Company / division: Amazon
Apple’s Siri learns Shanghainese as voice assistants race to cover languages – Reuters (Mar 9, 2017)
One of the things that’s often missed by US writers covering Amazon’s Alexa and its competitors is how limited it still is in language and geographic terms. It only speaks English and German and the Echo range is only available in a handful of countries. Siri, meanwhile, just got its 21st country and 36th language, which reflects a long-time strength of Apple’s: broad global support. Apple News is a notable exception, which is only available in a few countries and one language, but almost all of Apple’s other products are available in a very long list of countries and territories, often longer than for other competing services. The article here is also interesting for the insights it provides into how each company goes about the process of localization, which is quite a bit more involved than you might surmise.
via Reuters
Why Amazon Echo And Google Home Can’t Tell Who’s Talking–Yet – Fast Company (Mar 7, 2017)
This is a good counterpart to the Time article from last week about Amazon working on voice identification in their respective home speakers. It points out the complications in providing such a feature, not least that heavy processing to make voices clearer will also tend to distort them and therefore make it harder to recognize and distinguish speakers. The article also makes clear, though, that these challenges are far from insurmountable, which leads me to believe that Amazon or Google or both will eventually figure this out. In fact, whichever does figure it out first could have a big advantage, because for a lot of the most useful features (calendar, emails, etc) individual profiles are critical. So much so that Google misleadingly included that exact use case in its I/O launch video last year.
via Fast Company
Pulse is Twitch’s new social feed and GIF-delivery system – VentureBeat (Mar 6, 2017)
In my last post about Twitch just over a week ago I described Amazon’s acquisition of the site as one of the most interesting it’s made, and talked about the two separate tracks it’s pursued with Twitch: deepening the gamer focus on the one hand, and using it as a jumping off point for other things on the other. This news is yet another example of the latter strategy, in which Twitch is being used as a platform for creating a Twitter- or Facebook-like feed of content from brands and creators. For now, that’s not going to have mainstream appeal beyond the core Twitch audience, but as Twitter also continues to evolve into something more like YouTube, that could actually become very interesting. In reality, of course, what’s missing for now is the social side – it sounds like this is mostly a one-way feed from creators to followers. But there’s no reason it couldn’t evolve into a more social or two-way following relationship between regular users as well, even if they’re not regularly posting gaming videos. Between Twitch and Echo, it’s starting to feel like Amazon has the beginnings of some really interesting and potentially powerful extensions to its ecosystem well beyond its current focus areas.
via VentureBeat
The Bad News and the Really Bad News for Retailers Fighting Amazon.com – WSJ (Mar 6, 2017)
There are some interesting numbers in here – notably that at its current growth rate, Amazon’s North American retail business could double in size in the next three years, or put another way, that it could suck the same amount of value out of the US retail market in that period as in its entire history to date. Realistically, growth is going to slow a bit, so it’ll take a little longer than that, but the broader point remains: Amazon is vacuuming up tens of billions of dollars of additional retail spend each year, and that has to come from somewhere. Given how small a share e-commerce still has of total retail spend in the US, that means it’s largely going to come from brick and mortar retailers, who have been suffering as a result. Some retailers have been able to recover a little lately in sales growth, but largely at the expense of margins, while one or two retailers have managed to find niches that seem somewhat immune to Amazon’s encroachment. We’re not going to see brick and mortar retailers take this all lying down, though, and one of the most interesting things to watch in the next couple of years will be how effectively these companies can pare Amazon’s growth back if they’re willing to be aggressive enough on margins. I suspect we saw a little of this in Q4, when Amazon’s growth rate dropped a few percentage points, but we might see more of it going forward.
via WSJ
WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell: Amazon keeps me up worrying at night – Business Insider (Mar 3, 2017)
WPP is one of the world’s largest ad agencies, and Martin Sorrell is its CEO. As such, what he says about trends in advertising is worth listening to, and he says he worries more about Amazon than almost anything else. That’s because Amazon’s ad business is both growing fast and has the potential to displace agencies and work directly with advertisers, much as Facebook does. This story is fascinating, because it’s a great reminder that Amazon is building a decent-sized ad business largely under the radar – hardly anyone ever talks about it, but it’s becoming pretty big. This article cites eMarketer forecasts, which are about the only estimates I ever seem to see, and which suggest the ad business is getting pretty big – over a billion dollars in 2016. You may not have thought about it much, but certain searches on Amazon lead to pages literally full of ads. Given how many people now start product searches on Amazon, it’s in an enviable, Google-like position of being able to serve up ads that are directly relevant to what consumers are interested in right now. That combination of relevance and timeliness is rare – almost everyone else can manage relevance, but timeliness is much tougher. Though Amazon isn’t going to rival Google or Facebook’s scale in the near future, it’s arguably got a strong shot at becoming number three in online advertising in the near term.
via Business Insider
Amazon plans to release new Alexa devices that can make phone calls and work as intercoms – Recode (Mar 3, 2017)
This is a slightly different spin on the WSJ article from a few weeks ago about Amazon and Google looking to add phone call capability to their home speakers. For one thing, this article suggests new hardware, rather than merely a software upgrade, though it’s not clear why, given that these devices already have all the necessary hardware elements for phone calls (speakers, microphones, and connectivity). One reason might be the intercom functionality that’s mentioned in the article too – again, if that’s audio only it wouldn’t necessarily require new hardware, but if there’s a video component, that obviously would. And that would also jive with the reports from yesterday about Amazon working on a video camera for the home. It’s increasingly feeling like Amazon is using Echo and Alexa as a Trojan horse to other things in the home, and we’re just starting to see the real potential here. That’s interesting, because in and of itself a voice speaker isn’t that threatening to other established players like Apple and Google, but if it becomes something more, that presents a more ecosystem-level threat, which is much more serious.
via Recode
Amazon Explains its Massive S3 Outage (Mar 2, 2017)
Amazon’s S3 service went down in part of the US on Tuesday, something I commented on at the time. But we now have an official explanation, which is that an employee attempting to debug an issue with the billing system for AWS accidentally took down more servers than he/she intended to, which in turn had a knock-on effect on several other services which manage other aspects of the S3 system (including the dashboard which reports whether the service is performing as expected). Restarting several of the servers took far longer than anyone had expected, which meant Amazon’s contingency planning turned out not to be adequate after all. It sounds like it has now put in place some protections to prevent similar things from happening in future, but once again it’s just a reminder of how vulnerable big chunks of the Internet are to an AWS outage, something we discussed in depth on this week’s Beyond Devices Podcast, recorded earlier today shortly after this announcement was made.
via Amazon
Amazon is working on its own home security camera – The Verge (Mar 2, 2017)
I’ve been wondering when we’d see Amazon get deeper into the home automation business, and it looks like some sort of camera might be the answer, and fairly soon. The Echo is often described as a smart home enabler, but I’ve argued that it’s actually a fairly dumb device – it merely passes commands back and forth without knowing anything about the state of your home or being able to intelligently take any actions on its own. If Amazon had a camera (or several of them) in your home, however, it could start to know whether anyone is home or not, and do other clever things, which could enable a smarter approach to home automation in future. I’m still skeptical that the home automation market can advance much further out of the early adopter segment without a services model – that feels like the key to broader adoption, and I can’t see Amazon offering that directly, though it would be an interesting fit with its new third party home services business.
via The Verge
Amazon cloud issues send Web publishers scrambling – Axios (Feb 28, 2017)
I might update this or post a follow-up later, since the outage is still underway and there isn’t yet an official explanation. But it’s already clear that this outage is having very widespread impacts, not just on a couple of big tech companies but on a variety of news sites and other businesses too. This is a great illustration of the enormous power a single player can have when it takes a dominant market share position, and conversely the danger customers put themselves in by failing to secure adequate redundancy. One of the changes between Snap’s original S-1 and its S-1/A filing was the inclusion of a deal with Amazon (ironically) to provide redundancy for its Google Cloud services, and I think it’s very unlikely the timing was a coincidence: I suspect the investors Snap talked to first were wary of its massive dependence on a single cloud provider. But of course that kind of redundancy can cost an awful lot, especially at scale – Snap’s contractual commitment to Amazon five years out is almost the same as its commitment to Google in the same year, which is not to say it will actually end up spending the same, but it’s indicative of the problem here. Of course, the Snapchat app hasn’t gone down today while many other services and sites have – if it had single-sourced based on Amazon, perhaps it would have done, which would have been disastrous the week of its IPO.
via Axios
Amazon Echo May Get Voice ID Feature – Time (Feb 28, 2017)
From the first time I heard about Google Home at I/O last year, I assumed it would have multi-user support, and yet it didn’t. Now it sounds like it’s Amazon that may bring this feature to its home speaker first, which is yet another example of how Google seems to be punching below its weight in this fight. Google is all about individual user accounts: email, calendar, to-do lists, YouTube subscriptions, Android device identities and lots more are all tied up in personal accounts. Amazon, by contrast, probably works mostly at the level of the household, with families sharing Prime shipping and video accounts. So it’s ironic that Amazon would be the first to market with something that provides individual identification by voice. At the same time, I think there are going to be severe limitations around voice identification that may well make it inappropriate for anything security related – voice recordings are much easier than fingerprint cloning, for example. And in both the household I grew up in and my own home now, there were several people with very similar voices – it will be very important for Amazon (and Google) to be able to tell apart even voices with shared genes.
via Time
Twitch will start selling games and giving its streamers a cut – The Verge (Feb 27, 2017)
Amazon’s Twitch acquisition was one of the most interesting it’s made, and one of the few big ones it’s made which weren’t in the e-commerce space. Since the acquisition, it’s pursued two separate tracks with Twitch, one focused on the core gamer space it’s always served, and the second broadening its reach and appeal beyond gaming and becoming something of a YouTube clone. This announcement belongs in that first strand, though it also ties in the online sales angle by putting a buy button next to video game video encouraging viewers to buy the game being played in the video. This is a unique take on the ad revenue sharing model YouTube popularized, and could be pretty lucrative for at least some channel owners over time. It’s also a great way to provide very relevant advertising around a video platform, something that’s often tough to do beyond broad demographic profiling.
via The Verge
Historic Oscar victories for ESPN, Netflix and Amazon – CNN (Feb 27, 2017)
Amazon and Netflix both won their first Oscars this year, though Amazon seems to have got most of the attention because its awards were for features, whereas the sole award Netflix received was for a short documentary. Interestingly, though, as far as I can tell the two Amazon wins were for properties it had nothing to do with until it acquired the distribution rights, whereas Netflix backed its short The White Helmets as one of several production companies behind the film (and was also the main backer of The 13th, Ava DuVernay’s feature-length doc, which lost out in that category). That’s an important difference – Netflix can claim that it was behind a winner from the beginning, whereas Amazon only acquired its two movies when they were finished and showing at festivals to strong positive responses. Still, it’s great validation for both platforms and a further indication that they’re increasingly important powers in the movie and TV worlds.
via CNN
Samsung’s reputation nosedives in the US after Galaxy Note 7 snafu – The Verge (Feb 20, 2017)
As usual, it would be great to understand in more detail the methodology behind this survey, but it’s not available. The Verge seems to have got the rankings wrong – from what I can tell, Samsung was 7th and not 3rd last year – but it’s also worth noting that Samsung’s score dropped from 80.44 to 75.17, which sounds a lot less dramatic than dropping from 3rd (or even 7th) to 49th. The fact is that there are a lot of companies clustered together between 75 and 87 points and so a small drop in the score produces a big drop in rankings. Since the survey was also conducted in November and December last year, when the Note7 debacle was still very fresh in people’s minds, I’m guessing it would score a lot better just a few months from now. Though the Verge picked up on Samsung’s drop as their headline, it’s worth noting where other tech companies sit too: Amazon is #1 (score 86.27), Apple #5 (82.07), Google #8 (82.00), Tesla #9 (81.70), Netflix #18 (79.86), and Microsoft #20 (79.29), all of which classify as either very good or excellent. It’s also worth noting that big cable companies like Comcast and Charter score in the low 60s, which qualifies as “poor”, while the major wireless carriers score 66-72 (“fair” to “good”), with T-Mobile top and Sprint bottom.
via The Verge (official release here)
Google Home now lets you shop by voice just like Amazon’s Alexa – TechCrunch (Feb 16, 2017)
“Just like Alexa” is a bit of a stretch here, because the whole point of Alexa’s ordering is that you know the products will come from Amazon. Google Home, by contrast, will order from a range of different Google Express merchants, only some of which are available nationwide. And because most people don’t have a Google Express account set up yet, they’ll have to do that first before they order anything. Lastly, unlike items bought using a Prime subscription, shipping will be charged extra after a short promotional period. Despite all that, this is obviously an area where Alexa has had unique capabilities and where Google Home has now closed the gap a little. By far Home’s biggest disadvantage is still its lack of awareness and distribution.
via TechCrunch
Amazon just shared new numbers that give a clue about how many Prime members it has – Business Insider (Feb 15, 2017)
I had missed this earlier in the week, but we got some juicy new numbers from Amazon as part of its 10-K filing, and they’re quite illuminating when it comes to Prime. This article specifically talks about Prime subscriber numbers, but the same underlying figures from the 10-K can also be used to derive some other interesting conclusions about Prime revenues and so on. I put together an in-depth blog post just now on all this, which you might want to check out too (my subscriber numbers are a little different from Morgan Stanley’s).
via Business Insider
Amazon and Google Consider Turning Smart Speakers Into Home Phones – WSJ (Feb 15, 2017)
If only the device you use as a voice assistant had phone functionality built in! I’m being facetious, but it’s interesting to watch Amazon and Google potentially working backwards from a non-phone device to something capable of making calls. This is a logical extension of a voice search for a local business – I already regularly do this using Siri, especially while driving, and it’s very useful. As with yesterday’s Nest story, this is a great illustration of the benefits of software-based products – you can provide meaningful additional functionality through an update and suddenly the device you already have becomes more functional. I would guess that Amazon would need a partnership for local business search, whereas Google of course has that functionality in house – it’s in domains like this that Google has an advantage over Amazon despite the latter’s early big lead. I’m very curious how far out these efforts are – unusually, the WSJ is reporting on both companies’ efforts at once here, but they may well be at quite different stages of development. And of course Google famously stayed out of the phone business when it launched Google Fiber because of all the regulatory headaches and fees that go along with being a fully-fledged phone provider – it might try to stop short of going that far this time around too.
via WSJ
Amazon’s new Chime video calling service takes aim at Skype and WebEx – PCWorld (Feb 14, 2017)
Amazon’s most high-profile enterprise offerings are back-end stuff – AWS, obviously, but also a range of other services mostly designed for IT departments rather than the broad base of employees within a business. But it has tinkered with employee-facing services in the past, and now it’s getting into one of those big categories almost every enterprise end user uses (and probably mostly dreads): conference calls. It looks like Amazon has thought this through pretty well – there are a handful of little features which could address specific pain points, and the pricing seems reasonable compared to some of what’s out there too. I’m definitely tempted to try this myself with a view to potentially ditching my expensive and frustrating WebEx subscription. This feels like it could be a gateway to more end user-focused enterprise stuff from Amazon too – much more promising than some of its earlier efforts in this space.
via PCWorld (more on Techmeme)
Jeff Bezos wants Amazon to be the next HBO, Showtime – New York Post (Feb 13, 2017)
This feels like a totally logical next step for Amazon, which already has lots of both episodic and feature length content, and has been selling other companies’ premium channels for a while now. It’s presumably learning a lot from selling Showtime and the like, and has seen an opportunity to add yet another layer of subscription revenue to the base Prime membership. One big question, of course, is how it will divvy up its original and acquired content between the existing Prime service and this premium tier – any exclusivity around the paid channel dilutes the value of the base subscription, which Amazon wouldn’t want to do. It’s possible that this will be an offering primarily aimed at non-Prime subscribers, or part of its video-only version.
via New York Post
Amazon Tap’s new hands-free Alexa update means it’s actually useful – The Verge (Feb 10, 2017)
Reviews for the Tap were mostly pretty negative when it came out, because it was like the Echo without its best feature: hands-free usage. Requiring a button tap to invoke Alexa basically ruined the experience for many of the reviewers, but this new software update rectifies that when the device is connected to WiFi. I’m guessing it runs down the battery quite a bit faster when it’s always listening, so users will probably want to have it plugged in when in this mode, and the mic array isn’t as impressive in this cheaper device than in the Echo either. But this is now on paper the same functionality as the Echo for $50 less than its list price, which isn’t bad. The Dot, however, continues to be by far the most cost effective way to get into the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, at $50 per unit, and that’s why it’s the best seller in the lineup by far.
via The Verge
Amazon, Apple, Google and Other Tech Companies on the Billboard Power 100 (Feb 9, 2017)
Billboard does an annual Power 100 ranking of the most important/influential execs in the music industry. Coming at this from a tech angle, there are several notable companies on the list: Spotify’s Daniel Ek takes the top spot, several Apple folks are at #4, Amazon at #12, iHeartMedia at #19, YouTube at #30, Pandora at #34, Facebook is at #54, and various others are scattered through the second 50. Amazon’s ranking is surprisingly high, but is entirely due to Billboard’s perception of Echo and Alexa’s role in transforming music, as illustrated by Billboard’s interview with Jeff Bezos and Amazon Music head Steve Boom. I think the take here is a little overblown, but there’s no doubt Echo and Alexa are changing the experience of music for the small minority of people who use them. YouTube’s relatively low ranking is surprising given how important a channel the site is for the music industry, but of course its relationship with the labels and artists is complicated. This kind of ranking exercise is always somewhat arbitrary, but it’s interesting to get a music industry take on the tech companies and their relative importance here.
via Billboard Bezos Interview (see also Power 100 rankings)