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Up above us, companies like Apple and Globalstar, SpaceX and T-Mobile, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and more are duking it out over a new frontier of business: satellite connectivity.

Amazon is helping develop “personalized” cancer vaccines.

A diagram shows how an Amazon drone could land on a sloping surface while keeping its main frame level, thanks to telescoping landing legs. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO) Amazon’s inventors are taking a page from Inspector Gadget’s playbook to design drones with adjustable landing legs and reconfigurable propellers. Those two design tricks are the focus of patents issued today. It’s hard to say whether they’ll become features on Amazon’s delivery drones, still in development. But surely there’s a chance someone will make use of the innovations, right? The idea for the landing gear, credited to Nicholas Kristofer Gentry, adapts the sort of telescoping feature long used for camera tripods: When a drone lands on a sloping surface, its legs can expand or contract to keep the drone’s frame (and, not incidentally, its payload) level. “The landing gear assembly may also operate as a landing dampener to absorb shock resulting from a landing of the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] to absorb safe delivery of fragile items,” the patent says. The patent even covers ideas such as building spikes, screws, suction cups or magnets into the landing legs. Such features could help the drone stay put while it’s sitting on icy, slippery or metallic surfaces. This diagram shows how the angle of a drone’s propeller tips (seen at upper left) can be adjusted for different flying conditions during a trip from Boston to New York. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO) The other patent published today focuses on the tips of a drone’s propellers. The originators of this idea, Brian Beckman and Allan Ko, suggest building in a mechanism that can change the slant of the propeller tips, effectively creating “winglets” like the upturned tips on a Boeing 737’s wings. Winglets can increase flight efficiency by minimizing the spinning vortices of air that are created as a flat surface slices through the air. However, there are some situations where winglets reduce flight stability – for example, if there’s a strong crosswind during takeoff or landing. The patent lays out a scheme in which the drone can adjust the angle of its propeller tips to strike the right balance for its flying conditions. And that’s not all. “Those of ordinary skill in the pertinent arts will recognize that the systems and methods of the present disclosure may be utilized to realign or readjust any attribute of a reconfigurable propeller, including not only cant angles of blade tips with respect to blade roots, but also blade pitches, blade lengths, blade rake angles, or any other attribute of the propeller,” the inventors say. The applications for both patents were filed back in 2015. Amazon traditionally doesn’t comment on its patent filings, and there’s no evidence that the features have been built into the prototypes that the company is currently testing (or putting on display at this week’s SXSW conference in Texas). Nevertheless, the concepts sound a lot less far out than some of the other ideas that Amazon has patented, such as flying warehouses and parachute package drops. http://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-patents-drones-landing-legs-propellers/

I was searching for a digital piano.... and Google showed me all the local sellers.... I then clicked on the Shopping tab and realized that Google is the new Amazon. Has anyone else noticed this? What does this mean for Amazon.com going forward? Do you think Amazon is scared to death of Google entering its "shopping" space?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 Is Amazon soon to become a regulated entity within the US as a shopping platform due to misuse? malfeasance?

Jeff Bezos first named the company as Cadabra, after the magic slogan “Abra-Cadabra”. When he first mentioned this to his lawyer over the phone, his lawyer misheard it as “Cadaver ???” . Bezos knew right then, that the name would not stick. Bezos had the customer-centric approach to the business, right from the start. So, he had proposed to change the name to “Relentless Inc”, a way of saying that the company would be relentless in its approach to customer satisfaction. In 1994, the company’s then de-facto CTO was Shel Kaphan. He was not very amused by the proposal. So, Bezos continued to look for options for the company name. In the 1990s, the number of websites were finite, and countable by humans. The websites were sorted alphabetically on the “internet directory” of those days. After a bunch of research, Bezos settled on Amazon Inc for two reasons - Amazon river has the largest collection of flora and fauna in the world. Amazon Inc will represent the largest collection of retail items on the internet Amazon-dot-com will appear in the first pages of the internet directory, making it easier to attract users and customers. Source

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Amazon's done it to books. And electronics. And clothing. Now it wants to rule the grocery aisles.

Just think what we could do if we all shopped on smile.amazon.com and designated the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society as our charity. I did this over a year ago and, well, my purchases sent $73.45 to the society. But with others, we have contributed $21,439.23 to the society - that could build two kingdom halls in Africa!! Spread the word to use this feature and switch to smile.amazon.com

From the company that brought you the option of letting a courier inside your homecomes a new service: package delivery inside your car. Amazon is expanding its in-home delivery service called Key to include deliveries to trunks and back seats of cars. The service is available only to Amazon Prime members in 37 cities who have a 2015 or newer Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac or Volvo with an active OnStar or Volvo On Call account. Essentially, these are already connected cars that can be remotely unlocked — in this case for package delivery, which Amazon promises within a four-hour window. The shopper has to confirm that they've parked within range of the delivery location — in a publicly accessible area — and can track the progress through the Amazon Key app. Amazon has devoted much effort to figuring out how to stop its packages from being stolen from porches and public spaces, which is costing the company a pretty penny. With in-car service, Amazon can use shoppers' cars as secure mail drop boxes. Amazon, which recently started an offer to deliver packages inside people's homes, now offers to deliver inside people's cars. Amazon Read more: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/24/605057245/amazon-wants-to-deliver-packages-inside-your-car

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Amazon is testing a service that provides two-hour deliveries directly from Whole Foods stores, the tech giant’s latest push toward selling groceries in a way that allows customers to avoid physical stores altogether. According to the Seattle Times,Prime account holders in Austin, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Virginia Beach can order items online and an employee will go and remove them from the shelves at his or her Whole Foods. (You thought Whole Foods employees had a lot to cry about right now …) A Prime courier will then collect and deliver the items in the one- or two-hour time window, the website promises. Amazon says it’s already working on expanding. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/02/amazon-tests-two-hour-prime-now-whole-foods-deliveries.html

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If you thought Amazon’s retail domination would slow down any time soon, you were mistaken. Just a day after it announced it’ll let Prime shoppers try on clothing at home for free before charging them, Goldman Sachs notified clients that Amazon is inching toward a wholesale partnership with Nike. Until now, Nike has only been available on Amazon through third-party sellers. Competitors Adidas and Under Armour already sell directly to Amazon, but Nike is one of the many brands that have held out, likely because of Amazon’s rampant counterfeit problem. According to Goldman Sachs, Nike is “close to commencing a direct relationship selling product on Amazon.com.” This partnership could give Nike $300 million to $500 million more in revenue. As Gordon Haskett analyst Chuck Grom notes, the impact of this new partnership would be devastating to other stores. It could essentially wipe out a massive chunk of business for struggling department stores like Kohl’s and J.C. Penney, which are in a dire state and rely on business from popular and approachable brands like Nike. Stores like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Foot Locker, businesses that mainly rely on a brand like Nike, could also see colossal effects. Read more: https://www.racked.com/2017/6/21/15847190/nike-selling-on-amazon

Whole Foods shoppers save after Amazon slashes prices Â

Andy Rubin said Wednesday that his new startup's anticipated Essential Phone is now "in full mass production" and he plans to announce next week when the $699 device will become available. The phone's launch is delayed after Rubin, the creator of Google's Android, first promised a June release. So, to prove that Essential's first product is in fact coming soon, Rubin posted three pictures on Twitter of the production of the phones. Read more: https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-tencent-join-300m-investment-in-andy-rubins-essential/

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Amazon is giving a price break on its prime service to low-income consumers on food stamps and other government assistance. Customers who receive benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, can pay $5.99 per month for membership, which would include free shipping and unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Prime Video. Customers will need to qualify for the discount by having a valid EBT card, which are typically used to disburse funds for food stamps and other government aid programs, such as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF.) More: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-prime-discount-offered-to-people-on-food-stamps/

Amazon is customer-obsessed to the point that everyone has to be able to work in a call center. As part of a training session each year, Jeff Bezos asks thousands of Amazon managers, including himself, to attend a two-day call center training program. In the early days, Bezos had brought an empty chair to the meetings and informed his top executives that they should consider the empty seat as being occupied by a customer, who is "the most important person in the room."

Amazon is dominating the voice-controlled speaker market, according to a new forecast from eMarketer out this morning. The maker of the Echo-branded speakers will have 70.6 percent of all voice-enabled speaker users in the U.S. this year – well ahead of Google Home’s 23.8 percent and other, smaller players like Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon, and Mattel, who combined only account for 5.6 percent of users. The new report backs up another from VoiceLabs released in January, which also found that Amazon was leading the voice-first device market, thanks to Echo’s popularity. While the market itself is not expected to be a winner-take-all scenario, competitors like Amazon and Google will win entire homes, as most consumers have said they wouldn’t consider buying a competing device once they already own one voice-controlled speaker. Continue reading