Today we visited Amazon.  My group is in charge of presenting about Amazon so we all came ready with loads of questions and enthusiasm.  When we first got to the right new fancy building the first thing we were told was “no photos could be taken”.  We then had to sign document waivers to be able to enter into the building.  This was totally different from Google and the rest of the companies we have visited so far.

The first speaker for Amazon was an engineer who was involved in the creation of Alexa.  The model he had out for us was a collaboration with GE.  This Alexa had a cool ring light structure that lit up when it was communicating.  This speaker gave us so much information on Alexa and even gave us a demonstration on how it works.  I was blown away when he talked about the future plans Amazon has for Alexa.  They are currently tryng to partner with as many companies as possible to integrate Alexa into there products.  Amazon sees voice controlled intelligence as the future and hopes to expand on this concept.  It as crazy to think about how AI and Alexa can be used to someday replace butlers and doctors.  This is a great idea in my opinion but is scary to think about the impact on the world.

Also we learned a great deal about AWS and all the businesses and startups Amazon is involved in.  I had very little knowledge on cloud computing and AWS going into the presentation but came out blown away.  AWS is so far ahead of the completion they have to change the scale of the graph.  Amazon has a hand in the stock exchange, Netflix, and 1/3 of the internet as a whole.  This is crazy and scary.  I’m very curious to see how Amazon develops in the next 3 years because they have so many amazing things going for them.

Overall I enjoyed all the information that was presented but really wanted to walk around the building.