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Amazon Prime Air

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Re: Amazon Prime Air

#551

Post by ori_b »

mpclark wrote: post #475
michaelt wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Textbook drone delivery: http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/14/zookal-starts-world-first-d... Cake drone delivery: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1020621... Pizza drone delivery: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/dominos-tests-delivery-pizza-r... Parcel delivery drones: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57601531-76/drones-in-chin... Beer delivery drones: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/brandin…

What, just a story to make sure Amazon dominates the media on Cyber Monday? I'd say your analysis is bang on. The lesson to learn here, folks, is that this is one of those themes that just keeps on giving. Any time you need some quick publicity, reach for a drone...

The fact that it's very obviously timed to give a PR boost doesn't mean it's fake. They may very well be working on this, hoping that it succeeds, and looking for a PR boost.

In fact, given that they were working on it, one would expect them to announce it when it would give the most positive buzz possible.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#552

Post by icebraining »

webjprgm wrote: post #535
icebraining wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of a few problems: 1) Scale: a small store might not have enough sales to justify buying a single drone and training the staff to use it. 2) Regulation: licensing and certifications to be allowed to use these - particularly in a completely hands-off way - may have high fixed costs that a small store can't afford. 3) Lack of knowledge: most small store managers probably don't have any idea of how to set th…

Could you get your pizza or Chinese food delivery via drone?

Yeah, for food I think it could actually work, if you had a startup like GrubHub handling the drones, which would just fetch the food from the chosen restaurant and deliver it.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#553

Post by orblivion »

jmduke wrote: post #176

(Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not for anything related to this. This is the first time I'm learning of Prime Air.) I'm somewhat disheartened by the skepticism of a lot of comments from HN, Reddit, and Twitter. Not stuff like "I wonder how they'll handle adverse weather" (which I think is intellectually interesting) but stuff like "As soon as one of these kills a dog it's done for". What merit is there in rootin…

I hope they're at least as skeptical of Virgin Galactic or the Hyperloop if they're honest. Yes it's far fetched but cool things do sometimes happen.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#554

Post by Shamanmuni »

Semaphor wrote: post #541
esusatyo wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News on Dropbox: Why would anyone want this? I can do this already with my home PC, all I need to do is install package xyz and let it run in the background. How does this handle duplicates, this is doomed to fail.

This feels like a HN myth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 First top level comment is positive, 2nd says we don't need it, following are again more positive comments. 99% of the thread are positive, most negative comments are regarding presentation.

I agree with you, it's a myth, there's just one comment which is similar to what the parent states, and his objection about not solving the connectivity issue is completely valid. I still use a pendrive in case there's no internet connection. Most of them are congratulations.

What most people don't notice is that many votes don't necesarily mean "everybody agrees with him/her". Many times I have upvoted comments with which I didn't agree but I thought were well reasoned and had validity because I think those comments improve the conversation.

On the other hand, I could agree with comments stating "Great work guys!" but I wouldn't vote them as they offer little to no substance.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#555

Post by pseudometa »

ori_b wrote: post #551
mpclark wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, just a story to make sure Amazon dominates the media on Cyber Monday? I'd say your analysis is bang on. The lesson to learn here, folks, is that this is one of those themes that just keeps on giving. Any time you need some quick publicity, reach for a drone...

The fact that it's very obviously timed to give a PR boost doesn't mean it's fake. They may very well be working on this, hoping that it succeeds, and looking for a PR boost. In fact, given that they were working on it, one would expect them to announce it when it would give the most positive buzz possible.

You sure get an award for being optimistic, but I shall have to take away any certification you may have for being realistic.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#557

Post by ori_b »

YeahKIA wrote: post #547
untog wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smoking gun on this is announcing a new service on a Sunday evening. No-one does that. Unless, say, it happens to be Cyber Monday the next day.

This is exciting but a little too early for its time. Four months early to be specific.

So, in other words, you think that they're outright lying about doing any development?

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#558

Post by createmyaccount »

qwertz123 wrote: post #407
meritt wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kills a dog!? I don't know what sort of half-ass dogs these people have but I'd be vastly more worried about my dog fucking up one of these drones and being held responsible for replacement costs.

My dog would definitely try to take it out but it's the same as with cats: I would be more worried about the old guy losing an eye than hurting the cat. Those rotor blades look pretty dangerous to me.

Maybe worry for all of them. I would. If I had a dog.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#559

Post by djKianoosh »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #74
wiremine wrote: post #32

Just watched the 60 minutes segment: Bezos say they won't be ready until 2015 at the earliest, likely 2016. (Edit: as the commenter below pointed out, I misheard the timeframe: is is 4-5 years out) He said the range is 10 miles, which is good enough for most residential areas. They are aiming for delivery in 30 minutes. The drones are autonomous: you plug in the GPS coordinates and away they go. The biggest challenge…

As far as range goes, you could Pony Express it with a series of waystations.

why not just use the delivery (UPS/Fedex/etc) trucks as a base station for the drones?

Pull in to a neighborhood of, say, 500 residents; Say you have about 100 packages to deliver... Set up 5 drones to deliver packages. Even if it takes 60 seconds on average for each drone to deliver and return, it probably is still much faster than the truck driver having to drive into every street, stop, grab the right package, drop it off, and go back to the truck and repeat.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#560

Post by benjamincburns »

dharma1 wrote: post #496

we've been flying with drones (mainly octos) with heavy payloads for a while now - http://londonhelicam.co.uk . RED Epics, Phantom high speed cameras, a lot of expensive and heavy cameras. The main thing is energy density - the current gen LiPo batteries only allow for about 10-15 mins flight with a reasonable payload. Considering Amazon will have to do a roundtrip, this will not give them a very long range. The seco…

Energy density combined with mechanical efficiency. I could see something like this being viable if they could find a way to make it a hyper-efficient VTOL fixed-wing craft, but quad/hex/octo-copters from an efficiency standpoint are really quite poor electricity-to-thrust converters.
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