Amazon Prime, now with free same-day deliveries
The e-commerce company announces free same-day shipping on over 1 million items in 14 metro areas across the US.
Prime by bedtime.
That's a phrase millions of Amazon Prime members may start saying, thanks to the online retailer adding free same-day deliveries to the $99-a-year membership program.
For now, the new service, unveiled Thursday, will be a stripped-down version of Prime's current, free two-day deliveries. Over 1 million items will be available for free same-day shipments -- a fraction of the 20 million available in the US for two-day deliveries. Orders need to be more than $35 and purchased before noon, or will arrive the next day instead. Also, the service will be available for now in 14 metro areas (encompassing 500 cities and towns) across the US.
Even with those limitations, the new service marks a big step forward for Prime pulling off a long-sought goal in the retail industry of offering cheap (or free) same-day deliveries. Google and Walmart are two other firms racing to create same-day networks. Prime members in a handful of cities were already able to order same-day deliveries, but need to pay $5.99 an order (that fee will still kick in for items not listed for free same-day service).
Amazon was able to offer the new service thanks to its huge investment over the years in its network of warehouse-and-delivery hubs it calls fulfillment centers, Chris Rupp, vice president of Amazon Prime, said in an interview.
"We can get items closer to customers, get more items in stock and be able to deliver as quickly as possible," she said of the delivery network.
The new service may help Amazon maintain and grow its tens of millions of Prime customers -- who pay $99 a year for free shipping, a streaming video library and cloud storage -- during a time when the e-commerce giant is staring down plenty of new competition. Walmart will test out a $50-a-year unlimited shipping service, eBay plans to pilot a buyer loyalty program in Germany, and startup Jet.com, which hasn't officially launched, is looking to offer a new member-focused online marketplace. Also, Google has been developing its Express shipping service and Uber is dabbling in deliveries. Startups including Instacart and Postmates are also getting in the mix.
While none of those new efforts come close to Amazon's size or reach, Amazon appears to be working hard to stay ahead of the competition and speed up its deliveries to make itself more desirable for consumers. Prime is an especially critical part of Amazon's business, since Prime users tend to spend considerably more with Amazon than others, so the retailer is keenly focused on building up Prime's services.
The new same-day shipping for Prime members expands on two smaller rapid-delivery programs within Amazon. The company offers grocery deliveries around New York City, Seattle, Philadelphia and parts of California under the brand Amazon Fresh. In December, Amazon started Prime Now, a one-hour delivery service for tens of thousands of items that's its quickly expanded to Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Dallas, Manhattan and Miami. Both services are available only to Prime customers, with Fresh requiring a special $299 annual Prime Fresh membership.
Amazon is also trying to develop delivery drones, but so far has been slowed as government officials weigh how to regulate such a service.
The free same-day service is available seven days a week in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Indianapolis, the Los Angeles metro area, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and Washington, DC, as well as San Diego and Tampa Bay, which previously didn't have the option for same-day deliveries through Amazon.
Customers can find which zip codes are included in the new service at amazon.com/sameday. They can find what items are eligible by looking for a free same-day logo attached to products or by clicking on a new same-day filter in the Amazon.com search bar.
Same-day delivery pricing for non-Prime customers hasn't changed, and starts at $9.98 per order. For Prime members, orders of $35 or more are now free, and orders under $35 will cost the previous flat $5.99 per order.
After studying customer behaviors, Rupp said, Amazon sought to add products to the same-day delivery service that consumers tended to need more urgently, including HDMI cables, batteries, water filters, baby wipes, deodorant and last-minute travel items such as sunscreen and towels.
"We believe this to be a real life-changer," Rupp said. "Having the ability to get your to-do list done in just a few clicks and have the rest of the day to yourself we think is going to make a big different in customers' lives."
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Google Glass is still misunderstood, says the guy who wore them in the shower
Commentary: Forget the privacy issues -- it was a long list of other shortcomings, social and technical, that doomed Glass. Can Google learn for the next go-round?
I'm still very bullish about wearables, particularly the ones for your face.
Yes, Google Glass had its problems, but that's because it was released too early. It was a misunderstood product that could stand up to neither expectations nor criticism.
Many people think the privacy concerns about its camera are what killed it. I totally disagree.
Glass introduced us to a new way of socializing. That new thing messed with our social mores. And Google didn't know how to respond.
Let me explain.
The whole way the company introduced Glass, back in 2012, was to jump out of a zeppelin over the Google I/O gathering and show live video coming from headsets mounted on skydivers as they landed on the conference center roof in downtown San Francisco. That right there convinced me to run to the back of the room and lay down $1,500 to buy a pair.
I then wore them every day for more than a year. Including in that infamous shower photo.
During that year, I demonstrated Glass to more than 500 people. Most were excited by what they represented: a new kind of assistant that would help you live your life and let you capture your life in a new way. We love capturing our lives, don't we? Just go to a concert and you'll see thousands of smartphones and GoPro cameras hoisted into the air, recording everything about the experience.
It wasn't for everyone, though. When I was at the Coachella music festival last year, several people voiced disgust at someone wearing Google Glass. (It wasn't me. I had already stopped wearing them in public).
I wanted to know why. It turned out their disapproval had nothing to do with Glass' recording capabilities. How do I know that? Because there were hundreds of smartphones capturing the scene, not to mention a professional video crew.
So what was going on there? A new problem that we don't have good language to describe: they messed with the social contract we have with each other.
If I pull out my iPhone in the middle of a conversation with you and start playing around, you might think that's rude (it is). You can challenge my behavior by saying, "Is Facebook really more important than me right now?"
But with Glass you can't see what I'm doing. It's just always there, potentially dividing your attention and interrupting the conversation. There are no cues to tell me whether that's so.
Since you can't really say anything about it, your response might be to come up with something else to get me to take them off. "Are you recording me?" or "Those things are ugly." Or as tech writer Sarah Slocum learned in a San Francisco bar, people might even get violent.
In August 2014, I went into one of the San Francisco restaurants where Google Glass had been banned. I looked around and counted 12 cameras: They were in people's hands on smartphones. There were also Macs and Windows machines, with cameras and microphones, sitting on desks and being used. There was even a Samsung smartwatch, which has a camera built into its design.
So clearly the restaurant and its patrons weren't too concerned with recording devices. Something else earned the ire of patrons and owners: This messing with our social contract.
See, we've evolved to look into each other's eyes to judge trust, interest and focus. If a screen is suddenly put between us, it screws things up.
Google isn't going to give up, though. First, it led the investment of half a billion dollars in a new startup, Magic Leap, that is creating a new kind of computerized glasses. Second, we keep being told that Google is bringing back Glass.
And it isn't just Google.
Microsoft is getting a lot of hype for its Hololens glasses. I've visited startups in the San Francisco Bay Area, Meta and ODG, that are also building augmented-reality glasses. There will be more. Baidu is working on a pair in China. Kopin, a company that makes military glasses, showed me a prototype that has a screen about half the height of the little one in Glass.
So Google is still working on Glass. Even if it's misunderstood, does it have a chance of success? Yes.
Where Glass fell short
There is still intense interest in the future of on-the-face computers like it. And Google can fix the perception of this as a privacy-ruining gadget by adding a red light to the front that would shine anytime its recording capabilities were turned on (something that smartphones don't have, by the way).
Google could also fix the social contract problem by making Glass easier to take off and put in a pocket, or hang from your neck. The next pair must be foldable (y'know, like normal glasses?) for just those occasions where you want to enter a bar -- where people might not like you wearing them -- or a movie or going on a date night.
We also have to teach the geeks that these glasses just aren't appropriate to wear everywhere. Including in the shower.
So other than messing with our social contract, here's a list of the real problems with Glass:
1. The device didn't deliver good-quality video. It wasn't sharp and the battery lasted only 45 minutes when recording. Not to mention that Glass got very hot when trying to record video. I heard that all these problems were due to the way video was handled in software, so it's fixable.
2. The launch pissed me and other people off. I didn't mind paying $1,500 to buy a prototype. But it turned out I had to do a lot of free PR and R&D for Google, too. People constantly stopped me in the street and asked to try them on. At more than one conference, people surrounded me, asking to give them a whirl. The BBC, Bloomberg, and many others also wanted to have a look. It's ridiculous for Google, a company that makes billions of dollars per quarter, to have charged early adopters for these, particularly because it was such an incomplete product.
3. Glass never worked well with iPhones. Sorry, most of my friends use iPhones. Most startup CEOs use iPhones. Of the 200,000 attendees at Coachella, the world's most influential music festival, it seemed like 90 percent of the people were using iPhones. Since Google forced me to use Android with these, they lost my interest as the rest of the world I cared about was building for Apple first. Don't believe me? Look at how popular Apple's smartwatch is compared to smartwatches running Google's software.
4. Glass never improved in any real way. I expected to see massive updates over that first year. They never arrived. At times, I wondered what the heck was going on at Google and whether it really believed in this product. Turned out those skeptical thoughts got louder and louder until one day I visited Google's campus and noticed no one was wearing them, even executives who had funded the project. It was this lack of passion that pushed me away. If execs aren't going to wear them, then I knew the project was doomed. I had witnessed this when I worked at Microsoft and saw how poorly Microsoft's employees treated its tablet PC efforts. It wasn't until Apple released the iPad a decade later that Microsoft truly cared about tablets.
5. It didn't meet my wife's or my friends' expectations. The first day I got them home, my wife Maryam (who took that famous shower photo) asked, "Will they tell me anything about people I'm looking at?" The expectation is that these things will augment the world around you. Sort of like how the app Blippar shows you stuff when you aim it at a box of cereal. But Glass did none of that. And guess what: The speaker sucked so I could never hear. The microphone sucked, so I couldn't use it in noisy rooms. The mirror corroded if you got salt water (er, sweat) on it. It was fragile. Imagine if Apple's watch had so many problems? The press would have a field day beating it up.
Truth is, unlike the Apple Watch, Glass just wasn't a good product and it wasn't complete enough to sell to the public. It really pissed me off when Google tried to get everyday users to plunk down $1,500 for a pair. That was fleecing of an unsuspecting public, I thought, and played a role in my turning against the product. It's one thing to do that to early adopters and developers who are used to putting up with a lot of problems. But it's totally another to get the everyday user into a poorly finished product. If an Apple Watch is $400, Glass should be in the $500 range, not $1,500.
Unless Google is only going to sell them to companies.
All that said, there's still a lot of demand for these things. I know hospitals and other enterprises want to use them. I want to use them, if Google fixes the problems and make the devices more affordable.
To wrap up: Glass was misunderstood. It wasn't privacy concerns that doomed Glass, it was the product's inadequacies -- even for fans like me who thought we would never take them off. In the shower or out of it.
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Messaging becoming the heart of mobile, Mary Meeker says
The prominent venture capitalist says mobile messaging may soon evolve into a central hub of communication for users.
Messaging apps will likely take over our mobile lives, that is if they haven't already.
That's one of the insights from venture capitalist Mary Meeker's annual report on Internet trends, presented Wednesday at Recode's Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former Morgan Stanley analyst, has become an influential voice in the tech world thanks to her reports, first published in 1995. Her slide presentations -- which delve into some of the biggest changes in mobile, media and tech -- often point to deep shifts in how people use and relate with technology. They are also often used by tech firms as signposts on which direction they should be going.
The 197-slide presentation this year delves into several topics, from the growth of drones to the Internet's penetration into consumer's lives. One notable trend Meeker discussed (starting on slide 46) was the growing significance of messaging apps, with services like Whatsapp and Snapchat potentially becoming "central communications hubs" for users.
"The messaging leaders around the world are growing really quickly," said Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a former Morgan Stanley analyst.
Bolstering her case, Meeker pointed out that Whatsapp now has 800 million active mobile users, Facebook Messenger has 600 million and WeChat has 549 million. Snapchat, she reported, has 100 million daily active users.
On top of those giant user bases, messaging apps also make up six of the top 10 most used apps globally. These statistics build on Meeker's 2014 report, in which she noted how communicating online was changing, with people using messaging and chat apps more frequently to communicate with small groups of close contacts than they were using sites like Facebook to broadcast messages to larger audiences.
These chat apps may draw on their enviable perches in people's lives by becoming hubs for purchasing food and clothing and storing your personal information like location, name and interests, Meeker said.
The potential of messaging apps becoming such a big part of people's mobile lives illustrates why Facebook, the world's largest social network, bid $3 billion (unsuccessfully) for Snapchat and purchased Whatsapp -- which reported just $12.5 million in revenue last year -- for about $22 billion.
Meeker's slides also point to why Facebook, which already created Facebook Messenger, would want to own more chat apps. In one slide, she shows how people use different messaging apps for different purposes, so it's likely several messaging apps will continue to grow, without a single app taking over the market.
Meeker ended her talk Wednesday with a reference to the importance of diversity in the workplace, a statement that follows a high-profile sexual discrimination lawsuit against her firm by former employee Ellen Pao. Kleiner won the jury case in March, but the trial shined an unflattering light on the male-dominated world of venture capital, with the firm facing heavy criticism for its lack of diversity.
"Diversity matters. It's just good business," Meeker said. "The best decisions are often made by diverse groups of people."
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Apple tops Google as world's most valuable brand
The iPhone maker recaptures the No. 1 spot after losing it to Google last year, according to the latest list of the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands.
Apple is on top in yet another category, namely the world's most valuable brand.
A report known as the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands, released on Wednesday by advertising firm WPP and market researcher Millward Brown, attempts to rank the value, or dollar amount, of a company through a combination of market data and customer surveys. Overall, technology firms fared well among the 100 brands that showed up.
But it was Apple that shined higher than the rest of the tech pack. This year, the company reclaimed the top spot after being overtaken by Google in 2014. Specifically, Apple picked up a brand value of $247 billion, a jump of 67 percent from last year. In bumping Apple back to the top of the charts, Millward Brown cited the success of the iPhone 6 and the surrounding excitement about the Apple brand in general. The company also was the leader in the growth of its brand value over the past ten years, rising by 1,446 percent.
At one point, Apple investors, consumers and watchers had wondered whether the company had lost its mojo following the death of co-founder Steve Jobs and the dearth of new, innovative products. The company was also losing market share and customers to rival Samsung. But the heavy demand for the big-screened iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus and the debut of the Apple Watch appear to have rejuvenated Apple, pushing the shares higher and prompting many analysts to raise their stock price projections.
Second-place Google was no slouch either, rising by 9 percent to achieve a brand value of $173 billion. Known primarily as a search engine, Google always seems to have its hooks in a variety of businesses, including the Android operating system, self-driving cars, its high-speed fiber network and its new Project Fi wireless service. The only major area where the company stumbled this past year was Google Glass, which was put on hold in January as Google tries to develop a more consumer-friendly model.
Microsoft took third place with a brand value of $115 billion, rising 28 percent from last year. The report credited new CEO Satya Nadella for refreshing the company's culture and establishing a greater sense of cooperation with partners and customers. In fourth place was IBM with a value of $93 billion, though that number was down 13 percent from last year.
Which other tech companies scored well in brand value? Ranked at No. 12, Facebook's value rose by a whopping 99 percent to $71 billion.
"Facebook led the Top Risers with a year-on-year brand value increase of 99 percent, based on the brand's ability to remain relevant through acquisitions and to monetize its audience of over one billion people worldwide," the report said.
Other tech players on the list included AT&T with a brand value of $89 billion, Verizon with $86 billion, Amazon with $62 billion, Vodafone with $38 billion and SAP with $38 billion.
The list also showed the growing strength of Chinese technology firms.
The brand value for Chinese Internal portal Tencent rose by 43 percent to $76 billion. Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group landed on the list for the first time ever with a brand value of $66 billion. And the value for telecom provider China Mobile increased by 20 percent to $59 billion.
To rank each company on the list, Millward Brown first calculates its financial value based on earnings and other financial information. Then the firm stirs in a second layer called brand contribution, which factors in how consumers feel about the company and its products. And then the financial value and brand contribution are combined to determine the brand value, which is described as "the dollar amount a brand contributes to the overall value of a corporation."
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