Future of The Environmental Services Industry

Changing an Industry. First by accident  and then by design. "There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second." - Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon When SampleServe.com first started back in 2001, the goals we had for the company were completely different than the goals we have now.  Back then the internet was just gaining momentum and not everyone was comfortable having their data online.  As a matter of fact, some people were actually outright opposed to it.  In the beginning we wanted to be a "field services" company.  In 2002 we developed an online data management tool to facilitate our own sampling. Being efficiency minded, we wanted to be able to lay out a project and print chain of custody's, sample bottle label's and sample location  maps ahead of time so that our own field staff could sample quicker and with fewer mistakes.  The client access function w

Laboratory Data Deliverables "   Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."  -Alfred North Whitehead I may be dating myself, but when I started working in the environmental industry, the fax machine was just becoming standard office equipment. They were slow, used thermal paper that came on a roll, and you had to cut the paper into the right size yourself. The paper was difficult to work with as it wanted to roll back up on itself. When we needed results from a laboratory in a hurry, we would ask them to "fax it over." Otherwise, laboratory  reports were always printed on paper and mailed via US Postal service. Once the paper or fax reports were received, we would take the data and "maybe" put it into a table. We would have to re-type the data ourselves into whatever format we wanted it in. We didn't always do tables because I'm talking about a time before

Technological Unemployment "Technology... is a peculiar thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other."  -C.P. Snow Wikipedia defines Technological U nemployment  as "unemployment primarily caused by  technological change , " or more accurately technological innovation. In industries were "technological unemployment" occurs, productivity and profitability tend to increase. We don't generally think of increased unemployment as causing increased productivity. Most "technological unemployment" tends to happen in industries and work scenarios that are easily automated like assembly and manufacturing. Think robots.   However, automation is occurring in more and more sectors not previously thought to be automatable. Fast food restaurants are starting to experiment with automation. I've personally seen robotic beverage machines. A machine that grabs the right size cup and fills