September 15, 2005 | New York Times |By JAMES FLANIGAN

Henry Fan expects growth from acquiring distressed apparel firms and gaining the size and strength to withstand the risks of supplying big retail companies even at the low prices that Chinese imports are dictating....Fan says he believes he can continue to compete by using the expertise he gained in the worlds of technology and finance to build an international supply network to handle the growing trade.

"We have overseas offices in Hong Kong and in many parts of China as well as Bangladesh and Thailand," he said. "We can design products here or overseas and ship them anywhere; we can tackle the job in numerous ways." In short, he wants to make Basic Elements a central part of the new supply equation of Chinese factories and American retailers.

By JAMES FLANIGAN
Published: August 16, 2007

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 5 2007 | Financial Times | By Andrew Jack