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Kevin J. Delaney is the founder of Reset Work, a newsletter about work and leadership in the pandemic era and beyond.
This post is part of Reset Work s weekly business book briefing, republished with permission.
In it, Delaney breaks down Working Backwards, a new book from Amazon alums Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.
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Much of the coverage of Jeff Bezos s recent announcement that he plans to cede the CEO role at Amazon noted the retailer s idiosyncratic corporate practices. Perhaps most famous of them is the fact that important meetings at Amazon begin with 20 minutes of silence. During that time, executives quietly read six-page narrative memos presenting the matter to be discussed.
Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy told AWS employees there’s “still plenty of time” to determine who will lead the cloud computing division when he takes over as CEO of parent company Amazon.com this summer.
A 24-year Amazon veteran, Jassy launched AWS in 2006 and served as its senior vice president before becoming AWS CEO in April 2016. Yesterday, he was was named as the successor to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who will be stepping down and taking a new role as executive chair of the company’s board.
Amazon made the announcement as part of its fourth-quarter earnings release for 2020 yesterday. The transition is due to take place in the third quarter, which starts July 1. Jassy’s replacement has yet to be named.
Amazon s Alexa could control your smart home without you knowing
The smart assistant can start acting automatically on its hunches about what you want, Amazon s site says
Credit: Telegraph
Amazon s smart assistant Alexa can start making its own decisions about when to turn your lights off or what temperature to set your thermostat.
The company said on its US customer support website that users could set up automatic actions for what are known as hunches , where Alexa picks up patterns and spots when users break that pattern, for example forgetting to turn the lights off before bed.
In the past, Alexa has acted on these hunches by reminding users and asking them whether they want to stick with their normal routine.
Report: Amazon working on Alexa-enabled device to track and measure sleep disorder
January 6, 2021 at 10:29 am
Dave Limp, Amazon’s devices and services chief, has introduced a number of Alexa-enabled products over the years. (GeekWire File Photo)
Amazon is reportedly working on a new Alexa-enabled bedside device that does more than soothe you to sleep with white noise or wake you up with an alarm. The device could assess how well you’re actually sleeping.
Business Insider reported this week that the small device that it has exclusively learned about will be used to detect and track sleep apnea.
According to people familiar with the project, contactless technology will be used to monitor the sleeping disorder using “millimeter-wave radar to track sleeping and breathing patterns of individual users and detect subtleties in their movements that could come from stoppages of breathing associated with sleep apnea.”
OneWeb launches 36 satellites to join its global broadband constellation on orbit
In a return to active launch, constellation satellite operator OneWeb has sent 36 new satellites to join its existing spacecraft on orbit. This is the third large batch of OneWeb satellites to be delivered, after an initial launch of six in 2019, and then a second and third launch of 34 satellites each in February and March of this year. The company then ran into financial difficulties that led to its filing for bankruptcy protection in March, before emerging from said bankruptcy in July thanks to a deal funded in part by the U.K. government, and in part by Bharti Global. In short, it’s