Amazon Seeks Approval For Drone Delivery Service

Amazon is pushing harder to bring its drone delivery project to commercial use.

Amazon is trying to launch its drone delivery service within the United States boundaries, which it announced a couple of years ago. Sources reported that the online retailer spent a staggering $10 million in Washington last year just to begin the process of delivering packages through drones. The company is not only the online retailer but also an evolving advanced logistics giant, which is currently making headlines in this domain. The retailer is set to create shipping network.

The usual mechanism of shipping packages is that it will be shipped on either the same day, in one day, or more, but when it comes to Amazon, same day or one day shipping is not good enough. When the Seattle-based firm announced its plans to launch the drone delivery service, it was done under the one-hour and two-hour delivery program. It was an attempt to deliver packages faster to its customers i.e. within the next hour or so. Online shoppers, who wished to avail the drone delivery service, had to restrict their order within the weight limit.

Amazon is striving to deliver packages to customers faster than usual. The products may vary from fresh goods to floss picks, fashion, electronics, and furniture. The US retailer is trying to invest more than ever in shipping to spend on Capitol Hill. It has finally submitted its bid in order to bring its much anticipated drone delivery service and longer delivery trucks in commercial use.

The New York Times reported that the investment that Amazon has been making lately makes it the most active and the fastest growing tech lobby in Washington. The Times adds that the company is determined to bring in longer delivery trucks in commercially along with road improvements and improved relations with the United States Postal Service (USPS) as Amazon seeks to push for the delivery drone approval.

The Vice President for global public policy at Amazon, Mr. Misener said, “So Prime Air is a future delivery service that will get packages to customers within 30 minutes of them ordering it online at Amazon.com. These things will weigh about 55 pounds each, but they’ll be able to deliver parcels that weigh up to five pounds.”

When asked about the pricing plan of Amazon Prime Air, he stated that he is not familiar with what the product has been priced yet. Amazon also wants independent logistics channel for delivery.

Amazon Rolls Out Its AWS Migration Service

After five months of testing and previewing, Amazon has launched its migration service for big companies.

In the past three to four years, Amazon Inc. has proved that it has all what it takes to dominate the e-commerce industry of the United States. An industry which was getting tougher and stiffer day by day due to intense domestic competition, the company came on top of all with its exceptional goods and services offerings along with decent loyalty programs to further cater the customers. However e-commerce is not the only domain the online retailer dominates in. It is believed that Amazon is also known as the powerhouse of the cloud computing industry.

According to various reputable sources, it was reported that the CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos said in the first half of last year that its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, is a massive $5 billion business. The company is well known for not revealing its figures whether it is success or not, it does not exactly disclose its results. But the data compiled so far, it is known that Amazon has ‘numerous’ big name clients subscribed to its cloud service offering. Apart from that, AWS leads the cloud division of various tech giants including Google and Microsoft.

According to Venture Beat, the firm has come up with a new service which will allow the companies to shift their databases conveniently to Amazon’s own cloud computing division, AWS. And it claims that the companies who wish to do it can easily set up their migrations within 10 minutes.

The vice president of relational database services at AWS, Hal Berenson, said in a statement “Hundreds of customers moved more than a thousand of their on-premises databases to Amazon Aurora, other Amazon RDS engines, or databases running on Amazon EC2 during the preview of the AWS Database Migration Service.”

Five months ago, Amazon debut its AWS Database Migration Service in preview to show what it can do for the companies. For instance, there are many firms who wish to change their cloud service provider or are in need of an upgrade but the fear of losing database or creating and managing all over again stops them. But after five months of the first preview, Amazon is finally filling this loophole with its new service.

Mr. Hal Berenson added, “Customers repeatedly told us they wanted help moving their on-premises databases to AWS, and also moving to more open database engine options, but the response to the AWS Database Migration Service has been even stronger than we expected. In the preview, one-third of the database migrations used the AWS Database Migration Service to not only move databases to the AWS Cloud, but also to switch database engines in the process.”

Since the beginning of this year, Amazon reported that there are more than 1,000 databases that have been migrated to the AWS. It does not necessarily mean to move other cloud premise database to Amazon Web Services but companies who have saved huge data and databases on MariaDB, MySQL, and Oracle can migrate their databases to Amazon’s cloud segment. 

Amazon Equips New Minnesota Fulfillment Center With Robotic Workforce

Amazon showed new Shakopee fulfillment facility where both robots and humans will be employed as workforce.

Amazon Inc. has established a massive shipment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, which will be operational in the coming months. According to sources, the massive fulfillment center located in Shakopee will have a huge team of 1,000 human employees along with ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of robots that will further assist humans with the daily tasks. This move is a part of the company’s ongoing operations to build its own shipping network in order to deliver the packages faster to the customers.

Amazon is coming up with a facility that spans over an area of 20 acres (approximately 1 million square feet). This place will become the 14th "robotics fulfillment facility” of the online retailer. The facility will cater to flattened orange machines that are responsible for merely fetching-related activities for the biological overlords.

The Minnesota fulfillment center will be the focal point for smaller items, such as DVDs and books. It further intends to speed up the shipping process of smaller items to the customers in numerous cities across the United States. Brian Urkiel, a supervisor in the facility, said, “The center enables us to deliver a higher amount of items, with faster delivery.”

Reports suggest that the Shakopee fulfillment facility was in construction since late past year. Amazon declined to comment further about the specifications regarding the initiation of operations in the center.

The Shakopee complex is a portion with four levels, which mainly is robot’s kingdom. Around 1,000 ‘human’ employees will assemble and work together. This fulfillment center will be operational on the same business model as others with both robots and humans. The robotic workforce will have a task to grab ‘pods’ which will contain consumer products ready to be shipped. These pods will be transferred to the humanoid workforce. Workers will have a more complex task such as picking, stowing, and counting procedures.

According to the company, each robot weighs nearly 320 pounds and has the ability to lift at least 750 pounds on its own. Robots will read the barcodes installed on the floor of the complex to find their position as they move around the place with their pods. Apart from the operations to begin, Amazon refused to give out the exact number of robots that will be deployed in the Minnesota fulfillment center.

Once the packages are picked and sorted, they will either be transferred to the nearest storing facility of Amazon or will be picked up by the shipping businesses, such as FedEx or UPS, to carry on with the delivery process. Regardless of the option, shipments will be dispatched through the dock doors.

Brian Urkiel added that the complex is “a marriage of the latest and greatest fulfillment technology and robotics technology.” Urkiel already has experience of running and operating a robotics fulfillment center in Kenosha, Wis.