As society begins to realize it has allowed globe-spanning commercial net giants too much power, it also becomes clear that figuring a policy response will be hard. Techonomy's co-founder, author of The Facebook Effect, weighs in on the disturbing and growing controversy over what comes next. More
Tag Index / Showing 1 - 20 of 38 results for “Amazon”
From the Magazine Global Tech Government
Amazon, Facebook, and Google: Too big to tolerate. Too big to stop.
What’s Techonomic Now?
The news is techonomic: Equifax attack exposes data of nearly half of all Americans; Amazon price drops at Whole Foods decimate grocery stocks; Apple Watch used by Red Sox for cheating; Facebook harbored Russian fake news. Tech is altering business and society, which is why Techonomy 2017 in November is aimed explicitly at helping attendees understand how to cope and thrive amidst the digital chaos. More
Soon You Won’t Need the Broken Healthcare System
The tech giants are moving quickly to deliver healthcare. Amazon is hiring leaders to bring it into the pharmaceutical market, sending shivers through executives at Walgreens and CVS. Google and Facebook watch for early-warning signs of life-threatening depression. If you think of healthcare as consumer-driven, you can grasp the future the giants envision. More
The Technology Secret Most Leaders Miss
As technology changes business, hiring and retaining talented software engineers becomes ever more crucial. But great talent can be squandered with poor infrastructure and inefficient processes that waste peoples' time. Companies that don't implement the latest software development tools won't keep the best programmers. More
Amazon IS Santa Claus
The decades-long process of Amazon taking over consumer product sales continues this holiday season with the company's dominance achieving daunting levels. The online retailer expects its peak shipments volume this year to be 10% greater than last year. In New York City, the superintendents in apartment buildings have been struggling this season to contain the huge mounds of online-ordered boxes. More
Cutting the Cords for the Holidays
Advancements in connectivity and batteries have enabled new products that offer great convenience and freedom. We tested devices that leverage rapid advancements in wireless technology-including headphones, flying cameras, and devices to keep tabs on your kids or your home. More
Internet of Things Mobile Partner Insights
Why Ford’s Work with Amazon will Echo Widely
Amazon's Echo ambient voice interface device is a breakthrough with growing implications for the future of computing. And the relationship developing between Amazon and Ford to add vehicle-related functions to Echo's cloud service is one more piece of evidence to show how vast Echo's potential could be. Soon you will be able simply to speak in your living room to turn on your car, set its heater for 72, or perform all sorts of other tasks relating to your vehicle. More
Global Tech Internet of Things
The Internet of CES Things
CES was a gigantic, if predictable, letdown when it comes to "consumer electronics." Everything seemed incremental. People ask each other "What's the most interesting thing you've seen?" My answer was an announcement not a device--Amazon's deal with Ford to put its Echo "Alexa" technology inside of cars. It was the Internet of Things that loomed large in the background--not to make connected toasters but to transform society with connected efficiency. More
Vitals Aims to Be the Priceline of American Healthcare
Entrepreneur Mitch Rothschild says he has always followed a simple philosophy: Determine where a gap exists and launch a business to fill it. He thought information was seriously lacking in healthcare, for both patients and service providers. So he founded Vitals in 2007 to offer a suite of information and analytics tools to help consumers, providers, and health plans better track healthcare prices and quality. Today he serves as the company's executive chairman. Each month, some of Vitals' 10 million users perform 250,000 searches at Vitals.com, seeking information about the U.S. healthcare system, where they can browse 5 million user reviews of about 890,000 medical practitioners. In simple terms, Vitals hopes to be a Priceline of sorts for an industry in which costs can be opaque and consumers often feel powerless. More
Why Amazon’s Newly-Bought Twitch Has Value
I'm not sure why Amazon is the one who wants to own Twitch, but it must be part of the merchant's desire to broaden more fully into online media and become a real network of entertainment and content. This elucidating review of a Twitch viewing experience from Re/code underscores several things: the uniqueness of the platform's interface and viewing experience, the immaturity of many of its users, and the power of the brand among those testosterone-fueled boys and young men. It could be a dicey property for a would-be decorous part of the global media landscape to manage, but Bezos thought it was worth a billion dollars, so anybody who wants to know where media is going needs to be alert to it. More
Got Audiobook? Audible CEO Katz on the Rewards of Listening to Literature
Since introducing one of the first digital audio players in 1997, Audible (now owned by Amazon) has become the biggest name in audiobooks. “It really is seen as a service now,” says Audible founder and CEO Donald Katz of the surging audiobook phenomenon. We spoke to Katz at the recent Venture for America Summer Celebration in NYC. He ticked off some of the benefits enjoyed by the growing legions of audiobook consumers: “They get to work smarter than the guy in the next cube; they have storytelling in their lives on a consistent basis.” Most importantly, he said, they’ve found a valuable way to spend the millions of hour per week Americans spend in traffic. More
Tomorrow’s Sci-Fi Tech Excites Us … and Scares Us
For all the technological change Americans have witnessed in recent decades, from space travel to smartphones, we know much more is coming. And we’re only happy about some of it. A study by the Pew Research Center released last week finds that while Americans are generally optimistic about science and technology in the long term, we’re more pessimistic about it in the short term. The report culled data from a survey of 1,001 adults, with questions that attempted to get at the heart of attitudes toward closer-term advances—like bioengineering and robotics—and longer-term possibilities like space colonization and teleportation. More
Kirkpatrick: Amazon Smartphone Move “Brilliant”
Come September, the hottest phone on the market might not be the iPhone, Galaxy, or Nexus, but a new 3D-capable smartphone developed by none other than Amazon. The Internet behemoth has been considering making a foray into the smartphone market, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, and is likely to publicly announce plans in June and go to market as early as September. Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick spoke on Bloomberg Surveillance on Monday about Amazon's possible push into smartphones, calling the move "brilliant" and noting its potential for connecting customer relations with mobile payments. "If you were trying to keep an ongoing relationship for all kinds of commercial relationships with everybody, you have to have a phone," Kirkpatrick said. And for companies hoping to get a return from consumers, transactions are paramount. More
In Future, Data May Help Predict Even Wars
Amazon predicts what you want to buy, political pundits predict who you'll vote for, search engines predict what you're looking for. And now researchers and social scientists are looking to similar techniques to predict mass violence and atrocities like war, civil unrest, and genocide. The "GDELT" Project (Global Database of Events, Language and Tone), created at Georgetown University, is updated every morning and catalogs more than a quarter billion event records from across the globe since 1979. The hope is that by mapping and tracking human societal-scale behaviors and beliefs we can learn from the past and better forecast the future. More
Tencent-JD Tie-Up Takes Aim at Alibaba
The new week is just beginning, but it could well go down as a pivotal moment in Chinese Internet history with Tencent’s new announcement of an e-commerce alliance with JD.com that could threaten the dominance of sector leader Alibaba. The tie-up, which was first rumored last month, will see Tencent pay $215 million for 15 percent of JD.com, which will also receive some of Tencent’s e-commerce assets including a minority stake of its flagship Yixun.com B2C service. The companies will merge their e-commerce businesses, creating a new player with nearly a quarter of China’s B2C e-commerce market. More
Alibaba, Baidu’s Li Mount High-Stakes U.S. Forays
Two of China’s biggest Internet names are making interesting new moves into the tough U.S. market, with word that Alibaba has launched an American e-commerce website and Baidu founder Robin Li is helming a major new Hollywood animation studio. Both moves look cautious but relatively well conceived, even though each carries a degree of risk due to intense competition in the U.S. e-commerce and animation sectors. Still, I have to admire both companies for at least trying, even if their chances of success could be around 50-50. More
Southeast Asia E-Commerce Surge Boosts Region
E-commerce companies moved hard into Southeast Asia in 2013. Armed with innovative strategies and lots of funding, global giants and local startups raced to promote online retailing in a region where brick-and-mortar stores still dominate. Their efforts will bring more than just convenience to tens of millions of net-enabled consumers. They’ll also boost living conditions and create opportunities for a new generation of ambitious entrepreneurs. More
How Data Will Drive Business Strategy in 2014
Among all the recent year-end roundups and summaries was a surprising piece of business news. Blockbuster, the last surviving sentinel of the video rental industry announced that it would close its remaining 300 or so company owned stores across the United States. Many have been quick to credit Netflix with the decline of the once formidable Blockbuster. The case of Netflix versus Blockbuster shows that disrupting an entrenched industry requires much more than competitive pricing and improved service: it requires a complete reorientation of business strategy based on a more thoughtful use and understanding of data. More
Why Bezos Should Buy the L.A. Times
In the wake of Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post, he would do the journalism business a big favor by cutting a similar deal for The Los Angeles Times. And while he's at it, the Amazon multi-billionaire should snap up the seven other newspapers owned by the Times' parent, the Tribune Company. They include The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Hartford Courant, and The Orlando Sentinel. Since the Tribune Company emerged from bankruptcy last December 31, it has signaled its plans to either spin off or sell the newspaper part of its media empire. Bezos could quickly flesh out his news and information universe. More
How Much Will Bezos Disrupt the Post?
The best news for the ailing news business in a long time is Jeff Bezos's $250 million purchase of The Washington Post. Those who entertain the knee-jerk reaction that this acquisition of a legacy media operation is simply Bezos laying down dead presidents for “a billionaire's bauble” are sorely mistaken. The news and information economy desperately needs disrupters and innovators of Steve Jobs-like ambitions, and who else but Bezos fits that description? The Amazon founder wouldn't have opened his checkbook if he himself didn't think he was that guy. More
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