Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Inside the R&D lab at Amazon

Inside the Secretive R&D Lab Behind the Amazon Phone

More than 1,600 people claim Lab126 as their employer on the professional networking site LinkedIn (LNKD). Just a few months ago, Amazon investors might reasonably have demanded to know what those expensive engineers and product managers—and many others working on device hardware and software from Amazon’s offices in Seattle and in Cambridge, Mass.—were actually doing.
Many Amazon watchers struggle to explain just why the online retailer and cloud services provider is in the risky business of making hardware in the first place. That’s the wrong question to ask. Lab126 is in the business of asking: Why the heck not? Fueled by his pride in Amazon’s inventiveness and his stubborn refusal to cede even an inch of the tech landscape to other companies, Bezos provides much of the motivation at Lab126, pushing it to develop mainstream hardware devices, as well as a variety of so-called “science projects,” many of which have yet to see the light of day.
One group at Lab126, for example, is working on a device that projects a computer image onto any surface. A second is developing a wireless speaker that responds to voice commands. Apparently there are many more. Lab 126 insiders whisper about a credit-card reading device similar to Square, which could help propel Amazon’s fledgling payments business, plus a remarkably thin upcoming version of the Kindle Paperwhite, code-named Ice Wine.
The Amazon smartphone took off from there. It was at one point code-named Tyto, after a genus of owl. The project was accompanied inside Lab126 by a lower-cost smartphone design without the 3D effect, code-named Otus, for another owl genus. That Amazon would name its smartphone projects after birds of prey may not come as a surprise to anyone who’s paid attention to the company over the years.

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