When Lickety Ship launched in late 2006 to deliver ecommerce items to purchasers within four hours of checkout, I asked if it would end any differently than the ill-fated Kozmo, which burned through $280 million in capital before a spectacular flame out in 2001.

Kozmo didn’t charge for deliveries, and people would jokingly buy a packet of M&Ms or other small item and have it personally delivered for free. A $150 million marketing deal to get Kozmo promoted in Starbucks cafes didn’t help much, either.

LicketyShip, founded by Robert Pazornik, took a different approach. They would charge users a steep fee for quick delivery, leveraging under-used couriers to deliver the goods. The hope was that there was enough demand for super-fast delivery that they could make a business out of it.

It turns out that the idea may not have been so bad, but the execution was impossible. LicketyShip needed to do deals with retailers who had goods physically located near the markets served – they had to be close enough so that a courier could go to the location, pick up the item, and then drop it off with the customer. And since LicketyShip was selling the items from its own site, it had to integrate deeply with these retailer’s inventory systems. If it worked, that integration would be a huge competitive advantage. But in practice, it was impossible.

In July 2007 the company gave up on integrating directly with retailers, and began to focus just on aggregating local courier services. You can now use the service (in supported geographies) to pick up items you’ve bought over the phone with local retailers.

The good news is that the company didn’t waste a lot of money on the first model – they’ve raised just $1.5 million in capital from angel investors.

But the bad news is that investors got tired of waiting for Pazornik to make this thing work, and about a month ago they made a switch. Pazornik was out of the company he founded. John McGrory stepped in to replace him as CEO.

Now the company is preparing a relaunch, and will be focusing on aggregating courier services for more than just deliveries of retail goods. In effect, they’ll be taking the huge but highly fragmented courier market and turning it into a web service.

25 million courier packages are delivered each month in the U.S., McGrory says, at an average cost of $100 per delivery (implying a $30 billion market annually). There isn’t much price sensitivity – people want reliability more than anything and tend to build relationships with individual courier services over time (law firms use them extensively, and pass the cost on to clients, for example). The key to cracking the market, McGrory says, is to provide bookings via a web service or by phone along with a service guarantee. Think 1-800-Flowers for couriers.

And LicketyShip is also building an API to turn courier services into a web service. Any ecommerce site or retailer, for example, could build in an option for immediate courier delivery. All that would be required is that they have a warehouse near the customer. Best Buy and Barnes & Noble would be ideal customers. This would also help brick and mortar competitors to better leverage those physical assets by allowing immediate fulfillment, on the same day as purchase.

The company is now out pitching this new strategy to investors, and hopes to close a new venture round this summer.

One of the great flameouts of the 1990s tech boom was Kozmo, which started in Manhattan, and let you order a pint of Ben & Jerry’s online and a Kozmo bike messenger would deliver it to your door. After burning through $280 million in capital, they closed shop. Well, now New Yorkers have Wakozi. It just launched and only covers Manhattan wine shops, liquor stores, and delis. But they’ve learned from the failure of Kozmo. They don’t actually deliver anything themselves. Instead, they only list inventories of shops that make their own deliveries. Founder Rob Rizzo explains the concept:

Through our site, you can order virtually anything that you would find in a bodega, deli or wine shop and get it delivered to you in less than an hour. So if you want a bottle of Chardonnay or a six-pack late at night or if you’re partying with friends and need another bottle of Belvedere, you can now get it without leaving your apartment. We don’t hire delivery guys or stock any of our own inventory—instead we work with the stores in your neighborhood who already have all the stuff you want and can get it to you the fastest. Right now we’ve got stores in every neighborhood in Manhattan and we’ve initially knocked out what we think everyone cares about most: booze

So this is really a lead generation site for local businesses. (For another approach to tryingto reinvent the Kozmo model, see our coverage of LicketyShip). Wakozi’s site is built entirely on Adobe Flex and lets you drill down into the inventory of your local wine shop. Once it loads, the user interface is fast enough, but the developers chose a faded look for the Website that is hard to read (or is that just Flash?). And the initial loading time is pretty slow. You have to wait again when you click through to an individual store as it loads up what it has in stock. Also, the only information presented is the inventory on the shelves and the price. For wines, you can sort by region or type in search terms. But there is no other information that would help you make a purchase of a wine you’ve never heard about before, such as tasting notes. If you know what you want, this is fine. If you want to try something new, you are better off walking to your local wine store and asking for advice.

A search near my office in downtown Manhattan yielded nine participating stores. I just ordered a bottle of Gnarly Head Old Vine Zin from Gramercy Wine & Spirits about an hour ago. Let’s see if it can get here before I leave my office.

Update: My wine has arrived, exactly an hour and a half after I ordered it. I am a very happy customer, although I’d be happier if they could get the time down to under an hour. Now, I’ve got some more important research to do. (Where’s that corkscrew?)

Same day delivery service LicketyShip (previous coverage) is expanding out across the state from their initial beta in San Francisco and the Bay Area, joined by some new partners.

LicketyShip has moved away from serving as a delivery service for online stores (like Kozmo), to servicing local door to door deliveries. You can use it for local business deliveries or last minute packages that need to arrive ASAP.

You set up a delivery by logging on to the site, inputing the start and finish locations, and then paying with a credit card. A short while later, a courier will show up to your door to deliver your package in 1 to 4 hours, depending on your needs and payment ($19.99 starting). Goods can be up to a whopping 5500 pounds and even have their progress tracked on the website, email, or SMS.

LicketyShip seeks to avoid a Kozmo-like flame out by utilizing the pre-existing system of couriers, instead of creating their own. LicketyShip “rents” couriers by paying for deliveries couriers can take during their normally unproductive down time. Whenever an order is placed, their computer system examines prices and reputations couriers to calculate the best route for delivery.

LicketyShip will now be making on demand door to door delivers to all the the major markets over California, including LA, Orange County, Sacramento, and San Diego (including outlying areas). As part of the launch, LicketyShip will be handling deliveries for the LA times, K&L Wines, and Ztail.com.

Using their API, the LA Times will be using the service as a delivery option for the Times’ 40,000 classified listings on Recycler.com. Prices for deliveries start at $19.99 for the first 200 lbs. K&L Wines, will be using the service to offer local, same day deliveries to their consumers over the phone and eventually their website. Ztail, which helps eBay merchants make better listings, will offer LicketyShip deliveries for their eBay auctions.

New startup LicketyShip, the Kozmo-like ecommerce service that delivers goods within a couple of hours of ordering, is counting on this holiday season to make a name for itself. The company, which we first noticed back in January, launched in September, but they’ve recently gotten a lot of mainstream press attention and are offering $9.99 delivery up through Christmas Eve. So while the big ecommerce sites can no longer get stuff to you by the big day, Lickety Ship is still running strong. The company is only shipping same day in the Bay Area currently.

They are almost certainly taking a hit on the $9.99 deliver charge – LicketyShip outsources delivery to local couriers with extra capacity to make deliveries, which is costly. While the holiday season is a good time to pick up extra customers for ecommerce companies, Lickety Ship may be sending the wrong signal with the greatly reduced delivery charges.

Kozmo, which offered free deliveries within an hour, flamed out spectacularly in 2001 after burning through $280 million in capital. Real-time deliveries are expensive, and just because there’s lots of demand to have stuff delivered in a couple of hours doesn’t mean there’s a good business model there. LicketyShip needs to prove that people will pay $20 or more (their break even cost) to have something delivered in a couple of hours. The company says that 30% of Amazon orders are for overnight delivery, where the cost of shipment often exceeds the cost of the item itself. If that’s accurate, then there may be a bright future for the company. But Lickety Ship needs to focus their marketing attention on that segment of the market, not last minute Christmas shoppers.

LicketyShip is a new service launching today (we spoke about it previously here) that allows you to shop online at a number of different local stores and to have products that you order delivered within 4 hours. It works by co-ordinating the online stores close to you with courier companies, allowing you to receive goods that you order very quickly. The service is currently in alpha though launching today in the San Francisco Bay Area and has plans to expand in other areas over time.

The service is easy to use, you search for a product by name and specify your zip code. The site will then query local stores and show you results of products that are available to order. When you place an order, it will fetch the item from the nearest store and then have it delivered to you. The ordering process is simple enough, and the only additional cost is a $19.99 fee for the delivery service. Search is currently restricted to electronic goods, but they also plan to expand on this as well.

I know that I often choose to go to a local store over ordering online because I can’t wait for a 2 or more day delivery time, so LicketyShip might make that easier for some. The question is if it is worth the fee, I can see a lot of businesses using this for office supplies and other goods, and possibly some consumers who are impatient. They can delivery up to 7pm on most nights (which I assume means you can order up till 3pm and have it delivered that day) while on Friday’s and Saturdays can deliver up till 8pm. I expect to see more improvements in the product search engine, as well as the range of retailers supported (they have an API) – I don’t think there is any doubt that the tight integration with courier companies and the value-add of same day delivery will be worth something to a lot of people.

Remember Kozmo? It was an immediate delivery ecommerce service that launched in 1998 (ahhh….1998…sigh). They’d deliver a packet of skittles, or a new Palm Pilot, to you within an hour. After burning through $280 million in venture capital, they called it quits in early 2001. Kozmo had plenty of demand, but its cost structure just didn’t make sense: free delivery, which equaled low or negative margin sales.

Well, Robert Pazornik, CEO of new San Francisco-based LicketyShip, isn’t afraid to try the whole thing again, albeit with a significant twist. LicketyShip is now in private beta in select Bay area markets: San Jose, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Santa Clara, and Milpitas.

I first got a glimpse of LicketyShip at a young entrepreneurs event at Stanford in January. Robert told us that 30% of Amazon orders pay for overnight shipping, signaling that a lot of people are willing to pay a big premium for quick delivery.

LicketyShip aims to fulfill that demand by combining items available at local retailers (they have 20,000 items in “stock”), with an oversupply in the local courier market. When you order something at Licketyship, you pay a premium of around $20 (this varies). LicketyShip dispatches a courier to a local retailer to purchase the item, and then deliver it to you within two hours during normal business hours.

To do it right, the technology around all of this is complex and requires LicketyShip to interact directly with the inventory systems of the major retailers it partners with. Robert won’t disclose much more, saying its too important to keep their proprietary relationships and technology confidential.

I went through the purchase process and stopped just short of ordering (the company asked me to hold off until next week). There’s lots of stuff to choose from in the consumer electronics categories, and LicketyShip says other things, like books, office supplies, home improvement, medical supplies, and foodstuffs soon.

LicketyShip is not launching for a while, although you can sign up for their beta test on the home page.

I attended the E27 Technology Conference today at Stanford University. Startups founded by entrepreneurs who are less than 27 years old were eligible to present. With a couple of exceptions these companies were all new to me, and a few have the potential to be real winners. The E27 founders did a great job of picking quality attendees (lots of venture capitalists, big company representatives and bloggers in the audience), and promising companies.

The invite-only event was created by Noah Kagan, Shivani Sopory, and Nancy Gong.

Below are my notes on each of the nine startups that presented. See Robert Scoble and Emily Chang for additional commentary, and Max Kiesler has a podcast recording of the entire event here.

BillMonk

I wrote about BillMonk last week. The company, founded by Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom, have created an excellent tool for managing social debts and IOUs. It’s easy to see this catching on. IOweYou is a competitor.

411 Metro

411Metro, is an advertiser-supported free 411 service. Derek Merrill presented the company. His co-founders are Alec Andronikov and Alexey Bulavin. 411Metro joins Free411 and 411 Save in this space, with a nearly identical business model of playing a short advertisment from a competitor to the requested business. The company is seed funded from Hummer Winblad and launched in November 2005

Standpoint

Standpoint, which launched today, is a “wikipedia of opinions”. At its core it is a simple blog for users to post their opinions and links to websites that help them form or support those opinions. Topics are grouped and the aggregate opinion of the community on any topic can be gauged. Co-founder Justin Smith presented. Gentry Underwood is Standpoint’s other founder.

LicketyShip

Robert Pazornik’s LicketyShip has the potential to be a big winner. It is an ecommerce service that can deliver purchased goods within two hours of placing the order. The magic? They combing local retail shops with the apparent over-capacity in the local courier market. Couriers pick items up at retail shops and deliver them immediately.

Lickety Ship hopes to tap into the must-have-now crowd (Robert claims theat 30% of Amazon orders pay for overnight shipping, often paying more for shipping than for the item itself). The company is beta testing now in a few select cities.

This reminds me of the good old days when we had kozmo to deliver a packet of skittles. The difference here is that customers will pay for this added convenience.

Flagr

Flagr was founded by Matt Colyer, David Wurtz adn Cole Poelker – all college dropouts from Boston. They are collecting emails on their site for a private beta…but the company promises to allow people to send tips on real world stuff in via a text message on a cell phone. Type in the title, address and comments, send it to Flagr and broadcast it to your friends or everyone. Their tagline is “sharewhere”.

PlaceSite

PlaceSite is another of my favorites from the event. They add their software to a standard wifi router and distribute them to cafe’s, events, etc. The result is a portal that all users of the network see that shows them current users of the network, allows instant messaging, etc. Their idea is to build more online community in these real world settings.

Placesite is up and running at one location now – Cafe Couleur in San Francisco (16th and De Haro). The revenue model is super-local advertising, customized versions for venues (this is great for conferences), and permission based licensing of user data.

I like it, and I want it on my home wifi.

Given the focus on instant messaging, PlaceSite seems to be trying to address the same market at Meetro – giving people who are local to eachother a way to meet online.

Box.Net

Box.Net is an online storage provider that launched in early 2005. They boast 4,300 paying users and funding by Mark Cuban. The founders, aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, were demonstrating the new functionality that they’ll be releasing in a couple of weeks. I’ll be writing more about Box.net and other companies in this space next week. This is a quickly evolving space.

Skobee

Noam Lovinsky is the founder of Skobee, a new service to help people plan events. They seem to be a direct competitor to Renkoo. The site is currently collecting emails for the beta.

Both Skobee and Renkoo are focused on event planning (as opposed to an evite which looks at organizing people once the event specifics have been finalized). One thing I really like about Skobee is that users just email back and forth, cc’ing a unique skobee email address. Based on the live demo the service seems to be quite good at turning natural language into structured text. For instance, saying “Let’s do this on Monday instead” is understood by Skobee as a request for a date change and noted.

NeuroSky

Johnny Liu’s NeuroSky claims to have created “the world’s first consumer-minded nural device”.

A longer description from their website is “Neurosky has developed a non-invasive neural sensor and signal processing technology that converts brainwaves and eye movements into useful electronic signals to communicate with a wide range of electronic devices, consoles, and computers”. Applications include controlling video games. Sort of scary and really cool.