Yes … that’s David Ansel, the Soup Peddler, in a lengthy spread from November’s issue of FOOD AND WINE magazine. (Nice to see the Law of Remarkability in action.)
This autumn we find the Soup Peddler in the beginning throes of his fifth soup season. But this year, many things have changed for Brand Autopsy’s favorite jumboSHRIMP Marketing business. Gone is the infamous delivery bike in favor of deliveries by refrigerated trucks. And gone is the single-minded soup menu. In its place is an expanded menu including entrees because as David said in an email to his Soupies,
Category: Entrepreneurs
Healthia: Comparison Shopping, Online, for Health Insurance
This looks like a useful idea. California only, for now.
At Healthia, we are tremendous believers in the consumer driven healthcare movement sweeping America. Our goal is to provide America’s first comparison shopping and research portal for consumer driven healthcare, enabling businesses and their employees to choose health plans and ancillary health benefits objectively and transparently.
At our beta launch today (2005-Aug-11), we serve the California market with a strong emphasis on HSA compatible plans. We also enable any user across the nation to compare over 50 leading HSA products.
David Cowan has a useful summary of the movement behind this: “Consumer Directed Healthcare” or CDH. Cowan also references this CDH study.
Country Collectors
The fact that news of this probably has never reached you attests to what an impossibly distant and godforsaken place Bouvet Island is. Only a few dozen humans have ever left their footprints on it, and it’s a safe bet most of them would happily have passed on the honor.
But there is a small and obsessive group of people scheming, plotting, cajoling and ultimately trying to buy their way there. They are known as country collectors, and they spend their lifetimes journeying to the farthest and most obscure reaches of the globe, from Abkhazia to Umm Al Qaiwain, filling their passports with rare and exotic stamps. Bouvet Island is to them what Everest is to peak baggers, what the British Guiana 1c magenta is to philatelists, what the Apple Tree Girl 141X is to collectors of Hummel figurines.
Only a tiny handful of country collectors — precisely eight by one estimate, “not quite 20” by another — have ever managed to cross Bouvet off their lists. The most recent is a 40-year-old dot-com millionaire from San Francisco, Charles Veley, and he believes this, along with all his other peregrinations, qualifies him as the most well-traveled person in the history of the world.
The Art of Selling
Ben Stein writes well about the Art of Selling, and a good salesperson truly practices art:
In other words, align your interests with those of the buyer. Don’t try to shove something down his throat. Don’t try to hoodwink him. Just listen to what he needs and wants, see if you have the good or service he needs and wants and then arrange to make it easy to buy. Make sure that the buyer is a real buyer with a real need, a real timetable to buy and the real means to buy. Then satisfy that need.
It is also important to be a friend to your buyer. In fact, I observe that almost all success in life comes down to being a friend to someone: a friend to the voter, a friend to the judge, a friend to your spouse, a friend to the client, a friend to your parents. As Miller said so aptly, you have to not just be liked, but “well liked.”
Skysails: Great Shipping Energy Saving Idea
Great application of a mix of old an new technologies in a way that makes sense. Kudos to the SkySails folks for bringing this to market. The Economist has more:
But the SkySails approach does away with masts and is much cheaper. The firm says it can outfit a ship with a kite system for between €400,000 and €2.5m, depending on the vessel’s size. Stephan Wrage, the boss of SkySails, says fuel savings will recoup these costs in just four or five years, assuming oil prices of $50 a barrel. Jesper Kanstrup, a senior naval architect at Knud E. Hansen, says the idea of pulling a ship with an inexpensive kite—attached to the structurally solid bow like a tugboat—had never occurred to him. “It’s a good idea,” he says.
Skysails reveals the essence of any successful (We’ll see) idea: economics, application, timing and luck!
Midwesterners are Less Entrepreneurial
Two especially surprising findings from the study are: (a) that the Latino rate of entrepreneurship increased from 0.38 percent in 1996 to 0.48 percent in 2004, which was higher than the white, non-Latino rate of 0.39 percent; and (b) that immigrants have substantially higher rates of entrepreneurship than native-born individuals. The average rate of entrepreneurship for immigrants was 0.46 percent compared to 0.35 percent for the native-born.
New entrepreneurship activity is highest in the West. Other regions have similar rates of entrepreneurship.
Bud Selig Interview
What were the disappointments? Some controversies that I found disappointing in terms of human behavior. They tried to put a jail next to the ballpark … putting a jail next to a ballpark isn’t exactly an entertainment complex. And then the whole stadium controversy. And, look, I understand taxation. But here we are trying to keep baseball in Milwaukee … and it happens in a lot of places, this is not the only place it happens, but the Machiavellian behavior was just sad. And someday when I write a book I’ll describe it as it’s never been described. The personal abuse that the ownership took, I took, my daughter took, the organization took, baseball took — was inexcusable. And today, well how bad is it? Milwaukee has a Major League team for the next two generations. … It’s a great tribute to a lot of people. … Will Milwaukee in the future be a better place for your children and grandchildren? You bet it will.
I appreciate Bud’s gumption in making baseball happen. BUT, I think the location (should have been downtown – see Denver and San Francisco) and process that lead to Miller Park was a big mistake.
A New Kind of Middleman
But Noone’s outlook couldn’t be more global. He spends a typical weekend watching Chinese-language movies and listening to Chinese-language tapes. At least once a week he makes sure to eat with chopsticks. “You’ve got to show people you’re interested in their culture,” he says.
Noone is interested, all right. The 54-year-old entrepreneur is founder and CEO of Capacitor Industries, which imports low-cost electronic components from China and sells them to motor makers and other manufacturers in the U.S. and, increasingly, abroad. His stock-in-trade is capacitors: tiny devices that store charges, maintain electrical currents, keep motors running, and protect computers and communications equipment from surges. Every motor manufacturer needs a steady supply of them, which has helped send Noone’s annual sales to $5 million.
Innovation, Burt Rutan and EAA’s Airventure: “We bought the engines on ebay”
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20MB Quicktime Video |
SpaceshipOne/White Knight, making it’s way east to the Smithsonian, flew during Saturday’s EAA Airventure Air Show. I captured a 20MB video clip of several passes along with SpaceshipOne’s landing. You’ll hear designer Burt Rutan address the crowd during the aircraft’s flight, using “Military Power”. Enjoy! Rutan also mentioned that the aircraft would make one more stop at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio before reaching it’s final destination; the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. the video is a bit jerky at the beginning, but my handheld technique improves after a few seconds 🙂 | |
| Earlier this week, Rutan and Richard Branson announced a joint venture to form a new aerospace production company to build a fleet of commercial sub-orbital spaceships and launch aircraft.
I’ll post more photos and videos over the next few days. John Robb has been pushing for the government to support, in a big way, competitive private space initiatives ala the X-Prize rather than spending $3.2B annually on 1970’s technology – the shuttle. Robb also mentions how “big buck programs are a source of power in the Pentagon“. Robb has more ideas on the Government’s role in all of this and makes a rather startling but true statement:
More Videos: Marine AV8-B Harrier VSTOL | B-17 Takeoff. My father took a number of photos earlier this week. More photos here (click to view larger versions): |
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Entrepreneurs: Competing with the Big Firms
Tom Peters offers up several useful tips on competing with big organizations:
Can the small player compete in a world of Citigroups and Bank of Americas? I said it was a lark. And I more or less meant it. That is, among other things, giants— “new tech,” CRM, etc notwithstanding— will always be clumsy and impersonal relative to an “intimate local” who is really out to make a dramatic difference.