Author: Krikor
Live Life Light
Retailer/Supplier Relationship
In retail distribution, the relation between the retailers and the suppliers is always in high tension, the below sign was seen at a Leclerc store in France, saying that Danone is refusing to deliver them goods, because the later thinks the store is not selling their products at the right price. Which means that Leclerc is selling cheaper than the competition and this did put Danone under pressure from other retailers in France.
photo credit: Haroldparis.fr
Competition 24 vs 25
Othaim Markets is a local Saudi chain of supermarkets and hypermarkets. It seems their marketing department think that opening 1 extra hour during the day will bring more business. This is what we call “Competition”.
Hard Time For Hard Discount
The economical situation in Europe is not helping the hard-discounters to keep the trend. Aldi France had to take the hard decision by introducing 3 products from Ferrero, Kinder Bueno, Kinder Chocolat and Nutella.
Other multinationals are also in negotiations to introduce some of their products very soon on the shelves of the German hard-discounter in France and some other major European markets, such us Belgium and the Netherlands.
During the last 5 years, many other hard-discounters in France (Lidl, Leader Price, Netto, Le Mutant, Ed/Dia) had to open their store doors with pleasure to the multinationals.
The biggest rumor is about Coca-Cola invading very soon the shelves of hard-discounters.
10,452 km²
This guy loves his country, Lebanon, which has a surface of 10,452km², so he decided ending his mobile and car plate numbers with it.
Website Hosting in Lebanon
This morning, while I was going thru a classified-ads magazine left at our doorstep, I saw the below web hosting ad. For God’s sake, we are in 2012.
I am not sure if the guy/people behind this service is/are dumb or they are trying to offend the intelligence of people seeing their ad, or there are still out there many ignorant consumers when it comes to web hosting.
50mb of hosting space and 2 email addresses for 60$/year, come on… wake up. While a free email at Gmail give you now 7GB of space and you can get almost endless space for cloud hosting like Box.net or SkyDrive or many other service and in case you are looking for a straight hosting service, you get “unlimited” everything + a domain for even cheaper than $60/year.
I personally use HostMonster for many years now and they never let me down (this is not a paid blog entry by hostmonster), I am just a happy customer.
So please, stop being stupid or making us feel stupid.
Books I Read In April 2012
The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure your prospective employer is thinking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day–more than a worker in India, a robot, or a computer could? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow?
And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today’s hyper-connected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria. This is precisely why LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Garrett Hoffman, one of the premier starter-uppers in Silicon Valley–besides cofounding LinkedIn, he is on the board of Zynga, was an early investor in Facebook, and sits on the board of Mozilla–has written The Start-up of You, coauthored with Ben Casnocha.
Amazon.com Link
Entrepreneurship & Problems
So you want to be an entrepreneur like everybody else. For the last 2-3 years, i have heard or read this word almost everyday, from the kid who is 10 and came up with an app, to the average employee who hates his boss and wants to quit and start his own business.
Being an entrepreneur is a wonderful thing, but don’t forget, you need to work harder than before to get where you want to go. But with time I started hating the word, every time i hear it, it puts me in a bad mood and don’t really know why.
So you have a business plan for an idea or project and you want to be an entrepreneur. You dig here and there and end up having 30 minutes with a VC. You go to the meeting, enter a big room with nice chairs and video projector and during the conversation, someone asks you, “what problem is your product gonna solve?”.
Excuse me?
Why do you think I am here to solve a problem or who told you my idea is about solving problems. I just got an idea and I want to execute it differently.
No matter what article, blog post or book I read about VCs, entrepreneurship or ideas, they always bring up the problem of solving a problem.
What about 20, 30 or 40 years ago, when people used to open businesses around the corner, was it to solve a problem? or to make a living? or they had an idea that sometimes turned into pure gold?
What about I take a product that already exist and do it in a different way? What about I copy someone else better? What about I just come up with an idea that does not solve any problem but is a nice idea?
When Jeff Bezos created Amazon.com, he simply wanted to build the world largest bookstore, was this a solution for a problem? Then he started selling other products, what solutions did he bring to DVDs or CDs or electronics? There are electronics shops in New York City and Brooklyn who have bigger stock and larger selection than Amazon.com, and Jeff is still making good earnings.
So whenever you have an idea, it does not necessarily need to be a solution for a problem, just go and make your idea and dream come true.
