Tag: amazon

NY Budget Dir on Amazon

Make no mistake, at the end of the day we lost $27 billion, 25K-40K jobs and a blow to our reputation of being ‘open for business.’ The union that opposed the project gained nothing and cost other union members 11K good, high-paying jobs. The local politicians that catered to the hyper-political opposition hurt their own government colleagues and the economic interest of every constituent in their district. The true local residents who actually supported the project and its benefits for their community are badly hurt. Nothing was gained and much was lost. This should never happen again.

Amazon Marketplace Fraud

Fascinating article about the many ways Amazon Marketplace sellers sabotage each other and defraud customers.

Defacement: Sellers armed with the accounts of Amazon distributors (sometimes legitimately, sometimes through the black market) can make all manner of changes to a rival’s listings, from changing images to altering text to reclassifying a product into an irrelevant category, like “sex toys.”

Phony fires: Sellers will buy their rival’s product, light it on fire, and post a picture to the reviews, claiming it exploded. Amazon is quick to suspend sellers for safety claims.

AWS Ground Station

Amazon EC2 made compute power accessible on a cost-effective, pay-as-you-go basis. AWS Ground Station does the same for satellite ground stations. Instead of building your own ground station or entering into a long-term contract, you can make use of AWS Ground Station on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. You can get access to a ground station on short notice in order to handle a special event: severe weather, a natural disaster, or something more positive such as a sporting event. If you need access to a ground station on a regular basis to capture Earth observations or distribute content world-wide, you can reserve capacity ahead of time and pay even less. AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service. You don’t need to build or maintain antennas, and can focus on your work or research.

A Business With No End

His parents had been receiving mysterious packages at their house. The packages were all different shapes and sizes but each was addressed to “Returns Department, Valley Fountain LLC.” I looked into it and found that a company called Valley Fountain LLC was indeed listed at his parents’ address. But it also appeared to be listed at 235 Montgomery Street, Suite 350, in downtown San Francisco. So were 140 other LLCs, most of which were registered in 2015. The names of many of these other companies were baffling and surreal. They included Bropastures, Dreamlish and Your Friend Bart LLC. And on further inspection, each one was associated with an Amazon seller (usually based in a European country) with an equally bizarre but unrelated name, like Ipple Store, DeepOceanStoreuk and GiGling EyE. There was little pattern or theme to what these Amazon shops sold. They had everything from hemorrhoid cream to desk lamps, and there were varying levels of inventory. On sale at DeepOceanStoreuk (a storefront on Amazon.uk associated with Bropastures LLC), I found a book on industrial electricity, a set of fake facial wounds and a “No Stress Tech Guide to Microsoft Works 8” Another storefront called Kingdom Kber, this one on Amazon.de and associated with Agapao LLC, advertised a miniature whale, nail gel and a copy of “Undocumented Immigrants and Higher Education.” When I clicked on these items, though, none of them were currently available. A good number of the storefronts were completely empty.

Battle for the Home

While the home may be the current battleground in consumer technology, is it actually a distinct product area — a new epoch, if you will? When it came to mobile, it didn’t matter who had won in PCs; Microsoft ended up being an also-ran. The fortunes of Apple, in particular, depend on whether or not this is the case. If it is a truly new paradigm, then it is hard to see Apple succeeding. It has a very nice speaker, but everything else about its product is worse. On the other hand, the HomePod’s close connection to the iPhone and Apple’s overall ecosystem may be its saving grace: perhaps the smartphone is still what matters. More broadly, it may be the case that we are entering an era where there are new battles, the scale of which are closer to skirmishes than all-out wars a la smartphones. What made the smartphone more important than the PC was the fact they were with you all the time. Sure, we spend a lot of time at home, but we also spend time outside (AR?), entertaining ourselves (TV and VR), or on the go (self-driving cars); the one constant is the smartphone, and we may never see anything the scale of the smartphone wars again.

Data Factories

Facebook quite clearly isn’t an industrial site (although it operates multiple data centers with lots of buildings and machinery), but it most certainly processes data from its raw form to something uniquely valuable both to Facebook’s products (and by extension its users and content suppliers) and also advertisers (and again, all of this analysis applies to Google as well): Users are better able to connect with others, find content they are interested in, form groups and manage events, etc., thanks to Facebook’s data. Content providers are able to reach far more readers than they would on their own, most of whom would not even be aware said content provider exists, much less visit of their own volition. Advertisers are able to maximize the return on their advertising $ by only showing ads to individuals they believe are predisposed to like their product, making it more viable than ever before to target niches (to the benefit of their customers as well).

Bad Romance

One awkward thing about the supposed book stuffing “scam” is that it walks so closely to accepted industry practices. These compilations deceive readers by baiting them with promises of fresh content, like a new novella, at the end of a book which is otherwise all repackaged, previously published material. But mainstream authors do sometimes include bonus short stories or previews of upcoming titles in the back of a book — granted the book itself is usually original. The incentives that Kindle Unlimited generates to put out longer and longer books aren’t completely new, either — Charles Dickens’ verbose, meandering prose may reflect the fact that he was paid per installment. The 30-day Amazon Kindle cliff may necessitate ghostwriting, repetitive plots, and copycat writing, but none of these things are new in genre writing. Publishing and marketing have long gone hand in hand. Gaming the best-seller charts happens outside of ebooks — arguably, the major publishing houses live and die by their ability to game the best-seller lists.

Disruption Antidote

the first place to look for weaknesses is not in the supplier base or distribution or even regulation: it is with the end users. That is why it matters that Amazon is the most popular company in the United States, why Apple and Google continue to have 2 of the most respected brands, and why Facebook is right to be more concerned about the PR effect of its scandals than the regulatory ones. Owning the customer relationship by means of delivering a superior experience is how these companies became dominant, and, when they fall, it will be because consumers deserted them, either because the companies lost control of the user experience (a danger for Facebook and Google), or because a paradigm shift made new experiences matter more (a danger for Google and Apple). In the meantime, though, disruption has its antidote.

Robot delivery

Amazon, which currently charges a $99 annual fee for 2-day deliveries under its “Prime” service, will eventually offer 2-tier pricing for delivery services. One will be a “Gold Prime” membership costing $199 to $249 a year that covers next-day deliveries, the other a platinum membership for $399 a year that includes same-day deliveries.

2019-08-20: Starship Technologies

The company has made over 100K commercial deliveries. The total funding has reached $85M. Parcels, groceries and food are directly delivered from stores, at the time that the customer requests via a mobile app. Once ordered the robots’ entire journey and location can be monitored on a smartphone. Starship delivery bots use machine learning to detect objects and do not use expensive LIDAR. Starship robots mostly drive on sidewalks and cross streets when they need to. This poses a different set of challenges compared to self-driving cars. Traffic on car roads is more structured and predictable.

2021-01-27: 1m now:

Starship reports that while its operation has not been flawless and its robots are always learning, any potential issues with the robot have not resulted in any injuries due to the low speed on the sidewalk. In addition to sidewalks, the robots are also doing 50K street crossings per day.

This might seem mundane, but both sidewalks and bike lanes are a huge opportunity. Even Amazon realized this, and is using both for last km delivery.