Tag: Amazon
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AI’s Dark Secret
Behind every freakishly algorithm is a group of often underpaid and overworked “digital serfs” busy labeling and reviewing the data streams that make the technology work. Expensify SmartScan for receipts? In 2017, someone discovered some of these receipts turned up on Mechanical Turk. Amazon announced last week that it’s shutting down its “Just Walk Out”…
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Encore Gig : Camperforce
Migrant workers in 2017 now work for Amazon and live out of an RV. The Guardian reports that older workers, unable to afford rising rent and medical expenses, hit the road to work at Amazon distribution centers in exchange for a place to park their RV and water, sewage and electrical hookups. They call them…
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Goes Around, Comes Around
In a wonderful turn of events, we now hear that bookstores in Seattle are doing well again. It turns out, in the shadows of the world’s largest online bookseller, Amazon employees are choosing to browse the shelves at their local bookseller rather than buy online, and buying. Efficiency is not everything. Shopping can also be…
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Amazon’s Robot Army
Yesterday I posted videos of two kinds of robots. One showing a driverless car that allowed a blind person to pick up some Mexican food and his dry cleaning, another, some kind of hive-mind controlled swarm of micro-quad copters that seemed to come right out of a Michael Crichton novel. Today, via an high school…
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The Next Opportunity in Publishing
Much to the chagrin of my wife, I took over the remote on our internet-enabled TV (old macbook hooked up via HD cable to the back of our flatscreen) to catch highlights from the Web 2 Summit taking place this week in San Francisco. Steven Berlin-Johnson’s “high order bit” on the early history of book…
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User-Driven Development
It’s one thing to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers and think about how to solve their pain points but it’s entirely something else to pretend that this product already exists and think about how you would market it. This is the approach at Amazon and I think it’s quite effective. It’s…
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The Premium Upsell
Todd Sampson has a great take on publisher’s reaction to the text-to-speech feature on the new Amazon Kindle. Rather than view this feature as a threat to their existing Books on Tape business line, they should look at Amazon’s electronic distribution of their text as a potential channel for an upsell. The quality of the…
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Playmobil Security Checkpoint
Is this for real? Amazon has it listed in stock and ready to ship. Thankfully we can count on the Amazon reviewing public to bring out the snarky truth. Some choice excerpts: Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing…
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Everwas.com now on the Kindle