European Tech Analysis
Posted on Written by Marcel Weiss
Me at Early Moves on a rumored portable version of Amazon Echo:
This portable version of Echo might be the first iteration of Amazon’s next attempt at the smartphone market after its Fire Phone flopped phenomenally. After all, once people use your portable voice operated device at home, why not add cellular connectivity and a touch screen to the next model?
It will be very interesting to see how exactly Amazon is going to present this device at launch.
Posted on Written by Marcel Weiss
I wrote about the industry dynamics behind the recent announcement by Ford to integrate Amazon Echo/Alexa at Early Moves :
As Apple is not-so-secretly working on his own car and Google continues its quest to a self-driving car with mainstream capability car makers are becoming uneasy. The coming move from combustion engine to electric vehicles and, after that or maybe even at the same time, the more drastic change to self-driving cars will change the industry fundamentally. Every top manager knows what happened to industries that changed fundamentally with the entrance of Apple or Google.
Hence: Both tech giants provide in-car entertainment systems that customers want. But everyone, especially the car makers, know that these systems are entry points to a coming rapid iteration that will lead to those tech companies moving ever closer to the center of the industry (where the profits are made). Car makers give their customers what they want, but they’d rather not hand the keys to kingdom over just yet. This is the point where companies start looking for allies and are looking to create competition by cooperating simultaneously with several parties.
By virtue of not being Apple or Google Amazon has a good starting position for talks about cooperations and integrations like this.
Posted on Written by Marcel Weiss
Horace Dediu:
“This view shows just how different the economic value of users can be. In the case of Apple, it’s growing its user base at (literally) exponential rates. The revenues per user does, understandably, decline. This is because new/later users don’t spend as much as early users. There might be some stability toward the later stages of adoption in revenue per user. The other point about iTunes data is how the mix of revenues has shifted from music to Apps and Services pointing out how users can be migrated across revenue sources over time.
In the case of Amazon it’s growing its user base at a linear rate (note equation). The revenue per account remains very steady however.”
Posted on Written by Marcel Weiss
The playbook: why Amazon’s Fire TV is a guaranteed hit | The Verge
The Verge:
“Amazon doesn’t innovate by crafting new product categories, like Apple does. It also doesn’t make much money selling its hardware. Instead, it takes all the data it gathers as the world’s biggest online retailer, breaks down exactly what’s available and what consumers want, then produces a piece of hardware that it can sell cheaply in order to bring consumers into its ecosystem. Just as Netflix created House of Cards to satisfy the particular tastes of its viewers, Amazon made the Fire TV because millions of buyers are already looking for it. To understand the Fire TV is to take one glance at Amazon’s best-selling electronics list: two Roku models, Google’s Chromecast, and the Apple TV are the only non-Amazon devices in the top 10. The world’s largest online retailer just took on all three.”
Posted on Written by Marcel Weiss
Memo #1 to Jeff Bezos: Try Washington Post Prime
“My bet is Jeff Bezos will use lessons from Amazon’s Prime service. For Monday Note readers outside the United States, Amazon Prime is a special service from which, for an annual fee of $79 (€60), you get free two-days shipping, free video streaming and the right to borrow Kindle titles in a catalog of 350,000 (I can hear writers and bookstore owners faint…) The least we can say is that it worked: more than 10m people joined the Prime program (including a couple of friends of mine who quickly dumped their cable subscription — call it collateral damage…) And that’s just the beginning: Amazon expects to reach 25m Prime customers by 2017. Even more interesting: when you cough up eighty bucks a year to use the service, you also tend to buy more, that’s the juiciest psychological facet of the Prime program.”
Bundling on a grand scale.
Posted on Written by Marcel Weiss
Bendict Evans:
“Amazon is not a media company; it’s a leveraged play on the conversion of the entire economy (or as much of it as possible) to ecommerce.”
