Amazon Buys Kiva Systems

Here's something fascinating. Amazon buys Kiva Systems. As far as I can tell, Amazon are the first of the internet giants to take robotics seriously. (I know Microsoft has a robotics platform and Android did that hook up with Willow Garage last year, but those are minor experiments trying to figure out a market.)

What's significant :

- Amazon have a real use-case for this. They're a customer and will undoubtedly be improving the technology to suit themselves.

- Amazon have a history of transferring the technologies they perfect for in-house use to products aimed at third parties. (Z-shops, AWS, Mechanical Turk).

How soon before Amazon start offering integrated supply-chain management with completely automated warehouses to third parties as a turnkey solution?

The Amazon Playbook

Venkatesh Rao has a very good overview of Amazon's strategy focussing on the coherence and long-term thinking of Jeff Bezos.

Interestingly he discounts Apple as a similarly strategic player, which I think undersells Jobs somewhat. (Though I also suspect this may be a rhetorical trick of Rao's to get a rise out of his readers.) Meanwhile Robert Cringely highlights the parallels, casting Bezos as the natural heir to Saint Steve.

Amazon cleverly create their own Android AppStore.

This is a smart and interesting move. There's no reason you need to own the operating system to own the appstore. And Amazon as innovative online retailer with size and technical has a good profile to do this.

There will, of course, be a tension between Amazon the curator / publisher and Amazon the network-market enabler. Will they censor content they don't like? Would they exclude a wikileaks app?

It also raises the fascinating question (at least to me), if Android, why not Windows? Is any company bold enough or foolhardy to build an app-store and take the role of curator / gatekeeper of the Windows eco-system rather than wait for Microsoft to lumber up and do it badly in about three or four years?

Some people have kind of been in this game for a while : Tucows, Download etc.

Imagine what some visionary leadership and chutzpah could do with one of these companies at this moment.

Facebook + Amazon : Social Shopping

Interesting state of The Mechanical Turk roundup.

This especially important :

For most users of mechanical turk (us included), it has become an API call that fits smoothly within their workflow. (Or as someone at the meetup wryly suggested, turk is a Remote Person Call.) The last pair of speakers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, reminded us that behind mechanical turk lies thousands of workers† ("the crowd in the cloud") working without (health care) benefits, oftentimes at extremely low hourly wages. Irani and Silberman suggested that rather than abstracting mechanical turk services as mere API calls, users should start thinking of the plight of the turks ("Mechanical Turk Bill of Rights") behind the service. As a first step they have a released a Firefox plugin that aims to narrow the information assymetry between the turks (those performing task) and requesters (those posting tasks). While requesters can see ratings for turks, requesters aren't rated: Turkopticon lets turks rate requesters. They need more turks to download and start using Turkopticon, so if you know any mechanical turks please enourage them do so.

Dare Obasanjo on whether the Yasn-as-platform is dead. (channeling Alex Iskold)

Eeek!!! Has one of the major planks of my understanding and prediction of the software industry just turned turtle and sunk?

Well, I still believe in the widgets and YASN-as-Platform model. But some things clearly went wrong in Facebook's case. Is this in relation to their being evil?

Or is it an issue when giving away access to your platform : applications must pay somehow. What does this bode for GAE or Amazon or Faceforce or Microsoft's Azure? Presumably paying apps. earn their keep.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Java never made money for Sun. Which shouldn't surprise anyone. But does raise the question, what was their strategic objective? It's one thing to have had a sound strategy and just been beaten (eg. by Microsoft's C# or the free-software movements swarm of "scripting" languages) but it's very hard to see what on earth they were expecting from Java.

My first thoughts on Microsoft's Azure ended up at Folknology.

Basically, it seems to me that M$ aren't clear what they're aiming for. An Amazon-like generic hosting option. Or a GAE-like integrated experience. I'd be more impressed if they'd produced a great hosting story for ASP. At least then you'd feel that they had the something that they believe in. Dropping hints about PHP or Rails on the one hand, while pushing tighter integration with Visual Studio on the other, just sounds dissembling at best, and downright deliberately misleading at worst.

Windows Server on Amazon EC2

Good move for both of them.

Simon Wardley on the open-source Amazon EC2 clone : Eucalyptus.

Wow! AppDrop clones the GAE API on top of Amazon AWS!! Already!

Update : Cohesive offers another hosting option

Google App Engine to challenge Amazon, Ning etc.

Write your applications in Python ... w00t!

Update : OK, this is big, at least this is going "mainstream". Poor Ning, they had all the great ideas, Amazon too ... but it sounds like Google are taking the whole package : integrated development environment, database, python, logging, version control, multiple developers working on same code-base etc. etc. and bringing it to the masses.

But only a limited number of free accounts ...

Update 2: early chatter is complaining about Python-only, actually I'm not sure it's gonna be Python that people struggle to get their heads around ... I think it's gonna be BigTable.

Phil Wainewright on DevPay

Dave's interesting take on commodification ... it's gonna put prima-donna developers out of business?

I'm not sure I totally buy the idea that people will put more of their data up for themselves. In a recent chat with Folknology we were discussing who would be the natural company to bring customers directly into the cloud. Ie. who would resell Amazon et al's commodity infrastructure and storage as non-exploitative way of managing your online identity (as opposed to evil Facebook, Microsoft or Google who want to own your online identity and relationships in order to resell you.)

Perhaps blog-software providers like Six Apart or Wordpress? Perhaps EBay who already controls some important information about your trustworthiness? Although Amazon provide this infrastructure, it seems like there's a conflict of interest with them wanting to sell to you.

Ironically, it may be that this conflict of interest makes it especially hard for a web 2.0 internet playa ... anyone too closely associated with an advertising funded model seems suspect. Anyone too closely associated with data-mining, collaborative filtering or Amazon-style "users who bought this also bought ..." are suspect.

Outside speculation ... could it be Apple who have the genius to create a slick iMe device they can sell to you, containing your electronic identity and social network, tethered to an always on phone system? (Perhaps in the form of a little voodoo doll, that has your face. :-) ...

Or some other name more closely associated with personal communication than online networks? Actually, could Microsoft would be in with a chance if they promoted it as the next development of Outlook rather than try to make it part of some grand everything-under-one-Live-umbrella scheme.

Remember ... the user is the platform.

EBook predictions ...

Databases are now a commodity.

And Amazon are commoditizing hosting.

Apple vs. Amazon

Personally, I think some kudos should go to Amazon for even raising this possibility.

Can't blame Amazon for borrowing the iPod strategy wholesale. It worked spectacularly for Apple. Why change anything?

Dare Obasanjo on Amazon's EC2 and S3

John Battelle's Searchblog: Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game

Amazon just became the first internet giant to open up their search engine index as a platform for others to build applications on.

People have been paying attention to Yahoo (because it keeps buying into all the trendy stuff) and ignoring Amazon. But it's actually the latter who are doing all the really weird crazy stuff at the moment (like the mechanical turk)

Remember, Google's book search undermines the book publishing industry (and indirectly Amazon). This is Amazon's counter-offensive.

BTW : Battelle says "Why didn't I predict it?" but isn't this more or less what Dave Winer has been calling for for a while now? (ie. a no restrictions, open search core for people to build applications on? )

In practice, how different is this from the APIs of Google and Yahoo that things like RollYo are built on?

michael parekh on Google's "Click to Call"

Interesting story.

Google's latest ad-words let advertisers opt to receive phone calls (via Google's Jabber based VOIP).

Ultimately, this is in competition with SkyPal and Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a way of creating an online market for services with a live human at the end.

michael parekh on Google testing "click to call" advertising