Saturday, June 29, 2013

It?s the Prop 8 boys? turn! Weddings galore in California tonight (Americablog)

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The Wrigley Company Sales Manager Job in Kenya | Kenyan Jobs ...

Summary:
?

The Wrigley Company is the world's largest manufacturer of chewing gum.??

A subsidiary of the MARS Company, a global leader in the chocolate and pet-food categories and one of the largest privately owned businesses.?

At Wrigley, we love what we do and are passionate about our people. People in over 150 countries enjoy our brands every day.?

Our secret to success is ensuring our associates treat the business as if it were their own and ensuring that we harness the individual strengths of our people.?

We also place great emphasis on being a responsible company with an eye on the future.?

We are seeking to recruit a Sales Manager Kenya reporting to the Sales Director, East Africa.

Job Purpose
?

To ensure effective execution of sales strategies in the market with a focus on the traditional trade so as to deliver company sales targets by working through an engaged team of associates.

Key Responsibilities

  • Contribute to the setting of country and regional sales targets based on demographic and channel standards as well as consumer needs, state and occasion insights.
  • Lead and motivate a team of sales associates and guide their development to achieve their full potential.
  • Work closely with the marketing department to increase consumption of Wrigley products and implement sales interventions aligned with the marketing strategies.
  • Manage the Wrigley Field Force teams to achieve Wrigley merchandising standards in all outlets.
  • Work closely with our distribution and wholesale partners to ensure effective supply to the traditional retail outlets.
  • Manage trade advertising, merchandising and sales promotions within established budgets.
  • Provide Market Intelligence and other useful trade information.
  • Create Collaborative relationships with all our Partners/Stakeholders in the business

Requirements

  • Bachelor?s Degree ? Preferably Business Administration (Marketing)
  • Minimum?? 5 years in a FMCG company. Must currently be at sales management level.

Key Competencies
?

Leadership Capabilities:?

  • Motivating Others
  • Creates Collaborative Relationships
  • Delivers Consistent Results
  • Action Orientated
  • Managing and Measuring Work

Technical/Functional Skill

  • Control & Processes ability
  • Budget Planning & control
  • P&L Understanding
  • Negotiation skills

How to apply:
?

Send your application including a cover letter indicating your desire to work with our client; a detailed CV highlighting relevant experience, details of current and expected salary, a daytime phone contact, email address, and the names of three professional referees by end of day Friday 12th July 2013 to:
?

Adept Systems
Management Consultants
P O Box 6416,?

Nairobi, GPO 00100
?

Email: recruit@adeptsystems.co.ke
?

Only short listed candidates will be contacted.?

Please note that we do not charge fees for receiving or processing job applications.

Source: http://kenyanjobs.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-wrigley-company-sales-manager-job.html

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Thursday, June 20, 2013

From the ashes of Webvan, Amazon builds a grocery business

By Alistair Barr

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The online grocery start-up Webvan may have been the single most expensive flame-out of the dot-com era, blowing through more than $800 million in venture capital and IPO proceeds in just over three years before shutting its doors in 2001.

Twelve years later, though, Webvan is rising from the dead - in the form of an online grocery business called AmazonFresh.

Four key Amazon.com Inc executives - Doug Herrington, Peter Ham, Mick Mountz and Mark Mastandrea - are former Webvan officials who have spent years analyzing and fixing the problems that led to the start-up's demise.

Kiva Systems, the robotics company that Amazon bought last year for $775 million in one of its largest-ever acquisitions, was built on ideas and technologies originally developed at Webvan and is a key part of the AmazonFresh strategy.

Even Webvan's old Web address, webvan.com, is now part of the Amazon empire.

"We had a lot of Webvan DNA in the room and we drew on that experience a lot," said Tom Furphy, who helped start AmazonFresh with Herrington and Ham before leaving to become a venture capitalist. "That was a good formula for building the business responsibly."

Amazon declined to comment for this story, or make any AmazonFresh executives available for interviews.

Former Amazon and Webvan officials say Amazon drew three big lessons from the Webvan debacle: expand slowly, limit delivery to areas with a high concentration of potential customers, and focus relentlessly on warehouse efficiency.

The opportunity for Amazon is huge. The grocery business in the United States generated $568 billion in retail sales last year, with online accounting for less than 1 percent, and it's among the last major retail sectors that the online giant has yet to tackle.

But the risks are large as well. Groceries are a notoriously low-margin business, and the aggressive expansion of discounters like Walmart has made the business even more cutthroat than it was in Webvan's day.

And competition in the online grocery business is heating up. FreshDirect and Peapod have been plugging away for years, while traditional grocery chains like Safeway also do online ordering and delivery. Walmart is testing its own fast delivery service in some markets in the United States now.

SLOW EXPANSION

AmazonFresh now serves Seattle and Los Angeles, and it plans to launch in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year. If these cities go well, Amazon is eyeing 20 new markets for 2014.

But the big plans belie what has been one of Amazon's most cautious entries into a new business since founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos started selling books online in the 1990s.

The grocery service started in just two Seattle neighborhoods, Medina and Mercer Island, in 2007, and then slowly spread to other Seattle communities over the next five years. It didn't expand beyond Seattle until June 10 of this year, when it launched in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles roll-out is similarly modest, covering only a few zip codes initially. "We know customers value this service but the economics remain challenging," an Amazon spokeswoman said when describing the L.A. launch.

Webvan - which ironically was also the brainchild of a book-seller, Louis Borders - expanded to nine major metro areas just 18 months after it began serving the San Francisco Bay Area, former executives recall. (Borders, co-founder of the now-defunct Borders Books & Music, declined to comment for this story.)

Webvan began its big expansion in Atlanta while the San Francisco service was still "wobbly," recalls Krishna Hegde, Webvan's vice president of deployment and systems engineering.

After the Atlanta launch in April 2000, Hegde said he recommended that the company slow down. But another executive argued the company should press on because of promises made to Wall Street investors, Hegde said.

Webvan "committed the cardinal sin of retail, which is to expand into a new territory - in our case several territories - before we had demonstrated success in the first market," said Mike Moritz, a Webvan board member and partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the company's venture capital backers. "In fact, we were busy demonstrating failure in the Bay Area market while we expanded into other regions."

DELIVERY DENSITY

Webvan not only launched in many cities, it also offered service across entire metro areas. That resulted in the company's delivery trucks making many trips where they only dropped off a few orders.

"The biggest failure of Webvan was delivery density," said Gary Dahl, vice president of distribution at Webvan from 1997 to 2001. In the Bay Area, he said, Webvan made money delivering in San Francisco and Oakland, but lost a lot of money delivering in suburbs such as Orinda and Moraga.

"Mean travel time between delivery stops is the key to success in the home delivery business," Dahl explained. "Travel one block in San Francisco and you have passed 200 people, travel one block in Moraga and you have passed about six people."

AmazonFresh has tackled this problem by only delivering to densely populated areas of Seattle, and it's taking the same approach in LA, according to Keith Anderson, an executive at consulting firm RetailNet Group.

"If you drive into certain neighborhoods in Seattle you will see a lot of front doors with AmazonFresh totes," he said. "That's because Amazon expanded gradually into specific neighborhoods and tried to deliver to lots of homes in those specific areas."

FreshDirect covers more than 80 percent of the New York metro area, but it took the company about a decade to expand its delivery network this wide. Last year, FreshDirect launched in Philadelphia.

KIVA ROBOTS PROVE KEY

Webvan also suffered severely from weaknesses in the design and technology of its giant warehouses. At its first facility, there was a single conveyor belt that snaked about five miles through the building bringing items to workers, who would then pick and pack the products into totes, Webvan Chief Technology Officer Peter Relan said.

When the conveyor belt broke, the operation would grind to a halt, he recalled.

Mick Mountz, an MIT-trained Webvan executive, oversaw the picking and packing process, along with Mark Mastandrea, and together they tried out lots of technology to make the warehouse run more efficiently, according to Relan.

For each $100 bag of groceries, it cost Webvan about $30 to pick and pack; the company had to get that down to $10 to make the process economically viable.

Mountz came up with a solution based on multiple robots that would bring products from different parts of the warehouse to human workers for picking and packing. Unlike a conveyor belt, if a robot broke down it could be fixed while the other robots continued their work.

However, Webvan had spent so much on its original warehouse - about $100 million, according to Relan - that the company was loath to completely change the process in favor of robots.

After Webvan went bust in 2001, Mountz founded Kiva Systems, which designed and built robots that now zip around the warehouses of retailers including Staples Inc, Walgreen Co and Gap Inc.

Amazon bought Kiva in 2012 for $775 million. Mountz is still running Kiva, while Mastandrea became director of delivery experience at AmazonFresh in March.

"When there are a large number of products and the shapes and sizes vary, as they do in grocery, you still need a human at the end to do the picking and packing," said Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures, which was an early investor in Kiva. "The Kiva System is the best solution out there for that combination of warehouse technology and human workers."

Amazon has one other thing Webvan never had: a huge, existing customer base. While Webvan had planned to expand into delivery of other goods once it had developed a base of grocery customers, Amazon is going the other way, and can help defray the cost of delivering groceries by delivering books or electronics at the same time.

There are other advantages that have accrued over time. The spread of cloud computing services - pioneered by Amazon's Web Services business - makes it cheaper to run online businesses, while consumers are more comfortable buying online through faster Internet connections.

Online shoppers who type "webvan.com" into an Internet browser today will find a website selling more than 45,000 non-perishable grocery items. In the top right-hand corner, it says Webvan is "part of the amazon.com family" and consumers can use their existing Amazon accounts to buy.

"Amazon purchased the name a couple of years ago," Dahl said. "Maybe they will revive it if sales are slow in the Bay Area."

(This version of the story was corrected to remove reference to Mark Zaleski in paragraph 18.)

(Reporting by Alistair Barr; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Claudia Parsons)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ashes-webvan-amazon-builds-grocery-business-213317146.html

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Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Internet sales tax bill faces tough sell in House

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., president pro tempore of the Senate, right, and Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., left, walk to the floor of the Senate during a vote on legislation to collect sales tax on Internet purchases, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, May 6, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., president pro tempore of the Senate, right, and Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., left, walk to the floor of the Senate during a vote on legislation to collect sales tax on Internet purchases, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, May 6, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Chart shows U.S. online sales and projections

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, left, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., right, leave the Senate floor after voting on legislation to collect sales tax on Internet purchases, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, May 6, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

(AP) ? Traditional retailers and cash-strapped states face a tough sell in the House as they lobby Congress to limit tax-free shopping on the Internet.

The Senate voted 69 to 27 Monday to pass a bill that empowers states to collect sales taxes from Internet purchases. Under the bill, states could require out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes when they sell products over the Internet, in catalogs, and through radio and TV ads. The sales taxes would be sent to the states where a shopper lives.

Current law says states can only require retailers to collect sales taxes if the merchant has a physical presence in the state.

That means big retailers with stores all over the country like Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target collect sales taxes when they sell goods over the Internet. But online retailers like eBay and Amazon don't have to collect sales taxes, except in states where they have offices or distribution centers.

"This bill is about fairness," said Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., the bill's main sponsor in the Senate. "It's about leveling the playing field between the brick and mortar and online companies and it's about collecting a tax that's already due. It's not about raising taxes."

The bill got bipartisan support in the Senate but faces opposition in the House, where some lawmakers regard it as a tax increase. Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate, and the conservative Heritage Foundation oppose the bill, and many Republicans have been wary of crossing them.

Supporters say the bill is not a tax increase. In many states, shoppers are required to pay unpaid sales tax when they file their state tax returns. However, states complain that few taxpayers comply.

"Obviously there's a lot of consumers out there that have been accustomed to not having to pay any taxes, believing that they don't have to pay any taxes," said Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., the bill's main sponsor in the House. "I totally understand that, and I think a lot of our members understand that. There's a lot of political difficulty getting through the fog of it looking like a tax increase."

On Tuesday, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, declined to say whether the House would take up the bill, deferring to the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the legislation. Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said there are problems with the bill but he did not reject it outright.

"While it attempts to make tax collection simpler, it still has a long way to go," Goodlatte said in a statement. Without more uniformity in the bill, he said, "businesses would still be forced to wade through potentially hundreds of tax rates and a host of different tax codes and definitions."

Goodlatte said he's "open to considering legislation concerning this topic but these issues, along with others, would certainly have to be addressed."

Internet giant eBay led the fight against the bill in the Senate, along with lawmakers from states with no sales tax and several prominent anti-tax groups. The bill's opponents say it would put an expensive obligation on small businesses because they are not as equipped as national merchandisers to collect and remit sales taxes at the multitude of state rates.

Businesses with less than $1 million in online sales would be exempt. EBay wants to exempt businesses with up to $10 million in sales or fewer than 50 employees.

"The contentious debate in the Senate shows that a lot more work needs to be done to get the Internet sales tax issue right, including ensuring that small businesses using the Internet are protected from new burdens that harm their ability to compete and grow," said Brian Bieron, eBay's senior director of global public policy.

Some states have sales taxes as high as 7 percent, plus city and county taxes that can push the combined rate even higher.

Many governors ? Republicans and Democrats ? have been lobbying the federal government for years for the authority to collect sales taxes from online sales.

The issue is getting bigger for states as more people make purchases online. Last year, Internet sales in the U.S. totaled $226 billion, up nearly 16 percent from the previous year, according to government estimates.

States lost a total of $23 billion last year because they couldn't collect taxes on out-of-state sales, according to a study done for the National Conference of State Legislatures, which has lobbied for the bill. About half of that was lost from Internet sales; half from purchases made through catalogs, mail orders and telephone orders, the study said.

Supporters say the bill makes it relatively easy for Internet retailers to comply. States must provide free computer software to help retailers calculate sales taxes, based on where shoppers live. States must also establish a single entity to receive Internet sales tax revenue, so retailers don't have to send it to individual counties or cities.

Opponents worry the bill would give states too much power to reach across state lines to enforce their tax laws. States could audit out-of-state businesses, impose liens on their property and, ultimately, sue them in state court.

___

Associated Press reporter Andrew Miga contributed to this report.

___

Follow Stephen Ohlemacher on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenatap

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-05-07-Internet%20Sales%20Tax/id-5b870fcaab3e404cabb3ac7ded8a7995

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Professor Federico Rosei of INRS to receive 2013 Herzberg Medal

Professor Federico Rosei of INRS to receive 2013 Herzberg Medal [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 6-May-2013
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Gisele Bolduc
gisele.bolduc@adm.inrs.ca
418-654-2501
INRS

Quebec City, May 6, 2013 Professor Federico Rosei, who is also the director of the INRS nergie Matriaux Tlcommunications Research Centre, has been awarded the Canadian Association of Physicists' (CAP) 2013 Herzberg Medal. This is the first time that an INRS physicist has received this distinction. With the medal, CAP acknowledges the importance of Professor Rosei's innovative and interdisciplinary research in the field of nanomaterials and his role as a mentor for hundreds of young scientists. Introduced in 1970, this prize will be awarded during CAP's annual congress, taking place in Montreal from May 27 to 31, 2013.

"I feel truly privileged and honoured to receive this medal from the Canadian Association of Physicists. I owe this success to the excellent research fellows and collaborators with whom I had the pleasure of working and to my mentors, who always supported and encouraged me," the award winner said.

A world-renowned researcher and Canada Research Chair in nanostructured organic and inorganic materials, Professor Rosei has paved the way for new discoveries and applications by providing new insights into structure/property relationships of several classes of advanced materials. His research team has also developed new strategies for fabricating, processing, and characterizing nanomaterials, including biocompatible materials.

Professor Rosei's outstanding scientific contribution is widely recognized and has garnered a number of awards. The Herzberg Medal follows the 2011 Rutherford Memorial Medal in Chemistry from the Royal Society of Canada. He is also the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's 2010 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the U.K. Institute of Nanotechnology, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and the Australian Institute of Physics. He is also a member of the Global Young Academy and the Sigma Xi Society, as well as a senior member of the IEEE.

Congratulations to the 2013 Herzberg Medal recipient!

###

About INRS

Institut national de recherche scientifique (INRS) is a graduate-level research and training university and ranks first in Canada for research intensity (average grant funding per faculty member). INRS brings together some 150 professors and close to 700 students and postdoctoral fellows at its four centres in Montreal, Quebec City, Laval, and Varennes. Its applied and fundamental research is essential to the advancement of science in Quebec and internationally even as it plays a key role in the development of concrete solutions to the problems faced by our society.


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Professor Federico Rosei of INRS to receive 2013 Herzberg Medal [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 6-May-2013
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Gisele Bolduc
gisele.bolduc@adm.inrs.ca
418-654-2501
INRS

Quebec City, May 6, 2013 Professor Federico Rosei, who is also the director of the INRS nergie Matriaux Tlcommunications Research Centre, has been awarded the Canadian Association of Physicists' (CAP) 2013 Herzberg Medal. This is the first time that an INRS physicist has received this distinction. With the medal, CAP acknowledges the importance of Professor Rosei's innovative and interdisciplinary research in the field of nanomaterials and his role as a mentor for hundreds of young scientists. Introduced in 1970, this prize will be awarded during CAP's annual congress, taking place in Montreal from May 27 to 31, 2013.

"I feel truly privileged and honoured to receive this medal from the Canadian Association of Physicists. I owe this success to the excellent research fellows and collaborators with whom I had the pleasure of working and to my mentors, who always supported and encouraged me," the award winner said.

A world-renowned researcher and Canada Research Chair in nanostructured organic and inorganic materials, Professor Rosei has paved the way for new discoveries and applications by providing new insights into structure/property relationships of several classes of advanced materials. His research team has also developed new strategies for fabricating, processing, and characterizing nanomaterials, including biocompatible materials.

Professor Rosei's outstanding scientific contribution is widely recognized and has garnered a number of awards. The Herzberg Medal follows the 2011 Rutherford Memorial Medal in Chemistry from the Royal Society of Canada. He is also the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's 2010 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the U.K. Institute of Nanotechnology, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and the Australian Institute of Physics. He is also a member of the Global Young Academy and the Sigma Xi Society, as well as a senior member of the IEEE.

Congratulations to the 2013 Herzberg Medal recipient!

###

About INRS

Institut national de recherche scientifique (INRS) is a graduate-level research and training university and ranks first in Canada for research intensity (average grant funding per faculty member). INRS brings together some 150 professors and close to 700 students and postdoctoral fellows at its four centres in Montreal, Quebec City, Laval, and Varennes. Its applied and fundamental research is essential to the advancement of science in Quebec and internationally even as it plays a key role in the development of concrete solutions to the problems faced by our society.


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-05/i-pfr050613.php

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Terrafugia considering TF-X, a vertical-takeoff flying car (video)

Terrafugia researching TFX, a verticaltakeoff flying car

We've been hearing about Terrafugia's Transition "flying car" for, well, far too long, considering that it has yet to even venture beyond the prototype phase. The prop plane / roadworthy vehicle combo has its fair share of fans -- some of them with deep enough pockets to place an order -- but it won't be making its way from your garage to the runway anytime soon. With that in mind, the company's TF-X vertical-takeoff model is even less likely to see the light of day, but it's being considered nonetheless.

The plug-in hybrid-electric aircraft would take off and land vertically, like a helicopter -- if the DOT and FAA allowed it, you could literally fly over the highway whenever you run into traffic, though we can't imagine that pilots will ever get the green light to take off from public roads, even if the TF-X becomes a reality. For now, it exists only in the minds of Terrafugia's ambitious team, a few image renders and a minute-long animated demo, which we've embedded for your viewing pleasure after the break.

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Comments

Via: CNET

Source: Terrafugia (PR), TF-X Product Page

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/2Ag15QSksn0/

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