I use the Kindle desktop app a fair amount, usually for going back to books I’ve already read for reference, or to review highlights and make notes. It’s always been a pretty bad application, with a strangely dated interface and extremely rare updates, but lately it’s gotten unusable. Maybe it’s unstable on the M1 Mac mini. It now crashes constantly and corrupts the local data, requiring purge and reinstall to fix it.
Instead of fighting with it, I went back to their Kindle Cloud Reader, a web-based version of the same Kindle client that Amazon’s kept around for a decade....
Geoff Zeiss on combining satellite imagery and spatial analysis to identify tree encroachment in utilities:
Transmission line inspections are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. They are generally performed by manned helicopters often together with a ground crew. There are serious safety issues when inspections are conducted by helicopter. Data may be collected with cameras and analyzed to detect...
The Kindle launched in 2007, making ebooks accessible as a format not only because of a compelling device, but also a marketplace for content. Suddenly most books were available instantly for $10 a piece. No more trips to the store, expensive hardcovers and paperbacks, and importantly, no more paper taking up shelf space. As much as I love the Kindle, I have a growing list of gripes about the experience. Like with John Gruber’s recent post on the iPad, criticism comes from a place of love for the platform, and a disappointment with how...
AWS’s re:Invent conference just wrapped last week. Since we’re so deep into AWS technologies, I keep an eye out each year on the trends visible in Amazon’s product launches. They move at breathtaking speed to fill out their offering suite and keep their current momentum as the leader in the cloud space. They’re really nailing the bundling & scale economics that the likes of Microsoft and Oracle were so successful at in years past. When going upmarket, having a product for every problem outweighs the need for having the highest quality in any individual product line. Enterprises...
I’ve linked before to pieces about Amazon’s culture of long-form writing and memos in place of PowerPoint for meetings and conveying new business concepts. In their case, the discipline around this kind of thoroughness comes from the top. In this piece by Jean-Louis Gassée, he references Bezos’s own writing in his famous annual shareholder letters. I read these every year. It’s a great example of a practice I value — using writing and long-form narrative to explain the ins and outs of an idea. Bullets, outlines, and emails leave too much room for ambiguity, and...
Another fantastic piece from Eugene Wei on what he terms “invisible asymptotes” — the invisible barriers companies collide with in growth:
One way to identify your invisible asymptotes is to simply ask your customers. As I noted at the start of this piece, at Amazon we honed in on how shipping fees were a brake on our business by simply asking customers and non-customers.
Here’s where the oft-cited quote from Henry Ford is brought up as an objection: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” he is reputed to have said. Like most...
Amazon is famous for its “No PowerPoint” policy for meetings, requiring that those calling meetings for any new idea, project, or effort write a narrative document to describe the ins-and-outs of what’s on the table for discussion. These documents get circulated to all the right people beforehand for review, so that the team can really drill in on an aligned objective for the meeting with clear data at their fingertips about the pros and cons.
This piece talks about the experience with this process first-hand from a former employee, bulleted out to help understand how it works:
This piece from Barry Ritholtz does a good job breaking down the real background behind the Amazon NYC HQ issues, how they were attracted and why they bailed:
The heart of the opposition to Amazon was how much the city and state bent the existing rules to offer a very generous package. The arguments are pretty clear: On the one side, net net the deal works to the city’s benefit, and $3 billion is not all that much.
The other side is less pragmatic and more philosophical. It is the same issue I have with taxpayers subsidizing Football stadiums....
During this TED talk from 2003, Jeff Bezos compares the Internet revolution to the early years of electrification. Even 15 years ago he was already describing the core philosophy behind his future products, like Amazon Web Services. AWS is like electricity for technology companies: paying the AWS bill is like paying your utility bill.
AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for analytics. You simply point AWS Glue to your data stored on AWS, and AWS Glue discovers your data and stores the associated metadata
Interesting new service from AWS (is there a need in computing they don’t cover at this point?), providing serverless ETL transformations on datasets hosted anywhere. The automatic discovery is particularly interesting for applications dealing in highly variable data structures.
Google has built their own custom silicon dedicated to AI processing. The power efficiency gains with these dedicated chips is estimated to have saved them from building a dozen new datacenters.
But about six years ago, as the company embraced a new form of voice recognition on Android phones, its engineers worried that this network wasn’t nearly big enough. If each of the world’s Android phones used the new Google voice search for just three minutes a day, these engineers realized, the company would need twice as many data centers.