| Amazon's Ring purchase: Get ready for Alexa to greet you at the doorstep |
 |
| You may have no interest in "smart" locks, lights, doorbells and the like now. But you will. Trust us. |
| This week Amazon forked over an estimated $1 billion-plus to buy the scrappy maker of video doorbells, Ring. This isn't, in our view, because Amazon believes its future lies in putting smart doorbells on every home in America. Instead, we see it as just another way the e-tailer intends to get a tighter grip on your home. |
| Today, you might think of the Amazon Echo connected speaker as a simple device that plays music on command, tells you the weather and turns on and off your lights, and that's about it. |
| In the next years, Alexa turns into "your bestie," says James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Your confidante running your life." |
| The intelligence gleaned from the Ring doorbell camera could enable Alexa to know "hundreds" of things about the home family life that would make the speaker more useful, he says. |
| For instance, the father upstairs waiting for the high-school age son to get home by midnight could ask Alexa if Brian had arrived yet, and the parent at work could check with Alexa to see if the fifth-grader had walked through the front door, as was hoped. |
| "It starts with a camera ingesting the data and applying the intelligence to Amazon," says McQuivey. |
| Ring isn't Amazon's first doorbell purchase. It also snapped up lesser known security camera maker Blink, which is slated to release its answer to Ring later this year. And McQuivey says there will be more. |
| The other missing ingredient here is the smart lock, and McQuivey believes Amazon will work with Ring and others to create one that's paired with the doorbell and easier to install than existing products. |
| Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, believes Amazon's goal was to use Ring to get into home security, using the camera with Alexa as the vehicle to bring in potentially $10 billion yearly in subscriptions. He figures Amazon has 100 million members of the Prime expedited shipping and entertainment service. One hundred million times $10 a month for security equals $10 billion. |
| And from security, Amazon now has smart home products installed that will lead to other ones. "Amazon is deadly serious about winning the war for the smart home," Pachter says. |
| Amazon says Ring will remain an independent unit of the company, similar to Zappo's online shoes and Whole Foods, which hasn't changed its name. Whatever Amazon does with Ring, this you know —you may not have heard of Ring before, but you will now. Amazon will make it its business to put the doorbell in front of you. |
| A quick scan of Amazon's home page this week found me targeted for a new Amazon Prime credit card offering 5% off all Whole Foods purchases, an offer to save $25 off Amazon home grocery delivery, and invite to play Jeopardy with Alexa and to check out audio books from the Audible unit. |
| Can a video doorbell be far behind? |
| In other tech news this week |
| Spotify, the No. 1 music streaming service, filed papers to start selling shares on Wall Street and offered a peek into his anemic balance sheet. The good news: 71 million paying subscribers and nearly $500 billion in revenue. The bad news — even with so many subscribers, the service is bleeding money, to a tune of $1.5 billion last year. Some 73% of every dollar goes right out the door to music labels, publishers and artists, notes Paul Resnikoff from Digital Music News. |
| Samsung introduced two new premium Galaxy phones, the S9 and S9+ at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, with much of the emphasis on improved camera optics. Like the iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X, the S9+ gets a second rear lens, and both phones promise to perform better in low light thanks to a dual-aperture lens system. |
| Speaking of the Mobile World Congress, the huge trade show focusing on wireless in Barcelona saw some interesting new product launches beyond the Galaxy phones, including a new Nokia handset in the share of a banana and a new Chromebook from Lenovo with a screen that can be written on with a No. 2 pencil. |
| This week's hot app is Vero, a social network and would-be Facebook killer that is bringing in folks by promising to avoid the things users seem to dislike most: advertising and algorithm-dependent feeds. At one point during the week it was the No. 1 app on the Apple App Store, although it had gone to No. 8 by the end of the week and a #deletevero campaign had already started. It was still No. 1 on the Google Play store, however. |
| The week in Talking Tech podcasts |
| Save money with Freedom Pop. We chat with Stephen Stokels, the CEO of the wireless company, about how to shave $40-$100 off your monthly wireless bill. |
| Our two-parter with Netflix's Phil Rosenthal. Part 1, Part 2. The host and producer of the new Netflix travel/food show, "Somebody Feed Phil," stopped by the USA TODAY offices in Los Angeles to tell how he picked out where to eat in countries like Portugal and Israel for his web show —by looking for recommendations on Yelp. In Part 2 of the show, Talking Tech's mom got on the phone to ask a few questions to Rosenthal, we pulled out the guitar and played some TV themes, and he sang along. |
| Google's odd new Clips camera. Our review of the weird new camera from Google that shoots 6-7 second silent video clips and is aimed at capturing pets and babies. |
| Ring rewind - In the wake of purchase of the Ring doorbell by Amazon, we go into the Talking Tech rewind file to listen to how Jamie Siminoff came up with the original idea for the product. |
| Goodbye subscription music, it was nice while it lasted. After reading Spotify's IPO filing, and how it lost $1.5 billion in 2017 even though it had 71 million paying subscribers that brought in $710 million monthly, I came to the sad conclusion that streaming music's best days must be behind us. |
| Photowalk 101: how to get Instagram-worthy vacation shots on your next trip. Check out the gallery from our visit to Hollywood Boulevard and the Walk of Fame here, and if you have the time, check out our YouTube channel for videos of the Hollywood shoot. |
| That's it for this week's Talking Tech weekend wrap. Please subscribe to the TalkingTech newsletter via this link. Follow me on Twitter, @JeffersonGraham. And if you haven't checked out the daily #TalkingTech podcast yet, now's the time. You can listen on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to online audio. |
No comments:
Post a Comment