September 2006 Archives
Amazon continues on the path of opening up all of its services for customers and partners to use. One of the services customers repeatedly asked us for was to open up our fulfillment network for them to use. Currently there are over 1 million small and large active sellers on the Amazon platform and most need to do their own fulfillment and shipping. Which is a big hassle. This has been an area where Amazon has made significant progress in terms of optimization and cost-effectiveness and we already offered this to our partners through our enterprise services program. We are now also opening up our fulfillment network for everyone to use.
This service is dubbed “Fulfillment by Amazon”, and the low pricing reflects the kind of efficiencies that Amazon has been able to achieve. In completely self-service way you can send items to our warehouses and we will take care that the items get shipped to customers once they get sold. But the service is not limited to when your products are sold on Amazon.com; if you use WebStore to build your personalized storefront you will now have both the front-office and back-office of your own store powered by Amazon's technologies. And we handle the returns if necessary...
There are also major advantages from this program for our retail customers; if a 3rd party seller is using Fulfillment by Amazon its products will now be eligible for free shipping promotions and for Amazon Prime.
It was very interesting to see this service come to life. Quite a bit of innovation was necessary at the business, the software and the fulfillment side to completely open up all the functionality in a completely self-service manner to customers.
Every year the MIT Technology Review publishes a list of technologists and scientist under the age of 35 to honor their ground breaking inventions and research. In the past I have written a number of recommendations in support of these innovators and last year I was particularly happy to see George Candea recognized for his work on recovery oriented computing in general and for micro-reboots in particular.
This year the list is more impressive than ever. Two young academics made the slate: Ben Zhao for his work on structured overlay networks and Eddie Kohler for operating systems security. Surprisingly three internet entrepreneurs also make the list, all well deserved: Joshua Schachter for tagging and del.icio.us, Paul Rademacher for igniting the map mashup movement, and Jason Fried for relentlessly advocating simplicity in online development.
It was good to see some privacy and security innovators also make the list: Apostolos Argyris for chaotic synchronization, Roger Dingledine on anonymized email, Anand Raghunathan for mobile device security and Sumeet Singh who capitalized on the virus detection work he did at UCSD.
For the full list and details see the TR Website. The honoring ceremony will be at TR’s Emerging Technology conference and Jeff Bezos will be giving an exciting keynote. I will have to miss out this year because I am speaking at the Handelsblatt Future of IT Conference in Berlin.
One of the coolest features in Unbox, Amazon’s Video Download Service, is the remote delivery. A video you have bought will show up in Your Media Library and from there you can control which PC the movie should be downloaded to. I just bought a Margaret Cho show while at work and asked it to be downloaded to a laptop at home. It will be there when I get home. Very useful.
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Congrats to DeWitt for launching the OpenSearch.org community website
