When it comes to impact on our everyday lives, there are few people on this planet that can compete with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. After launching Amazon as an online bookstore initially and then turning it into the multinational retail powerhouse that it is today, Bezos has truly changed the way we shop. Whether that’s for the better or not is probably a debate for another day, but during a 60-Minutes interview with Charlie Rose, the man behind Amazon revealed that his company isn’t going to sit on its hands moving forward.
Constantly looking at new ways of making life easier for its customers and in turn making Amazon more indispensable to the way we live, Amazon is already planning on the next stage of its evolution, which will apparently involve a new Amazon Prime feature that allows the company to offer a 30-minute delivery option. Remember when next day delivery was a luxury?
In order to make such a claim reality, Amazon plans on using a fleet of drones, or more accurately octocopters as a way of getting relatively light products to its customers. The plan would mean that anyone living within 10 miles of one of Amazon’s distribution centers would be able to have their new products within the hour and considering how many of those centers are sprouting up, that might cover more people than you may think.
Bezos says that such a reality is still a good five years away thanks to the legal tape that would need to be worked around thanks to the FAA, but given Amazon and its founder’s past abilities to just make things happen, we wouldn’t want to bet against it.
60-Minutes’ Charlie Rose took a tour of one of Amazon’s huge facilities and saw how the drone system may work. Conveyor belts would queue up products for delivery, with drones picking them up at the end of the line. That drone would then fly to the parcel’s delivery address and leave it there. Security of both the drone and the item being delivered are obvious concerns, but again, we have a feeling Bezos will find a way to make it happen.
Our neighbors are going to love us when the drone invasion begins!
(Source: CBS)
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