Tag: lyft

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Lyft enters car rental race

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Lyft offers car rentals

Lyft announced that it will now enable people to rent cars through its app, eliminating the requirement that a person go to a rental desk to get a car. Shares of Hertz and Avis were lower on the news. CNBC

dis-rup-shun: Rental car companies should have seen this coming and beat the ride share companies to the punch. Silver Car, purchased by Audi, has been renting cars through its app for several years, providing not only the transaction, but the check in and pick up process all through its app. Renting a car and returning it to a specific office is inconvenient, and if Lyft and Uber make this process much easier, then the traditional rental car business, at least off-airport, will be upended.

Connected life vests have arrived

French safety product company Plastimo is working with networking company Sigfox to develop life jackets that can be tracked with low earth orbit satellites and a wide-area ultra-narrowband network near coastal areas. Plastimo states that product costs are less than $2 per unit and falling. Enterprise IOT Insights

dis-rup-shun: Another story to tell your grandchildren… “There was a day when you went out on the water and there were no satellites tracking your location and safety – some people died.” Safety seems an obvious application of IOT and connectivity. The problem is, GPS and battery powered transceivers add costs, and must have a power source. For commercial seamen, maintaining a connected life vest will be critical. Life jackets on a leisure boat likely have a product lifetime of one to two decades. Keeping your life jackets powered will be an additional challenge when keeping a boat running is challenge enough.

The top 44 gadgets released in 2019

CNet provides a look at the best products released to the markets in the past year. Here is a sampling across multiple categories…

  • Motorola’s Moto G7 — maybe the best “lower” cost phone, coming in at under $300 for friends of Android.
  • Apple Watch Series 5 — the wearables continue to improve at a fast pace, providing heart monitoring and now an always on display.
  • Apple AirPods Pro — generation 2.0 of the wireless ear buds get better with noise cancellation and a more customized fit.
  • The LG OLED B9 TV is the cream of the crop, with even better clarity, connectivity and thinness.
  • Google Nest Wi-Fi — not sexy, but a mesh router can solve your home Wi-Fi dead zone problems.
  • Disney + — a streaming service with enough blockbuster content to make it a no-brainer.

dis-rup-shun: The gadget industry continues to deliver faster, better, cheaper products and, considering CPU per dollar, even the most expensive phones continue to get cheaper. The biggest challenge, it seems, is to figure out how to engage customers with new product categories that didn’t exist last year. Product managers need to forecast growth on three potential curves: catching the viral wave, non-viral appeal, and lack of appeal. If you know how to guarantee viral growth, I have several job opportunities for you.

Smart home opportunity: air purification

Indoor air quality is a big business in Asia – expected to be $1.7 billion by 2023 while the US market for air quality is still in its infancy. With increasing focus on health, climate change, sleep quality, diet, exercise, and recurring calamities such as California wildfires, the public is generally more concerned about what we breathe than it was a decade ago. A number of technologies are available to both monitor as well as purify indoor air. A few of note are Airthinx, Awair monitor,  HEPA-filtered Dyson stick vacuum, Molekule, Air Visual Pro. Wired

dis-rup-shun: Add air quality devices to homes is a natural product line extension for HVAC makers, thermostat makers, and small appliance manufacturers. First, however, consumers need to be made aware of the quality of their environment through sensors. Paired with a mobile app, small, in-home air quality monitors that provide information and eventually activate purifying systems are a strong product growth opportunity for the connected home.

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A roadmap to Amazon’s next conquests

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The seven industries Amazon will disrupt next

According to analyst firm CBInsights, the next targets for Amazon include the following:

The four industries certain to be disrupted by the Seattle giant:

  1. Pharmacies — Amazon has acquired Drugstore.com and PillPack. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Pharmacy middlemen (PBMs) and executives enjoying fat profits.
  2. Small business lending — Amazon knows the financial performance of thousands of small merchants that sell on Amazon.com. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Commercial and local banks.
  3. Online groceries — a notoriously difficult business, Amazon is now expert at both logistics and the retail grocery business from its Whole Foods acquisition. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Meal subscription services that charge a small premium for meal kits will find Amazon offering more choices for the same or less money.
  4. Payments — the company already owns Amazon Cash, Amazon Reload, Amazon Pay, and Amazon Prime Visa and will work hard to keep more deposits in Amazon accounts. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.

And the industries that may be disrupted by Amazon:

  1. Mortgages — getting approved for a mortgage is a cumbersome activity, therefore ripe for disruption, and Quicken Loans is the leader in fast, online mortgages. Amazon understands online selling. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Not only mortgage originators, but the archaic title companies.
  2. Home and Garden — several companies are shipping plants and garden kits to new home owners, and this is a supply chain business. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Amazon needs volume and the mail order plant business may not be very reliable, so Home Depot and Lowe’s will continue to be the go-to companies for lawn and garden.
  3. Insurance — Amazon has a great deal of information about its members, especially Prime members, and can use this data to determine who the better risks are. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Insurance providers who are not profiling subscribers based on available data and therefore are slow to target the best customers they wish to keep for many years

Ride hailing in China takes a step up

Alibaba (think Chinese Amazon) has created an aggregation service which enables ride hailers (330 million in China) to summon a ride from a single app, rather than compare ride availability across the four major rideshare providers’ apps. The aggregator takes a share of the fare and simplifies the process of both getting a ride and, if you are an emerging ride service, gaining scale. China is raising the required standards for accreditation of drivers and autos, creating a shortage of drivers. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: U.S. and European local governments will be wise to follow China with higher standards for drivers and autos, as the demand for more drivers has degraded the formerly consistently delightful Uber or Lyft experience. Taxis are now looking better than they have in five years as many yellow taxis are now cleaner and mechanically equal or better than the average ride share vehicle. Ride share vendors should offer a new class of premium ride, such as ‘Uber Certified,’ which ensures a clean, sound car and a preferred driver.

Waze data shortens emergence response time

It turns out that Waze users are so good about reporting accidents, that Waze learns about a crash 2 minutes and 41 seconds before emergency responders are notified. Wired

dis-rup-shun: Here is yet another example of crowd sourcing from private enterprise functioning better than a government entity’s best and most optimized emergency system. If a free app can provide more accurate emergency data than the tax-payer funded 911 emergency system, then should the public expect that Facebook’s proposed private currency, Libra, can provide better warnings of financial meltdown, fraud or theft than the Federal Reserve Bank? Makes you wonder.

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How Amazon will wreck the pharmacy industry

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How Amazon will wreck the pharmacy business

Amazon quietly entered the pharmacy business in 2017 and introduced PillPack, a direct to home prescription drug business that packages pills by daily dosage, with dates and times to take the medicine printed on the package. The retail pharmacy heavyweights currently play middle man by negotiating discounts from drug makers for large health insurers, creating special pricing for insurance networks. By selling directly to insurance companies, Amazon will cut out the retail pharmacy giants. CNBC

dis-rup-shun: Amazon’s disruptive move will benefit the consumer with lower drug prices and, possibly, lower health insurance premiums, but will destabilize the retail pharmacy industry by forcing it to rely more heavily on the sale of non-drug products, a battle it is already fighting against Amazon.com and Prime. One answer is for retail pharmacies to move more aggressively into care clinics, a trend well underway, putting further pressure on doctor and hospital chains to become more consumer-friendly as they are forced to compete with retail pharmacies for walk-in healthcare.

Direct share offerings will put a squeeze on bankers

Collaboration tool vendor Slack went public this week without assistance from investment banks, gaining 50% value in its first day. The capital raise puts valuation of the company at $23.1 billion. Compare this to Uber’s IPO last month which, by absolute dollar valuation, was the worst performing IPO in history. Both Lyft and Uber have recovered somewhat from a bad initial offering. Gizmodo

dis-rup-shun: Two large IPOs, Slack and Spotify in 2018, were direct (limited banker involvement) offerings. Both companies have enjoyed strong value growth since IPO. Uber and Lyft were heavily hyped by investment banks and crashed after offering. Before we conclude that bankers are bad, it is important to note that Uber and Lyft’s business models do not show profitability in the near term, and seem to be in multiple businesses. On the other hand, Slack is facing stiff competition from tech giants. If we assume that the market is sophisticated enough to understand the competitive landscape ahead of the IPO, then one conclusion is that bankers may be over-promoting offerings and that a more informed market later corrects. Expect direct offerings to become more commonplace, eventually forcing a correction in the fees charged by banking firms.

Zuckerberg outranks Tim Cook

Glassdoor’s anonymous survey of former employees’ views on their CEO has a number of tech CEOs ranking in the top 10. Ranking in the lower half of the 100 ranked are Facebook’s Zuckerberg at 59 (#1 is the best) and Apple’s Tim Cook at 69th place. ZDNet

dis-rup-shun: Interesting to see Cook at the bottom of the heap, especially after a brutal year for Facebook’s public image. Does the secrecy inherent in Apple’s culture create distrust inside the family? Despite Facebook’s missteps, Zuckerberg has been quite penitent in public, perhaps gaining employee’s respect. It is rare for a company as successful as Apple to not become an arrogant empire, and perhaps more transparency would engender more employee admiration.

Netflix will eventually include advertisements, says industry

Netflix, with its 150 million subscribers, faces significant costs from developing original content. Industry insiders predict that Netflix will break its vow of no advertisements as production costs increase and the value of its audience reach soars. CNBC

dis-rup-shun: Netflix continues to pursue a unique strategy — using debt to finance a very large catalog of original content that it can monetize over coming years. As other streaming services are launched from companies including Disney and AT&T’s WarnerMedia, Netflix subscriber growth will be challenged. The barriers to entry for streaming services have become original content — a very expensive barrier. As John Penney, CSO of 29th Century Fox has been telling the industry for years, there is simply not enough non-movie theater revenue in the TV distribution chain to support the costs of original content. The company’s stock price, however, continues to show confidence in the company’s ‘think different’ strategy.

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Practicing app hygiene makes life simpler

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Clean up your phone

The average person launches 9 apps per day and uses 30 over the course of one month. Smartphones, however, typically have several pages of apps, well over one hundred in many cases. The problem with the old, unused apps is that they are not updated, and become security risks, memory hogs, and location trackers. Popular Science

dis-rup-shun: People purchased high tech tools to manage their lives. Now quality of life, like protecting privacy and un-complicating interactions with devices, requires management of devices. What technology will help us manage the devices that help us manage our lives?

 

HVAC dealer as smart home channel

Philadelphia’s Joseph Giannone Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning is selling smart home features as a way to increase peace of mind during summer vacation. Focusing on energy savings, leak detection, HVAC performance and lighting as security makes a trip to the beach that much more worry free. Yahoo

dis-rup-shun: Much of the industry is focused on the shootout between Google Nest, Amazon Ring and Alexa, and low-end security provider SimpliSafe. HVAC dealers and installers, however, provide a trusted source for information as well as a reliable installation authority. Brand will be less important when recommended by HVAC dealers, as their level of authority, in most cases, will matter more to homeowners than asking friends or family which technology is best. 

Uber and Lyft are unsustainable

Shelly Palmer explains that Uber and Lyft have no differentiation, and therefore cannot attain enough pricing advantage over one another to sustain profits. Autonomous vehicles, however, built by big car companies, will win as their ability to make and deploy products directly to consumers who will “buy” the cars one mile at a time will be more profitable. Uber and Lyft, the argument goes, cannot purchase cars outright and rent them as efficiently as automakers. 

dis-rup-shun: For the same reasons automakers purchased car rental companies — creating large buying groups that cut out the middle man (the dealer) — makers of autonomous vehicles operated by the manufacturer will enjoy a higher margin and a pricing advantage in a cutthroat market.