It’s like Kickstarter for Alexa. Artists, startups, and organizations typically turn to Kickstarter to set up new products and achieve a certain funding goal to help get the project off the ground. Now Amazon is doing something similar, except that the trillion-dollar company certainly does not need help raising money for its production process.
If a concept pre-orders Amazon’s goal, it’s on the doorstep this summer. If interest is lacking, Amazon will stop and buyers will not be charged.
If Amazon relied more frequently on this Kickstarter model, it would effectively obtain additional user data that could help it launch countless products – some similar to others already on the market – while the odds and costs of any flops in the process, making it potentially so much more of a terrifying competitor.
The three new concepts unveiled this week come from inventors, designers and engineers within Amazon: to begin with, there’s a $ 89.99 hands-free smart wallpaper printer the size of a receipt printer that you’d find next to a cash register see. It works with Alexa to print shopping lists, reminders and calendar events on small Post-it-size notes. Meanwhile, a smart $ 34.99 scale can ask Alexa to weigh 200 calories of blueberries and nutritional information for thousands of ingredients and foods by weight. Finally, the cuckoo clock ($ 79.99) features a mechanical pop-out cuckoo bird, built-in speakers for timers and alarms, and can be wall-mounted or mounted on a shelf.
The company said it has produced workable models for each article to make sure development is possible.
The company told CNN Business that it does not disclose the target amount for the new products, but the product pages will show a percentage progress bar to indicate how close they are to the benchmark.