Dropshipping - the new ecommerce market

Shopify is the new way to make money. Drop Shipping is where a manufacturer ships a product directly to the buyer. You have to drive traffic to your website and make money on the markup.

How Drop Shipping Works

Drop Shipping is especially useful for Kickstarter campaigns. Your product needs to be durable and in stock before you get an order. Once you have sold enough units, you'll have an initial order with a cost of around $200. Every time the campaign reaches that $200 mark, you'll have an additional shipment that you'll charge the customer for. This process makes sense if you know how much your customers will spend on your products. For example, if you sell cleaning solutions, it's likely that the price per product will stay fairly steady throughout the campaign.

 As long as the customer stays happy, they'll be unlikely to spend more than $50 on a single product.

How it works with your product?

Supplies are tricky. When I looked into drop shipping for my eCommerce business, I learned that your product also has to be physically able to be shipped by air. If the products aren't shipping with tracking, you'd have to check every box on the way to the customer to make sure they got the product they ordered.

My friends on Etsy seem to have the most success with this. Since Etsy is a drop shipping store, the customer has the ability to check shipping by phone. Just reach out to them and they'll do the math for you. To maximize customer satisfaction, send them the tracking number before you ship. You should also see that only about one third of those orders ever finish shipping.

Speaking of shipping, if you're not already shipping your products to all 50 states, try doing that. You'd only be paying for postage on those that didn't make it.

Moving into the cloud

We have all heard about Amazon Web Services - EC2, S3, RDS etc and how it is fueling innovation all over the software industry. Developers are jumping onto the cloud bandwagon and building applications that were previously unthinkable - DropBox etc. Even NetFlix is known to be using Amazon's web services.

This is the first wave of cloud innovation. Building service and applications that are more infrastructure-like in the value they provide. The next wave of cloud innovation will be when semantically-cognizant applications can be made available in the cloud. Actually, cloud as an infrastructure option should be removed from our vocabulary. As far as a CIO is concerned, the infrastructure exists and has an SLA associated with it. Who cares if its in the cloud or if its in my data center?

So, are there any cloud-based applications out there that are at a different plane than the DropBoxes?

15yrs later...

I remember working on an airline reservation system coding a Passenger Name Record (PNR) parsing system. One of our biggest concerns was the special characters embedded in the PNR which caused the code to fail as it wasn't intelligent enough to detect real data from the special characters. Of course, we got around the scenario by coding to the bad data rather than fixing the bad data or normalizing the data.

Fast forward 15yrs. I'm working in healthcare IT and building a solution that involves parsing data from a third party provider. One of the challenges of parsing data is ...guess what...special characters in the data causing the code to break.

Why do we not stop to fix the data and end up writing code to work around the issue? Time and time again!

Apple Sept 9th press event

So, Apple finally confirmed the Sept 9th press event. Looks like its the usual announce new products guessing game from now until then.

The most popular predictions are:

• an ipod with a built-in camera
• an itablet

How about if Apple releases an iTablet that also doubles up as an e-Reader a la Kindle? That would be a one-in-all device. It would be worth it at $699 too.

iPhone Product of the Day

The award for Product Of The Day has to go to Air Video by InMethod.

http://www.inmethod.com/air-video/index.html;jsessionid=F7EF22C725F70A98E2C07048F7FBC62F

All you need to watch movies from your NAS is a host server. Either Windows or Mac will do.

Install the Server component on your Mac, point it to the shared NAS and you're good to go.

Note: It currently doesn't support TVOut due to a firmware glitch.

Multi-room streaming using Songbird, iTunes, Airport Express, iMac

Apparently, iMac supports simultaneous audio streams to different audio destinations.

Here's how my configuration worked:

* Play Audio Stream #1 in Songbird which will default to the iMac speakers

* Play Audio Stream #2 in iTunes but select remote speakers via Airport Express

You now have multi-room streaming through a single iMac server.

Agile Project Management

Agile seems to be many things to many people. It is a "drink the kool-aid" approach. It is a Waterfall-done-right approach. It is also the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Having experienced Agile at a large Healthcare IT company, the greatest revelation was that it was all of the above and yet none of the above. Here are my findings:

• The team has to find its comfort zone with Agile. (Translation: how much is the team willing to stay within and step outside of their comfort zone to adopt Agile)
• Agile has to be modified to fit the company/team culture and working practices. (Translation: Agile is not a one-size fits all approach)
• Adoping Agile for the sake of adoption will lead to uncomfortable results. (Translation: Identify value realization before adoption)

Was Agile successful? Agile did lead to a higher level of engagement from the team.