Future of drive-thru

McDonald's announced last week that it is buying the AI company Apprente to automate drive-thru ordering.  It will be interesting to see what they come up with and how they will revolutionize the drive-thru experience.

I have always been thinking of how the future would unfold in various areas including the drive-thru experience.

Imagine you are driving on the freeway around noon to meet one of your clients.  Your smart car wakes up and asks if you would like to order lunch.  The conversation goes this way:

Smart Car (SC) - Would you like to order some lunch?  It is close to your lunch hour. 
You - Sure.  Why not?  What is around here?
SC - There is a SubWay on your route.
You - Nah.  Not today.  Is there a McD?
SC - Yes, there is a McD on your route.
You - What are today's specials?
SC - There are no vegetarian specials today.  Would you like to order the usual?
You - OK.  Just add a chocolate milkshake to it.
SC - Chocolate milkshake.  Small?
You - Sure.
SC - Placing the order.  You will arrive at the McD in 8 mins and your order should be ready.  Anything else I can do for you?
You - Play the next podcast in my queue.
SC - Certainly.

What happened here?  The car is smart enough to figure out that you are on the road and it is your lunch time.  It also looks up all the restaurants nearby.  Especially the ones you frequent.  It finds a place that is on your route, not the nearest one.  It knows what you generally order at the various restaurants.  It knows you are a vegetarian.  It calculates the approximate time it takes to prepare the order (dependent on the order) and places the order at the location nearest to where you will be at that time.  Even though there was a McD a minute away, it still places the order at the McD that is 8 mins away.  It wants to reduce the wait time to almost nothing.  It automatically takes care of paying the restaurant with the credit card attached to your application.  It now knows that on certain days you prefer McD over SubWay.  It also learned that you like to have chocolate shake with your veggie burger.  The Smart Car keeps getting smarter everyday. 

How did the customer engagement and experience improve? 

You don't have to stand in line at the drive-thru.  You don't have to speak to anybody to place your order.  You don't have to wait for the order to be ready in order to pick it up.  You are saving time and reducing pollution.  The traditional drive-thru experience changes dramatically and the only thing needed is the pickup window. 

As far as technology is concerned, everything is available.  You just have to expose your geo-location to the app as well as the restaurants.  The app tracks where you are, maps your location and route and determines the restaurants en-route.  It places the order at the restaurant and notifies the arrival time.  It also allows the restaurant to track your geo-location so they can be ready to deliver your order in time.  Similar to how you track your Uber ride as it arrives to you.  The technology is readily available.  We just need to work with the restaurants that are ready to jump on the platform. 

Waiting to see how the drive-thru experience will transform. 

Driverless cars are here to stay!

I have always owned a manual transmission car, until recently.  I switched to an automatic recently and have not looked back.  Once a while I do get the itch to drive a manual transmission, and that is when I switch to the manual mode in my Steptronic transmission and hit the winding mountainous roads of Pacific North West.

The Steptronic is incredibly quick and smooth in shifting (thanks to the paddle shifters) as well as forgiving on inexperienced drivers.  Even with this clutchless manual transmission experience I cannot shift at the right RPMs as does the automatic transmission.  I know the main reason to shift to manual is to rev up the engine before shifts so you can feel the power and have complete control over it.  After some fun time, I get back into the Auto mode so I don't have to think anymore. 

That is when I realized how dependent we are on the automatic transmissions.  In the early days of the auto transmission, it was still clunky in shifting and you could feel the jerk and it did not always shift at the right RPM.  But, with technological advances the awkwardness is gone and nobody ever realizes that gears are shifting underneath (unless if you keep any eye on the tachometer).  Today's auto transmissions are so smooth, quick and efficient that it is better than a human shifting gears.  Some times during my travel to Europe I rent manual transmissions for the fun of it.  Even for an experienced driver, the modern cars instruct when to up or down shift if there is a slight delay in shifting. 

Similar to the early auto transmissions, the driverless car is going through its growth period.  Soon, the time will come when we realize that they are much more efficient than us and we will accept them as the better drivers.  I know the driverless cars are much more complex than a transmission, but the journey to maturity is still similar.  With technological advances and inexpensive compute power, the day will arrive sooner than later.

Amazon Go Store experience

Living in Seattle, I had to go and experience the Amazon Go store.  It is an awesome concept.  When everyone was thinking of self scanning shopping carts and RFID tags and such, Amazon went for the moonshot of completely getting rid of the checkout process and they have nailed it.

You enter through the turnstile by scanning your QR code in the Amazon Go app.  This code identifies you and the store lets you in.

Once inside, you can freely pick up anything and stuff it in your shopping bag.  Cameras in the ceiling (there are a ton of them.  Look at the picture below) are used to recognize you and your activity.

Every item had a large bar code that is read by the camera (I assume) when the item is picked up by the user.  The system is smart enough to recognize if you put something back.  I tried to take a few items and put some back, and take them out again, and it worked flawlessly.

Once you are done with your shopping, you just walk out of the store through the turnstile you entered through.  It is as simple as that.

On a subsequent visit I noticed another nuance that is purely Seattle.  I had enthusiastically bought a lot of stuff in my previous visit and wanted to return a few items.  I walked into the store and asked the employee at the front door.  BTW, this employee is positioned at the front door to help new comers use the app to get into the store, or allow visitors (without the app) into the store.  To my surprise, he said that the Amazon Go store does not accept returns.

What?  I was flabbergasted.

Then, he corrected himself and told me that I could "return" anything on the app and I get money back instantaneously, BUT, the store does not take back any items.  He told me that if I didn't want the items, I could give it away to a friend or someone.  The store is completely trust based.  This seemed weird since the items I was returning were fully sealed packages.  Still, I left the store with a good feeling, looking for a homeless person to give the packages to.  All in all, a great experience.

The store is small and carries a few categories of groceries, lots of packaged meals and drinks.  They have an onsite kitchen to make the packaged meals.  But, the same concept could be extended to all kinds of stores.

The future of grocery shopping has arrived!

Alexa in the hotel room

Last year, I wrote about how Alexa should make in-roads into the Enterprise territory rather than stay in the consumer space.  It looks like this is already happening, now that Alexa is becoming mature.

I travel on work and end up spending a lot of time in hotels in various parts of the world.  Recently, I was at the Copenhagen Marriott and that got me thinking about how VUI (Voice User Interface), and specifically, Alexa, could have made my life a little better and easier.  I started thinking about use cases where Alexa and Echo can be deployed in the hospitality industry.  Today, everything is done by human agents and it is not always efficient or pleasant.

Imagine the following scenarios and see how seamless they can be, with Alexa.

1. Calling front desk:
Me: Alexa, call front desk
Alexa: Calling front desk
Front Desk: Hello, Mr. Shashidhar, how can I help you today?

The reason this is a simple but powerful use case is because of the fact that I can be anywhere in the room while I talk to Alexa.  I wanted to talk to the front desk as well as pack my bags at the same time.  The speaker phone is not very effective in far field communication, which necessitated me to be near the phone during the call.  Alexa would have made this a hands free communication, and I could have continued to pack while talking to the front desk.  A minute saved in the hotel is an additional minute enjoyed at the airport lounge!

2. Summoning your car from the valet:
Me: Alexa, get my car from the valet
Alexa: Getting car from valet.  Do you have a ticket number?
Me: 5842
Alexa: Ticket 5842.  When do you want the car?
Me: Now
Alexa: Summoning car from valet.  Your car should be at the front of the hotel in 5-10 mins
Me: Thanks
Alexa: Is there anything else I can do for you?
Me: Nope

There were instances when I had to call the valet and had to hold for them to answer my call.  Instead, the system can log my call and provide the ticker number to the valet staff on their system. 

3. Ordering room service:
Me: Alexa
Alexa: Good evening, Mr. Shashidhar.  How can I help you?
Me: Please order one margarita pizza from the room service menu
Alexa: Margarita pizza ordered from room service.  Is there anything else you would like to order?
Me: A glass of orange juice
Alexa: A margarita pizza and a glass of orange juice.  Anything else?
Me: That's it
Alexa: When would you want this delivered?
Me: As soon as possible
Alexa: <thinking for a moment> Your order has been placed.  It will be delivered in 40 mins
Alexa: Is there anything else?
Me: That's it for now

Room service orders anyways end up as a ticket in the kitchen.  Why not remove the layers between the guest and the kitchen?  This system would seamlessly take the order and print a ticket in the kitchen.  The system can determine the wait time based on the current open orders as well as the estimated prep time.

4. Ordering extra amenities:
Me: Alexa, could I get two additional bath towels?
Alexa: Two extra bath towels ordered.  Is there anything else, Mr. Shashidhar?
Me: Ah, I forgot toothpaste.  Could you please get me a toothpaste as well?
Alexa: Two extra towels and toothpaste.  They should be delivered in a few minutes
Alexa: Anything else, Mr. Shashidhar?
Me: Nothing for now
Alexa: Have a good day

Alarms, local weather, room controls, etc. are straightforward use cases.

What these use cases need is a echo device in every room with a unique address.  The devices would talk to a central server and the server is integrated to the existing enterprise hospitality systems (room service, valet, phone system, etc.).  These are hotel specific and not generic as the context for most of the use cases is just the hotel.

With the advances in robotics, the use case of delivering extra amenities could be completely autonomous.  The intent is transferred to the server which orders a robot to fetch the goods and deliver it to the room.  As seen in Eatsa, the San Francisco robotic restaurant, a time will come when robots will make food and deliver it to your room as well.  Since the hotel is a known and controlled environment, it becomes easy to deploy these technologies.  Hospitality industry can be the incubator of all this technology and then it can enter the rest of the world.

What this would do is eliminate the need for human intervention in a lot of the cases.  Initially, when automated phone systems came around for customer service, we cringed.  But, nowadays they have become more efficient and in some cases, better than their human counterparts.  The same way, automation and VUI will make a difference and as it matures, the transactions become seamless and more pleasurable.  We don't have to worry about human emotions and the mood of the person on the other end of the line.

Currently some of the hotel chains are trying to integrate Alexa for in-room controls like lighting and climate control.  But, the bigger ROI is in the other areas where hotels can cut expenses.  In-room automation is cool and sexy, but the big bang for the buck is automating the back office services that are currently manned by humans.

Image courtesy: Amazon.com

The driverless World is here (almost)!

I recently visited a city with completely autonomous vehicles and no drivers at all and it was a delight to see the way the automobiles (including trains and planes) moved about without an adverse incident.  All vehicles moved around within the limits of the law and were aware of each other (as long as they were in close proximity).  It was a wonderful sight to behold.  Vehicles of all sizes varying from a small car all the way to a 18-wheeler moved around the city and in between cities, with ease.  Trains were, of course, on a schedule and followed it like clockwork as they moved in and out of stations.  The airport was the icing on the cake.  All the vehicles, including planes and ground support vehicles, were autonomous and they all went about their job effortlessly.

Now, you are wondering where this futuristic city is.

It is the Miniature Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany.  Everything I explained was in place but what was missing was the variability and chaos caused by humans.  This was an autonomous world with no people.  Hence the clockwork precision in its operation.  The only humans in sight were the spectators visiting the Wunderland.

I do think there is a lesson to learn here.  One of the biggest challenges facing the technologists is to blend self-driving vehicles with human drivers.  This interaction is complex and can lead to confusion and unnecessary traffic congestion.  As long as we have everything automated, there is a high probability that things will work well.  The key information that is needed is about the surroundings (static as well as dynamic) and the road rules that govern the vehicles.  The roads can be made smarter so they can transmit information about their conditions to a central location and it could be made available to anyone interested.  The vehicles could also be made smarter and they can identify, collect and transmit information to a central location for consumption.  We are partly there already with roads transmitting traffic as well as condition information and vehicles transmitting their location information to start with.

The autonomous technology has matured and costs have come down drastically,  Even with a completely autonomous world there will still be challenges to overcome.  From hacking of the system/vehicles, economic impact, regulatory hurdles and liability are a few issues that need to be still sorted out.  The good news is that a lot of heavy weight companies are after these issues and we are sure to see them resolved in the very near future.

Anyone interested in model vehicles would love this museum.  It uses state-of-art technology in each of its displays.  It even simulates 24 hours of the day every 15 minutes.

For the road vehicles, they use the Faller Car System and have customized it to their needs.  They have created their own custom software to operate the airport.  For light control, they developed their own system called MiWuLight.

They have even partnered with Google to create street views of the Wunderland.  Check it out on Google Maps here.

Here come the drones!

Amazon Prime Air announced this week that they successfully delivered a package to a customer in the UK.


This is exciting news for the package delivery industry.  Drones have already made a mark in other industries like agriculture, construction, oil and gas.  They are very efficient in inspecting power lines or oil and gas lines and even oil tanks.  Those are niche usecases where a drone is perfectly suited. Delivery of goods is one area where lots of companies are trying to make headway.  Drones have been used to deliver medicine, blood, etc.  Healthcare can benefit from drones immensely when it comes to delivering care packages to remote areas.

Possibilities are endless with drones due to their VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) capability as well as stability.  Equipped with a HD camera and a GPS, drones are basically robots on a mission.

Some think that drones are going to replace UPS/Fedex, but that is not going to happen.  Drone delivery is one of the delivery channels for a specific niche. It will never become mainstream and replace USPS or UPS or Fedex, due to its limitations.  Payload is one of the key limitations followed closely by range.

Payload is a limitation that will continue to keep drones to their niche.  But, range limitation can be overcome by several means.

Due to the limited range, drones can only deliver within a small radius from the distribution center (DC).  One way to solve this is by having a mobile DC that moves the products close to the delivery site and uses drones to dispatch the goods.  Imagine a small truck driving into a neighborhood, parking itself and dispatching as many as a dozen drones to deliver a dozen packages in one shot.  The drones will fly line of sight, thus reducing the distance to the target and the time for delivery.  Once the delivery is complete, the drones return back to the truck (mobile DC) and get recharged while the truck moves to another location.  The traveling salesman problem is simplified by a hub and spoke design for the last mile (the truck still needs to solve the TSP).  The hub being the mobile DC and drones making up the spokes.  Large number of deliveries (albeit, small) can quickly be achieved this way.

The next stage of this mobile DC would be larger drones replacing the trucks.  Imagine a large drone (mother ship) carrying the goods as well as smaller drones flying into a neighborhood and landing atop a 'perch'.  The perch could be a flat rooftop or a light pole.  People could rent their rooftops as perches for these mother ships.  The mother ship drone would land and dispatch individual smaller drones to the end point delivery.  Once the deliveries are complete, the drones will return back to the mother ship for recharging and their next assignment.

The beauty of this model is that the mother ships can recharge while waiting for the smaller drones to complete their delivery.  Imagine a rooftop drone perch with a power outlet.  If the perch is on a light pole, a power outlet can be created atop the pole.  This extends the range of the mother ship as well as the drones on board.  The only reason for the mother ship to return to a DC is to gather the next shipment of goods.  Remember, this DC that the mother ship returns to, could be a mobile DC itself!

The research that companies like Amazon are doing in the area of drone delivery can benefit other areas like healthcare, agriculture, power, oil & gas as well.  

Programming Projects for Beginners - Bubble Sort

This exercise will introduce you to sorting and specifically Bubble Sort.  There are several methods for sorting and bubble sort is one of them.

Note: If you stumbled upon this post and are wondering what this is about, start here.

Bubble Sort makes multiple passes through the list, while comparing adjacent elements.  It compares adjacent elements and swaps them if they are out of order.

Here is how it works:
Input list = [23, 4, 55, 12, 76, 3,41]
First pass:
[4,23,55,12,76,3,41] - Swap
[4,23,55,12,76,3,41] - No swap
[4,23,12,55,76,3,41] - Swap
[4,23,12,55,76,3,41] - No swap
[4,23,12,55,3,76,41] - Swap
[4,23,12,55,3,41,76] - Swap
Note that at the end of the first pass, the largest number is in its final place.  It has 'bubbled' up to its final location.

For the second pass, we can ignore the last element and sort the rest.  At the end of the second pass, the penultimate item will be in its final position.  This way, we keep shrinking the list until there is nothing else to sort.

Here is the usecase:
- Program displays a list of randomly ordered integers
- Program sorts the list using bubble sort
- Program displays the sorted list

Programming constructs used:
- Comparison
- Looping
- Conditional statements

Here is what the output would look like:

Note that I am printing the list at the end of each pass, but you don't need to do that.

You will also note that the sorting algorithm continues with the passes even though there is nothing to sort after the 6th pass.  This is because the algorithm is blindly running through the list once for every item in the list.

Bonus:
Improve the algorithm in such a way that it stops soon after the list is completely sorted.  The output should look like this:

Happy coding!

Programming Projects for Beginners - Hangman

This is the classic hangman game where the user guesses the chosen word in a given number of tries.

Note: If you stumbled upon this post and are wondering what this is about, start here.

Here is the usecase:
- Program asks user to guess a letter that makes up the chosen word
- User enters a letter
- Program checks if that letter is part of the word
- If the letter is not part of the word, the program starts drawing the hangman
- If the letter is part of the word, the program displays that part of the word and asks for the next letter
- If user keeps making guessing incorrect letters, the program continues to draw the hangman
- After several bad guesses, once the hangman drawing is complete, the user loses
- If the user guesses the word, the user wins

Programming constructs used:
- User input
- Comparison
- Looping
- Conditional statements
- Error handling
- Exception handling

Here is what a sample output would look like:

Another sample execution:

Hint:
For the hangman, create a list of the ASCII pictures with increasing degree of completion, and display them accordingly.

Bonus:
Read the list of words from a local file on disk.
Account for words with repeated letters.
Account for user typing an already found letter.

Happy coding!

Programming Projects for Beginners - Email Validator

We have all filled out forms where your email is requested.  In most advanced forms, as soon as you type your email, in case you made a mistake, the form would indicate that something is wrong.  This program does exactly that.  It checks the input text to ensure it is a valid email address.

Note: If you stumbled upon this post and are wondering what this is about, start here.

Here is the usecase:
- Program asks user for email address
- User enters email address
- Program checks validity and tells user if something is incorrect and asks user for the email address once more

Assume valid email addresses look like this:
abc@cde.com
where,
'abc' and 'cde' are alphanumeric text of any length (no special characters or spaces though)
'com' is either a two char or three char alpha string

Programming constructs used:
- User input
- String comparison
- Looping
- Conditional statements
- Error handling
- Exception handling

Here is what a sample output would look like:

Happy coding!

Programming Projects for Beginners - Guess the Number

This is a game where the computer selects a random number (say, between 0 and 10, to keep it simple), and the user guesses the number.

Note: If you stumbled upon this post and are wondering what this is about, start here.

Here is the usecase:
- Program picks a random number
- Program asks user to guess it
- User enters a guess
- Program tells user if (a) it is the correct guess (b) too high [say, if the guessed number is 5+- spaces away](c) too low (d) bit high or (e) bit low
- User guesses again until the answer is found

Programming constructs used:
- User input
- Libraries
- Comparison
- Looping
- Conditional statements
- Error handling

Here is what a sample output would look like:

As you notice above, I ran the program several times to give you a flavor of the output.

Bonus:
Handle invalid input as seen in the example above.
Count the number of tries the user takes and make an appropriate comment about it (as seen in the example).

Happy coding!

Programming Projects for Beginners - Python

I had signed up to teach programming as part of the Hour of Code movement to middle/high school kids and was pondering on what would be good and interesting programming exercises for beginners.  That got me thinking about simple programs that beginner students can write and feel proud about learning programming constructs and see them used in constructive ways.

After some thinking, here are five simple programming exercises that I came up with.  Each of these can be completed within an hour.

Note that I have solved these in python and will be including the screenshot of the output to give you an idea of how the program behaves and handles errors.

Python is a simple high level interpreted programming language with a rich set of libraries which makes it easy for beginners to learn. You can learn python here as well as run it in an online interpreter.  I often use repl for an online python interpreter. For some exercises, you will need to install python locally and run your programs.  We will go into the details later.

1. Texting monitor: This was inspired by Shark Tank episode where Trisha Prabhu pitched her app 'ReThink' to stop cyber bullying.  As soon as I saw it, I thought a beginner could write a simple program to mimic what she is doing.

2. Guess the number: This is a game where the computer selects a random number (say, between 1 and 100), and the user guesses the number.

3. Email validator: We have all filled out forms where your email is requested.  In most advanced forms, as soon as you type your email, in case you made a mistake, the form would indicate that something is wrong.  This program does exactly that.  It checks the input text to ensure it is a valid email address.

4. Hangman game: This is the classic hangman game where the user guesses the chosen word in a given number of tries.

5. Bubble sort: This exercise will introduce you to sorting a list of items.  Sorting is the process of placing the elements in a collection in a specific order.  In our case, we will sort a list of random integers into a list that contains the numbers in an ascending order.

I will post more details of each of these exercises in the coming days.  Look for those posts.

Happy coding!

Driverless pizza ovens

You order a pizza from your local pizzeria and a half hour later, a driverless car pulls up in front of your door and pings you to come out and pick up your pizza.  You go to the car, scan a code from your phone and a small door opens revealing your pizza box.  We all know this is bound to happen, or already happening in certain cities.

On a busy day, it can take up to a half hour for a pizza to be prepared and then transportation time is added on top of that.  This could easily add up to almost an hour, depending on how far you live from a pizzeria.  In general, a pizza takes about 3-4 minutes to prepare and 8-10 mins to bake.  Once baked, it tastes its best if consumed immediately.  Depending on the contents of the pizza, it starts to age and get soggy by the minute.

This is where the driverless oven comes into picture.

A pizzeria gets its order.  The order contains not only the products purchased, but also the address to be delivered to.  Software can easily categorize orders based on the product as well as distance to be transported.  For those orders within closer reaches, the pizza can be baked in the store and loaded for delivery.  For those orders which have a larger travel time, the chef can prepare the pizza and load it into the delivery vehicle.  The pizza is baked in the vehicle's oven, and packaged once fully baked and readied for delivery automatically.  This would need an automated vehicle with an automated pizza oven inside it.  The oven could be designed to handle several pizzas which will be baked based on the distance to the destination.  Material handling robots would package the pizzas as they are cooked.  The vehicle decides when to start baking depending on the distance as well as traffic conditions.

This optimizes the baking and delivery of the pizza.  Delivering fresh baked pizzas would become a reality.  This can also free up the store over to service in-store customers.

PC: Dominos Pizza

Maximizing store productivity

The other day I was at the mall and visited a clothing store.  Walking inside I noticed a line formed in front of the dressing rooms.  Here we had a bunch of customers who were wasting their time waiting to get into the dressing room rather than perusing the clothes and accessories being sold by the retailer.  What a great wasted opportunity.

What if they had an app that customers could download and use it to reserve the dressing room.  If no room was available, they would be put on a waiting list and pinged when one came available.  This would allow the customer to roam around and shop for more things.  Once the retailer's app is installed on the customer's mobile device, and once the customer logs into the app, the retailer will have all the customer's information so the app can provide tips or sales information to the customer based on her/his taste.

This would not only provide a pleasant experience to the shopper but also help the retailer maximize the customer's time in the store.  Which retailer would want a shopper standing in line rather than browsing the aisles and picking up products to purchase?  

Alexa in the Enterprise

Amazon Echo has been the face of Alexa all these days and it is a hands-free speaker that you control with your voice.  It also acts as a virtual voice-controlled assistant with limited capabilities.

 

Amazon released Alexa API to developers for free and developers are flocking to it.  This is a great move by Amazon and this will herald a new wave of applications that make use of Alexa.  And the Alexa Champions Program was put in place to recognize creative and outstanding contributions to the ecosystem.

Alexa has been seen as a way to enter into everyone's living room and as an assistant for the home.  Even the Alexa Home Kit is geared towards helping create home based custom skills.  This is all good.  But, the next generation of skills are going to empower the enterprise.

Imagine walking into a sporting goods store and wondering where to find running shoes.  You walk up to a virtual assistant installed strategically on every pillar/corner and speak to it and ask your question.  It can then reply with the exact location of the running shoes.  A custom skill could be created to go into the store database and check the location of the product in question, verify its location on the store planogram and return the location for the virtual assistant to voice.  The database and its information should be store specific.

Taking it to the next level, imagine a virtual assistant answering questions about a product.  All the information about the product, its reviews, etc. are available and can be piped into the assistant without any human intervention.  Custom skills can be built to work with the store database.  In cases where the answer is not found or the question is not understood, the virtual assistant can page for a human assistant.

The next generation of Human Computer Interaction is already here: It is voice based.  We still have a long way to go before computers can read our minds (think, Firefox, the movie).  We do live in interesting times.

Update: With Echo Show, the enterprise use case is strengthened.  In the above sports store scenario, Echo Show can display the store planogram/plan and show the user how to reach the product of interest.  It can also display additional information (choices, etc.) on the product as well. 

Image Courtesy: Amazon.com

Amazon IOT

Amazon has finally done it.  They have created a generic IOT Dash button.  Last year I wrote about how the Dash button was super specific to not only actions but also products, and they needed to make a generic programmable button.

Last year, the Dash button was first hacked to order pizza from Dominos.  Later, people started hacking the button and using it as an IOT device to perform various tasks.  This was the right direction for the button.  Amazon realized the potential and has taken a step in the right direction  The AWS IOT button is a generic device that can be programmed to do anything one wishes to accomplish.  The price point ($20) seems steep for the device.  The original Dash price point of $5 was perfect.

Amazon how has a IOT button (touch).  The next step would be for Amazon to create MEMS sensors to sense sight, sound, pressure, acceleration, etc..  This will give developers all the needed sensor capability for IOT.  Amazon could then expand their IOT ecosystem.  

Lytro's saving grace

What is Lytro?  I pondered a few years ago when Lytro came into existence.  They had amazing technology albeit it was not very useful or competitive against the current still cameras.  I wondered where Lytro would end up.

Yesterday, Lytro announced Immerge, its latest creation. With Immerge, Lytro seems to have found its sweet spot and saving grace. 

Immerge is a professional grade cinematic virtual reality video camera.  It offers 6 degrees of freedom which suits it very well for VR.  It also allows one to mix CG into the footage.  This is where Lytro's light field technology can truly shine.  It can capture light volumes and play back based on where the viewer is looking.  Imagine wearing a VR headgear and viewing a scene shot on Immerge.  As you glance around using its 6 DoF, and as you look at objects, the scene could refocus based on the light field technology.  It could simulate a human eye looking around in a scene bringing the scene eerily close to reality.

With Immerge, Lytro is also moving away from consumer market and into the professional market.  Lytro is not just selling this camera, they are selling an end-to-end solution with a server, post-processing tools, a player as well as a streaming server.  This will allow them to own and control the entire ecosystem.  They have also mentioned support for all available and future VR headsets and players. 

This is an amazing opportunity for Lytro to make a mark in the VR world as it matures. 

Photo credit: Lytro.com

Amazon Dash Button - departure from corporate principles?

Amazon seems to be going away from its basic principles with the latest Amazon Dash button.  Amazon has always been for empowering the customer, providing all the information (choice, prices, reviews, etc.) to the customer so that the customer has all the freedom to make intelligent decisions.  But, with Amazon Dash, all this is going out of the window.  Well, almost all.

Amazon Dash is a new service (and device) that Amazon has recently released.  Amazon supplies stick-on buttons to Prime customers so they can stick these buttons to relevant things in their home/office to seamlessly order supplies before they run out.  The following video from Amazon illustrates it.

The biggest gripe I have with this service is that it is too specific.  It locks customers to specific brands. 

With Dash buttons, Amazon has just driven all new comers out of the playing field.  If Amazon ships me a Tide button, I am voluntarily signing up to buy Tide for the foreseeable future.  Any new competitor to enter the field of washing soap will have a tough time to sell their wares.  The principle of 'Choice to the customer' goes right out of the window.  What if I wanted to try other brands?  Do I have to go to Amazon and get another button for that? 

Amazon is slowly entering our homes and introducing the concept of 'Internet of Things' (IOT) with this device.  All this device is an IOT. albeit not a very smart one.  A smart IOT would have figured out when I am getting low on my supplies and would have automatically placed an order for me.  Well, we will have to wait a bit longer for that. 

What Amazon should have done is create a generic button and sent a dozen of them to each Prime customer.  The customer would then affix the buttons wherever appropriate (like fridge, washing machine, coffee machine, etc) and program them to a particular category.  Note I am saying 'Category', not a specific product.  So, the customer would affix a button on a washing machine and program it to the category of 'Laundry Detergent'.  This is a one time activity.  Once programmed, the device has a specific job.  Its job is to order a laundry detergent. 

This is where Amazon can still empower the customer.  When the user presses the laundry button, the system automatically adds a few choice detergents into the shopping cart as options.  User would then preview the options and choose the one that made the most sense based on brand, quality, reviews, price, etc.  Of course, we could go further and mark one of the choices as a default choice for the next 6 months so that Amazon picks that choice automatically without prodding (at least for the next 6 months).  This way Amazon can still provide the power of choice to the customer.  The customer can always choose the same product and set it as default. 

By not sending brand specific buttons, the customer is free to choose the brand she wants (at that point in time).  Also, the buttons can be made re-programmable so that they can be moved around and assigned different categories as the user sees fit.

New devices and ideas should always be aligned to the corporate vision and should never waver from it.  Otherwise, the company loses its vision and will soon become irrelevant. 

Of course, with the present design, Amazon can flex its muscle and charge brands to position themselves on the Dash button.  This is similar to the retail shelf space they compete for, in a brick and mortar store.

Amazon should use this opportunity to innovate and slowly position themselves within every home.  As long as they stick to their original vision of empowering the customer, this will be a grand success.

Planned Obsolescence

I recently watched a documentary on BBC about planned obsolescence.  It is an interesting view on the current marketplace and how companies have been designing for obsolescence. This phenomenon has been going on for a long time. 

I remember as a kid when all the ballpoint pens had refills, not just the high priced ones.  You bought a pen or two and kept replacing the ink cartridge refills.  Or, you used a fountain pen and bought ink bottles to refill the pen.  I must have gone through most of my primary education with just a few of these pens.

And then I came to the US where everything is disposable.  Bic pens were the first disposable ballpoint pens I used.  I was shocked to see people chucking pens in the trash as soon as the ink ran out. 

Fast forward to 2015.  People are chucking MP3 players and phones as trash as soon as the battery runs out.  Or, in some cases, as soon as the newer version is released. 

Thanks to the advances in 3D printing, we are coming up with technology to literally 'print' everything as a single unit.  No need of assembly, dis-assembly, servicing, replacement of parts, and such things.  You buy one unit and throw it away at the end of its life.  The end of life could be defined by either its functional usefulness or its capacity (battery life, ink, etc.).  This is ultimate consumerism at work.

What this is doing is making consumers spend more and buy more.  This will help corporations sell more and make more money, but we have to look at its global impact.

• What this does to our environment?  
• How is it recycled?
• How do we separate the components for recycling?  
• How much does it cost to recycle?

There is always a fine line between usability, design and being responsible to your consumers, to the environment, to the economy and to the world as a whole.

There are cases where this technology makes perfect sense.  Say, parts for a satellite which are never serviced once launched.  These parts need to work in harsh environments and need all the protection they can get.  These parts could be built as a single unit so that they are well sealed and can function optimally.

Nanostructures come to my mind as a great fit for this technology but unfortunately, the current 3D printing technology is still measured in mm and not in nm.  These structures are too small to assemble.  It makes more sense to just build them as one cohesive unit. 

3D printing is seen as a boon for making spare parts when none are easily available.  Companies are taking 3D printing to places where no man has gone before: printing food, printing prosthetics, printing tissue, printing organs and other areas that we have not imagined yet. 

We truly live in an exciting world today! 

16 Things from A16Z

Andreessen Horowitz published 16 areas they are focusing on for 2015.  This list is a good bellwether of what areas to research, work on, invest in, etc. 

CES 2015

Steven Sinofsky has published a nice recap of what he saw at this year's CES.  It is nice to note that batteries are improving in performance and how companies are trying to figure out ways to incorporate sensors into everyday products.