More than half of Amazon’s US deliveries are now completed using its own fleet. So at some point, the company will no longer need to rely on FedEx and/or UPS. It’s also on track to quickly surpass them in terms of packages delivered per year, if it hasn’t already.
But this also means that Amazon has had (and has been developing) its own maps platform to help support its delivery vehicles. Up until recently it was an entirely internal and proprietary tool. But this month, the company started to open it up in preview form (via an API).
What this mean is that if you have a web or mobile application that needs a map or some other kind of location-based feature, you now have the option of using Amazon instead of Google or Apple or some other company.
What’s interesting about this move is that it’s exactly what Amazon did with AWS (its dominant cloud infrastructure business). AWS is a meaningful part of Amazon’s overall business — in fact, it’s responsible for over 10% of the company’s total revenue, and an even bigger part of its operating income.
So this quiet little announcement could be something.
The “contact tracing” API that Apple and Google are working on and that I wrote about earlier this month is set to be released on May 1. Given all the concerns around privacy, it’s now being referred to as “exposure tracing.” The idea, here, is to emphasize that it is being designed to trace the coronavirus and not individuals.
To be clear, we’re talking about APIs, and so third party apps will need to be built on top of this tech before we can start downloading anything to our phones. But I am sure that will happen very soon and I will gladly opt in.
It’s also worth mentioning that this entire concept of smartphone exposure tracing only works when Apple and Google cooperate. Whatever apps ultimately get built need to work across both platforms, otherwise there would be far too many gaps in the network. So this — along with the focus on privacy — has become a bit of good PR for “big tech.”
The smart people working on exposure tracing over at Oxford University seem to think that (alongside other interventions) we could stop this virus with only about 60% of the population using an exposure tracing app. (They ran models with a pretend city of 1 million people.) But even at 50% penetration, they believe it could make a meaningful contribution.
These are numbers I think we could easily get to in major cities. Overall, I suspect it could also make people feel a lot more comfortable about going out. And going out is what’s going to be required as we gradually reopen the global economy. How many of you think you will opt in to something like this once it becomes available?