Skip to main content

Amazon drone delivery- too dangerous for passenger planes- says senior pilot


The Real Reason Amazon Announced Delivery Drones Last Night: $3 Million In Free Advertising On Cyber Monday

Last night, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes and announced that Amazon's R&D department is working on drones that can deliver packages within 30 minutes. He called the service Amazon Prime Air.
The thing is, Amazon Prime Air won't be available for many years.
Even Bezos said last night that the earliest Amazon Prime Air could be in service is 2015 because that's the soonest the FAA could update its laws.
But the Wall Street Journal reports that the FAA isn't planning on beginning the certification of commerical drones until 2020.
There is a good reason for this. Drones can be very dangerous.
In March 2013, a commercial airliner flew within 200 feet of a small drone flying at 1,750 feet over a neighborhood in New York. The collision would have killed hundreds of people.
A retired commercial pilot named Tom Jeffries told ABC15.com the airliner almost hit the drone because drones don't appear on radar.
Jeffries says: "You're never going to see them until they hit something. When they suck one of those drones into the engine of an airplane, then it'll get everybody's attention."
The fact is, there is a very good chance that, last night, Amazon "announced" a service that will never exist in reality.
Why did Amazon do that?
The answer is free advertising. Even better: free advertising the night before the biggest e-commerce shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday.
How much was that free advertising worth?
60 Minutes gave more than 15 minutes to its Amazon story. A 30 second spot during the 7 P.M. show usually costs just over $100,000.
If you figure Amazon got 30 30-second commercials worth of time, you can estimate that it got about $3 million worth of "earned" media.
But $3 million is probably a very low estimate. That's just the cost Amazon would have had to pay to reach 60 Minutes's 13 million viewers. Thanks to the all the coverage Amazon Prime Air has gotten in other outlets, many more millions of people are talking about the company today.
The funny thing is, talking about "drones" is a fairly common PR stunt at this point.
After the 60 Minutes show last night, a Hacker News reader compiled a list of previously announced delivery drone programs, many of which were also PR stunts:
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

http://www.businessinsider.in/The-Real-Reason-Amazon-Announced-Delivery-Drones-Last-Night-3-Million-In-Free-Advertising-On-Cyber-Monday/articleshow/26750851.cms

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LIC Buys Double as Prices Dive - 10 Aug 2011

http://licreddy.com/Content/information/insurancenews_details.asp?NewsCode=4872 LIC Buys Double as Prices Dive 10-Aug-2011 Life Insurance Corp of India, the government's institution of choice to stabilise the stock market whenever it gets wobbly, has more than doubled stock purchases in the past three days as the global debt worry-triggered selloff made valuations attractive. LIC, the country's biggest investor with stakes in L&T, Axis Bank and Grasim, will raise its secondary market purchases this fiscal as IPOs dry up with promoters not keen to sell shares at lower valuations. "We have been buying in the past few days,'' said a LIC executive involved in decisionmaking. "With the market correcting and not many public issues coming up, we would be investing more in secondary market," said the person who did not want to be identified. LIC to Invest . 50k Cr More LIC, which had been buying stocks for an average of . 120 crore in the first four...
Post a Comment
Read more

Best IELTS and English language training institutions in Hyderabad

IELTS stands for International English Language Testing System. As the name implies it is basically an English test for testing the proficiency of the language in an individual.  Training for IELTS can be taken to pass the IELTS exam or to develop good english language skills. I am giving the training institute addresses for Hyderabad. The test system is jointly managed by the British Council,IDP education ltd and University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations and more than 1 million candidates are taking the exam all over the world. The test has two versions : 1. Academic 2. General training Academic  version is for people who plan to continue their higher education by enrolling in universities in countries like US,UK,Australia,Canada,New Zealand etc.The academic institutions in these countries consider the IELTS score as a criteria for the admission process. General training is mostly for immigration purposes in countries like Australia,New Zealand,Canada etc. It may ...
9 comments
Read more

Home loan or Car loan calculator

A good EMI calculator http://www.bankbazaar.com/home-loan-emi-calculator.html Tax benefits: Tax benefit is only on the interest paid on the loan taken. Prohibition of Usury in Various Religions Hinduism The earliest such record derives from the   Vedic   texts of Ancient India (2,000-1,400 BC) in which the "usurer" ( kusidin ) is mentioned several times and interpreted as any lender at interest.  More frequent and detailed references to interest payment are to be found in the later   Sutra   texts (700-100 BC), as well as the Buddhist   Jatakas   (600-400 BC).  It is during this latter period that the first sentiments of contempt for usury are expressed.  For example, Vasishtha, a well known Hindu law-maker of that time, made a special law which forbade the higher castes of   Brahmanas   (priests) and   Kshatriyas   (warriors) from being usurers or lenders at interest.  Also, in the   J...
3 comments
Read more