Top 12 Coworking Hives Keep Seattle Buzzing
As Seattle netizens search for functional, flexible office space in the city’s skyward-jutting metro corridors, the number of co-working venues has multiplied, offering e-lancers, entrepreneurs and growing businesses alike well-appointed, community-centric locations boasting all the amenities of corporate office perks in a shared office environment.
Looking for fast […]
Cambia Health Solutions is part of an Innovation Force for Blockchain — and Cambia Grove the New Kids on the Block for Entrepreneurs
Maura Little has just finished delivering the 2018 Strategic Vision outlook for Cambia Grove — a synergistic, healthcare-focused, innovation hub and community workspace — and collaboration is front and center of the […]
Bank of America Better Money Habits® Millennial Report Finds That Young Adults in Seattle Prioritize Jobs With Personal Purpose Over Salary, but Finances Are Still a Source of Stress
Nearly three quarters of Seattle millennials believe passion is more important than salary in their career, according to the new Better Money Habits® Millennial Report released […]
Tanja Omeze, the former marketing head for Amazon Video had been appointed the Chief Marketing Officer for Seattle-based RealSelf where she will lead global marketing initiatives to increase awareness, engagement and connections among and between consumers and medical aesthetic professionals.
Recognized as the world’s largest online aesthetics marketplace and the best place to learn about cosmetic treatments and […]
When, in 2009, an online marketing industry forerunner by the name of HasOffers created what was the first mobile tracking software to attribute customer clicks and downloads to sales commissions and cash, the flame that would ignite an explosion in mobile app marketing was just a flicker.
The Google Play store was still […]
It is a well-known fact that there is more computing power in today’s iPhone than there was on the Apollo spacecraft mission that landed the first human on the moon.
To enumerate just how much power, the iPhone 6’s clock is 32,600 times faster than the best Apollo era computers and could perform instructions 120,000,000 times faster. […]
Amazon has introduced its first Small Business Impact Report highlighting new details about the millions of small and medium-sized businesses that sell their products on Amazon. Small and medium-businesses are the backbone of Amazon’s stores, providing shoppers with millions of unique products. According to the report, more than a million U.S.-based small and medium-sized businesses […]
Nordstrom has closed deals to acquire two leading retail technology companies: BevyUp, the innovators behind a digital selling tool, and MessageYes, a platform rooted in conversational commerce.
“The retail environment is changing faster than ever, but the value of service, speed, convenience and newness remain constant,” said Brian Gill, technology senior vice president at Nordstrom. […]
Apprenti™, the nation’s first registered tech apprenticeship program which launched in Seattle Washington, will expand nationally into Oregon, Michigan, California and Ohio. The apprenticeship program – which hasa been guided by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) in 2016 – recruits, trains and places diverse talent into tech roles.
According to a forecast […]
In the quest for more refined marketing attributions and accurate ROI’s, marketing automation leader Marketo has announced its biggest acquisition in history with the addition of Bizible, a Puget Sound innovator in managing marketing performance. As MarTech reported, “With the acquisition, two complementary, cutting-edge analytics and technologies […]
Apple, Xbox and other tech startups, have collaborated on explaining foundational concepts including circuits and logic, or hardware and software, in a fun and digestible way.
Code.org is delighted to share a series of six short videos that teach How Computers Work. This project […]
The Internet’s biggest game distribution platform and marketplace, Seattle-based Steam, has dropped support for the blockchain-based cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin.
The parting of the ways sent a shock wave that registered on the Richer scales of both technologists and economists as Bitcoin has been experiencing a serious surge in investor interest and value.
Steam […]
by Congressman Derek Kilmer
Last week, cable news carried live the testimony of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, before the House and Senate. The news anchors dissected his every move: “Did he really take a sip of water like that?” While the theatrics might have made for compelling television, Congress did nothing to […]
by Bob Ferguson, Attorney General, State of Washington
The most aggressive opening in chess is called the King’s Gambit. On the second move, White sacrifices a pawn that typically protects his king for a blitzkrieg assault on Black. It’s audacious. With no preparation, no careful groundwork, White signals his intent to wipe his opponent off the […]
The GIX Innovation Competition was created in 2016 to spur solutions to global challenges. GIX, the Global Innovation Exchange is a global partnership between major research universities and innovative corporations to develop leaders in innovation. The first two academic partners are Tsinghua University in China and the University of Washington, with early support from […]
Since the introduction of Microsoft HoloLens, the world’s first fully self-contained holographic computer in January 2015, Microsoft has continued to propel the Mixed Reality revolution.
Now, the complement of Windows MR partners have kicked off the 2017 holiday buying season by celebrating the availability of pre-orders for Windows Mixed Reality headsets at Microsoft stores and Microsoft.com.’
[…]
A new “Pop-in” shop at eight Nordstrom department stores across the national electronic gridiron creates a “Tron-like” shopping environment where you are the human pulse of energy tracing the silicon paths of a circuit board between different product displays and placements, each containing some very nifty gizmos for your home tech portfolio.
As Nordstrom […]
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May 19 2018
Trump Pushes Postal Commissioner to Double Amazon Shipping Rates. Discuss!
In a series of moves reminiscent of the Nixon administration’s “Enemies List,” president Donald Trump has held a number of meetings with Postmaster General Megan Brennan personally pushing Brennan to double the rates the Postal Service charges Amazon.com
According to multiple sources, Brennan has so far resisted Trump’s demands. In multiple conversations occurring this year and last, the PG has tried to explain that “these arrangements were bound by contracts and must be reviewed by a regulatory commission.”
Brennan and Trump have reportedly met at the White House about the matter several times, beginning in 2017. Yet, the meetings have never appeared on the president’s public schedule.
President Trump has latched on personally to Amazon CEO owner Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post in addition to his leadership role with Amazon. By all accounts, the president’s actions constitute what can only be described as a blunt act of retaliation that uses the available federal machinery of the U.S. government to personally punish someone he perceives to be a political adversary.
Within the last month, the Wall Street Journal has published that “the president has turned what were sporadic and private criticisms into a sustained volley of tweets against [Amazon], often causing stock market fluctuations.”
The question at hand: Is the U.S. Postal Service making or losing money delivering Amazon packages?
Analysts have estimated that Amazon uses the Postal Service for 40 percent of its shipping and that the per-package cost works out to roughly $2, or about half of the standard rate charged by other big shippers.
One reason the Postal Service is willing to give Amazon such a big discount is the huge volume of deliveries that the contract guarantees — a key factor in business with high fixed costs.
Another is that Amazon performs a fair amount of the shipping work itself, arranging the packages by Zip code and carrier route and dropping them off on pallets at one of 20 Postal Service distribution centers across the country.
In its role as the government-designated postal monopoly, the Post Service is already required to stop by every home, business and rural post box six days a week, and already had the workforce and infrastructure to do that. In that context, the additional — or “incremental” — cost of delivering the additional Amazon packages is modest.
Looked at from the standpoint of incremental revenue (huge) minus these incremental expenses (modest), the Postal Service could very easily have come to the conclusion that, even at $2 a package, the Amazon contract was likely to be highly profitable.
Using short-term incremental accounting — incremental revenue minus incremental costs — the Amazon contract certainly looks profitable. But any enterprise that uses only short-term incremental accounting to price its products would, over the long run, probably find itself out of business. That’s because incremental cost accounting ignores the common costs (or what the Postal Service calls “institutional” costs) that can’t easily be attributed to any one customer or any one line of business — regular first-class “letter” mail, for example, or second-class newspapers and magazines, or third-class catalogues.
The Washington Post analyzed that the way the Postal Service calculates its package-delivery costs is to start with the incremental costs directly attributable with package delivery, or any of its “competitive” business lines, and then add an “appropriate” surcharge to cover common, or institutional, costs.
For all of the Postal Service’s competitive lines of business, including third-class mail and package delivery, this surcharge now covers 23.2 percent of all of the Postal Service’s common costs, significantly higher than the minimum 5.5 percent level required by federal law. Using that methodology, the Postal Regulatory Commission found that special contracts such as Amazon’s generated $7 billion in profit for the Postal Service last year.
But a number of analysts, including more than a few hired by UPS and FedEx, have argued that the common charge assigned to the Amazon contract was way below that average, and way below what it should be to keep competition fair. The correct charge, they argue, would add about $1.50 to the calculated cost for the Postal Service to deliver a package.
So what would happen if Trump got his way and the Postal Service was required to charge that much for a package?
It’s a pretty good guess that the Postal Service would lose many of its biggest package delivery customers, including Amazon. And without that revenue, the Postal Service would lose a lot more money than it is already losing. That would force it to dramatically raise rates on Aunt Millie and Orvis, who would respond by mailing fewer birthday cards and catalogues.
In the end, what you would get would be a death spiral that eventually would force Congress to shut down the Postal Service and sell it off to the highest bidder.
The Post concludes: “For years, critics of the Postal Service argued that it should act more like a profit-making business. Now that it is, those same critics are arguing that it should be prevented from using pricing strategies routinely used by profit-making businesses and act more like a government agency.
The reality is that the modern Postal Service has been set up to be a hybrid — part government agency with a mission of universal service, part private enterprise with a mission not to lose money, overseen by an independent regulator whose job is to make sure that the two missions are held in proper balance. Unfortunately, that is a reality that is way too complicated for our president to understand.” [24×7]
