suggest wholesome comedy groups to Trump supporters. Read More …

Pfizer’s CEO: 3 key decisions helped it develop a COVID-19 vaccine in record time

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Last year, Pfizer was one of several pharmaceutical companies to take on an incredible challenge: make a life-saving vaccine in a fraction of the time it usually takes to do so. Over the course of 2020, Pfizer and others tested vaccine candidates as hundreds of thousands of people died from COVID-19. Pfizer’s success at creating a vaccine with 95% efficacy in record time has landed it, along with its partner BioNTech and fellow vaccine maker Moderna, atop Fast Company ‘s Most Innovative Companies list for 2021 . Bourla and Pfizer’s head of vaccine research Kathrin Jansen , joined Fast Company Editor in Chief Stephanie Mehta at the Most Innovative Companies Summit for a conversation about how Pfizer created an effective vaccine so quickly. “The thing that scientists hate the most is bureaucracy,” says Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. “Innovation and bureaucracy is oil and water.” When Pfizer began work on a COVID-19 vaccine, one of the first choices Bourla made was to reduce stop decisions from having to go through multiple layers of approval. He also developed a close and trusting relationship with BioNTech’s CEO Uğur Şahin, with whom Pfizer collaborated on the vaccine. Innovation and bureaucracy is oil and water.” Albert Bourla “We had one meeting, we were all there, and we could all decide,” says Bourla. “That meeting was happening twice a week.” He said this was one of the reasons he decided not to take money from any government for their research. It enabled the company to make decisions at the speed of science, he says. “All of the decision makers came together and we made our decisions on the spot. Everything that could slow us down was put to the side.” Bourla also listened to his scientists. When Jansen came to him recommending the mRNA platform for the vaccine, he trusted her advice. “mRNA—if we were going to be successful with it—was not going to be the first COVID vaccine. It would be the first [MRNA] vaccine ever ,” he says Read More …

For the first time in years, someone is building a web browser from scratch

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For more than two decades, building a new web browser from scratch has been practically unheard of. But a small company called Ekioh has its reasons. The Cambridge, U.K.-based company is developing a browser called Flow , and unlike the vast majority of browsers that have arrived in recent years, it’s not based on Google’s Chromium or Apple’s WebKit open-source code. Instead, Flow is starting with a blank slate and building its own rendering engine. Its goal is to make web-based apps run smoothly even on cheap microcomputers such as the Raspberry Pi. There’s a reason companies don’t do this anymore: Experts say building new browsers isn’t worth the trouble when anyone can just modify the work that Apple and Google are doing. But if Flow succeeds, it could rethink the way we browse the web and open the door to cheaper gadgets. That at least seems like a goal worth pursuing Read More …

Why software legend Ray Ozzie wants to monitor your home’s air quality

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“I don’t know you’ve seen this thing yet, but it’s light enough, and it’s got Velcro mounting, so if you have a sunny window somewhere in the house, you can just open the window, reach out, and—after you turn it on—just stick it out there, and it’ll be solar-charged and run autonomously.” Ray Ozzie is on the other end of a Zoom call showing off Airnote, the new air quality monitor from his latest startup, Blues Wireless . As he talks, he brandishes the device—a palm-sized white box with a small LCD display, a built-in AT&T data connection, and an angled top that sports a solar panel. I am at least mildly surprised to find myself in the position of having Ray Ozzie explain a new gadget to me. Since the 1980s, after all, he has been known as one of the biggest brains in software—the mastermind behind pioneering “groupware” application Lotus Notes (still extant as HCL Notes ) and then Groove and Talko , two intriguing collaboration startups he ended up selling to Microsoft. In between Groove and Talko, he  served as Microsoft’s chief software architect , succeeding a fellow named Bill Gates and bootstrapping Azure , the portfolio of cloud-based services that eventually turned out to be the future of the company. Ray Ozzie [Photo: courtesy of Blues Wireless] Then again, Ozzie’s intellect has always been focused on the future of communications and collaboration, and that connects some of the dots between his past lives and Blues. Since 2019, the startup has been quietly working on Internet of Things (IoT) hardware and services designed to make it much easier to give just about anything a wireless internet connection. Its pilot customers—whom Blues isn’t ready to talk about yet—have built its Notecard system-on-module board into their own creations. With Airnote, Blues has become its own customer, embedding Notecard in a $149 air quality monitor intended for outdoor use and aimed at both consumers and businesses. It goes on sale on Blues’ site today and is scheduled to ship in early April. To Ozzie, the way Blues shuttles data across the net is still a form of collaboration, even if it’s not human-to-human. “The opportunity here is really to collaborate with machines, not just with people,” he says. The company, which employs around 30 people, is also a personal opportunity for him to go back to basics, getting his hands dirty in ways he’d left behind decades ago: “I haven’t done hardware since the seventies or coded since ’96, and it’s been an amazing journey.” A failure to communicate The ideas that became Blues Wireless have their roots in natural disaster and the challenges of disseminating essential information in its wake—another fact that links the company to Ozzie’s bona fides in communications. Ten years ago this week, Japan suffered the most powerful earthquake in its history , which spawned a  massive tsunami . Those catastrophes in turn led to the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant , which—just by themselves—required the evacuation of 154,000 people. To complicate matters further, the Japanese government and the power plant’s managers were soon criticized for their inadequate communications about the nuclear accident and its implications to the country’s residents Read More …