From the Wired Business Conference comes a video showing 'A Day in the Life of a Kiva Robot'.
This isn't the first time that Amazon has shown us a video about the Kiva robots. This video, however, goes more in depth as to how the robots operate in Amazon's warehouses.
Folks, this is the wave of the future.
David Streitfeld, writing for The New York Times:
One consequence of this shift is that soon no one will know what a book’s “real” price is. Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim. The first seeds of this can be seen in the Justice Department’s suit against the leading publishers, who felt that Amazon was pricing their e-books so low that it threatened their viability. The government accused the publishers of colluding to raise prices in an anti-consumer move. Amazon was not a party to the case, but it emerged the big winner.
There seem to be two different topics mixed together here, yet are presented as being the same topic. The first topic is the notion of a 'real price'. Folks, the market price for a product is whatever price the buyer and seller are willing to agree upon. If the market is willing to pay a higher price, then the price will rise. If the market is not willing to pay a higher price, then the price will stay the same or will fall. There is no reason to believe that books should operate under a different set of rules than other products in the market.
The other topic revolves around Amazon's role in the market and whether they might be hurting the viability of book publishing with their pricing tactics. As a whole, readers should be concerned about the health of the market for books. While Amazon provides a way to acquire books cheaply, there is a danger in letting cheap prices take the focus away from good content. The best way for consumers to make sure that they continue to get good content is to continue to buy (and read!) books that they enjoy, even if the price isn't the absolute lowest possible price. As well, a good way to ensure that one market player (e.g. Amazon) or one industry group (e.g. the publishers) don't have a disproportionate amount of sway in what gets sold and how much it is sold for is to support authors when they self-publish or offer a book through their own website.
Folks, vote with your wallets.
Roughly six weeks ago Facebook bought Parse, the mobile-backend-as-a-service that lets app developers focus on their app's business logic instead of sticky bits like hosting data services. There are many reasons that Facebook made this purchase. Of course, there is the developer/user base that comes along with such a purchase. However, the primary reason is that Parse's platform (data storage, user account management, Facebook/Twitter login integration, push notifications, the ability to run code in the cloud with multiple service integrations) has extensive capabilities that allow app developers to quickly and cheaply create new apps with sophisticated features. Facebook wants more developers to create apps that integrate with Facebook, and the Parse acquisition goes a long way towards that goal.
Where, then, does Amazon come into play? Well, I've used Parse for a few projects in the past. I was also seriously considering using it in two different apps that I've been contemplating. However, after the Facebook acquisition, I'm a bit hesitant to put my faith in Parse as a platform. The main reason for this stance is that Facebook isn't known for being very kind to developers. There are alternatives such as Microsoft's Windows Azure Mobile Services, but those alternatives are either inferior in feature sets, more expensive, produced by fledgling startups with uncertain futures, or some combination of the above. Amazon, however, could provide a suitable alternative for developers worried about betting their business on Facebook/Parse.
Amazon has been quite successful with its AWS (Amazon Web Services) offering, and many of the web's biggest players use AWS as their backend. In fact, Parse itself is a platform that is developed on top of AWS. Something that Amazon is missing, however, is a service that provides the same ease of use for mobile app developers that Parse does. (Seriously, go check out Parse's documentation...it's amazingly well done.)
From a technical perspective, Amazon could create a service that is simpler to use than the raw services provided by the current AWS stack and with deeper integrations with third party services. From a business perspective, Amazon could price this service very competitively. From a trust perspective, Amazon is clearly a business that isn't going to go away any time soon.
How would this fit into Amazon's strategy? Creating a mobile-backend-as-a-service would encourage even more developers, particularly mobile app developers, to use Amazon's services. This creates greater revenue opportunities for Amazon by reaching developers that might not otherwise have selected the full AWS offering. Also, it creates an opportunity for revenue sharing with some of those niche magazine apps that have become all the rage on the iOS Newsstand (The Magazine and The Loop, for example). After all, that type of content needs to be hosted somewhere and the subscriptions inherent in those magazines provide recurring revenue opportunities. (Bonus points if Amazon makes it easy to migrate to the full AWS stack when/if a developer is ready to do so.)
It's not clear if Amazon has ever considered creating this type of service. It certainly sounds intriguing to me as a mobile app developer. If the 'Featured Customers' section of Parse's website is any indication, there are many big name app developers that might agree.
Microsoft recently released a commercial for the Surface Pro. This commercial is in the same vein as the Surface RT commercial released last year.
The commercial is also rubbish.
Why is this? It's because in an attempt to look 'cool', 'hip', and 'edgy', Microsoft has failed to inform the public what its product actually does. This is an especially terrible idea when you are clearly lagging behind the market leaders. What are the market leaders doing right with their commercials that Microsoft is doing wrong?
Apple's iPad Mini commercial takes half as much time (roughly 30 seconds) as the Surface Pro commercial (roughly 60 seconds) to explain twice as much to the user in a more easily digestible format. This particular commercial shows that the iPad A) can let you communicate in real-time via voice and video, and B) comes in different sizes (standard iPad and Mini).
Amazon's Kindle Fire HD commercial has a narrator discussing the various features that the device has, overlaid to video showing people using the device in real-world scenarios. In 30 seconds, the video shows us that you can read books, play games, watch movies, play music, and communicate in real-time via voice and video.
Google's Nexus 7 commercial, at 60 seconds, is the same length as the Surface commercials yet is so much more informative. The commercial shows us a little girl reading a book with her mother, using a drawing app, communicating in real-time via voice and video with her grandmother, playing a video game, and using Google voice search to find out how far away the Earth is from the moon.
What could someone possibly learn about the Surface Pro from the commercial? If they are paying very close attention, they might possibly see that it has a stylus, connectable keyboard, and kickstand. Everything else gets lost in the blur of song and motion. Microsoft's competitors communicate the value of their respective devices in a very efficient manner by crafting short stories that resonate with the viewer. We already know why we want to communicate with our loved ones. We already know that we would enjoy playing games, watching movies, or listening to music. It's unclear why we would want to have a stylus, connectable keyboard, or kickstand.
Ultimately, Microsoft fails to inform the viewer why they should care.
The folks at Bloomberg have an excellent short video (see the source link) about the Kiva Systems warehouse robots used by Amazon. The Kiva robots are intended to operate much more efficiently than humans performing the same job of retrieving items from the warehouse. In addition, repetitive motion stress is reduced since there isn't as much need for people to bend over or carry heavy items.
One of the most interesting statements in the video relates to the fact that we shouldn't be so obsessed with the idea of creating robots that look like humans. As years of effort have shown, it's actually fairly difficult to achieve something that approaches human dexterity. With that said, it is far easier by comparison to create single-task robots that do things that humans can't do well or shouldn't do much of from an ergonomics perspective.
Go ahead and check out the video (which is only about a minute and a half long). I bet you can't look at the Kiva robots without thinking of them as the 'bigger brother' to iRobot's famous Roomba robots.
Aabha Rathee, writing for Wall St. Cheat Sheet:
Amazon announced last week that its 22-million song catalog was now optimized for users of Apple devices in a way that lets them circumvent the iTunes store and pay lesser for their music. Users will be able to the Safari web browser on their iOS device to access the music, with purchases then directly stored to their Amazon Cloud Player library.
Rathee later goes on to mention (via quotes) how this action is similar to the strategy that Amazon employed when eBooks became available on the iPad. As Matthew Yglesias opines in an article over on Slate, Amazon can be a scary competitor even when (or perhaps especially when) it doesn't care about profits.
I'm not entirely convinced that Amazon can continue to play the market share game this aggressively, but I'm intrigued by the prospects of a formidable competitor keeping Apple on its toes.
