Blog: Amazon Echo

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Facebook Launches Its Smart Speaker: A Few Strategic Considerations For Portal

Cover image for Facebook Launches Its Smart Speaker: A Few Strategic Considerations For Portal
Zach Fuller
Earlier this year, MIDiA predicted that Facebook would join the smart speaker market. A TV dongle or smart speaker: It makes strategic sense for Facebook to develop a TV dongle like Amazon’s Fire Stick or smart speaker like Apple’s HomePod, to give it a hardware foothold in the home—something that Oculus clearly is not going to be anytime soon, if ever.
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Thoughts On Second-Order Effects For Content Discovery in Voice

Zach Fuller
Second-order effects are rarely considered when new technologies come to the fore and reach critical mass. For example, the realisation of smartphones, the emergence of Apple's app store and the ubiquity of Wi-Fi and cheap, effective data in mature digital markets means a service such as WhatsApp makes more immediate sense, but Uber and Snapchat are less obvious.
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Quick Take: Amazon Music Unlimited Comes To The UK

Mark Mulligan
Amazon announced the anticipated launch of Amazon Music Unlimited in the UK today. For my full take on Amazon Music Unlimited see my previous post here. Make no mistake, Amazon are taking this launch seriously, with a coordinated PR campaign and press release quotes not only from Amazon’s head of streaming music Steve Boom but also from Jeff Bezos himself.
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