Amazon Hungry to Take Over More Diverse Industries
December 27, 2018
Amazon Web Services is the secret juggernaut of the home shopping giant. It has been reported far and wide just how many businesses, from private and public sector alike, use AWS to host their material. While Amazon has been raking in the money, they are starting to make enemies from…their clients? It looks that way judging from a recent CNBC story, “AWS is Competing With its Customers.”
According to the story:
“AWS is the world’s biggest public cloud, generating $6.68 billion in revenue for Amazon in the third quarter, up 46 percent year over year. But as Amazon expands into countless new areas, from grocery stores to health care, some companies that have previously worked with Amazon have found a partner becoming the competition overnight.”
This would not be the first time we’ve heard of Amazon entering a market and gobbling it whole. However, this particularly puts artificial intelligence companies in a tough spot. Many are known to use AWS, but with news like that of Amazon redoubling its efforts to break into AI, suddenly this partnership doesn’t seem so rosy. We’d be watching our backs if we were any industry reliant on AWS, which is…pretty much everyone.
Patrick Roland, December 27, 2018
AI Be Dumb Compared To Humans
December 24, 2018
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are supposed to solve everyone’s problems like smart analytics and big data were supposed to a few years ago. Yet it, as with everything, has its limitations and AI is really lagging behind the hype. CNET explains how dumb AI is in the article, “ ‘AT Is Very, Very Stupid,’ Says Google’s AI Leader, At Least Compared To Humans.”
Andrew Moore is one of Google’s vice president and the leader for the company’s AI cloud division. Moore said that AI is good at doing some tasks, but the algorithms cannot think outside the box or do any creative thinking. He does not want people to think he’s against AI, on the contrary, Moore is a huge AI supporter.
At the moment, the AI technology is limited, but it is great for certain tasks. These include language translation, mimicking human speech, and catching credit card fraud. The biggest AI breakthrough, however, was nine years ago and nothing has happened since. Will there be another breakthrough? Of course, but they have not discovered it yet.
“ ‘People feel whoever gets to GAI first maybe has a real edge in the world, but it’s questionable whether it’s going to happen or when it’s doing to happen…’ But for today’s AI technology, Moore is happy to see the glass as half full. ‘There is so much that we could do to increase safety of people in the world and increase productivity just using the existing tool sets,’ he said.”
How about making an AI that does not make humans obsolete? At least that is some time away.
Whitney Grace, December 24, 2018
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Amazonia for December 24, 2018
December 24, 2018
Amazon operates at scale. For those who don’t want a lump of coal in their holiday stocking, Amazon cheer is in order:
Sharing the Digital Goodies
Amazon, according to the Inquirer, gave a customer access to another Amazon customer’s Alexa voice recordings. Just an error. According to the Inquirer,
It turns out two men has requested their data under Europe’s GDPR, and Amazon had just sent each set of files to the wrong person, ironically causing more GDPR paperwork. Source: The Inquirer
Amazon Means Delivering the Goods
Amazon is the new USPS. According to the New York Times, customers perceive that only Amazon can deliver gifts in time for the holiday. The newspaper adds its own Amazon commercial, stating “Amazon is far and away the leader in e-commerce, outpacing competitors like Wal-Mart, Target and eBay.”
Alleged Dirty Tricks
Bloomberg dissects the procurement dust up for the multi-billion dollar Department of Defense cloud computing contract. IBM and Oracle have signaled that whatever the DoD does will result in a loss for these two long-standing DoD vendors. There’s another dossier zipping around DC, complete with allegations of improper relationships. The Bloomberg story reveals that the dossier reveals that Amazon acquired ABD Advisor to pump out pro-Amazon information.
The Amazon Marketplace Jungle
Amazon’s marketplace has its own culture and its own rules. “Prime and Punishment” reveals what may be a digital jungle. Bogus reviews, dirty tricks, and eBay-inspired questionable products. Push through the underbrush for a look at the primitive life thriving in the Amazon.
Another Amazon Product Service Run Down
Wired explains why Amazon is the king of the digital jungle. The write up reveals that Amazon’s cloud services generate money. The write up states:
AWS offers so many cloud computing products and services that it would be cumbersome to name them all. In 2011, Amazon introduced AWS GovCloud, aimed at government agencies. Four years later, it launched AWS IoT, a platform for connecting and managing the plethora of connected devices known as the Internet of Things. Shortly after, the company won a $600 million contract to build AWS Secret Region, a cloud storage service for the CIA.
Advertising gets a mere three mentions, but our research teams anticipates that ads will be an opportunity for the company to put increased pressure on the fragmented colossus, Google.
AWS: How Big? $600 Billion Big
Business Insider reports that Amazon Web Services could be a $600 billion dollar business by itself. That’s a hefty number. But Excel spreadsheet fever is easy to catch at this time of year. Jeff Bezos himself believes Amazon can fail. So whom does one believe: The financial analyst or the king of the jungle?
Crystal City to Gleam Again?
The once lustrous Crystal City may gleam again. The reason? Amazon. The “Update On Amazon’s HQ2 Impact On Crystal City & Long Island City” states:
According to Trulia via Forbes, as of December 8, there were almost 100 properties for-rent or for-sale that mentioned Amazon’s new headquarters, or National Landing. A total of 44 neighborhoods across the DC metro area contained at least one listing that mentioned Amazon’s new campus (to be built) as a noted selling point.
What? Us Worry? Ask FedEx and UPS
FedEx and UPS may face a tough 2019. Amazon has added more aircraft to its fleet of airplane. According to CNet:
Amazon announced that it was expanding its fleet to 50 aircraft (up from 40). Amazon says this is to support the increasing number of Prime subscribers who expect free two-day delivery…. By adding 10 more aircraft, Amazon is expanding its fleet by 25 percent — a sizable increase.
UPS owns 247 aircraft and FedEx owns over 650. Nothing for these firms to worry about.
Amazon In House Brands
Amazon has more than 100 in house brands. Bloomberg points out:
Amazon has more data on what people shop for than anyone else and can lure people to its own brands with house ads and software-generated product suggestions online and through the Alexa digital assistant and prominent online placements like in the Solo and Dawn examples. And those brands may feel compelled to pay Amazon for ads to ensure their products remain front-and-center when shoppers go looking for them. Amazon loves to say it only thinks about what’s best for shoppers, but is it good for shoppers to have top product listings dominated by companies that pay Amazon for prominent placement and Amazon’s house brands?
If you own shares of Amazon, the answer is, “Yes.”
Stephen E Arnold, December 24, 2018
Amazonia for December 17, 2018
December 17, 2018
The online bookstore has been motoring forward. As Facebook and Google face heat in Europe and the US, Amazon floats in the clouds.
We noted these items this week:
A parrot has used the owner’s Alexa to play music and order products. The parrot allegedly specified strawberries, watermelon, raisins, broccoli and ice cream. — Source: Fox News
You can buy an Alexa enabled twerking stuffed bear. The bear complements the Big Mouth Billy talking fish. Source: PocketLint
Amazon is uniquely well-positioned to dethrone UPS and FedEx’s duopoly. It’s built up a strong logistics infrastructure, counting hundreds of warehouses and thousands of delivery trucks. — Source: Business Insider
AWS used to be easy, but over the last decade it’s become a specialization. Every time I wander back to it, there’s another layer of complexity in the way towards doing something simple. — Source: Hacker News post by Sonny Blarney at https://bit.ly/2SJSQjg
Amazon could be using facial recognition to create ‘database of suspicious persons’ The concept would give homeowners, police a way to more easily ID someone engaged in potential criminal activity. — Source: OCRegister.com
“Use NoSQL and do things the “dumb” way every time. Because the perf characteristics are much more obvious to the programmer and designer, now you can just do a full join, or a full table scan every time for every query. Much more stable!” — Source: Colm Mac Carthaigh at https://bit.ly/2QQ7Vm4
An interesting browser plug in surfaces. “Looking to raise awareness of Amazon’s power in the marketplace and of its HQ2 incentives, a group of tech workers in New York created a Chrome browser plug-in called Block Amazon for Me. ‘We asking people to reconsider what they are supporting and what are the real costs,’ said Woody, who is the project manager for the plug-in project…”– Source: CNet
Amazon is moving in, leaning in, and pressuring both the Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure: “Amazon Outposts, a service scheduled to become available in the second half of 2019, will allow customers to provision physical racks of Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers and have them shipped to their own data centers. The racks will be configured with the same servers that Amazon runs in its AWS data centers; once installed, the racks will connect back to the AWS mothership over the Internet and then can be configured with storage services and virtual machines through Amazon’s AWS Management Console. And just as with services hosted in Amazon’s own data centers, customers won’t own these racks—they’ll rent them. The costs and connectivity requirements associated with Outpost have yet to be determined.” — Source Ars Technica
An Alexa clock is available. Engadget notes that the Amazon Echo clock requires an Amazon Echo in Version 1.0. These Amazon gadgets will connect to gizmos like the Amazon microwave in the near future. — Source: Engadget
The “everything” is hyperbole. But a useful run down of some Amazon developments has been assembled by Vox. Here’s an interesting item: “AWS also partnered with Lockheed Martin to get a competitive edge on faster and cheaper “downlinking” (downloading, basically) of information stored on satellites, making it officially part of the military industrial complex.” — Source: Vox
Stephen E Arnold, December 17, 2018
Visual Search Gets Personal
December 7, 2018
The steps made in visual search are many and well-advertised, so it should come as no surprise we have news. What might be surprising, is that you could be part of this latest development by Google. We learned more in a troubling and fascinating story in recent Venture Beat story, “Google Makes Dataset of 50 Million Drawings Available on its Cloud.”
According to the story, Google’s cloud sourced AI drawing game, Quick Draw, is turning out to be less time-killer and more data collector:
“Quick Draw has collected more than 1 billion drawings across 345 categories, 50 million of which Google open-sourced last year — complete with metadata, including prompts and geographical user locations. Today, it’s making them available through Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in the form of an API and an accompanying Polymer component.”
This is a really odd development for a tool that most people never realized would be made public and mined for data. However, when it comes to anything visual, one should not be surprised by Google’s ultimate goal. Currently, they are fine-tuning their visual search tools and we have a hunch this is part of the big picture. Search by talking, search by drawing—next up mental telepathy?
Patrick Roland, December 7, 2018
Wal-Mart Versus Amazon: Is the Game Over?
December 6, 2018
Wal-Mart likes to be on top. Wal-Mart’s sales, however, have fallen due to Amazon and other online retailers, but they will not go down without a fight. Wal-Mart has decided to fight digital sales with a bigger, better digital supply chain super structure. The Motley Fool reports on Wal-Mart’s biggest investment in, “IBM And Microsoft Are Upgrading Wal-Mart’s Digital Supply Chain.”
Wal-Mart has teamed up with Microsoft and IBM to revamp its supply chain. Azure is the official cloud infrastructure of Wal-Mart with an exclusive five year contract. All of the retailer’s Web sites will now run natively on Azure and taking advantage of Microsoft’s machine learning and data management tools. Azure’s insightful tools will also streamline Wal-Mart’s supply chain, watch energy levels, and control devices.
Wal-Mart uses IBM’s blockchain technology to monitor product origins and IBM also built an onboard system for suppliers. How does the new supply chain help Wal-Mart:
“The modernization of Wal-Mart’s supply chain with cloud, IoT, and blockchain services could improve the retailer’s operating margin, which has been weighed down by e-commerce and overseas investments, store renovations, and wage hikes in recent years. That digital foundation can also pave the way for Wal-Mart to install more robots in its warehouses and stores, thereby reducing its overall labor costs. A streamlined supply chain would also help Wal-Mart avoid food safety problems, which are becoming increasingly common across supply chains and multiple countries and states.”
The new system will also help Wal-Mart regain some of the losses from its China suppliers due to Trumps tariffs.
The team up between Wal-Mart, IBM, and Microsoft is a joint effort to counter Amazon-their common enemy. But is the game over for Wal-Mart? Police in many municipalities find that Wal-Mart is a frequent stop and not for a hot dog and a soft drink. Perhaps Wal-Mart ecommerce would be less exciting than a visit to some establishments?
Whitney Grace, December 6, 2018
Microsoft and Credibility: Updates and Amazon
December 4, 2018
Perhaps you are like the millions of others who are unhappy with Windows and its updates lately. And if you are like many of those folks, you have recently discovered Microsoft is trying to fix its problems in a strange new way, as we discovered in a recent OnMSFT story, “Microsoft is Now Inviting Select Windows Insiders to Share Their Feedback Via Skype Interviews.”
According to the story:
“Following the botched release of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, Microsoft promised that it would pay more attention to user feedback going forward. Last month, the company added new impact and severity indicators for new Feedback Hub items, hoping to better surface critical bugs like the deleted files issue that initially shipped with the October 2018 Update.”
Their solution: listen to customers more…via Skype. Sorry, Microsoft, but that’s a case of too little too late. Perhaps, you could have avoided this catastrophe by, we don’t know, talking to users before the launch of these disastrous updates?
Plus as Amazon was rolling out enhancement after enhancement to its cloud services, Microsoft announced new icons. That’s the way to demonstrate technical excellence and strategic thinking to give Amazon pause.
Patrick Roland, December 4, 2018
Amazon: Making the Fuzzy Laptop Maker Look Silly
November 29, 2018
In an upcoming DarkCyber and in my new series of lectures for LE and intel professionals, I will be exploring the implications of Amazon’s public admissions that the company is the beastie in the policeware kennel. The “few words are better” Jeff Barr has summarized some of the more public announcements in “AWS launches, Previews, and Pre-Announcements” which is a useful, if incomplete, checklist of what’s happening at the Zon. (Where is that policeware info by the way?)
But for Beyond Search and its handful of very gentle readers I want to point out that Microsoft’s furry laptop, Azure outages, and the ineptitude of updating Windows 10 looks bad.
Consider what Amazon has been doing for the past five years or so: Developing not one but two different custom chips, building a range of machine learning tools including free for now training programs, and rolling out features and function to keep the often creaky Amazon Web Services engine chugging along.
Microsoft has the furry laptop thing. Oh, I almost forgot. Microsoft brought back the Microsoft “IntelliMouse Explorer.” Plus Microsoft continues to play more nicely with Amazon Alexa as it tries to make sure it can be Number Two in the big cloud game. Google, HP, IBM, and a number of companies whose names I struggle to remember want to knock of the big dog. The breed is a Bezos I believe.
Net net: Amazon seems to be taking bits and pieces from the Google, Palantir, and IBM playbook. Chef Bezos mixes the ingredients and rolls out a mind boggling array of new stuff.
But which company looks a little behind the times? Here in Harrod’s Creek we see Microsoft and its fuzzy laptop tablet thing. By the way, how does one keep fuzzy stuff free from dirt, bacteria, and burrito juice?
Amazon probably sells some type of cleaner. Why not do a product search on Amazon. Product searches account for a hefty chuck of online search action. Perhaps there is an Amazon Basics to clean the furry gizmo? Better yet, there are ads on Amazon. Ads which once were the exclusive domain of the Google.
Google. That’s another story one can research on a furry Microsoft device using an “old is new mouse” too.
Stephen E Arnold, November 29, 2018
Amazonia for November 26, 2018
November 27, 2018
The little ecommerce company has been beavering away.
Amazon Basics Now Includes ARM Server CPUs
One of Amazon’s stealth technologists announced AWS Graviton Processor. Amazon offers up a few details at this link. Lower cost, specialized capabilities, and proof that Amazon is thinking hardware thoughts. IBM markets its cloud capabilities and Microsoft tries to keep Azure alive and well, Amazon powers into a new space. Who wrote about these chips? None other than Jeff Barr. Trust the Beyond Search goose. This is a pivotal member in the Bezos Brain Bucket.
Amazon Sells a Lot over the Holiday
Although the source is not the most reliable, Bloomberg reports that Amazon sold more products in five days in the Thanksgiving interval than it did in 2017. Hard numbers? How about 18 million toys. Ah, Bloomberg. Get the scoop at this link. The Street says that Amazon sold $8 billion in stuff on one day. What about the mom and pop hobby store in Paducah, Kentucky? Oh, it closed. Too bad.
New Gizmo Coming?
IEEE Spectrum drops a lot of buzzwords suggesting that Amazon’s secretive Lab126 is working on new products. IEEE suggests that a paper outfit is connected to Amazon. The outfit is Chrome Enterprises, and it may be working on a faster, better, and probably cheaper way to do wireless magic. The report includes this soothing paragraph:
Cupertino’s branch of MassageEnvy is fewer than 500 meters from a satellite Lab126 building, called SJC3.
Amazon Offers Free Online Class to Train You to Use AWS
ZDNet reported that Amazon offer free training. The idea is that Amazon will teach you to use Sagemaker, DeepLens, and other AWS smart software. Hey, if the universities cannot do the job, Amazon can. The write up stated:
The company has over 30 online machine-learning courses, including video, labs, and documentation that have been used within Amazon for the past 20 years.
Here’s another Amazon wizard’s name to note: Dr Matt Wood, AWS’s general manager of artificial intelligence.
How do you know you have passed the course. Well, you pay $300 for an AWS SAT type test, of course.
Has Microsoft got the Windows 10 update working yet? What about Azure log ins? Two Seattle companies. Which has momentum?
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2018
Unstructured Data: Hey, Smart Software Is Supposed to Help
November 25, 2018
I read “5 Critical Steps for Identifying the Value in Your Unstructured Information.” The points in the write up are fine. In fact, anyone who has worked with unstructured data in the form of emails, tweets, Facebook posts, intercepts, etc. knows that a lot of work is required.
My problem with the write up in Datanami is that smart software keeps its nose tucked under the covers. I thought that smart software was able to perform collection (er, that’s a step not included in the list of five steps but let’s move on).
Smart software is supposed to discover important information. That’s fine but what is the process for configuring the smart software, checking to make sure that the system outputs useful or semi useful data, and presents it in a form which does not trigger another wave of manual effort? There are some systems which perform discovery; however, like today’s driverless autos, a human has to have his or her hands on the wheel. Otherwise a dead pedestrian or a dead driver can be an outcome. I recall a Tesla nuked a white truck because its LIDAR thought the truck was a cloud. Yeah, right.
The reality is that generalizations about what’s is required to make sense of unstructured data are only marginally useful. Anyone licensing a smart system from outfits like IBM, Palantir, BAE Systems, Textron, etc. must be prepared for the surprises which luck in the software.
For instance:
- Much of the work is manual. How does data get into Palantir Gotham?
- Setting up the system is iterative work. Have you ever heard about tuning?
- Creating and enforcing procedures for keeping data clean and happy is work. Automatic feeds and real time flows are super, but what happens when high value data is filtered and put in an exception folder?
- Analysis is work that needs a trained, attentive, subject matter expert. Who makes sense of the puzzle pieces and assembles them?
The real world requires that magic be confined to children’s books. Using the tools available today do not eliminate the need for manual work.
Smart software is a knee brace. The human has to carry the load. Omitting this reality creates false expectations and puts lives at risk or decision making in a higher risk setting. Smart software can do some functions well. Not all functions are smart.
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2018
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