Amazon

Quantifying the global e-commerce slowdown • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 18, 2022Posted in alibaba, Amazon, Commerce, EC Ecommerce and D2C, EC Newsletter, eCommerce, jumia, Shopify, The ExchangeNo Comments

The COVID-19 pandemic was many things. Global contagion. Health catastrophe. Herald of new geopolitical tensions and a long-running commentary on how far we’re willing to go to protect — or not — our fellow humans. It was also a business earthquake that shook up most industries around the world. But as quickly as COVID came on the scene, breaking supply lines and business models, it also faded. In the wake of most of the world learning to live with — or merely deciding to endure — the health impacts of the pandemic, many industries snapped back to their prior form. Airlines went from trash to first class; in contrast, tech companies flipped from darlings to disparaged. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Some tech concerns picked up tailwinds during COVID, in that a newly reformed business climate helped them grow for a time. You can cast a wide net here: Robinhood exploding in part thanks to consumers stuck at home with more cash than usual, Instacart seeing explosive demand for its grocery delivery service. Some tech companies went the other way, as was the case with Airbnb’s business cratering during the early COVID months as going places went from aspirational to insane overnight. Since the return to what passes as normalcy, the businesses impacted initially by COVID have charted diverging courses. Robinhood lost some of its shine as its user base, per the usually chatted narrative, went back outside. Instacart saw its growth slow but managed to hold onto its pandemic-era gains. Airbnb, an early example of the layoffs that COVID could induce at erstwhile healthy companies, recovered, and has retained much of its value since going public, a rare feat for its IPO cohort.

Amazon hardware head confirms layoffs in memo • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Amazon, dave limp, devices, Hardware, LayoffsNo Comments

Update: Spokesperson Kelly Nantel tells ZebethMedia, “As part of our annual operating planning review process, we always look at each of our businesses and what we believe we should change. As we’ve gone through this, given the current macro-economic environment (as well as several years of rapid hiring), some teams are making adjustments, which in some cases means certain roles are no longer necessary. We don’t take these decisions lightly, and we are working to support any employees who may be affected.” While Amazon has yet to confirm the size or scoop of its most recent round of layoffs, the company today posted the text of a letter from Senior Vice President of Devices & Services, Dave Limp, that sheds light on the situation. The note, which was initially sent to the company’s Devices and Services org, confirms a “consolidation” of teams within the division. “After a deep set of reviews, we recently decided to consolidate some teams and programs. One of the consequences of these decisions is that some roles will no longer be required,” Limp writes. “It pains me to have to deliver this news as we know we will lose talented Amazonians from the Devices & Services org as a result. I am incredibly proud of the team we have built and to see even one valued team member leave is never an outcome any of us want.” The memo is a confirmation of earlier reports that the company begun to inform employees yesterday. Amazon reportedly gave employees two months to find another role inside the company or accept severance. Limp adds that all impacted employees in that org were notified of the decision yesterday. “In cases where employees cannot find a new role within the company,” the executive writes, “we will support the transition with a package that includes a separation payment, transitional benefits, and external job placement support.” The moves follow a report earlier this week that puts the company-wide figure at 10,000 – amounting to roughly 3% of the overall corporate headcount. Devices were an easy target for corporate belt tightening, given reports that they’ve been losing $5 billion in annual revenue for Amazon. Human Resources, retail and the cloud gaming platform, Luna, are also said to be targets. “While I know this news is tough to digest,” Limp writes, “I do want to emphasize that the Devices & Services organization remains an important area of investment for Amazon, and we will continue to invent on behalf of our customers.”

Amazon begins layoffs as economic woes mount • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Amazon, Hardware, layoff, LayoffsNo Comments

This week, Amazon began the process of cutting jobs across the company. Managers have begun informing employees that they have two months to find another role inside the company or accept severance, according to reports. Numerous employees have acknowledged that they were impacted by the moves via services like LinkedIn. Other reports, meanwhile, cite frustrations among the workforce that the company has not sent any companywide notifications to acknowledge the size and scope of the cuts. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment. The news follows weeks of rumors around accelerating belt tightening led by CEO Andy Jassy. Following reports that the company was eyeing its devices division in particular, word arrived earlier this week that the company plans to lay off 10,000 – comprising roughly 3% of its corporate workforce. The figure would mark the largest “workforce reduction” ever undertaken by the e-commerce and cloud computing giant in its nearly 30-year history. Retail and human resources are also said to be impacted, along with the company’s cloud gaming service, Luna. The cuts come less than two months after Google pulled the plug on its competing service, Stadia. Last week, a spokesperson for the company told ZebethMedia, We remain excited about the future of our larger businesses, as well as newer initiatives like Prime Video, Alexa, Grocery, Kuiper, Zoox, and Healthcare. Our senior leadership team regularly reviews our investment outlook and financial performance, including as part of our annual operating plan review, which occurs in the fall each year. As part of this year’s review, we’re of course taking into account the current macro-environment and considering opportunities to optimize costs. The statement acknowledged what’s amounted to major financial headwinds for everyone from the smallest early-stage startup to the largest multinational corporation. Amazon’s devices division, which includes Echo Products, Fire Tablets and its Alexa business, was a prime candidate for the chopping block, given that it’s reportedly been operating at a $5 billion a year revenue loss. It’s been a long tail strategy to broader acceptance of its smart assistant, Alexa, but Jassy appears to be taking an especially close look at those divisions that require a lot of runaway. The company’s last mile delivery robot Scout was among the recent casualties in a broader consolidation of its robotics division. Amazon’s far from the only major tech corporation to make big cuts as it braces for economic headwinds. Last week, Meta laid off 11,000 — around 13% of the company’s entire workforce. Under the guidance of new CEO Elon Musk, Twitter has also begun laying off what could amount to thousands, while Salesforce and Stripe have grappled with their own restructuring. In addition to broader macro concerns, Amazon’s revenue has also begun to return to Earth following pandemic-fueled surges in online shopping.

Ring launches pilot program to let local agencies share updates and ‘safety information’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Amazon, Apps, government, neighbors, pilot, Ring, Safety, Security, StartupsNo Comments

Ring today announced that local government agencies will be able to have an official presence on the company’s Neighbors app. Beginning with the City of North Port and Pinellas County Government in Florida and the City of Fulton in New York, the new program will allow government organizations to provide safety information through Neighbors, the Amazon-owned company’s neighborhood watch feature that alerts users to nearby alleged crimes and events. “Local government agencies, such as county and municipality governments and their departments, play an important role in public safety,” Ring wrote in a blog post published this afternoon. “This pilot program will enable users in select municipalities to receive more safety information, updates and tips from a broader group of local agencies, all in one place.” Participating local government agencies will have public profiles in Neighbors that users can visit to see their activity and posts. Ring notes that the program won’t enable the agencies to make a “Request for Assistance” on Neighbors, a capability that lets law enforcement ask the public for help with an active investigation. For the time being, that’ll remain reserved to the police departments that’ve partnered with Ring. The new Ring program, while helpful on its face, is unlikely win over consumer advocates who’ve argued the company’s devices are a security threat. As ZebethMedia previously reported, Ring has a history of sharing footage with the government without users’ permission. Between January and July of this year alone, Amazon shared Ring doorbell footage with U.S. authorities 11 times without informing the device owners. Ring has been criticized for working closely with thousands of police departments around the U.S., allowing police to request video doorbell camera footage from homeowners through Neighbors. Ring only began disclosing its connections with law enforcement after the U.S. government sent demands for transparency from the company.

After mothballing Amazon Care, Amazon reenters tele-health with Amazon Clinic, a marketplace for third-party virtual consultants • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Amazon, Biotech & Health, Commerce, telehealthNo Comments

The ink is not yet dry on Amazon’s $4 billion acquisition of OneMedical, but in the meantime, the online services giant is making one more move into telehealth, and into medical services overall, on its own steam. The company today is taking the wraps off of Amazon Clinic, which Amazon describes as a virtual health “storefront”: users will be able to search for, connect with, and pay for telehealth care, addressing variety of conditions that are some of the more popular for telehealth consultations today. Amazon’s launch — which appeared to leak out about a week ago when users spotted some quiet landing pages — is coming only a few months after it shut down Amazon Care, which had been a telehealth service that it initially created for its own employees before stepping up plans to launch it nationwide and to third-party companies. Amazon Clinic represents another pass at the market and problem, but one that is very much built in the Amazon mold: as a marketplace where third parties can leverage Amazon’s platform and reach to find customers, and Amazon can leverage third parties to quickly scale what offers to its consumers, as well as to extend the business funnel for other Amazon operations — in this case Amazon Pharmacy, which can fulfill any prescriptions that come out of Clinic consultations. (Users can fill the scripts in other pharmacies, too.) Amazon Clinic is initially launching in 32 states in the U.S.. It does not work with health insurance and this point, and overall pricing will vary depending on providers, conditions, and location. (One example, connecting with a clinic for acne treatment in Nevada will cost around $40, and you get a choice of two providers whose different offers are provided in a comparative table. Another example, for pink eye (conjunctivitis) in New Jersey, has a wider price gap of between $30 and $48 between the two providers listed.) Other conditions include asthma refills, birth control, cold sores, dandruff, eczema, erectile dysfunction, eyelash growth, genital herpes, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), hayfever, hyperlipidemia refills, hypertension refills, hypothyroidism refills, men’s hair loss, migraines, sinusitis, smoking cessation, urinary tract infections (UTIs), yeast infections and so on. We’ve asked Amazon if it plans to provide its own in-house (private label, in e-commerce parlance) telehealth consultancy utalongside third parties, and what the plans are for further states, whether there are international ambitions, and if it will accept health insurance for Clinic in the future. It may well be that this is laying the groundwork for Amazon to link up what it is building here with OneMedical when that acquisition closes. The bigger picture for Amazon Clinic is that the service will sit within Amazon’s bigger ambitions in the healthcare market. The company already has an online chemists, Amazon Pharmacy, which fulfills subscriptions and lets users additional buy over-the-counter drugs via Prime memberships that ship the items within two days. Amazon also believes its new telehealth service addresses a gap in the market for providing users with health consultations for more minor ailments. Some situations need more direct physician involvement, which might be covered with One Medical or one’s existing healthcare coverage; some situations might be addressable by visiting a pharmacy on one’s own steam. “But we also know that sometimes you just need a quick interaction with a clinician for a common health concern that can be easily addressed virtually,” the company noted in its blog post announcing the service. Amazon has been making inroads, and laying out its ambitions, in healthcare for a number of years. Amazon Pharmacy was launched off the back of its acquisition of PillPack. And it’s been exploring healthcare as an enterprise opportunity, with integrations of Alexa into healthcare environments. But Amazon Care is not the only step back it’s taken in its longer journey. In 2018, it formed a JV with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to build an employee healthcare operation, appointing a high-profile doctor to lead it. That service never appeared to take shape as expected and shut up shop in 2021. We’ll update this piece as we learn more.

Klarna brings its price comparison tool to Europe • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Amazon, Apps, Commerce, Google, Klarna, PriceRunnerNo Comments

Klarna is expanding into the competitive world of price comparisons, with the launch of a new tool that compares prices across thousands of retailers. The company quietly rolled out the price comparison service in the U.S. a few weeks back, and is now extending this into additional markets in Europe including The U.K. and the Nordics. The European “buy now, pay later” fintech has had a turbulent year, laying off 10% of its workforce in May followed by a second round of layoffs in September. Sandwiched in between, news emerged that Klarna had raised $800 million in funding, albeit at a valuation 85% lower than the previous year, a trend that has echoed elsewhere across the fintech sphere and beyond. With today’s announcement, Klarna is building on an acquisition that closed just six months ago, when it snapped up comparison shopping service PriceRunner in a $124 million deal. At the time, it said that it would use the acquisition to power new features in the core Klarna app, including produce search and price comparisons — and that is what it has been rolling out over the past few weeks. It’s a notable expansion for Klarna, which has hitherto been better known for a service that allows consumers to buy goods through third-party retailers in instalments. Moving forward, the Klarna app will not only serve as a payment network, but a “single shopping destination” for finding the cheapest deals and paying. Digging into the specifics, the new price comparison smarts allow customers to filter their searches by criteria such as size, color, ratings, availability, shipping options, and more. On top of that, Klarna shows shoppers historical pricing data, which shows how the cost has fluctuated over time and whether they should buy now, or wait a little longer to see if the price goes down. A ‘credible alternative’ The company said that the tool is designed to serve as a “credible alternative” to other shopping services from the likes of Google and Amazon. Indeed, PriceRunner is in fact in the process of suing Google for more than $2 billion in Europe, alleging that the internet giant continues to breach a 2017 antitrust enforcement order against Google Shopping. The long and short of that case involves Google allegedly giving prominence to its own comparison shopping service in Google Search results. And this is why Klarna is pushing the message here that its own price comparison product is “unbiased” in the results that it serves up. “You could spend the whole day comparing offers at conventional search engines or marketplaces, but you’ll always have doubts — have I really found the best product at the best price?,” Klarna cofounder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in a press release. “Klarna’s new search and compare tool does the hard work for consumers and compares thousands of websites in real time to ensure they have all the information they need to make informed and confident purchase decisions.”

Amazon eyes devices group as it undertakes broad cost cutting • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Alexa, Amazon, devices, echo, Gadgets, HardwareNo Comments

The Echo business has always looked like Amazon playing the long game from the outside. Above all, the company’s home consumer hardware is a convenient vessel for getting Alexa into millions of homes. But when a corporation is doing some serious belt tightening amid broader economic headwinds, no divisions are safe from cost cutting — certainly not one that is reportedly operating at a $5 billion a year revenue loss. The Wall Street Journal this week noted that Amazon’s devices group could be the latest to get hit with cuts as the company braces for further macroeconomic disruption. The paper notes that “Amazon’s leadership is closely evaluating its Alexa business, according to some of the people,” citing internal documents. Many of the cutbacks thus far have been focused on longer-tail products. Devices is a mature division for the company, however, encompassing a wide range of Echo home devices, Fire tablets and Kindles, among others. Amazon offered ZebethMedia a fairly boilerplate response to the report, while noting that the normal performance review is certainly being impacted by the overall financial climate. “We remain excited about the future of our larger businesses, as well as newer initiatives like Prime Video, Alexa, Grocery, Kuiper, Zoox, and Healthcare,” the company writes. “Our senior leadership team regularly reviews our investment outlook and financial performance, including as part of our annual operating plan review, which occurs in the fall each year. As part of this year’s review, we’re of course taking into account the current macro-environment and considering opportunities to optimize costs.” A second comment, meanwhile, highlights Alexa’s overall successes: Alexa started as an idea on a whiteboard. In less than a decade, it’s turned into an AI service that millions of customers interact with billions of times each week in different languages and cultures around the world. Even in the last year, Alexa interactions have increased by more than 30%. We’re as optimistic about Alexa’s future today as we’ve ever been, and it remains an important business and area of investment for Amazon. Andy Jassy has been tasked with cutting costs across the firm — not an enviable task in any economy. In his 2021 shareholder letter, the CEO took a trip down memory lane, beginning with the first Kindle in 2007, while highlighting the ups and down of the category, including a little insight into the life (and death) of Fire phone, noting, “The phone was unsuccessful, and though we determined we were probably too late to this party and directed these resources elsewhere, we hired some fantastic long-term builders and learned valuable lessons from this failure that have served us well in devices like Echo and FireTV.” Jassy also highlighted the division’s evolving future, writing: Our goal is for Alexa to be the world’s most helpful and resourceful personal assistant, who makes people’s lives meaningfully easier and better. We have a lot more inventing and iterating to go, but customers continue to indicate that we’re on the right path. We have several other devices at varying stages of evolution (e.g. Ring and Blink provide the leading digital home security solutions, Astro is a brand new home robot that we just launched in late 2021), but it’s safe to say that every one of our devices, whether you’re talking about Kindle, FireTV, Alexa/Echo, Ring, Blink, or Astro is an invention-in-process with a lot more coming that will keep improving customers’ lives.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy faces enormous challenges amid falling profits and negative numbers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Adam Selipsky, Amazon, Andy Jassy, AWS, Commerce, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Ecommerce and D2C, EC News Analysis, Enterprise, jeff bezosNo Comments

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is the definition of a company man. In an age when people switch jobs frequently, he has been at Amazon for 25 years, working his way up to president and CEO. But before he reached the corner office, he helped build Amazon Web Services, its cloud arm, into a $60 billion juggernaut. It wasn’t exactly a rise from the mailroom, but Jassy was there as founder Jeff Bezos’ aide-de-camp when they came up with the idea of AWS in the early 2000s at an executive offsite. He helped build it. He nurtured it. He made it into the crown jewel of the company. So when Bezos announced he was stepping down early last year, it didn’t take long for the organization to turn to Jassy, whose hard work at AWS and his deep understanding of company culture seemed to make him the perfect heir apparent. But things haven’t necessarily gone as planned since he took over the leadership role in July 2021. Much of what has happened has been out of his control. Like many chief executives, he inherited the problems left behind by his predecessor. During the pandemic, Amazon became the general store for the world. People stuck in lockdown turned to Amazon for their goods. The company’s revenues mushroomed and its workforce exploded, with the organization adding an astonishing 800,000 workers, mostly in its warehouses (per The Wall Street Journal). The future was bright, but as Jassy took over last year, people were heading out again. Suddenly, everyone wasn’t buying everything online anymore. As we headed into 2022, other macroeconomic factors began to affect commerce — online and brick-and-mortar — as inflation soared and consumers’ buying power began to diminish. Add to that the higher cost of energy and persistent supply chain issues, and Amazon was suddenly facing some challenges that were beginning to have a serious impact on earnings.

Facing economic headwinds, Amazon consolidates robotic projects • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Amazon, amazon robotics, Hardware, Rivian, robotics, Robotics & AINo Comments

Westborough, Massachusetts is a quiet town of 22,000, 40 minutes by car southeast of Boston. BOS27 is among the town’s newer residents. The 350,000-square-foot Amazon facility opened its doors a little over a year ago. It’s a hulking, gray addition to the tree-filled scenery. Inside is a state of the art facility that — along with a space on the opposite side of Boston in North Reading, Massachusetts — forms the beating heart of the company’s lofty robotics ambitions. In the decade since the company acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash, it’s grown itself into one of the world’s leading robotics firms. Ask any founder in the warehouse robotics space, and they’ll quickly credit the company as the driving force in the space. “We look at Amazon, probably as the best marketing arm in the robotics business today,” Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk said at our robotics event in July. “They have set SLAs that everyone has to match. And we look at them as being a great part of our marketing team.” Amazon has set package delivery expectations at once-seemingly-impossible next or same day, and an entire industry has grown up around it, in hopes of keeping smaller firms competitive with the retail giant. Image Credits: Brian Heater What strikes you as soon as you walk through the doors at BOS27 is how much the space resembles one of the company’s many fulfillment centers. It’s cavernous and buzzing with robots and their human counterparts. The space, which was built to accommodate a business that had grown too large for just the North Reading location, is where the company develops, tests and builds its robotic systems. (Another space has recently opened in Belgium, as well, courtesy of Amazon’s September acquisition of Cloostermans.) This week, the company opened its doors to a handful of press members, including ZebethMedia. The “Delivering the Future” event was, by any measure, a PR push. It was an opportunity to show off the company’s shiny new production facility and a chance to present a kind of unified front for Amazon Robotics, a category that now encapsulates every element of the Amazon retail experience from the moment a consumer hits “buy now.” Image Credits: Amazon A couple of guided tours around the floor showcased the company’s growing army of wheeled robots built atop the Kiva platform, including the ubiquitous blue Hercules (the fourth-gen version of the product), and the mini conveyor belt sporting Pegasus and Xanthus, which is, for most intents and purposes, a lightweight version of the latter. Newer on the scene is Proteus, which arrives in a nearly neon green (“Seahawks green” as one executive joked today), with a small LED face and full autonomy — meaning it can safely operate outside the structured confines developed for the older models. Image Credits: Amazon Amazon also showed off a trio of robotic arms, which follow a similar evolutionary trajectory as their wheeled counterparts. There’s Robin, which debuted around 18 months ago and is now installed in 1,000 warehouses across the world. Its successor Cardinal adds a level of efficiency to the system, as it tightly packs boxes to send across the fulfillment center. A third, Sparrow, debuted at today’s event. As with its predecessors, Sparrow is effectively a souped-up version of a Fanuc off-the-shelf industrial robotic arm. The system is still in very limited pilots, including a facility in Texas and behind a safety cage at BOS27. What sets it apart from standard Fanuc arm deployments, however, is two-fold. First is the suction cup gripper, which utilizes pneumatics to pick up a wide range of different objects. The real secret sauce is the software of course. Amazon says the AI, coupled with a range of different hardware sensors, allows the system to identify around 65% of the inventory offered through the retailer. It’s a mindboggling figure. The system uses things like bar codes, size and shape to identify individual objects. Image Credits: Amazon Robin and Cardinal deal exclusively in boxes — of which Amazon has around 15 basic models. Sparrow has the far more complex task of picking up the products themselves. Beyond identification, this introduces its own spate of different challenges. If you’ve ever purchased anything from the company, you know how wildly these things fluctuate in size, shape and material. Hypotheticallym the same arm is picking up a bowling bowl and a bag of cotton swabs. That’s where the suction cup system comes in, offering a far greater range of picks than a rigid robotic hand. All told, the company has deployed more than 520,000 robotic drives since Amazon Robotics’ 2012 founding. It says that more than 75% of products ordered through its site come into contact with one of its robotic systems at some point in the process. Image Credits: Amazon Last-mile was the other of focus of today’s event. That starts with the 1,000 Rivian EVs the company has begun deploying to meet holiday demand. “Customers across the U.S. will begin to see custom electric delivery vehicles from Rivian delivering their Amazon packages, with the electric vehicles hitting the road in Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle and St. Louis, among other cities,” the company noted in July. “This rollout is just the beginning of what is expected to be thousands of Amazon’s custom electric delivery vehicles in more than 100 cities by the end of this year — and 100,000 by 2030.” Image Credits: Amazon Somewhat surprisingly, Amazon is still very bullish on the future of drone deliveries. “A demonstrated, targeted level of safety that is validated by regulators and a magnitude safer than driving to the store,” Prime Air VP David Carbon said during a keynote. “Delivering 500 million packages by drone annually by the end of this decade. Servicing millions of customers, operating in highly populated, suburban areas such as Seattle, Boston and Atlanta. Flying in an uncontrolled space autonomously.” Image Credits: Amazon But while a rendering of its MK30 drone —

This is Amazon’s new delivery drone, the MK30 • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Amazon, drone, drone delivery, drones, Hardware, Robotics & AINo Comments

Following this morning’s debut of the Sparrow bin picking robot, Amazon just unveiled MK30, the latest iteration of its delivery drone. The system is the successor to the MK27-2, which is set to debut limited deliveries to residents in Lockeford, California and College Station, Texas. The MK30, which is set for a 2024 debut, is both smaller and lighter than the earlier version and able to withstand harsher temperatures and a broader range of weather conditions. Another key element here is making things quieter. Drone noise has been one of the most anticipated complaints about bringing these systems into residential settings. The system maintains the same basic hexacopter foundation as its predecessor — a different tact that the fixed wing systems deployed by the likes of Wing. Image Credits: Brian Heater Amazon writes, Reducing the noise signature of our drones is an important engineering challenge our team is working on. Our drones fly hundreds of feet in the air, well above people and structures. Even when they descend to deliver packages, our drones are generally quieter than a range of sounds you would commonly hear in a typical neighborhood. Prime Air’s Flight Science team has created new custom-designed propellers that will reduce the MK30’s perceived noise by a further 25%. That’s a game-changer we’re very excited about. Also on-board are new safety systems designed to avoid a wide range of different obstacles, from fellow drones to trees to people and pets. “While it’s impossible to eliminate all risks from flying, we take a proven aerospace approach to design safety into our system,” the company writes. “As always, our newest drone will go through rigorous evaluation by national aerospace authorities like the Federal Aviation Administration to prove its safety and reliability.” The acknowledgement of risk is important here. The truth is as these things become more common, so too, will accident reports. Amazon’s delivery drones have been through their share of ups and downs (so to speak), but the program appears to have survived some wide ranging cuts from CEO Andy Jassy – the same may not apply to the company’s latest mile Scout delivery robot, however. Amazon: A drone being tested in a wind tunnel “[T]o sustainably deliver a vast selection of items in under an hour, and eventually within 30 minutes, at scale,” Amazon writes, “drones are the most effective path to success.” Plenty of skepticism remains around the efficacy so such programs, of course. Amazon, however, isn’t alone in better big on drone deliver — one baby step at a time. Alphabet’s Wing program recently announced a deal with Door Dash for food deliveries in Logan, Australia.