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Amazon Buys Smart Doorbell Maker Ring For a Reported $1 Billion (cnbc.com)
hyperclocker shares a report from CNBC: Amazon is buying smart doorbell maker Ring, a deal that will allow the company to expand its home security and in-house delivery services. In an email statement to CNBC, Ring's spokesperson confirmed the deal, saying: "We'll be able to achieve even more by partnering with an inventive, customer-centric company like Amazon. We look forward to being a part of the Amazon team as we work toward our vision for safer neighborhoods." Amazon is expected to keep Ring as an independent business, much like it has with its other acquisitions, like Zappos and Twitch, according to GeekWire, which earlier reported details of the deal. Financial details of the move were not disclosed, but Reuters reported it could be worth more than $1 billion, making it one of the largest acquisitions in Amazon's history.
How many more of these worthless investments are large firms going to make?
They should have paid attention to Google's mistakes.
Scraping the bottom for ideas.
I guess Amazon doesn't have any love/faith in their Lab126's Amazon Cloud Cam creation.. ;^)
very cool, i remember seeing them on shark tank a couple years back!
What kinda analytics from the smart toilet paper Amazon'll be selling soon (after they buy a smart TP startup named Wipe for $eleventy billion)?
Ewwww
Amazon hasn't done well with its cloud cameras and key systems. I'd hope that they don't make Ring just as bad.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
they match with amazon quite nicely, it will be instraesting to see if they can combine with the company they bought before (who actually did smart chips) called blink
now there is no way that blink/ring/flavour of the month actually add any value beyond easy install
IF they produced a version that worked OFFLINE (sent the video to a internal server rather than NOT JUST AWS ) THEN they might actually have something but in truth doing that is actually hard...
pushing things to the "cloud" and letting AWS churn through it is not hard, dont get me wrong thats a good thing to have but its not actually what most people want they want something that works offline and add's features via the services online... some people are happy with that and are early adopters but the devil is in the details and their sales will bottom out in 24 months or so, it would be interesting if they are locking them in performance wise beyond 2/3 years in stock grants
have fun with the lawyers your going to get eaten by the far eastern vendors unless you work out offline...
John
Now I can kill annoying neighbors no matter where I am
Huge installed base. With their money they could sell it for $50. The number one reason I think they want it is delivery confirmation. Both regular and groceries. It would reduce primarily Fraud and secondarily people stealing from doorsteps. That alone is worth the investment. But I hope their either get rid of the cloud video BS and let you store locally or make it totally free.
If they expand to security cameras and resell security patrols.... (think plain clothes and plenty of cameras) talk about Big Brother. Huge market. They could track theifs by their cell phones and know when they are entering ares they victimize. They can then send patrols into those areas and or put out bulletins to those already there such as regular police. Since they have no direct idea what a person looks like they can profile with less recrimination as to racial profiling and more as to crime statistically increasing when certain people are around. Amazon could totally dominate the security industry.
Would have been a bit cheaper. But seriously, I'm baffled by mergers and acquisitions. It seems like Amazon could have come up with their own device for a lot less money. Further, General Mills just bought out Blue Buffalo pet food for something like $8 billion. You mean to tell me that General Mills couldn't come up with their own "natural" pet food for less money? But the thing that really pisses me off is that in many cases, a company flat out steals somebody else's idea instead of buying them out. What's up with that?
B n L Store, drones, delivery and security.
Next logical step? Build a community around these items. Then cities, then country, then a space ship after it's all ruined. I think I've seen how this one ends.
Grumble grumble something about needing to hack my Ring cameras so I can use them when the service gets discontinued in the near future...
Perhaps Bezos thought he was buying the One Ring.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I see your pair of hounds and raise you a giant lutefisk.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Maybe Amazon is just keeping Ring out of the hands of other companies, it probably doesn't NEED it. But all the patents and the customer base are now under Amazon's umbrella and not a competitors. Think of it as a high tech cockblock.
I don't have any need for a Ring, but I know a lot of people that think it's a great idea, especially non-technical types that are convinced that it will make their house safe and will gladly pay the recurring monthly fees to access stuff completely contained on a proprietary site.
It was poorly engineered product, and it still is as Ring. The only way this will succeed is if Amazon guts the team, ditches the CEO and does a re-design, using the hardware design talent at Lab126.
See the other comments, latency is 45 seconds. The product is not designed for the outdoors, and will fail in direct sun and freezing temperatures.
The critical connection to the user is wi-fi, and it's performance is poor due to RF path loss through exterior walls and structures.
The latency is not 45 seconds, it's more like 2-3 seconds. The Mac app is very quick and shows the slowdown isn't in the cloud service.
The problem is the bloat/slowdown in their iOS offering. Part of the issue was the battery slowdown, where I was getting 40+ second connection times. After a new battery, it is around 20 seconds - still too slow.
They need to rethink the mobile app and speed it up a bit.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
It would have been great if the article would have mentioned what a smart doorbell actually does...
Doorbells are like telephones: They enable completely random people to interrupt whatever you are doing whenever they feel like it to deal with their wants. People only put up with these interruption devices because they grew up with this kind of shenanigans as "normal."
When I bought my current house, the doorbell didn't work.
Attempting to connect it causes the ringer to go continuously, so there's a good chance its miswired (or the switch is borked). I just (re)disconnected it and vowed to get it fixed when I got the motivation to take the trouble/expense to do so. So basically, when the day came that someone actually came to my door to interact with me positively without trying to get something out of me, and they couldn't have just as well left a message for me to get to later. In other words, I needed to be happy afterwards that I'd interrupted what I was doing to interact with them, and didn't want to miss out on an experience like that again.
I've now lived in the house for 20 years with no doorbell.
Am I the only one that sees a convergence vector here for Amazon. I mean they deliver things to your door. Heck they could even give incentives to Ring with free or discounted shipping. Anyway I think this has more to do with business convergence and a play to own the whole experience. Granted reading about your experience they may need to improve the concept a bit, however one has to think that that will become easier over time, and Amazon's deep coffers could certainly help that. Anyway I see it being built into their delivery system eventually with package notifications etc... It is a way for Amazon to get another foot hold within you home. Heck, I'd expect these things to be networked with Elexa which might also be leveraged for usage. I believe they were also talking about having direct access to homes to drop off packages, this would allow the user to facilitate that.
Ring is a mediocre device for a consumer, but for Amazon it's perfect for their unattended delivery service. But a kit with a video doorbell, and a smart door lock. When you get a delivery, the deliverer shows a unique QR code (unique to that delivery), the doorbell video authenticates, unlocks the door, package delivered, ensures the door is closed, then locks the door. Yey, reduction in human interaction/intervention for deliveries.
My coworker has it. The Samsung phone app is so non-laggy, you can have a conversation without frustration. But maybe he just got lucky.
so everything looks like a:
Not sure how you intended to finish that one. :)