Amazon acquiring Kiva Systems for $775 million • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon acquiring Kiva Systems for $775 million

#41

Post by demoo » Tue, Mar 20, 2012, 10:19 AM UTC

sirclueless wrote: post #40

demoo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this is another piece of scalable infrastructure they can offer to other companies.

Perhaps, but it seems to me that it is a competitive advantage they might not want to give up. More akin to Google's server warehouse design than AWS.

I don't know the exact situation of Google's server warehouse design. But I presume that was developed in-house. Kiva already has other big customers that rely on it for their order fulfillment. Like said in this thread, making your competitors into customers is a smart move.

Re: Amazon acquiring Kiva Systems for $775 million

#42

Post by hu_me » Tue, Mar 20, 2012, 10:26 AM UTC

This is a very smart play on part of Amazon. They have around 65 fulfillment centers and they are adding more this year.[1]

It costs around 15-20million to get a kiva system for a large fulfillment center.[2] With the number of kiva system amazon would need in those centres they surely saved a whole bag of money by buying the company instead of just systems, not to mention first dibs on future innovations.

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/19/amazon-acquires-online-fulf...

[2]http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2012/ki...

Re: Amazon acquiring Kiva Systems for $775 million

#43

Post by iandanforth » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 1:27 AM UTC

Maven911 wrote: post #20

swah wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately you can't start a robotics startup with almost no money (like sw startups) !

Yup agreed, though I would like to know what the parent commenter experiences have been, since it seems hes involved with some robotics/AI research. I previously posted the following about when will the robotic revolution will occur, to which I got some pretty good answers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3630139

My experience is limited, but there are now at least two hardware startup accelerators (in the bay area), I've watched a robot project go from idea to kickstarter to seed funding, another robot kickstarter go viral and get funded, watched a robot company raise money from the inside, and seen the explosion of open source designs and software for robots. All this in the last two years.

I don't think we're that close to your vision of the robot revolution (we need stronger AI first) but there are many places where robots are now technologically and financially viable where they weren't 5 or 10 years ago.

*Edited for clarity.

Re: Amazon acquiring Kiva Systems for $775 million

#44

Post by iandanforth » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 1:32 AM UTC

swah wrote: post #12

iandanforth wrote: post #5

It's a great time to start a robotics company and I hope this exit will further accelerate the pace of new companies being created! Kiva is also a great example of nailing a single high-value problem even if it's not the sexiest challenge.

Unfortunately you can't start a robotics startup with almost no money (like sw startups) !

Options exist!

http://haxlr8r.com/

http://www.lemnoslabs.com/

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peterseid/romo-the-smart...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/147564168/bilibot-an-aff...