Perhaps the plan for a fleet of package delivering drones was a little too audacious. Amazon is considering creating an uber-style, app-powered force of independent couriers to deliverr for The Everything Store. The Wallstreet journal reports:
But the concept faces many hurdles, from how Amazon will vet deliverers to whether physical retailers will cooperate with a key rival. Major shippers are efficient; it costs UPS an average of about $8 to deliver a package in the U.S. Amazon ships an average 3.5 million packages a day, according to SJ Consulting Group, so it would need a lot of couriers to make a meaningful impact. Nor is it clear who would be responsible if packages are damaged or go missing.
The Seattle-based online retail giant has experimented with nontraditional shipping methods in the past, including prototypical models that enlisted yellow cabs, bike messengers, and Uber drivers to carry packages.
So far though, Amazon hasn’t divorced the old steadfast movers like UPS, USPS and FedEx. They’re just, you know, looking around.
And the drones? They are still in development, but I wouldn’t go replacing your mailbox with a drone delivery net just yet.
If you’re a music executive Jeff Bezo’s rising shipping costs look much like the stuff dreams are made of. But those days are largely gone for the music industry. At the heart of that disruption is the MP3, the compression format that skyrocketed music piracy and eviscerated sales.
In a new book, “How Music Got Free”, Stephen Witt traces that recent history of the music industry. From the New York Times:
Stephen Witt’s nimble new book, “How Music Got Free,” is the richest explanation to date about how the arrival of the MP3 upended almost everything about how music is distributed, consumed and stored. It’s a story you may think you know, but Mr. Witt brings fresh reporting to bear, and complicates things in terrific ways.
He pushes past Napster (Sean Fanning, dorm room, lawsuits) and goes deep on the German audio engineers who, drawing on decades of research into how the ear works, spent years developing the MP3 only to almost see it nearly become the Betamax to another group’s VHS. Along the way, Mr. Witt delivers a tidy primer in the field of psychoacoustics.
Read more about the book here.
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