In a sneaky health move, Amazon and Verizon are opening 5G-edge commercial development facilities in Chicago and seven other cities by the end of 2021. Amazon and Verizon launched Wavelength last year but the latest move has nothing to go with speedy downloads and deliveries. Instead healthcare – a core future area of Amazon’s success if it wants to keep growing – is what’s at stake. Chetan Sharma Consulting says there’s $4 trillion in revenue up for grabs by 2030. That’ll pique anyone’s interest but especially Amazon thanks to bumper earnings that make future growth plans much more interesting. The sky – and beyond – is the limit (see below). With 5G phones rolling out faster and faster, slow adoption will kick up a gear even with the pandemic. Get ready for more AI medicine. Bloomberg has more on the story:

“During months of trials, Amazon and Verizon have been watching how well the technology works in the real world. Avesha, a developer of artificial-intelligence applications in the Boston area, is using the Wavelength service to help doctors instantly identify abnormalities during procedures like colonoscopies. And sports data company ShotTracker is using 5G sensors in basketball games to compile instant statistical analysis for teams and broadcast announcers.

“It will make a huge difference by not having to wait hundreds of milliseconds for the information,” said Tami Erwin, chief executive officer of Verizon Business. “With low latency, they’ll be able to do diagnostics very, very quickly.”

Gizmodo discussed the express approval of the 16% of Deliveroo that Amazon is set to own. Considering the marketing is getting smaller and smaller through competition and acquisition (Just Eat did the £6.2bn merger deal in April with Takeaway.com). Besides the raft of knowledge that Amazon can infer from knowing what you eat and when. Enquiring minds think about if and how this will eventually play out with Amazon’s other services and plans. It’s not a reach to think Amazon will try and sell pizza-lovers a pizza oven or pizza wheel just before some fitness gear or perhaps even a health check up once the numbers have been crunched and inferences about your cholesterol have been made.

“The investment money will apparently be used to “hyper-personalise” Deliveroo’s service to its customers, develop new tech and expand its range of delivery-only kitchens, i.e. places that exist on the app but that don’t have a physical location you can go and visit.”

After the satellites got approved last week, Amazon is now taking to the skies. In a move that could very well see food delivery changed too, Amazon’s drone team is swelling according to the Telegraph. With Amazon saying it has too much demand and not enough space, this move is inevitable once regulation and the lawyers get ‘sky law’ sorted. Amazon knows that it’ll never be in a better position than it is right now to skate things through red tape so the company is pushing hard while eyes are elsewhere.

The Telegraph looked at LinkedIn hire data for Amazon and have found the company has at least doubled the Cambridge “Prime Air” team in the past twelve months. No surprise since this technology will allow the company alleviate one of it’s biggest issues – humans delivering to humans. Literally multiplying the space Amazon can play in, drone technology is a smart move for the company – whether they decide to land of the top of forecourts and get you to pick goods up from lockers or straight to your back garden – the legal community and regulators are the sticks in the mud.

“Its most recent hires have included several “flight operators” who would fly the drones. The team is based at the company’s research and development base in Cambridge, where Amazon also works on its Alexa digital assistant. Last year, it emerged that it had expanded the size of its testing site to the size of a football pitch. The moves to grow its UK drone team comes after Amazon last year signalled it would be ramping up its work in this space. At its Re:MARS conference in June 2019, Amazon said it was aiming to roll out the drones, which could travel “up to 15 miles and deliver packages under five pounds to customers in less than 30 minutes”, within months. Last year, it requested approval from US regulators to fly its drones. Amazon also became part of an “innovation sandbox” team in the UK trialling the technology.”

Think you know enough about Amazon? Now you do.

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