Robotized Amazon

Amazon Is Well on Track to Become a Fully Robotized Retailer

Amazon’s latest forays into robotics have left me thoroughly impressed. Take a look at this awesome presentation of one of the company’s most modern order fulfillment centers.

Now combine this with the company’s obvious direction of turning into a delivery behemoth. Amazon is rather coy about this aspect, but why else would it be buying up planes and making airport investments? This is only the beginning I believe. I see the company making use of robotic planes and a massive fleet of self-driving trucks in the near future.

Kitchen 3.0

Kitchen 3.0

The age of interconnected devices and gadgets is slowly dawning. This category of communications-capable electronics has been labeled “the Internet of Things” – somewhat of a misnomer now-a-days when it is obvious that the security threat of any machine reachable from the Internet is enormous. Perhaps quantum cryptography will one day address this issue. Until then, home owners will probably be safer by using offline “smart home controllers” with manually-upgradeable firmware in what will be an Intranet of Things.

Irrespective of the name, this new wave of electronics is still barely in its infancy. Any company worth its salt has to prepare for how business will change in the coming decades. And there’s nothing more disruptive than what is basically the rise of the first mainstream generation of highly task-optimized robots. Indeed, a smart refrigerator is basically a robot focused on a certain task.

While the first robots accessible to everybody will still function very much like our current appliances, their smarts will open up a myriad opportunities for ground-breaking innovation.

RoboMasters China

China’s Awesome Robotics Challenge

It’s called RoboMasters and it’s more important than it may seem. At first sight it could be classified as a nerdy game show. It is much, much more than that.

This has seriously impressed me. I’m seeing a fascinating amount of innovation and initiative arising from China in the past few years. The country is on the rise in a deeper, more meaningful way than in the “manufacturing powerhouse” decades.