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Treasure Truck wins patent amid big ambitions

Treasure Truck
When the Treasure Truck is opened up, customers see a flashy array of signs. (GeekWire Photo)

If you’re thinking about building a knockoff of Amazon’s Treasure Truck, the funky delivery vehicle for flash deals ranging from cameras to candy, consider yourself warned: The design is now patented.

The patent was issued today, covering the ornamental design for the heavily modified Isuzu cab-over truck. The truck is typically stocked several times a month with one or two types of discounted goodies and makes deliveries to a few locations in the Seattle area.

The Treasure Truck been compared to an ice cream truck for grownups: Amazon app users can get alerts about the deals on their smartphones, but once all the goods are spoken for, that’s it. (Today’s deal, offering two pounds of wild Dungeness crab for $35, is already sold out.)

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Amazon patents self-driving lane control system

Amazon Fresh truck
An Amazon Fresh truck goes out for deliveries. (Image by Atomic Taco, via Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0)

There’s been a lot of speculation about Amazon’s interest in self-driving delivery trucks, and a newly issued patent suggests that the Seattle-based retailer is putting a lot of thought into how such a system would work.

The patent, issued today, concentrates on how a wireless control system could help autonomous vehicles negotiate changes in reversible lanes.

The arrangement would keep self-driving cars and trucks in contact with a central roadway management system. That system would track how lanes are allocated, and could even shift lanes from one direction to the other depending on demand.

“The roadway management system can identify a period of time and a particular lane of the roadway that is best suited to assign to the autonomous vehicle while taking into account an outcome directive,” Amazon’s inventors explain.

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Amazon wins share of Golden Globes spotlight

Jeff Bezos at Golden Globes
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laughs during the Golden Globes, with supporting-actor nominee Simon Helberg at left and presenter Matt Damon at right. (NBC / Golden Globes via YouTube)

Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, is becoming a regular at Hollywood award ceremonies like tonight’s Golden Globes, and now he’s becoming an inspiration for the jokes as well.

Bezos is attending the free-wheeling festivities by virtue of the 11 nominations that Amazon Studios picked up this year, including five for its TV shows and five more for “Manchester by the Sea,” an Amazon-backed theatrical release. Another movie with an Amazon connection, “The Salesman,” was up for best foreign-language film.

One of the video productions, “Goliath,” picked up a best-actor award early in the evening for Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of a washed-up lawyer trying to redeem himself. Toward the end of the show, “Manchester” star Casey Affleck won the Golden Globe for best actor in a dramatic movie.

But for Bezos, the biggest nod of the night may well be the joke that Golden Globes host Jimmy Fallon shot his way.

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Amazon exec worries about state laws on drones

Paul Misener
Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of global innovation policy and communications, speaks at the CES show in Las Vegas. (GeekWire Photo / Monica Nickelsburg)

By Alan Boyle and Monica Nickelsburg

A patchwork of state laws governing drone operations would pose a “real problem” for aerial delivery systems like the one that Amazon is developing, one of the executives in charge of the company’s drone program says.

Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of global innovation policy and communications, discussed the regulatory issues facing delivery drones today during a panel at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Amazon began using drones to make deliveries to a handful of customers in England last month, and the Seattle-based company is expected to ramp up U.S. drone operations in the next couple of years.

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Amazon wins a patent for delivery tunnels

Delivery tunnel
A diagram shows how goods could be delivered via tunnels. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)

Maybe it shouldn’t be that surprising that Amazon has patented a system for delivering goods via a dedicated network of underground tunnels. After all, the Seattle-based company is looking into virtually every other mode of transportation.

But the idea seem ambitious, even for America’s largest online retailer.

Amazon has experimented with delivery services that make use of autonomous drones, bicycle couriers and branded fleets of airplanes and trucks. There’s talk of self-driving trucks, flying warehouses and a system that would let drones hitchhike on trucks and buses.

Even the patent for Amazon’s Treasure Truck leaves the door open for Treasure Boats as well.

Amazon’s patent application for a dedicated network delivery system, above or below ground, was filed almost three years ago. The patent was finally issued and published a little more than a month ago.

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Amazon designs the Borg of delivery drones

Collective UAV
One concept for a collective UAV looks like the Borg Cube from “Star Trek.” (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)

Right now, Amazon’s delivery drones are designed to drop off packages weighing no more than 5 pounds. But what if you could link up lots of drones? Then your bigger packages could be assimilated.

That’s the idea behind a patent application from the Seattle-based online retail giant that focuses on Lego-like assemblies known as “collective UAVs,” or unmanned aerial vehicles.

“A collective UAV may be used to aerially transport virtually any size, weight, or quantity of items, travel longer distances, etc.,” says the application, filed in February 2015 but published just today.

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Will drones be dropping from flying warehouses?

Delivery via airship
This diagram shows an airship-style aerial fulfillment center dropping drones to make deliveries. After each delivery, the drones fly off and are collected for the return trip to the blimp via a replenishment shuttle. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)

Some patents seem so way out that you have to wonder if they’re a joke. Such is the case for Amazon’s patent covering an “airborne fulfillment center” that would launch drones to deliver merchandise from above.

The patent, which was granted in April, came to light this week in the wake of yet another patented Amazon scheme to ward off hackers as well as bow-and-arrow attacks.

“I just unearthed the Death Star of e-commerce,” Zoe Leavitt, a tech analyst for CB Insights, declared Dec. 28 in a tweet.

Hilarity ensued.

The scheme calls for having an airship hover over the intended delivery area at an altitude of 45,000 feet, stocked with goodies that can be loaded aboard drones when an order is made.

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Amazon plans to defend drones from … arrows?

Arrow attack on drone
A diagram from Amazon’s patent application shows a malicious person shooting an arrow at a drone – and missing. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)

If there are any Robin Hoods out there who are thinking about shooting down drones while they’re making deliveries, Amazon has a patented plan to stop you.

The patent, filed in 2014 but published just last week, lays out countermeasures for potential threats ranging from computer hacking to lightning flashes to bows and arrows.

If nothing else, the 33-page application illustrates how many things could possibly go wrong with an autonomous navigation system for unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.

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Delivery drones take small steps toward big deal

Amazon drone
Amazon’s delivery drone comes in for a landing over an English field. (Amazon via YouTube)

Amazon’s multimillion-dollar effort to deliver goods via drone currently has just two customers in the English countryside, but this could well be the way a multibillion-dollar industry gets started.

The current state of Amazon’s Prime Air project came to light today in an online announcement and video from the Seattle-based company, plus a tweet from CEO Jeff Bezos. The first delivery to an actual customer, identified only as Richard B. of Cambridgeshire, occurred on Dec. 7.

In the coming months, Amazon expects to expand the customer base from the current two to dozens of folks living within several miles of a specially designed drone fulfillment center near Cambridge. Hundreds more will be added as time goes on.

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Amazon Go store raises privacy questions

Amazon Go store
The first Amazon Go store, in Seattle, is open only to the company’s employees for now, prior to a scheduled public opening early next year. (GeekWire Photo / Nat Levy)

By Todd Bishop and Alan Boyle

As an online retail giant, Amazon can use its engineering prowess and the vast capabilities of the digital world to track and analyze how customers use its site.

So it’s only natural that the company, in its first brick-and-mortar convenience store, would want to create a real-world version of the same thing.

The new Amazon Go store logs customers in when they walk through the door, knows instantly when they pick an item up from the shelf, automatically tallies what they put in their carts or shopping bags, uses past purchases to improve their shopping experience, and automatically charges their accounts when they walk out — no need for checkout lines — making it nearly frictionless to buy something.

In short, it’s a physical manifestation of Amazon.com.

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