Enterprise Mobile News of the Week: 2/26/18

Well, the first half of February already saw some interesting developments in enterprise mobile news. A couple of Amazon news items surfaced that reveal a continued focus on logistics as a core competency for success, Google makes an IoT buy and Steven Sinofsky decidedly does not buy into the “Apple can’t make good software anymore” meme.

• Here’s an interesting read about Amazon ‘bracelets’ patent to track employee movements in a warehouse environment. The technology seems pretty neat on its face (ultrasonic pulses sounds cool), but of course privacy issues abound.
• I’m a bit surprised by the settlement between Uber and Waymo over the “potential” misappropriation of Google self-driving car technology, both in terms of the size and the nature of the settlement (only $245M as an equity stake in Uber).
• Another epic tweetstorm from Steven Sinofsky on Apple’s “quality problem.” In related post, read “Conversation #37: Features v. Schedule v. Quality.”
• What is Ambient Computing? Good question. I’m glad you asked. Facebook’s Narain Jashanmal has answers.
• Today, Amazon relies on shipping moguls like FedEx and UPS (and the USPS) to deliver products to customers. But the Wall Street Journal reports Amazon is preparing to launch “Shipping with Amazon” in with L.A. as the test market. What would it take for Amazon to scale across the US and the globe and supplant its current shipping partners? Read and find out.
• Google buys Xively from LogMeIn. Definitely a better fit for the young IoT platform. It will be interesting to see if Google creates a coherent strategy with this than just adding it to Google Cloud. It’s a tiny buy for them, let’s hope the impact far exceeds the spend. Color me skeptical.
• IoT may make the ‘user as product’ scenario worse, not better: “The customer…hit at the core of the issues with deploying smart products that provides more value to the company deploying than to the customer receiving the product. It’s a trap that many IoT/IIoT devices fall into. And it will be a huge issue as Gartner predicts that by 2020 95% of new product designed and released into the market will be IoT devices.”