...alternative to car ownership, traditional car rental services and other vehicle leasing programs. ZipCar operates a subscription based model. Members are required to pay annual fees that would in affect grant them the right to reserve a car at a pre-specified time. ZipCar is headquartered in Boston and commenced operations in 1999; by 2005 it became the largest active car-sharing company in the United States with over 30,000 registered customers1. ZipCar provides a convenient service for individuals who either (i) do not own or could not afford a car, (ii) instances where cost of inconvenience is too high ( i.e. parking, maintenance and insurance) and (iii) Students. ZipCar has forged partnerships with leading several universities across the United States to provide a fleet of fuel efficient cars in exchange for parking spaces. This has allowed for Universities and institutions alike to meet their environmentally friendly targets. ZipCar has recently expanded its fleet to include luxury cars. Customers The customer base for ZipCar tends to include young professionals living in major cities where car ownership would be exorbitantly expensive. Campus universities provided students the option to use ZipCar to meet their green initiatives. ZipCars were conveniently located at parking spaces in densely populated areas that are highly accessible by train and public transportation. ZipCar grew its customer base by establishing themselves as a low cost alternative to car ownership...
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...9-605-054 REV: JUNE 30, 2005 FRANCES X. FREI Zipcar: Influencing Customer Behavior Anita Karr frantically gathered everything she needed for her road trip: water, her favorite “mix” CD from Javier (the ex-boyfriend), ear plugs. After years as a struggling musician her sister was making her debut as the new drummer for No Bags to Check, a performance art/hard rock band that was gaining momentum on the East Coast college circuit. The venue for this breakthrough in her sister’s career was Lupo’s in Providence, Rhode Island and Karr had to be there. Living in Cambridge a car hadn’t been necessary; most of the places she needed to visit on a daily basis were within walking distance of Karr’s Valentine Street apartment. To visit her sister across the river, grocery shop, and run errands Karr relied on Zipcar, which she had signed up for a year ago rather than continue to pay for parking, car insurance, and gas. For tonight’s trip she had reserved weeks ago, using Zipcar’s convenient online reservation system, a VW Jetta Jericho. It was 3:30 pm. Karr was scheduled to pick up the Jetta at 4:00 pm, her sister by 4:30 pm, and arrive at Lupo’s by 6:00 pm. Both she and her sister had figured that this was more than enough time to get to Boston from Cambridge, load the drums, and make Providence by the appointed hour. Karr made one final sweep of her belongings—she couldn’t find Javier’s Best of Bob Dylan CD, which she had conveniently forgotten to return—then gathered her bags and...
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...Management Consulting Group Executive Summary This report examines the competitive strategy and business operations of Zipcar, in addition to its position within the U.S. car-sharing industry. The report has been commissioned in order to aid venture capitalists in assessing potential risks and rewards associated with investment in Zipcar, and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of Zipcar as a potential investment project. This report features: an assessment of the U.S. car-sharing industry, based on Porter’s five forces that shape industry competition an analysis of developments in Zipcar’s business model recommendations regarding the future development of Zipcar’s competitive strategy and business operations conclusions relating to the attractiveness of Zipcar as an investment project 1 Contents Executive Summary ................................................................................................... 1 Contents ..................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 3 Origins of Zipcar ......................................................................................................... 3 Porter’s five forces applied to Zipcar .......................................................................... 4 Business Model ................................
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...Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, us ed in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechani cal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the permission of Harvard Business School. MYRA HART MICHAEL J. ROBERTS JULIA D. STEVENS Zipcar: Refining the Business Model It was October 14, 2000, and Robin Chase was leaving yet another meeting with potential providers of capital for her fledgling venture, Zipcar. Chase was CEO and cofounder of the company, which she and Antje Danielson had starte d some 10 months before. The idea behind Zipcar—a sophisticated form of car sharing—was simple, yet potentially revolutionary. Chase and Danielson had conducted some initia l research during late 1999, and by the end of that year, the two had developed a business plan. They had incorporat ed in January 2000 and raised their first $50,000 from one angel investor....
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...Zip Car Case Analysis As the Springboard 2000 New England Venture forum was approach quickly, Chase needed to develop an effective business plan to present to the conference. My Recommendations for Chase are: 1. Refine Zipcar’s business model based on real U.S. market data, and use the real U.S. market date to construct a new pricing structure: eliminate the daily maximum rate, and double the per mile and per hour rate. 2. Maintain 40% car utilization. 3. Find a right person to join their management team. 4. Refine and complete Zipcar’s technology platform. 5. Secure good parking locations as its competitive advantage. Originally, since Chase was inspired by the car sharing business in Europe, the assumptions and financial plans were using the data from European market. However, due to the differences in consumer behaviors and market conditions, those assumptions were not accurate and cannot be directly applied to the U.S. markets. On June 22, 2000, Zipcar put its first three cars on street, which tested the market and gave real market data for Zipcar to use. With these data, we can see the difference between the original assumptions and reality: First of all, the attrition is much lower than expected. Chase was expecting a 15% attrition rate, however, the real attrition was less than 1.3%. (Table 1) This low attrition shows customers are buying in this business idea and majority of the customers are willing to continue using this service. In addition, the trip per user per...
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...STATEMENT ON FRAUD On the 27th day of June 2012, at about 1:10 pm, two gentlemen walked into the bank under the pretence of depositing money. They both sat at the reception area where one of them gave monies to the other who in turn walked to the teller point. They exchanged some few words then he walked towards the UT Life Rep. He asked to open an account for his father but upon giving the requirement he decided to go and bring the father himself. He walked out of the banking hall leaving the other gentleman seated at the reception. At that point the man seated at the banking hall was interrogated by the security lady if he needed assistance but he confirmed that he came in with someone who is buying tiles across the street. After a few minutes he walked out of the bank and came in again with the one who said he wanted to open account for his father. He sat again at the reception area whiles the other man walked to the UT Life Rep., he came back walked out of the bank and never returned. The other gentleman sat there for about 30minutes and was questioned again by the security lady but then he insisted he was waiting for his partner. I came back from lunch and realized the man has spent close to an hour then we asked him again who exactly he was waiting for, he then told us that the gentle he came in with said he was a staff and of UT. He went on to say that the supposed staff of UT met him around Barclays Bank and said he can change his money thus five thousand eight hundred...
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...Week 3 iLab—Calculate Overtime Pay ------------------------------------------------- TCO 3 — Given a simple problem, design and desk-check a solution algorithm requiring a modular design that is expressed in terms of pseudocode or program notes, input-process-output (IPO) analysis, and flow chart. ------------------------------------------------- TCO 4 — Given a simple problem that requires one or more decisions, create a working solution that uses decisions with logical and relational expressions. ------------------------------------------------- TCO 8 — Given a more complex problem, develop a complete solution that includes a comprehensive statement of the problem, complete program design, and program documentation. ------------------------------------------------- Assignment You will need to design an application that will prompt a user for his or her hourly pay rate; his or her hours worked; and whether he or she is single, married, divorced, or widowed. It will then calculate the user’s gross and net pay. If the user works more than 40 hours, overtime is calculated at 1 ½ times the regular rate and displayed separately. If he or she is married, use a flat tax rate of 15%; if he or she is single, use 22%. If he or she is divorced, use 23%; and if he or she is widowed, use 13%. (I realize that these rates are not very realistic). Below is a sample of what the program should do when run. (No overtime example) Enter hourly pay rate: 10.00 Enter hours worked:...
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...For both parts of this task, you will turn in only two documents: a single do-file and a single log-file. Your do-file needs to have ALL commands you use in the task (both parts) and must clearly indicate the question being answered (for example, “Part 1: question 1”). You should, after all is said and done and after downloading your data in its original format to your computer or server space, be able to open your do-file, hit a button, and have a log file generated showing the results for all questions. Homework assignments may be done in groups of up to 4 people, but each group member must turn in their own individual copy of their do-file and log-file. Please list the members of your group at the top of your do-file. Part 1 Using the two provided data sets “CEO_Salary.dta” and “CEO_Sex.dta” located on Moodle, complete this part of the task. 1. What is the 95th percentile of salary? 2. What are the 5 lowest salaries in the data set? 3. Create a new variable, the natural log of salary, and find its mean 4. Create and present a tab of a new variable (named industrytype) that indicates what industry the CEO is from. This variable will be of a string type because the values will be text and equal to either “ind”, “fin”, “cons”, or “util” depending on what industry the CEO is from. 5. What is the mean of salary of males? Of females? Part 2 In this part, you will download publicly available data from the American Consumer Survey. Go to IPUMS at https://www.ipums...
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...CS 157B / SE 157B Database Management Systems II Spring Semester 2013 Department of Computer Science San José State University Instructor: Ron Mak How to Run Hibernate in NetBeans and Eclipse NetBeans 7.1.1 and later NetBeans appears to have support for Hibernate built in. You need to add several libraries and the Log4J jar file to your class path: • • • • Select the Projects tab in the left panel of the NetBeans IDE. Open your project tree. Right-click the Libraries node and select Add Library… from the context menu. Select the following Global Libraries and click the Add Library button: o Hibernate JPA o MySQL JDBC Driver Right-click the Libraries node again and select Add JAR/Folder… from the context menu. Navigate to the folder NetBeans 7.1.1\ide\modules\ext in your NetBeans installation folder. Select log4j-1.2.15.jar and click the Open button. • • • Your project should look like this: 1 Eclipse 4.2.0 and later Supposedly, there are Hibernate plug-ins for Eclipse, but I haven’t tried them. I zipped up the jar files that you’ll need. • • Create a subfolder named HibernateLib in your project folder (or anywhere else). Download HibernateJars.zip (6.4 MB) from http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS157B/projects/1/HibernateLib.zip and expand its contents (9 jar files) into subfolder HibernateLib. (Don’t try to click on the URL. Copy and paste it into your browser.) Open your project in the Package Explorer panel on the left side of the Eclipse IDE. Right-click the...
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...Week 3 Activity—Calculate Overtime Pay ------------------------------------------------- TCO 3—Given a simple problem, design and desk-check a solution algorithm requiring a modular design that is expressed in terms of pseudocode or program notes, input-process-output (IPO) analysis, and flow chart. ------------------------------------------------- TCO 4—Given a simple problem that requires one or more decisions, create a working solution that uses decisions with logical and relational expressions. ------------------------------------------------- TCO 8—Given a more complex problem, develop a complete solution that includes a comprehensive statement of the problem, complete program design, and program documentation. ------------------------------------------------- Assignment You will need to design an application that it will prompt a user for his or her hourly pay rate, his or her hours worked, and whether he or she is single, married, divorced, or widowed. It will then calculate his or her gross and net pay. If the user works more than 40 hours, overtime is calculated at 1 ½ times the regular rate and displayed separately. If he or she is married, use a flat tax rate of 15%. If he or she is single, use 22%; if he or she is divorced, use 23%; and if he or she is widowed, use 13% (I realize that these are not very realistic). Below is a sample of what the program should do when run. (No overtime example) Enter hourly pay rate: 10.00 Enter hours worked: 35 ...
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...| Location: | | Travel Required: | | Level/Salary Range: | | Position Type: | [i.e.: full-time, part-time, job share, contract, intern] | HR Contact: | | Date posted: | | Will Train Applicant(s): | | Posting Expires: | | External posting URL: | | Internal posting URL: | | Applications Accepted By: | Fax or E-mail:(425) 555-0123 or someone@example.comSubject Line:Attention: [Recruiting or HR Department RE: Job Code/Req# and Title] | Mail:[Recruiting Contact or Hiring Manager][Department, Company Name][P.O. Box][Street or Mailing Address with ZIP Code] | Job Description | Role and Responsibilities[Type a description of the essential roles, responsibilities and activities a candidate can expect to assume in this position, using the Details style. For bullets, use the Bulleted List style: * Coordinate all travel arrangements for the company; research and make flight, hotel and rental car reservations in accordance with company policies and to obtain most economical and efficient travel. Create travel itinerary and schedules in accordance with authorized travel requests. Bulleted list itemFor a numbered list, use the Numbered List style:Numbered list itemNumbered List item]Qualifications and Education Requirements[Type a description of the work experience and educational background that a candidate should have when applying for position. Use the Details, Bulleted List, and/or Numbered List styles as needed.]Preferred Skills[Type a description of any additional...
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...Your Street Address City, State Zip Code Telephone Number Email Address Month, Day, Year Mr. / Ms. / Dr. First Name Last Name Name of Organization Street or P. O. Box Address City, State Zip Code Dear Mr./Ms./Dr. Last Name: Opening paragraph: State why you are writing; how you learned of the organization or position, and basic information about yourself. 2nd paragraph: Tell why you are interested in the employer or type of work the employer does (Simply stating that you are interested; does not tell why, and can sound like a form letter). Demonstrate that you know enough about the employer or position to relate your background to the employer or position. Mention specific qualifications which make you a good fit for the employer’s needs. This is an opportunity to explain in more detail relevant items in your resume. Refer to the fact that your resume is enclosed. Mention other enclosures if such are required to apply for a position. 3rd paragraph: Indicate that you would like the opportunity to interview for a position or to talk with the employer to learn more about their opportunities or hiring plans. State what you will do to follow up, such as telephone the employer within two weeks. If you will be in the employer’s location and could offer to schedule a visit, indicate when. State that you would be glad to provide the employer with any additional information needed. Thank the employer for her/his consideration. Sincerely, (Your handwritten signature) Your name typed Enclosure(s)...
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...ASSESSMENT INFORMATION PACKAGE – EXAM 473 Copyright © 2010 U. S. Postal Service Contents • Preparing for the Examination • What to Expect in the Exam Room • Obligation to Provide Reasonable Accommodation for Qualified Applicants with a Disability • Frequently Asked Questions • Sample Test Questions Preparing for the Examination Read all the information in this package. Come to the test physically and mentally prepared. Get a good night’s sleep. On the day of the test, you will need to arrive at the testing center 15 minutes prior to the beginning of your appointment to allow time for the check-in process. Be sure to leave yourself enough time for traffic, finding the test center location, parking, and getting to the exam room. What to Expect in the Exam Room Upon arrival, you will be required to present one piece of state or U.S. Federal Government issued photo ID as specified in your appointment confirmation email. If you are a current USPS employee, you may bring your USPS ID badge. You will not be permitted to take the assessment if you do not present an ID meeting the stated requirements. Personal items are not allowed in the testing room. This includes all electronic devices such as cell phones, pagers, and PDAs. Please do not bring any unnecessary personal items to your assessment appointment as storage may not be available. We also ask that you not have anyone accompany you into the test center as there is not adequate space for visitors...
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...Parts of a Business Letter This resource is organized in the order in which you should write a business letter, starting with the sender's address if the letter is not written on letterhead. Sender's Address The sender's address usually is included in letterhead. If you are not using letterhead, include the sender's address at the top of the letter one line above the date. Do not write the sender's name or title, as it is included in the letter's closing. Include only the street address, city, and zip code. Date The date line is used to indicate the date the letter was written. However, if your letter is completed over a number of days, use the date it was finished in the date line. When writing to companies within the United States, use the American date format. (The United States-based convention for formatting a date places the month before the day. For example: June 11, 2001. ) Write out the month, day and year two inches from the top of the page. Depending which format you are using for your letter, either left justify the date or tab to the center point and type the date. Inside Address The inside address is the recipient's address. It is always best to write to a specific individual at the firm to which you are writing. If you do not have the person's name, do some research by calling the company or speaking with employees from the company. Include a personal title such as Ms., Mrs., Mr., or Dr. Follow a woman's preference...
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...Swim Club Members Phone List & Birthday | First Name | Last Name | Street Address | City | State | Zip Code | Phone Number | Birthday | | | | | | | | | BARBARA | BRAUTIGAN | 2298 SIERRA BLVD # E | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95825 | 916-568-5759 | SEPTEMBER 28 | BETH | GREGORY | 4201 ARLINGTON AVE | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95820 | | | DEE | MACKENZIE | 3912 CRESTA WAY | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95864 | 916-482-184 | MARCH 10 | DORRIS | BROUILLETTE | 1136 HAMPTON ROAD | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95864 | 916-487-6101 | FEBUARY 4 | FLORA | JONES | 6985 McQUILLAN CIRCLE | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95820 | 916-451-4676 | FEBRUARY 24 | GENE | CERVELLIN | 8749-B WOODMAN WAY | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95826 | 916-362-6239 | SEPTEMBER 5 | JOSIE | RODRIGUEZ | 9012 POSADA WAY | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95826 | 916-368-8600 | NOVEMBER 19 | LAURA | MAXWELL | 4117 POPPLETON WAY | CARMICHAEL | CA | 95608 | 916-402-3488 | FEBRUARY 9 | LILA | McCORMICK | 2197 CAMBRIDGE STREET | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95815 | 916-922-4224 | DECEMBER 25 | LORI | WINTERS | 6706 52ND STREET | SACRAMENTO | CA | 94823 | 916-428-2315 | MAY 3 | LOUISE | MANITONE | 4262 MARSALLA COURT | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95820 | 916-451-2763 | NOVEMBER 19 | LUCILLE | CRESPO | 8749-A WOODMAN WAY | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95826 | 916-366-3098 | JANUARY 4 | MARGARITA | WOLSTENHOLM | 2128 MADERA ROAD | SACRAMENTO | CA | 95825 | 916-489-3356 | JANUARY 6 | MARIE | COLON | 3444 SHAWHAN LANE | CARMICHAEL | CA | 95608 | 916-483-5405 | MARCH 18 | NADENE | NAQUIN...
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