This is a revolution, or is it ?
Yesterday I was told about a revolutionary shop that Amazon will open in Seattle, Amazon Go. I love seeing innovations popping out in this world where it is harder to be amazed. This piece of news, despite interrupting me in the middle of some non-negligible amount of work, made me happy. As a developer, the less I deal with people, the happier I am. It does not make me asocial, it keeps me sane on the contrary. Obviously we need to have a certain balance but this is not the place for that kind of discussion. The main thing that made me happy despite that shop opening on another continent is in relation to a past event. If you are an attentive reader of this blog this should remind you from a certain hackathon a couple months ago.
Granted without salt
I loved being part of it, the few days before discussing about the topic trying to figure out what we should build. The brainstorms listing out what we hate and what we love in retail. All the ideas that came out of it. Even the harder bits where we had to weed out ideas to be able to focus on only one. One we could actually build in twenty-four hours. One idea to impress the judges, one idea to conquer them all. One idea was above others, we hate waiting. This is how it occurred to us. Scanning items using your phone, finding items within a store and checking out by walking out the store. Sounds familiar does it not ? Yes, Amazon Go in a nutshell some would say.
Obviously it is ludicrous to even think they would have inspired from us since presenting this idea was not worth of a podium. However, today we see it launched by a giant. In spite of not getting any recognition at this hackathon there is some comfort in seeing the world acknowledge that idea we had too as groundbreaking. We knew it back then, we know it now. It took us a night to implement a proof of that concept using an iOS app, beacons and GPS tech. From the ad I know they used much more than that for their test run. But then they are Amazon. They are giants, and it feels damn good to wake up, being confirmed that your mind is close to giants. It feels good to see it out before those ideas that beat us in a hackathon, that we may never hear about again.
Amazon Go is the future
When we presented that mobile self checkout idea we thought it was the future, god knows I shouted it everywhere. As I said first, I am happy to see Amazon Go out there and hope it will be successful and spread all around the world. I am looking forward to a world where you remove friction that can be generated by depending by how fast your cashier or other customers are. I am looking forward to take full control of my time when I pop in a shop to buy groceries. For those that have not seen it yet here is the ad they posted.