Amazonia for February 4, 2019
February 4, 2019
The Bezos retail bulldozer could be slowing. Nevertheless, the AWS jungle continues to flourish with hefty growth. Eweek remains a cheerlead stating confidently that “Amazon’s AWS cloud business will continue to grow.” Other jungle news includes:
Yahoo Reports about Amazon Disappointing Outlook
Yahoo. I thought that was Oath. The purple financial service reported that Amazon’s outlook [is] disappointing. The story asserted:
AWS’s revenue continued to grow at a breakneck pace. Its revenue growth isn’t accelerating anymore, as it was for several quarters through to Q2 2018, but it’s also not decelerating, as it did last quarter. In constant currency, the cloud computing service’s revenue has increased year over year as follows: 46% in Q4 2018, 46% in Q3 2018, 49% in Q2 2018, 48% in Q1 2018, 44% in Q4 2017, and 42% in Q3 2017.
Rekognition Denied Respekt
Gizmodo reports that it knows of only one law enforcement client for Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition policeware. The issue is the accuracy of FAR as these systems have been described by some observers. According to “Defense of Amazon’s Face Recognition Tool Undermined by Its Only Known Police Client”:
the only law enforcement agency Amazon has acknowledged as a client says it also does not use Rekognition in the way Amazon claims it recommends, Gizmodo has learned. In doing so, the law enforcement agency undermines the very argument Amazon uses to discredit critical research about Rekognition.
How accurate are FAR systems? The Gizmodo article reports:
…researchers from the MIT Media Lab published a study indicating that Rekognition’s facial analysis function showed it struggled to correctly identify women of color. Once again, Amazon suggested the results stemmed not from bias in the software itself, but from incorrect threshold settings….
Amazon is likely to face more scrutiny for its FAR than other, lower profile firms. This is likely to be a contentious issue for Amazon as it ramps up its sales efforts to the LE and intel community. Competitors may find it an attractive issue to discuss in their sales presentations.
Amazon and Banking
Bank Innovation reports that Amazon may move Alexa into voice and cloud based banking. You can read the analysis at this link. The story points out that
E-commerce giant Amazon mentioned its cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services, or AWS, 58 times, its virtual assistant Alexa 25 times, and retail just once in its earnings release for the fourth quarter of 2018.
Is there a connection among Amazon’s law enforcement services and the financial sector? The write up does not explore that angle.
MongoDB: An Analyst’s View
“Amazon’s Move Against MongoDB Does Not Worry Me” explains:
Amazon is effectively pitching customers on using AWS to get the best of MongoDB when there’s already a more functional version of the database available on not only AWS but also on Google Cloud and Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure. It’s called Atlas, and last quarter this cloud version of MongoDB accounted for 22% of MongoDB’s revenue. Total cloud revenue from Atlas soared 300% year over year in the third quarter. The following chart shows what Amazon is after with DocumentDB — replacing or enhancing the majority of Mongo deployments hosted on-site or co-located in a data center.
No problem. Amazon is using an older version of MongoDB. No worries, says the expert.
Amazon and Facebook
First, Apple showed Facebook that it is not able to control its destiny. Killing the Facebook calendar and other in house functions was a bit of a wake up call for the move fast, break things outfit.
Now Facebook perceives Amazon as a threat as well. According to “Facebook Thinks Amazon’s Ad Business Has Officially Become a Threat,” Facebook is nervous. Facebook mentions Amazon in its annual report.
One interesting Amazon data point, if it is accurate, is:
Amazon’s share of the online digital ad market is expected to grow to 2.8% in 2019, up from 2.1% last year, according to eMarketer.
There may be some headroom for Amazon to expand.
Amazon Plays Rugby AI
Who knew Amazon was athletically able to imitate IBM’s marketing of AI in sports?
According to Investor Ideas, Amazon Web services has been chosen for the Guinness Six Nations Rugby Championship. If you are into the use of smart software and brutal sports, you can find more information at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, January 4, 2019
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
