Building a Virtual Supply Chain in Second Life

First let me apologize for not posting in so long. I upgraded my Firefox browser and it dropped my user names and passwords, including this one and the retrieve feature doesn't work if you can't recall your user name. So all apologies. Now back to the exciting world of supply chains or in this case the virtual supply chain.

Last week IBM's CEO was in China and among several announcements that were made he hosted a virtual meeting using the world called Second Life. If you are not familiar the free, open standards software allows users to create an avatar or alter ego in a global online world. In this virtual world "people" can live almost a normal life. You can buy a house, land, clothes even a Dell laptop using the local currency. Which got me thinking, perhaps I will start a virtual supply chain company, perhaps a 3PL. One of the great and less realistic features of Second Life is that users can fly and one of the challenges of the application is that it requires a lot of bandwidth and RAM. So for those on slower connections, for a small fee, my 3PL company could deliver roses to 20 people faster than a user on a slow connection. Plus, as more retailers pop up, users could purchase products and not have to wait around as they are being built, as in the case when you buy a Dell laptop.

What do you think? Any Second Life VC's out there? Look me up on Second Life my name is Sac Racer (that's me to the right, chain mail shirt and all. Hey, wait a minute, that could be in the name of my 3PL - Chain Mail Express.

Chocolate Supply Chain in Cologne

Last weekend I visited Cologne, Germany and during the trip I visited the Chocolate Museum or Schokoladeen Museum. Besides some tasty sweets, I had the opportunity to see an end to end chocolate supply chain from bean to retail. I had no idea on the complexity and the level of physical labor in making chocolate.

The machines at the museum only produce about 400 kg a day of chocolate, but you can quickly imagine a larger version of the process, which includes the picking, fermentation, shipping from South American farms to facilities in Europe and that is just the first few minutes. From there the chocolate is melted down and squeezed into, what look like ice cube trays, which are they shaken to level out and sent to the cooler. From there they are popped out (see photo) and sat on a conveyor belt to the wrapping stage. It was interesting to see how many pieces fall off the side into a gutter, which gets flushed every few minutes into a steel bucket, which melts the chocolate and sends it back to the beginning again. So no waste. From there they are wrapped up and hand packed into baggies, which are sold in the gift shop about 20 feet away.