Factualities for April 17, 2019
April 17, 2019
Some of the data facts which caught my attention. My goodness. Believe ’em or not.
0. Number of Alexa killer apps out of the 80,000 apps available for the smart speaker. Source: Computerworld
5. Average number of mobile apps a person uses each day. Source: ZDNet
10 percent. The increase in distracted driving in 2019. Source: Road Show
35. The number of the IMDB top 250 available for streaming. Source: Streaming Observer
38 percent. The percentage of abusive tweets Twitter’s smart software stops. So only 62 percent get pumped out. Source: Engadget
48. Number of months a project lives before Google terminates it. Source: Next Web
50 percent. Number of records in Google local business listings with error. Source: Search Engine Journal
67 percent. The percentage of corporations not using blockchain technology. Source: Next Web
100. Number of pounds of iron the Titanic loses to hungry micro organisms. Source: Forbes
400. Number of people one can follow on Twitter. Source: CNet
$600. Cost of YouTube TV per year. Source: Engadget
5,860. Number of Amazon patent filings. Source: Failed Architecture
$50,000. Amount PewDiePie contributed in crypto currency to Alex Jones. Source: Next Web
200,000. Number of US government data sets available for free. Source: CIO
$4 million. Amount Goggle will pay for terminating the Google Fiber project. Source: Slashdot
$22.6 million. Facebook’s security bill for protecting Mark Zuckerberg. Source: Guardian
$58 million. Amount Uber paid Google for Maps between January 1, 2016, and December 2018. Source: Android Authority
1 billion. Number of records a hacker dumped in eight weeks. Source: Slashdot
$1.8 billion. Uber’s loss in 2018. Source: CNBC
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2019
Amazonia for April 8, 2019
April 8, 2019
The Bezos bulldozer was grinding along last week. The big celebrity news was the creation of a new world billionaire once married to the online bookstore’s founder. There were some less interesting developments the DarkCyber research team spotted. Here’s a selection of semi-interesting items.
Eero: A Deal?
If the information in “Amazon Bought Eero for $97 Million and Employees Still Got Screwed” is accurate, the easy networking outfit made some of its employees unhappy. Here’s the passage we noted:
According to confidential documents viewed by Mashable, Amazon acquired Eero for $97 million. Eero executives brought home multi-million dollar bonuses and eight-figure salary increases. Everyone else, however, didn’t fare quite so well. Investors took major hits, and the Amazon acquisition rendered Eero stock worthless: $0.03 per share, down from a common stock high of $3.54 in July 2017. It typically would have cost around $3 for employees to exercise their stock, meaning they would actually lose money if they tried to cash out.
Didn’t venture capitalists pump more money into the company? Maybe employees and investors got a lesson in how to be a billionaire?
Amazon in Space
Google does Loon balloons. Facebook likes gliders. Amazon wants to put 3,000 satellites in space to deliver Internet connectivity to those who want to buy a Kindle ebook. We learned:
The effort, code-named Project Kuiper, follows up on last September’s mysterious reports that Amazon was planning a “big, audacious space project” involving satellites and space-based systems. The Seattle-based company is likely to spend billions of dollars on the project, and could conceivably reap billions of dollars in revenue once the satellites go into commercial service.
DarkCyber wants to know, “Will Amazon use the Bezos space rocket to put these devices into orbit?” Source: Geekwire. As a prank a clever person created a mock up of an Amazon blimp or Loon balloon deploying drones.
Rekognition Facial Recognition May Face a “Rekoning”
DarkCyber does not know much about shareholder meetings. Apparently the subject of Amazon’s licensing of its facial recognition technology to law enforcement and government agencies is an issue for some. We learned that shareholders will have an opportunity to vote on where Amazon can sell its FAR systems. Who decided? Mr. Bezos? Nope, the Securities & Exchange Commission. Google has sparked some fierce discussion with its refusal to work on a government project. What will happen if Amazon disables its FAR systems? DarkCyber believes that some entities will be unhappy. Source: Verge
Hello, Air Pods the Amazon Basics Way
Poor Apple. It cannot make butterfly keyboards. The Cupertino giant cannot craft a wireless charging mat. The spirit of Jobs seems to have departed with version two of its wireless ear phones. Never fear. Amazon is going to release its own version, which will interact with Amazon’s services. DarkCyber is more interested in possible LE and intel applications of this particular chunk of Amazon’s technology. Source: Bloomberg
Amazon and Health Care
Google and Microsoft have bailed out of their health care initiatives. Not Amazon. DarkCyber learned that Alexa will be gussied up with medical expertise. Interested in what Amazon allegedly will do? DarkCyber is too. Information about certain medical conditions could be useful in some investigations. Source: Venture Beat
Amazon and Fairness Research
DarkCyber did not spot too many tweets about Amazon’s sponsoring research about fairness. A newspaper reported:
Amazon has partnered with the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation on a three-year, $20 million program to fund basic research into fairness in artificial intelligence systems, which are under increasing scrutiny as they spread in society and sometimes amplify existing biases.
“Fair” is a word like “quality.” Tough to define. So far the company has not abandoned the project. Google jettisoned its public ethics group. But Amazon may be paid for this effort to tackle a very fuzzy concept. DarkCyber asks, “What’s “fair” when it comes to lavatory breaks in an Amazon warehouse? Source: Seattle Times
Amazon Reduces Some Prices at Whole Foods
We don’t have a Whole Paycheck (sorry, I meant Whole Foods) here in Harrod’s Creek. We do have a saloon, a bar, a restaurant and bar, a filling station with a wood stove and old times. No Whole Feeds. The new reported in “Amazon Slashes Prices on Hundreds of Whole Foods Items” was greeted with silence. The local Kroger manager asked one of the DarkCyber research team, “What’s a Whole Foods?”
Good Bye, Oracle
Amazon once was a good Oracle customer. Oracle license fees. Oracle add ons. Oracle data base administrators. Oracle World speaking opportunities. If an Amazonia were lucky, a nifty Oracle hat. No more. Amazon uses its “own” database technology now, thank you, very much Larry Ellison. According to one British computer publication, Amazon’s database team held a “thank heavens, it is outta here” party. Don’t let the PL/SQL documentation fall on your head. Source: Computing
Hi, Microsofties. We’re Neighbors
Some Amazon employees will be relocating their offices to Bellevue, Washington. We learned from Geekwire:
Amazon plans to relocate its entire Seattle-based worldwide operations team to Bellevue, Wash., by 2023, adding thousands of employees to its new campus just across Lake Washington, according to an internal email obtained by GeekWire.
Yeah, about that security for corporate email? If true, Seattle’s city fathers may want to ask themselves, “What did we do wrong?” On the other hand, Microsoft may have its own questions. One big winner will be the Bellevue real estate specialists. Let’s not overlook this Amazon initiative: “Amazon Web Services Sharpens Its Focus on Cloud Security.” Internal email included or not?
An Amazon Alexa Robot May Be Developed
DarkCyber noted that a walking Alexa may be developed by Amazon’s engineers. We noted this passage in “Alexa’s Chief Scientist Wants to Give the Voice Assistant a Robot Body”:
Speaking at The EmTech Digital A.I .Conference held by MIT Technology Review in San Francisco, Prasad raised the idea of letting Alexa learn about the world by experiencing it like a human might. “The only way to make [a]smart assistant really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world,” he said. That would include giving Alexa a physical form. While the idea might seem a little out there, we’re already closer to the possibility than one might imagine. In some cases, Alexa already has access to “eyes” of sorts, as some devices with Alexa installed include cameras that the A.I. can access. A body would be a considerable jump in progression, of course, but it is a possibility. That said, Prasad didn’t confirm whether Amazon is already working on building a body for its voice assistant.
Source: Digital Trends
Jim Henson Shows on Amazon, Just Not in the US
We learned in “Jim Henson Shows Come to Amazon Prime Video, but Not in the US” that licensing spoils the fun:
Amazon has added a lot more Jim Henson Company programs to Prime Video after rolling out all four season of sci-fi series Farscape for the platform. Starting today, you’ll be able to access 2,500 hours of child-friendly shows with Muppets and other Henson puppets if you have a Prime or a standalone Prime Video subscription. That is, depending on where you’re located — unfortunately, most of those programs won’t be available in the US due to licensing issues.
Source: Engadget
Audio Watermarking
Was that secret recording subsequently modified? Amazon may have technology which could answer this question. An Amazon ebook lover wrote a journal article with the alluring title “Audio Watermarking over the Air with Modulated Self Correlation.” You can find a copy of the free article at this link.
Amazon Gets More Twitchy
“AWS Introduces API Specification for Securing On-Demand and Live Video” reveals that its the Secure Packager and Encoder Exchange (SPEKE) for video are available. DarkCyber noted:
The SPEKE specification aims to eliminate this one-off, customization requirement and replace the old with a standardized method. SPEKE-enabled servers and encryptors should greatly improve time to market for services regardless of consumption method (on-premises, cloud, hybrid, etc.). SPEKE is built on the DASH Industry Forum’s Content Protection Information Exchange Format (CPIX) standard. The API specification supports HLS, MSS and DASH packaging. Many DRM platforms (e.g. Apple FairPlay Streaming, Microsoft PlayRead, Google Widevine, AES-128 and more) are already supported.
Could the best of YouTube find its way to an Amazon Twitch-like service. Some disenchanted Vimeo customers might find this information interesting as well.
Amazon May Gun for Roku
Medium (an outfit which wants email addresses in exchange for articles) published “Amazon Asks Advertisers to Pledge Millions for Roku Rival.” Makes sense. Amazon wants to gobble revenue, and advertising seems to be an obvious money spout. Read the write up in Medium. Nothing like trading a story told in a headline for an email.
Amazon Complexity
Skimfeed published an interesting statement. Here it is:
@jeffbigham: The 2nd day of the month is my favorite day because it’s when I get a $9.95 bill from AWS for something I can’t figure out how to shut down.
If you want a free run down of “everything” Amazon, you may find “Amazon AWS: Complete Business Guide to the World’s Largest Provider of Cloud Services” helpful. Or not. The write up is short, incomplete, and generally without the information @jeffbigham requires.
Amazon Goes to Bogota
Bogota has an excellent climate. It will also have an Amazon infrastructure facility. According to “Amazon Web Services to Open Infrastructure Location in Colombia”:
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a unit of Amazon.com Inc, said … it will open a Latin America infrastructure location in Colombia and help train 2,000 students in cloud technology. The company will team up with Colombia’s public technical education institute to train students in cloud computing, Jeffrey Kratz, AWS’ general public sector manager for Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, said in a government statement.
Fleets of EC2 Instances. Fleets!
If you are a government agency and have a great deal of data to crunch, EC2 fleets may be of interest. The idea is that one can automate the creation of multiple instances. The method is to fill in a form. We learned:
hen you create a fleet, the virtual machine (VM) instances within the fleet will be based on a launch template. Launch templates are used to create VM instances in a standardized way. A launch template might, for instance, define the network interfaces, storage volumes and tags that are to be used by EC2 instances created from the template.
More information is available in Virtualization Review’s explanation “Use Amazon EC2 Fleets to Create Collections of EC2 Instances”, which is handier than Amazon’s documentation.
More Partners and Integrators
We jotted down the names of partners and integrators of things AWS not appearing in our files; to wit:
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2019
Amazonia for April 1, 2019
April 1, 2019
These are not April Fool items. Each appeared before publication in the sources identified below. If some of the items seem wonky, not my doing.
Was Bezos a Victim of Policeware?
Is this true or false? We don’t know. The Daily Beast reported on March 30, 2019, that an Amazon investigation suggested that Jeff Bezos was a victim of policeware spying. The story “Bezos Investigation Finds the Saudis Obtained His Private Data” contains the allegedly accurate details. Thinking about the political and legal implications of the information in the allegedly accurate article is outside the scope of this humble run down of news items about everyone’s favorite online bookstore. Perhaps others can answer such questions as when, who, why and how?
Amazon and Its Economists
Economists and I assume behavioral psychologists are surprised at the attention each professional group receives from the tech savvy crowd. According to “Amazon Gets an Edge with its Secret Squad of PhD Economists”:
Amazon is now a large draw from the relatively small talent pool of PhD economists, which in the United States grows by about only 1,000 new graduates every year. Although the definition of “economist” is fuzzy, the discipline is generally understood as the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.
Amazon allegedly has on its team more than 150 economists. If the economists are students of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” staff meetings may be more thrilling than a mid term lecture in Economics 101.
Will one of these professionals become a Hal Varian-scale thinker?
Apple Leaves Amazon an Opening, Free and Clear
The Verge reported that Amazon is “working on a free Fire TV news app.” Free may be more appealing that $120 a year for 300 magazines. Some in the weird scrollable PDF like format and others in Apple’s own proprietary format. The Verge sees the inspiration as Roku. Amazon may know that print centric services are not selling like hot cakes on the Amazon online store; thus, the focus is on where the eyeballs are—video. But there’s more free stuff from Amazon. If you are a Prime member, you get Switch online. Free is a compelling value proposition, or it is if you are into Nintendo games.
Africa and Amazon’s Banking Play
In my lectures about Amazon’s policeware, I described the financial information flowing through the firm’s infrastructure. It is interesting that Amazon is becoming more overt in its efforts to become a global financial systems. The company has cut a deal to become what Forbes called “Africa’s first bank in the cloud.” Amazon’s partner is Standard Bank. Note that Microsoft has been chugging away in Africa as well. Google, the Chinese, and assorted colonial nations are making moves as well. The financial services angle is an important one because Amazon has kept its financial moves under wraps for some time. Are regulators on top of this?
Amazon and Cost Management
Amazon received some coverage in the Seattle Times in the story “Amazon Finds an Alternative Workforce through Northwest Center, a Seattle Nonprofit Helping People with Disabilities.” The story explains Amazon’s employment of people with disabilities. I noted this statement:
In 2015, 22 people with disabilities were hired for part-time jobs in Amazon’s Kent sortation center as part of the pilot program. Their performance was tracked against the general employee population on retention, safety, productivity, quality and attendance.
The information in the article seemed dated and did not provide much data about pay and current number of individuals with disability engaged at Amazon.
Does Amazon Have a Lock on the CIA Cloud Business?
The answer may be, “Nope.” According to Bloomberg, a real news service which sometimes does not have sources for its information:
The CIA is preparing to significantly increase its reliance on cloud-computing services, with plans to solicit tens of billions of dollars of work divided among multiple tech companies.
Source: Bloomberg
Amazon and Columbia
South America is on the economic and political radar for 2020. Amazon has announced that it will open an infrastructure operation in Columbia. The region is unsettled in some ways, but Amazon obviously believes the risk is minimal. More information is available from Reuters. Reuters links do go dead, so you may be on your own if this source does not resolve. Complain to Thomson Reuters, not to me, please.
Caipirinha, Anyone?
It’s official. ZDNet reports that Alexa is alive in Brazil. DarkCyber thinks that Brazil’s new president may be interested in Amazon’s policeware too.
The Great Vendor Purge: Walking the Cat Back
Digiday reported that Amazon’s vendor purge is underway in reverse. According to Digiday’s online information service:
Amazon has walked back the decision to terminate a majority of the vendor purchase orders it stopped fulfilling last Monday, but the action has served as a bit of a wake-up call to sellers who are now planning how to protect their businesses by relying less on the e-commerce retailer.
Confusion at the controls of the Bezos bulldozer?
Proprietary Alexa Skills
There’s no mention of Amazon data capture or voice analysis in “Create an Alexa Skill for Your Organization with Alexa for Business Blueprints.” Be aware that this link may not resolve. You may be able to find the post at https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa and scrolling through items. The blog post states:
Private skills are voice-powered capabilities that enhance the Alexa experience while remaining private to members of an Alexa for Business organization. Skill Blueprints are so easy to use, people have used them extensively to create Alexa skills for their households. Now anyone at the office can do the same for their workplace, simply by filling in custom requests and responses in one of dozens of easy-to-use Blueprints. IT administrators can then review and enable that content for the company’s users and managed Alexa-enabled devices.
Interesting? DarkCyber wonders if the data from these private skills will flow into Amazon’s policeware system?
Why Is AWS So Appealing to Some Developer Palates?
“The #AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce” is a reminder that Amazon is the new Microsoft, which may come as a bit of news to Google. The online ad giant wants to be Microsoft. If you want a run down of some of the issues one may encounter with Windows in the cloud, Tehnodrone spells how Amazon handles Windows provisioning. Hint: Lots of engineering and more automated functions.
More AWS Computing Horsepower
“Nvidia’s T4 GPUs Are Coming to the AWS Cloud” reports:
The T4, which is based on Nvidia’s Turing architecture, was specifically optimized for running AI models. The T4 will be supported by the EC2 compute service and the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes.
Your play Google.
Redshift Scales
Who knows what Redshift does? If you are on the Redshift clue train, you will be delighted to learn that Amazon’s data warehouse offer concurrency and is allegedly better and faster than alternatives. More rah rah is available in “AWS Announces General Availability of Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift.”
S3 Glacier: Cheap Archiving
Amazon rolled out discounted storage. This is called Glacier, presumably because near line retrieval move slowly. More information is available in “AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive—the Lowest Cost Storage in the Cloud.”
Amazon Aurora: Another Complexity Block to Master
If AWS is the next Windows, these components are the equivalent of the chunks of capability stuffed in a DLL. The write up in Acolyer’s blog states:
Managing quorum failures is complex. Traditional mechanisms cause I/O stalls while membership is being changed….Aurora is designed for a world with a constant background level of failure.
The idea is to improve reliability. The key point is that the AWS system generates automatic adaptive actions. Some of these may cost money. Automated services which posts increments to fees, is it?
New Partnerships
Here are some of the new partnerships and integration vendors which appear to have Amazon AWS expertise.
- Lightstream, a global leader in cloud technology solutions, network integration and managed-network services now supports Amazon Chime. Chime is a communications service that lets licensees meet, chat, and place business calls inside and outside an organization. Source: New Kerala
- Sisense delivers its analytics via the Amazon Cloud. The service is called the “Elastic Data Hub.” Please, don’t confuse this with the Elastic company or the Elasticsearch open source system. Source: New Kerala
Know What NSA NIPA Means?
Somebody thinks those on LinkedIn do. Monkton.io (no, it is not a town in Maryland and it has nothing to do with monks) said via Harold Smith III on LinkedIn “NSA NIAP compliant mobile apps in weeks, not years.” Source: LinkedIn and search for “Harold Smith III”.
Stephen E Arnold, April 1, 2019
Factualities for March 20, 2019
March 20, 2019
Our data rich world yields bounteous riches. Ponder these factualities.
0. Number of runaway hits among Amazon Alexa’s 80,000 apps. Source: Bloomberg
$0.14. Amount Amazon receives from each Lyft ride. Source: Twitter
30 percent. Decrease in Web traffic to Tumblr.com since December 2018. Source: Verge
33 percent. Percentage of youngsters in the US who are lonely. Source: Reddit citing a UPI story no longer online.
49 percent. Percentage of Israeli start ups purchased by American companies. Source: No Camels
67 percent. Percentage of Android anti virus apps which are non functional once installed. Source: Techspot
2. Hours per day spent searching for information. Source: IT Pro Portal
200. Android malware with SimBad removed from the Google App Store. Source: The Inquirer
4,000. The number of Facebook users who viewed the New Zealand live shooting. Source: Engadget
$5,200. Cost of 256 gigabytes of RAM for the new Apple iMac. Source: 9 to 5 Mac
1 million. Number of bad advertiser accounts Google removed in 2018. Source: VentureBeat
$1.4 million. Amount paid for a racing pigeon. Source: CNN
$23 million. Amount of the cash grant Amazon will receive from Arlington County, Virginia, over a five-year period. Source: Reuters
245 million. Number of people in India watching YouTube on a mobile phone each month. Source: Financial Times
$500 million. Cost of a new U S supercomputer. Source: New York Times
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2019
Amazonia for March 18, 2019
March 18, 2019
The Bezos bulldozer has run into some soil filled with largish granite boulders. Check out these developments.
Amazon and Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch, the open source search system, is a popular way for many companies to make content searchable. With add ons, one can perform many useful functions. Elastic, the company founded by Shay Banon, provides for fee services to the search and retrieval technology. The Elasticsearch open source community does open sourcey things.
Amazon is open sourcey, although with a twist. The firm wants to provide a ready-to-go version of Elasticsearch as a widget callable from the numerous AWS services. How does Amazon achieve that goal? One solution is to move farther away from the Elastic version of Elasticsearch. Early signs of this special approach have been document by Code 972. Datanami published an interesting view of the AWS Elasticsearch activity in “War Unfolding for Control of Elasticsearch.”
That write up states:
AWS is seizing upon Elastic’s actions in creating this three-tiered system – not to mention the merger of X-Pack into Elastic Stack proper with the version 6.3 release of the Elastic Stack last summer – in justifying the creation of Open Distro for Elasticsearch.
Amazon does not want to fork Elastic or Elasticsearch.
Datanami states:
Banon accused AWS copying code and co-opting the Elasticsearch product for its own use.
Will legal eagle fly? Will Elastic’s investors and customers complain? Will Amazon alter its course?
No answers at the moment.
DarkCyber hypothesizes that if Amazon comes calling, one should listen. If Amazon asks for something, one should find a way to cooperate. A failure to orbit Amazon can have consequences, fork or not. See the culture item below.
Amazon’s Culture
Amazon is, from DarkCyber’s point of view, a big, friendly Teddy bear of a company. Some insights into the culture of the company are revealed in “AWS CEO Andy Jassy Drills Down On Cloud Adoption And Amazon’s Culture.” Here are a couple of highlights:
- No PowerPoints allowed
- Move quickly (for example, pull out of New York, we assume)
- Speed build
- Employees build their destiny using AWS.
Sound exciting. You can apply at this link.
Virginia: Pushback and Maybe Incentive Pullback?
The Big Apple was sour. Now “Amazon’s second headquarters Faces New Blocks in Virginia Funding Vote.” Pity Crystal City stakeholders. Feel some remorse for the condo speculators. According to the real news outfit Reuters:
local [Virginia] officials vote on Saturday on a proposed financial package worth an estimated $51 million.
The JEDI deal seems to be stalled. Either the wheels of bureaucracy are in neutral, or the various legal challenges are fouling the smart automatic braking system for the billion dollar deal. The slower the processes move, the more time anti-Amazon forces have to refine their tactics.
Gogo to AWS
Gogo’s in flight service is now collaborating with Amazon. According to the ever reliable Verizon Oath Yahoo:
Gogo is set to shift its entire infrastructure to AWS is order to improvise cost structure and achieve better work efficiency by utilizing AWS storage, database, analytics and serverless services. Meanwhile, the company has already shifted its commercial and business aviation division.
Amazon landed these customers in the last year:
Amgen
Ellie Mae
Guardian Life Insurance
Korean Air
Mobileye
National Australia Bank
Pac-12
Santander’s Openbank
As one person told me, “Microsoft can sell better than Amazon.” Synergy Research Group figured out that Amazon had 34 percent of the cloud business.
Where did Amazon Yahoo Oath get this information? Zack’s.
Training Courses
Amazon offers more than 350 training courses for those interested in the Bezos bulldozer’s technology. You can find these at amzn.to/2Y3wX1V . IIT Kharagpur has added AWS courses to its curricula.
Connect with Startups
Amazon has had a mechanism for monitoring startups for years. Now anyone can tap into this flow of potential financial opportunities. “Amazon [is] testing a new program that connects outside investors with startups that use AWS.” The service is called Pro Rata.
The write up points out:
Amazon uses other programs such as the Alexa Fund and Amazon Catalyst to invest in startups.
New Partners/Providers
DarkCyber spotted these partners in the AWS news last week:
Duo World. Info here.
Manthan. Info here.
Symbee. Info here.
Wipro. Info here.
Amazon wants to provide more visibility to its partners and integrators. The company has launched AWS Digital CX Competency. (CX means customer experience.)
Volkswagen Fears Amazon?
Not sure if “fear” is the right word. But DarkCyber found this article suggestive: “In Picking Microsoft’s Cloud, Volkswagen Shows That Even Carmakers Have Some Fear of Amazon.” Could part of the reason stem from Amazon’s buying Mercedes’ vans?
Amazon Smart City Program
IBM does the Watson thing at MIT, but Amazon is putting is Smart City center at Arizona State University. You can get the details in “ASU, Amazon Web Services open Smart City Cloud Innovation Center.” What’s a “smart city”? Google’s angle is to get a piece of the tax money. What’s Amazon’s? The write up states:
…The new center is part of a long-term collaboration between ASU and AWS to improve digital experiences for smart-city designers, expand technology alternatives while minimizing costs, spur economic and workforce development and facilitate sharing public-sector solutions within the region.
Stephen E Arnold, March 18, 2019
Amazonia for February 11, 2019
February 11, 2019
Amazon has been bulldozing away and pushing some jungle undergrowth into the parking lot of major media outlets. Let’s take a quick look at what’s shaking at the electronic bookstore on steroids:
In a New York We May Be Gone
I learned in “Facing Opposition, Amazon Reconsiders NY Headquarters Site, Two Officials Say.” The source? The Washington Post or what some of the DarkCyber researchers call the “Bezos Bugle.” The push back has ranged from allegations of subsidizing a successful company to suggestions that taxpayer money could directly benefit shareholders of Amazon. I learned:
In the past two weeks, the state Senate nominated an outspoken Amazon critic to a state board where he could potentially veto the deal, and City Council members for the second time aggressively challenged company executives at a hearing where activists booed and unfurled anti-Amazon banners. K ey officials, including freshman U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose district borders the proposed Amazon site, have railed against the project.
Worth monitoring because if the JEDI deal goes to Microsoft, would Amazon bail out of Virginia?
Indiscreet Pictures and Allegations of Blackmail
Amazon once was a relatively low profile outfit. Then the rocket ships, the Bezos divorce, the JEDI dust up, and now a spat. One headline captures the publicity moment: “Jeff Bezos Says Enquirer Threatened to Publish Revealing Pics.” I don’t want to unzip this allegation. You can expose yourself to the “facts” by running queries on objective search systems like Bing, Google, and Yandex. Alternatively one can turn to the Daily Mail and its full frontal report on this allegedly accurate news story.
Movie Madness
I don’t know anything about the Hollywood movie game. I noted “Woody Allen Sues Amazon for $68 Million for Refusing to Release His Films.” In the context of allegations of blackmail, this adds another facet to the diamond reputation of the humble online bookstore. According to the write up:
Allen blames the studio’s unwillingness to release his films on “a 25-year old, baseless allegation against Mr. Allen” — specifically, Allen’s adopted stepdaughter, Dylan Farrow, telling the world that he sexually assaulted her when she was a child. The suit claims that Farrow’s comments shouldn’t affect the Amazon deal, since the “allegation was already well known to Amazon (and the public) before Amazon entered into four separate deals with Mr. Allen—and, in any event it does not provide a basis for Amazon to terminate the contract.”
Amazon is taking a moral stand it seems. Interesting in the context of the blackmail allegations. Another PR coup?
Accounting Methods or Fraud?
The Los Angeles Times reported that some Amazon delivery drivers’ tips were not paid to the drivers as an add on to their pay. The tips were calculated as part of their regular wage. “Where Does a tip to an Amazon Driver Go? In Some Cases, Toward the Driver’s Base Pay” reported:
Amazon guarantees third-party drivers for its Flex program a minimum of $18 to $25 per hour, but the entirety of that payment doesn’t always come from the company. If Amazon’s contribution doesn’t reach the guaranteed wage, the e-commerce giant makes up the difference with tips from customers, according to documentation shared by five drivers.
Is this an accounting method related in some way to Enron’s special purpose entities? But in the context of blackmail and a legal battle with Woody Allen, I am not sure how to interpret the LA Times’ report if it is accurate.
Amazon and Facial Recognition
Amazon has thrown some support behind the idea that facial recognition systems may require a bit of regulation. I learned about this interest in “Amazon Weighs In on Potential Legislative Framework for Facial Recognition.” The idea is that responsible use of facial recognition technology may be a good idea. The write up stated:
…Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study that found Rekognition, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) object detection API, failed to reliably determine the sex of female and darker-skinned faces in specific scenarios.
Image recognition systems do vary in accuracy. The fancy lingo is outside the scope of this week’s write up. Examples of errors are interesting, particularly when systems confuse humans with animals or identify a person as a malefactor when that individual is an individual of sterling character. Eighty percent accuracy is a pretty good score in my experience. Stated another way, a system making 20 mistakes per 100 outputs is often close enough for horseshoes. A misidentified individual may have another point of view.
Alexa Gets a New Skill
The Digital Reader reported that you can now have Alexa play a choose your own adventure audiobook. Amazon wants to make sure it has a grip on the emerging trend of “interactive fiction.” Perfect for the mobile phone, zip zip zip reader.
Baby Activity API
The engineers at Amazon have chopped another trail through the digital jungle. Programmable Web reported that Amazon’s new baby activity skill API let parents track infant data hands free. Parents should be able to track their baby’s data. Are third parties tracking the infant as well? The write up states:
The new API includes several pre-built interfaces for tracking specific data points, including Weight, Sleep, DiaperChange, and InfantFeeding. Amazon plans to continue adding to these interfaces in hopes of streamlining integration.
If a third party were to have access to these data, combining the baby data with other timeline data might yield some useful items of information at some point in the future. Behavioral cues, purchases, social interactions, and videos watched could provide useful insights to an analyst.
More Live Streaming and a Possible Checkmate for QVC
“Amazon Live Is the Retailer’s Latest Effort to Take on QVC with Live Streamed Video” states:
Amazon is taking on QVC with the launch of Amazon Live, which features live-streamed video shows from Amazon talent as well as those from brands that broadcast their own live streams through a new app, Amazon Live Creator.
Will the Twitch model work for remarkable products like super exclusive Tanzanite? QVC may try to compete. DarkCyber believes that effort would tax the shopping channel in several ways. Some cloud pros might suggest putting QVC offering on a cloud service. Will AWS make the short list?
Amazon Space
Atlantic reported that the electronic bookstore “has 288M sq. ft. of warehouses, offices, retail stores, and data centers.”
Quite an Amazon-scale week.
Stephen E Arnold, February 11, 2019
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
Amazonia for January 28, 2019
January 28, 2019
Amazon and Open Source
We learned from GeekWire that Amazon Web Services continues open-source push with code behind SageMaker Neo. The write up told us:
Amazon Web Services has decided to release the code behind one of its key machine-learning services as an open-source project, as it continues to push back against critics who find its relationship with open-source software out of balance.
Amazon wants to make friends with the open source world.
The write up pointed out:
The release is also another sign that AWS increasing involvement with the open-source community, after years of criticism over its tendency to use open-source projects as the foundation for revenue-generating services without contributing much back to the community. Neo-AI joins Firecracker, which was also unveiled at re:Invent 2018, as another fundamental technology advance that the cloud leader has decided to release as an open-source project.
Amazon has some interesting use cases for open source. Some of these reminded DarkCyber Annex of Microsoft’s efforts years ago but blended with a little of the IBM lock in methodology.
Amazon Backup: Good Bye Cohesity and Veeam?
Amazon has rolled out its official back up service. “AWS Backup, a fully-managed, centralized backup service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises, helping customers more easily meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements.” Source: About Amazon
Amazon Helps Lots of Small Businesses. Yep, Lots.
According to Neowin, Amazon has helped 50,000 small businesses. The dollar volume of the help was pegged at $500,000. Plus, an additional “200,000 SMBs managed to generate $100,000” in revenue.
Alexa Team Number 10,0000
What are 10,000 people doing with Alexa. We assume that the Alexa in the auto device is high on the list. Business Insider listed some other important projects in the Bezos jungle:
- Machine learning
- Making Alexa “more knowledgeable”
- Giving Alexa a personality.
Another area of activity is improving the question and answer capability of Alexa.
Amazon Facial Recognition Performance
The New York Times revealed that Amazon’s facial recognition may have some accuracy challenges. For example, Amazon’s Rekognition mistakes women as men 19% of the time, and darker-skinned women as men 31% of the time, more than similar services from IBM and Microsoft.
Amazon and Zigbee. Zigbee?
Amazon is ubiquitous. At least that is what Quartz has concluded. Good catch. Zigbee, which does not occupy too much of my time, is now joined the Board of Directors of the Zigbee Alliance, reports The Verge. The write up states:
Amazon now has a say in the development of a commonly used smart home standard, giving the company more power as it continues to push smart speakers, cameras, doorbells, and all other kinds of gadgets into its customers’ homes.
Another path cut through the jungle by the Bezos bulldozer is being blazed.
Amazon Drivers Unhappy?
We spotted a news item from the CBS affiliate in Dallas, Texas. The write up states:
More than a dozen of Amazon packages were found on the side of the road in Arlington Sunday, addressed to homes not far from where they were left.
A single unhappy driver, perhaps. A signal that pesky humans can foil the well oiled Amazon machine? Amazon delivery robots may be the answer. But humans are still needed for Amazon’s house cleaning service which is becoming more widely available in the US. Humans are still required for this, however.
Stephen E Arnold, January 28, 2019
Factualities for January 23, 2019
January 23, 2019
Statistics, statistics—More plentiful than snowflakes. Believe these or not.
- 8,600. The number of molly tabs a drug dealer in Tacoma, Washington, had in his possession. Source: The News Tribune
- 16 million. The number of US households receiving over-the-air TV. Source: TechCrunch
- $56 million. The amount of “dark net market” transactions in a single month. Source: Reuters
- 77 million. The number of Americans who talk to their vehicles. Source: Recode
- $500 million. The amount Microsoft is “providing” to address housing issues in Seattle. Source: Quartz
- 773,000,000. Number of email addresses offered for sale. Source: Wired
- $1 billion. The amount Disney lost in 12 months with its video streaming endeavors. Source: CNBC
- 20 to 40 percent. The percentage price increase for Tesla recharges. Source: The Verge
- 74 percent. The percentage of Facebook users in a Pew sample who did not know that Facebook keeps track of user interest and clicks in order to sell ads. Source: TechCrunch
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2019
Automatic Text Categorization Goes Mainstream
January 10, 2019
Blogger and scaling consultant Abe Winter declares, “Automatic Categorization of Text Is a Core Tool Now.” Noting that, as of last year, companies are using automatic text categorization regularly, Winter clarifies what he is, and is not, referring to here:
“I’m talking about taking a database with short freeform text fields and automatically tagging them according to a tagged sample corpus. I’m not talking about text synthesis, anything to do with speech, automatic chat, question answering, or Alexa Skills.”
Though Winter observes the trend, he is not sure why 2018 was a tipping point. He writes:
“We’ve had some of the building blocks for this kind of text processing for decades, including the stats tools and the training corpuses. Does deep learning help? I don’t know but at minimum it helps by delivering sexy headlines that keep AI in the news, which in turn convinces business stakeholders this is something they can get behind. It wasn’t magic before and it’s not magic now; the output of these algorithms still requires some amount of quality control and manual inspection. But business leaders are now willing to admit that the old manual way of doing things also had drawbacks….”
The write-up goes on to observe that, while text categorization now works well enough for the mainstream, speech and conversation interfaces still fall short of flawless functionality. He directs our attention to this Google Duplex conversation agent demo as he alludes to some troubling trends in corporate AI deployment. He closes with a word to programmers wondering whether they should add natural language processing to their toolkits:
“The part of the question I can’t answer is how big is the job pool, how long will the bubble last and how much expertise do you need to get more money than you make now? … For myself, I’m learning the basic techniques because they feel core to my industry skill set. I’m staying open to chances to apply them and to work with experts. I’m not even at the midpoint of my career and want to stay ahead of the curve.”
It does seem that natural language processing is not about to go away any time soon.
Cynthia Murrell, January 10, 2019
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
