By DAMON DARLIN
September 24, 2011

San Francisco-based Cater2.me, delivers food from carts and small
restaurants to businesses that aren’t big enough to afford their own
chefs. The Web was supposedly eliminating the need for the layers of
brokers, agents, wholesalers & even retailers that separate the
consumer from the producer.

That has happened in some instances, e.g. drastically reducing the role
of travel agents. But consumers still need help and the Web has provided
the tools & the environment for companies like cater2.me to
flourish. It has made it easier for middlemen to reach consumers and
made it remarkably easy and inexpensive for these middlemen to create
companies to do just that.

While there has been a lot of talk about how the technology industry
does not create jobs on the scale of traditional manufacturing — a
shrunken GM still employs more people than a thriving Google — the
Internet has made it a lot easier to create a broad array of new small
businesses.

July 1, 2010 | Local Onliner | Peter Krasilovsky