Layout person in Atlanta?

What Amazon "thing" is that?

Cheers, Dave

Or the first of the month when people get their welfare or Social Security checks.

Fulfilment by Amazon: they do all the warehousing, shipping, billing, and customer service, for about 7% of sales and 50 cents per cubic foot per month. For selling small instruments, that's a gift.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Thanks Phil. Didn't know the details...

Dave

Last time I looked at it, it looked to be more like 15-20% (12% referral fee++), and there are some things like a $22.50/ft^3 semi-annual up-front fee if stuff hangs around for more than 12 months... also the only way to get stuff back seemed to be to buy it back. The cubic feet are calculated as "properly packaged for shipment to customers" so I think they'll be a lot higher than the actual cubic feet. I've think gotten some real bargains (on SS tubing) at the expense of companies clearing out stock before they got hit. Pennies, literally.

Still, could be worthwhile if you build your business model in a way to accomodate it (labels with their SKUs etc.). In particular, any customization would have to be handled carefully.

Have you looked at their EC2? Looks a lot more sensible than buying clusters if one has occasional high-demand computing needs, like heavy duty modelling in NASTRAN, CFD, multi-physics or whatever.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

It depends on your sales volume and a bunch of other things. But for something the size of your two hands that sells for $2000 or thereabouts, it's fairly hard to beat.

I've thought about cloud clusters in the past, but they always seem to have two problems: no guaranteed interconnect latency, and no stable programming model. I wrote my simulator right down on the socket API, with my own communications and serialization primitives, which is the cluster equivalent of bare metal. (C++ is a big help with that--I doubt I could have managed the complexity without object-oriented interfaces.)

If my simulation business were bigger and steadier, it might be worth hiring somebody to port my code to the cloud, but for the price of doing that I can build a 2-teraflop cluster to run the code I already have, which scales pretty well. (I've run it on 14 nodes of 2 cores each, and it was within 20% of linear scaling, even with only GbE interconnections.) So far my 150 GFLOPs office machine is good enough.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The real problem, for a niche gadget, is to make people aware that the product exists. It would be easy to get optimistic and put a bunch of widgets into Amazon and have them sit there forever. Also, customers may want loaners or modified versions.

One good way to sell stuff is to get a catalog company to list it, Thorlabs and such. They may want 30% or so off, but that could be worth it. And they do all the customer financial stuff for you.

It's sad, but selling is usually more important, and more difficult, than technology. It's not a thing that we geek types enjoy doing. We design a gadget and expect lines to form outside to buy it.

(That actually used to happen, as revealed in stories from the early days of HP, LeCroy, Berkeley Nucleonics. They would design things and next thing, orders with checks enclosed would show up in the mail from Sweden. No more!)

I don't know how your accountants do it, but I like to keep the value added for accounting purposes (eg. inventory, work in progress) to a reasonable minimum until close to when the item is invoiced. It's pretty hard to argue that the valuation of 50 $2000 widgets that have been shipped to another company for fulfillment should not be approaching $100K, which would likely show up as an asset and get taxed, even if it's not been invoiced. Of course it all works out the same in the end- but paying earlier than necessary is not good business. It's more significant with niche products where the markup on materials tends to quite high.

I don't think fulfillment costs on a $2000 item are very significant. I can tape up a box and stick it in a drop box, wait for the courier or even run them out to Fedex myself for a small percentage of that. On a slew of $20 or $50 items, the costs and logistics can be crippling. You can still ask to be paid up front (which costs a couple percent), and whoever does the payments and fulfillment, you're potentially on the hook if the product is, for any reason, not satisfactory (even if they change their mind or destroy the thing by being an idiot).

It would be nice if the catalog houses didn't hide the real manufacturer, but most of them do. It's hard to build up a loyal clientele when you're OEMing or white boxing everything. There are some that more passively hide the real source (not shown in the catalog, but they'll tell you if you axe, and the product has the mfrs name on it).

HP,

No more, unless you can really hit it lucky (or smart) as "the" source in a rapidly emerging field. Doesn't happen every day. Seems like anything that looks to be lucrative gets imitated very quickly these days.

Consumer products are the worst- with stores charging for premium shelf placement, offering no questions returns, and retaining the right to return everything shipped to them.

Yup. One can arguably not finish a product until the last minute, and value work-in-process at actual cost, not selling price. We actually keep subassemblies, or partly-stuffed boards, in stock so we can customize versions, which goes along with valuing inventory closer to cost until it actually gets assembled/tested/shipped/invoiced and becomes accounts receivable.

Imagine building 100 widgets, sales price $2K each, and never selling any of them, but showing $200K value for tax purposes. One can write it down eventually, but it could be awkward for a while. Not as bad as owing income taxes on worthless stock options, but close.

California used to have a punishing inventory tax (on top of everything else) but miraculously got rid of it.

Yep. That perdicshun was rattling 'round my brain for months. For a long time i have been waiting for property values 2 to hit, 'cause very similar factors including the same faulty deregulation, are in still place to make it happen again.

?-)

Oh yea. I remember really crazy sale prices after xmas every year.

I think the FTC has something to do with getting rid of it.

?-)

I vaguely recall it was pressure from the electronics industry to make California competative with out of state electronics companies that didn't have an inventory tax.

When my father was in the lingerie business, we would ship almost all our inventory across the state line into Nevada every Feb 4th(?), the day on which the inventory tax was based. After that date, it was safe to return to California. Most of our competitors did the same. Other businesses would ship their inventory by rail. During late Jan it was almost impossible to find a tractor trailer in the Smog Angeles area.

TX has some stupid law like that wrt cars- tax on everything in inventory at the first of the year or something like that.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Is she looking for a summer job where she could do Altium layout?

Some companies used to just pull the trailers from their shipping dock and claim it was shipped. Till they got caught.

Possibly--I'll ask her, thanks.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Vermont used to allow cities to impose an inventory tax. IBM finally got fed up (they could have shipped inventory from their Essex Junction facility across the river to their Williston facility every Jan.1, but didn't) and told the state to get rid of it, or else. They did but you should have heard the whiners who had been getting a "free ride" on their property tax for years. Some suggested that this tax was why IBM built the 300mm fab in NY instead of VT (the tax went away about the same time as that fab was announced).

Governments, at all levels, are pretty dumb, though they're more isolated from reality the higher you go.

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I'd agree with that, for nichie (sp) products there is a lot of customer service involved.

bs and

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Hmm his stuff could still be lost in Thor labs... their catalog is hugh now! A few times that I've bought a few items from Thor and then went on to find the 'real' source, I've found their mark-up to be closer to a factor of three. (But that was for ~$100 items.. maybe less for $2k?) Mind you I have no problem for a x3 mark-up.

George H.

gadget

of HP,

ers

.highlandtechnology.com  jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

It's not about deregulation. This one is about the stupid idea of some folks in Washington that printing money is the way to salvage the economy. It's not. All it does is make credit cheap, which in turn fosters wanton behavior on the part of almost everyone involved. With consequences we all know but which the decision makers still fail to see.

Except this time the kablouie will be more painful and the results more permanent.