You have to hand it to Amazon, for a company whose net worth is over $450B, they sure as hell do not act like a big slow bureaucratic corporate; but have a speed that leaves most startups with their heads spinning. Amazon this week done it again, outflanked the industry, and announced a brand new device to its hardware lineup; Echo Show – Alexa now has a face.
The device had only been leaked literally 48hrs before Amazon officially started taking orders – a level of secrecy the likes of Samsung or Apple can only dream of. Why is this? Because Amazon is a company we all underestimate. Many write them off too quickly as simply an online retailer. They are not scared to fail. They fail fast, which is a fancy way of saying, they don’t dwell on their mistakes, and simply dust off the experience and move on.
Echo is the hardware ecosystem around the Alexa AI intelligent voice-activated service. It gives a body to Alexa.
Yet the Echo range is part of a much longer game that most people have not yet realized.
First came the voice activated 2001 esq cylindrical monolith that would sit in your room listening for commands to serve you. Things like the weather status, daily news briefings and then of course controlling your music collection. You could of course have Alexa add things to your Amazon shopping cart – after all, Amazon is your consummate retailer and it needs to see those tills ring.
Though Alexa Echo had it’s shortcomings, something I detailed back in January of this year, it still found a place in my life, namely the bathroom where it provides me with my acoustic diet each morning in the shower.
But Amazon have bigger plans for Alexa than just being my shower buddy – this week they introduced a touchscreen with it, to make things a little bit easier. Many assume that the screen is there to help with some of the issues that voice-activated devices pose. Oh you are so wrong. Amazon is already ahead of you.
Amazon is well on it’s way to integrating into all of our daily lives. Alexa is already starting to pop up on cars and other devices, all linked back to your Amazon account. She can follow you around, like the Ship’s Computer in Star Trek, ever present to help you out.
But why the screen? Well, as part of the experience is the video calling. Amazon wants to make it as simple as possible to make hands-free video calling a real thing, and this goes a long way to make that happen. A couple of days after announcing this new device, they announced that anyone with the Echo device or even just the app, can enjoy voice calling for free to another Echo user.
Now this is where it is getting interesting. Amazon is now going to be making it real easy for us to connect to each other, not just Amazon. Instead of fumbling for our phone in our pocket, looking up contacts, we can easily say “Call mom”, up to my arms in either the kitchen, bathing a child, and get a helpful voice (or video call) all without detracting from what we are doing.
For the record; many a time, I have been knee deep in a project, hands busy with other stuff, loving to be able to call in help for some assistance, on the task at hand.
Think about that for a minute … what seems a simple movie-like feature is actually a very powerful game changer.
It isn’t a huge leap to think Amazon will connect this voice network to the public PSTN network and be able to dial up anyone in the world. Amazon AWS recently started offering build-your-own call center technology as part of its cloud offering. So you know they have the ingredients to easily and quickly add to the Alexa universe.
The Sony Dash – epilogue
For those of you that feel there is something a little familiar with the Amazon Echo Show, then allow me to help you there. Sony, in 2010, tried building an Internet helper device to sit somewhere in your house many years ago; the Sony Dash. I had one of these devices, and as soon as the novelty wore off (which took all of 2 weeks) it was relegated to the cupboard and never used again.
Sony creates and sells good devices, and outside of the Playstation, sucks at creating communities. The Dash suffered from a drought of updates, widgets and general features. It was also horribly slow and often locked up.
Sony is officially killing off all support and updates this July 2017.
Amazon, I believe will succeed where Sony failed, because it is more about just the physical device, but the overall story and vision. You are not buying a voice activated device when you jump into the Alexa/Echo world, but a fast paced evolving world of experimentation as we figure out just exactly what it is we want from such a device in our normal daily mundane lives.
Waymo, Google’s self driving company (I hadn’t heard of it either), has released its first vehicle in partnership with Fiat. A mini-van souped up with the latest technology to make it see through the streets.
Apple finally announced that AirPods are available for purchase and at a $159 for a pair, this is not an impulse buy. Apple drew a lot of criticism when it released the latest iPhone without the traditional 3.5mm audio jack; relying purely on BlueTooth technology. Being someone that uses BlueTooth all the time, not a major upset that the manufacturers are taking away this port; Samsung is rumored to be removing it from their next Galaxy.
So you may not be able to make a call with the once dominant handset manufacturer, but you could let it drive you to the shops or work. Blackberry has rebranded itself and launched into the self-driving market space, positioning it’s powerful QNX operating system at the heart.
The size of Uber cannot be underestimated. It is a company that is innovating on so many fronts than simply democratizing ride sharing. Uber, while private, is thought to be valued at around the $68B space, making it larger than even GM.
We live in Internet years, which each year feels like a few. It was only 20 years ago that Apple was really struggling both financially and innovatively. Hard to believe considering the powerhouse the company is today, which its huge stockpile of sheer raw cash at hand. But one man was all it took to turn the fortunes around, through the launch for the iPod and then the iPhone.
As I approach that time of life when the body can’t take the same level of abuse it once could, and every ache and pain lasts for weeks instead of hours, I get a huge amount of faith in the advances in medical science.
Any warrior of the sky knows that a good sleep on a plane is a hard thing to obtain. The company PowerSiesta has come up with a rather ingenious $17 product that is a flat pack cardboard pillow, that once erected creates a nice shelf for your head to rest on.
There are some viral videos that make you laugh, make you cringe, make you cry, but every so often one comes along that truly changes your life. This week, with the help of BD Wong, this one teaches us how to eat chicken wings.
This is a new twist in the cyber extortion world. We all know about how malware can target a machine and start deleting files if they do not pay a given amount of money to the hackers. Well there is a way to sidestep this payment – that is to infect 2 other people and if they succumb you will get an unlock key and you are off the hook.
Verizon who previously said they wouldn’t get involved in the deactivation of Samsung’s infamous flame bursting phone have reversed their decision and in an upcoming software update they will disable people from charging the phone. This will effectively render them useless.
Cisco’s ‘Intercloud’ which had a $1B budget behind it will be closing its doors in March 2017. While it has not 
Slack, the very popular corporate chat system, has finally added video calling to its suite. This brings it inline with pretty much every other chat system. You can do one-2-one video calling, or group calling.
The oldest property on the Internet block is just not having a good time of it. They have released details of an earlier attack, circa 2013, where over 1 billion accounts were compromised. This is in addition to the 2014 hack where 500 million accounts were abused.
We are all starting to get use to the faceless helpers such as Amazon’s Echo, or Apple’s Siri. Well GateBox have upped the ante here and offered up a hologram to respond to your every move. While this may first appear creepy, it does make a lot of sense, to have something more contextual to react to instead of just a voice. The avatar can feedback using actions which will speed up the interactions.
The man that invented one of the most famous anti-choking moves in the world, has sadly passed away at the age of 96. Henry invented the technique in 1974 when he discovered an alarming number of people died while eating out. He died of natural causes, as opposed to choking himself – the irony would have been too much.
Finally a great story about why connected cars matters to everyone. Seattle Police were helped by BMW when it was reported that someone had taken the opportunity of the owners carelessness with their key vob to drive off with the car.
While we have the likes of FitBit buying up Pebble for $40M last week, we see that Apple is not having a great time of it with its range of wearables. Sales are down a whopping 71% compared to the same quarter last year.
Picture a futuristic shop, where you walk in, browse around looking at merchandise and then if you want it, you simply take it and as soon as you walk out the door, you are billed for.
Bluetooth, the favourite short range network that connects your headphones and car to your phone (and also a great way to spam out obscene messages to anyone that tries to search for open networks).Bluetooth 5 has 4 times the range and more bandwidth, meaning you can walk further away from your phone and stream more data!
The world’s largest cloud provider has opened its first region north of the border, namely in Canada – you know the unofficial 51st state. The Canadian region supports all the big services of AWS and will be a boom for any company operating up there, as well as being able to keep the data out of the hands of the American government.
One of Java’s biggest releases to date, may be at risk of slipping a few months from its target release date of July 2017. Java 9 has many big features coming in, with one of the biggest ones Jigsaw. Jigsaw is the modular run time to make it easier to ship Java into smaller and more manageable pieces.
John Glenn, a pioneer of the space race, has sadly died this week at the ripe old age of 95 years. Glenn was the first American to fully orbit the earth, and also, the oldest many to travel to space at 77 years.
Last weekend, there was an attack on the network that controls San Francisco’s MUNI transit system, resulting in everyone getting free rides at the weekend, since the gates were free to walk through.
Sometimes it is good old fashioned human error that can take networks offline. This time it was a ship’s anchor dragging along the floor bed of the sea, that snagged 3 fibre optic cables, ripping them apart, resulting in the islands links to the UK cut.
This was the week that Netflix finally relented to continued pressure and released an update to its mobile apps to allow for users to download content for viewing offline.
FitBit has added to its portfolio by acquiring the struggling smartwatch manufacturer, Pebble. Pebble came to prominence many years ago as a big winner of KickStarter that help raise millions and get it started. I was one of such early investor.
No denying it, Amazon is doing terribly well in the cloud space, on track to book $13B in revenue this financial year. They are adding more servers daily, than it took to run the whole AWS cloud in 2003.
No small change, but the Central Bank of Russia, has been compromised with $31M being removed through fraudulent client accounts. This one could easily not be anything that sophisticated but merely relied on social hacking – the ability to convince another human you someone you are not.
Got to love the land of the free; you are free to buy a gun that can result in untold mayhem, but don’t you dare buy small magnetic balls that you might swallow, resulting in them being attracted to large magnets, you know, like an MRI machine!
alan williamson 