Jason Del Rey

Recent Posts by Jason Del Rey

Amazon’s Futuristic Delivery Method? Prime Air — Kindles Delivered by Drone. (Video)

Diapers and Kindles delivered to your doorstep not by truck, not by plane or train — but by drone?

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that this reality may be just four or five years away.

In a pretty gentle interview with Charlie Rose on CBS’s “60 Minutes” — not a single question asked about Amazon warehouse strikes or reports of mentally debilitating working conditions — Bezos showed off Amazon-branded drones that he said can travel 10 miles and carry packages weighing up to five pounds to doorsteps in less than 30 minutes.

“These are octocopters,” Bezos said in the interview. “These are effectively drones, but there’s no reason these can’t be used as delivery vehicles.”

You won’t be seeing them anytime soon — the FAA has yet to release rules about how unmanned flying vehicles may be used — but Bezos said he thinks Amazon could start offering a “Prime Air” service, which the company is acknowledging with its own landing page, within four or five years.

“It will work, and it will happen,” Bezos said. The truth is that the FAA will ultimately decide that.

As for how Amazon will deal with the inevitable neighborhood game called “Steal/crush/shoot the drone,” maybe we can ask the @AmazonDrone Twitter account that just popped up.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik