The recent acquisition of Amazon Whole Foods seems centered on adding a new distribution channel for its existing online retail sales activities. But beneath the surface, the real opportunity is to open APIs for a variety of new types of UI retail applications for AWS developers.
The acquisition of Whole Foods could offer an opportunity for developers to work with a completely new mode interface that is perhaps more important than the voice UI user interface. Over the next year, AWS is likely to focus on optimizing and rationalizing back-end logistics. This approach, which would follow the same button pattern as Alexa and Amazon Dash is to develop logistic errors - commands unintentional privacy challenges and new vulnerabilities, among others - while providing functionality in a secure way for the first user. But in this case, the first users are homes with smart devices connected in neighborhoods across the country.
Applications focused on retail
The acquisition of Whole Foods could create a paradigm shift in the way consumers interact with Amazon and other retailers. The detailed UI has not changed much since the advent of barcoding in the Amazon 1990 is better placed to provide a variety of consumer and business-centric applications that enhance the shopping experience in brick and mortar stores, Increase comment, provide new market opportunities and simplify the implementation of new packaging strategies. Examples of these new classes of applications:Smart recipes
The actual sale received has not changed, except for the minor update delivery via email. This leaves the consumer with a black box of information that says very little about what the total amount of sales represents in terms of real estate. Will toilet or food? Kale or ice? Amazon already offers customers an accurate accounting of their online purchases, and would be a small step to provide the same level of depth to physical purchases. Third-party vendors can take the opportunity to launch applications with health surveillance, analysis and monitoring of nutritional tax categories, which could take into account not only the products but also their ingredients - think of mobile applications like mint and MyFitnessPal On steroids.Improvement of feedback
For most, User reviews are limited to the purchase of data. Retailers should perform an analysis on the product packaging, product placement and marketing efforts to determine why the products they sell. Amazon could significantly increase the amount of data that retailers can charge their sales through standard APIs. This could even include anonymous emotional tracking capabilities, such as facial Affective analysis. These standardized APIs will offer new opportunities for third-party consumer applications to make improvements in product marketing practices.New Packaging Strategies
A growing market for the third Foodservice provides packaged food experiences to consumers. These foods range from semi-prepared foods that should be heated only in boxes filled with ingredients of a specific recipe for home cooks. Now, Amazon could provide APIs that allow third parties to build applications for creating recipes and virtual stores, just as they do for physical products. This allows a market of renowned chefs and local connoisseurs to easily sell their best creations.Amazon has already tested new user interface designs to details around Seattle payments and inventory optimization. The acquisition of Whole Foods could accelerate this process. Developers should be particularly interested in opportunities to create new applications for the future detail user interface that perfectly combine physical and digital channels. In the short term, AWS could create a specific market for such applications and perhaps even create a venture capital fund in the same model as the Alexa program.
