Amazonia for May 20, 2019
May 20, 2019
The Amazon machine is grinding along. We noted these items from the last seven days’ marketing exhaust.
Amazon Covets Covington, Kentucky
Geekwire’s reported that Amazon plans to use the white elephant airport near Cincinnati as a hub for its air freight delivery business. The Prime Air Hub requires an initial investment of $1.5 billion. The hub will accommodate 100 airplanes. Kentucky, like other Amazon suitors, ponied up $45 million in incentives.
DarkCyber believes that FedEx (Memphis) and UPS (Louisville) may face some headwinds as the Amazon Prime operation picks up steam. The Amazon bulldozer cuts new paths, and it is possible that some of these will cross the paths of these two and other air freight competitors. UPS may have less “economies” to squeeze in its operations. FedEx continues to ponder the impact of email on those once lucrative overnight deliveries for fast trackers.
It’s worth noting that Amazon is headed toward another facet of the shipping business if the information in “Amazon Jumps Into Freight Brokerage” is accurate. The article states:
Amazon.com has jumped into the market of the third-party logistics broker, roiling the waters and raising concern that the Seattle-based e-commerce giant could disrupt the freight industry forever and indelibly. Amazon’s new freight-hauling site — located at freight.Amazon.com — has been up and running since August 2018, but it went largely unnoticed by media until early May, when The Wall Street Journal and others reported on Amazon’s entry into the market. Reports noted Amazon was offering “beta service” full truckload hauling in dry vans. The service is available for pickups in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.
Amazon Embraces Semi-Abandoned Malls Too
A report in Inc. Magazine explains
Amazon is now moving into precisely those derelict malls. Why? To use the space for its vast and, some might say heartless, fulfillment centers.
Once people visited malls. Perhaps Amazon trucks with the happy face will deliver products to people.
Amazon-a-Roo
The Inquirer noted that Amazon twice tried to acquire the food delivery outfit Deliveroo. Those flopped. Amazon’s response? Invest. Amazon is part of a $575 million funding round for the company. The company’s funding is more than $1.5 billion. Deliveroo operates in more than 14 countries.
Alexa, Will You Stop Listening to Me?
Forbes reported that Alexa is always listening to one’s conversations. The reason is, “Make life better.” According to the capitalist tool:
The fact that Alexa is always listening to her surrounding is easily explained by the technology that Amazon chose to implement for its smart speakers: The Seattle-based technology giant uses cloud computing to process every spoken word captured by its smart speakers. What it means, in layman’s terms, is that every word you say to Alexa is sent to Amazon’s cloud service to be automatically transcribed before it can respond to your request including basic commands like “play music” or “turn on the light”—nothing is processed on the device itself because it doesn’t have the necessary computing power and the intelligence on-board.
Seems efficient and quite delicate, like a bulldozer. But there is one rust spot on the shiny Alexa D-9. According to ZDNet:
Amazon can’t yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions. It is working on a solution to deleting data when users request and is planning a bug fix for its Echo Dot Kids Edition.
The article pointed out:
Amazon’s admission that it retains text transcripts indefinitely followed news of a joint complaint filed with the the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition devices. A group of 19 consumer and public health advocates claim children’s data is retained even after parents delete voice recordings. A child can use an Alexa feature called “Remember This”, which keeps anything a child says until parents call Amazon customer service to delete the entire profile.
Amazon Travel: Another Amazon Hotels?
Google has been trying to corner the travel bookings market. Now Amazon wants a piece of the action. Is Amazon confronting the Google head on? No, Amazon is starting in India. “Amazon Launches Flight Bookings in India in a Superapp Strategy” reports that Amazon’s angle is to offer cash back on bookings. DarkCyber noted this passage:
Before 2014, Amazon had offered hotels sporadically at steep discounts with vouchers, but it then tried to provide public rates, and build a more ongoing offering, with the initial iteration focusing on weekend getaways from several major cities. But Amazon abruptly shuttered its hotel business in October 2015, perhaps a year after launching it, when it found the going very tough, and after not getting the results it apparently expected. Amazon was coy about its precise reasons for abandoning the hotel effort as it didn’t provide any substantial information about its exodus.
Amazon flopped in the hotel business. Skift opines:
Given Amazon’s stilted try at building a hotel business from scratch, some would argue that an acquisition of a major travel company, such as Expedia or TripAdvisor, for example, might be the way to go. Amazon had $23 billion in free cash flow for the trailing 12 months at the end of the first quarter, so buying either company would be affordable.
More Robots Are Coming to Amazon Warehouses
Reuters reported that Amazon will replace humanoid workers with robots. The robots pack boxes with customers’ goods more quickly than the humans. Over time robots will be more economical: No breaks for personal needs, no vacations, no coffee breaks, and no thinking about diapers, unionizing, or pay. “Amazon Rolls Out Machines That Pack Orders and Replace Jobs” reports:
The new machines, known as the CartonWrap from Italian firm CMC Srl, pack much faster than humans. They crank out 600 to 700 boxes per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human packer, the sources said. The machines require one person to load customer orders.
The first robots will require two or three humans to support the single robot. But it is faster, and a robot is unlikely to think about a union, a vacation, or the personal necessities a humanoid has.
Is Amazon Eco-Friendly in France?
“Does Amazon France Really Destroy Millions of Products? Yes, But –” asserts:
Amazon destroys a lot of products they can’t sell.
Why?
Taxes. Amazon does not like the idea of taxes DarkCyber assumes. The article makes this clear:
Amazon does destroy products, and one reason they do so is taxes
Logical and efficient.
Buffet and Amazon
Business Insider (the odd duck outfit with a pay wall and no pay wall) reported that Warren Buffet, once the world’s richest man, has about $1 billion in Amazon stock. Buffet’s group “it bought 483,300 shares in the first quarter, worth about $904 million.”
According to Yahoo, Amazon’s AWS boss sold $5.9 million worth of Amazon shares. Does Andy Jassy know something that Mr. Buffet does not?
Amazon Pays Employees to Quit and Deliver Instead
“Minecraft Meets the Real World, Amazon Pays its Employees to Quit, and the Scooter Saga Continues,” despite the wonky title, contains an interesting Amazon factoid:
Amazon is offering its employees an incentive to quit their jobs, if they start their own package delivery companies. This is the latest wrinkle in the company’s Delivery Service Partner program.
Efficient and logical. Let the inefficient workers drive around delivering packages hopefully.
Amazon Away Teams
The Register explained how Amazon coordinates its engineering work. The trick is a “hivemind”. We noted that Amazon
has a system of optimizing internal collaboration by organizing development around a collection independently managed services with a fascinating set of policies for governing it all based on A/B testing, pushed-down decision making, and a carefully curated culture of collaboration that makes use of a novel concept: Away Teams.
The article includes other details which may be of interest to a person eager to emulate one of the methods designed to keep Amazon efficient. There is no information about how an Away Team orders a virtual pizza for the ravenous technologists elsewhere in the hive.
Wanna Code in Cannes?
DarkCyber is not sure Cannes and coding go together as well as money, sun, sand, and Campari. If you know how to make AWS sit and fetch, you may want to journey to the Change for Good Hackathon. Those long khaki pants, gray T shirts, and uncut hair will match up to the average Cannes citizen. More information is available at Cannes Lion.
Partner and Integrator Activity
More companies with which DarkCyber is familiar has jumped on the Amazon bandwagon. Some representative examples:
- Advertity is now certified to Amazon digital customer experience work. No, DarkCyber does not know what that means. It’s probably important once one is trapped in the labyrinth of AWS.
- HyTrust has expanded its CloudControl system to handle AWS. Source: Eweek
- Metova is now an AWS advanced partner. Source: Csion
Stephen E Arnold, May 20, 2019
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