Amazon wants the keys to your house, Apple’s never-ending issues with the iPhone 10, and Google and Cisco team up to beat Amazon in the cloud.
Trending on Twitter today is Amazon Key, a new service launched by the company that would allow Amazon couriers to open your front door and put your package safely inside your home. Key relies on Amazon’s new Cloud Cam and compatible smart lock, which connect to your home’s Wi-Fi and talk to each other. How it works is when a courier arrives at your house with a package, they scan the barcode, and if everything checks out, the Cloud Cam unlocks the door and starts recording. The courier then gets a prompt on their phone and when they swipe, the door opens so they can place the package inside, and then relock it with another swipe on their phone. The customer then gets a notification that their delivery has arrived, along with a short video showing the drop-off. Needless to say, while Amazon tried to cover its bases, some consumers aren’t buying it and are skeptical of the security risks.
From Facebook, Apple is having more problems with its flagship iPhone X device. Rumours have been swirling over the last couple days that the company is cutting production in half to only 20 million devices by its launch date in November, and now Bloomberg is reporting that Apple has now told suppliers that they can reduce the accuracy of the iPhone X’s facial recognition technology to make it easier to manufacture. Apple’s sophisticated plans for its all new Face ID are ambitious, but consumers are not reacting well to the company sacrificing quality to meet demand. However, Apple has claimed that Face ID will only fail once in every million attempts, which is a huge leap from the one in 50,000 fail rate of TouchID. So even if lower quality manufacturing brings down the FaceID fail rate down to one in half a million, that’s still a huge improvement from existing technology.
And lastly from Google, the search engine giant announced it is teaming up with Cisco to catch up with Amazon in cloud infrastructure. Google wants to combine its expertise in building massive data centres and open source software with Cisco’s global salesforce, customer support, and security. Amazon Web Services controls 34 per cent of the cloud market, with Google a distant fourth behind Microsoft and IBM, so the company is hoping to make up some ground. Google and Cisco plan on releasing a new hybrid offering in early 2018 that will include Google’s cloud tools with Cisco’s security and computer networking to target enterprises that still aren’t ready to go full cloud.