Lab126 is in the Middle of a Kindle Hiring Spree in Boston
It looks like Lab126 is about to open a new office in Boston, Mass.
The Boston Globe’s tech blog has discovered that Amazon is holding a private recruiting event at the end of the month. It’s their second recruiting party in Boston in as many months, and it's being held in a restaurant only a few blocks from the MIT campus. The invite for the first event drops a few revealing hints about Amazon’s future plans (or so I choose to believe):
If you cannot see the image, the second paragraph says that Amazon is "working on a revolutionary V1 product that will allow us to deliver Digital Media to our customers in new ways and disrupt the current marketplace." Curiously enough, that quoted section is missing from the invite for the second event.
Update: It’s been pointed out to me on Twitter that 30 December 2013 did not fall on a Thursday. 30 January 2014 does, which means that the screenshot above is the early flawed description for the event coming up in a couple weeks.
Would anyone care to guess what that revolutionary product might be?
Rumors have circulated in the past that Amazon is working on a set-top box, a smartphone, and even more smartphones, Assuming those rumors are true then this new product would have to be something different. And I don’t think a new ebook reader or tablet would qualify as revolutionary, so those are out as well (plus they would be developed by existing teams).
So what do you think the new device is going to be?
I’m thinking that it could be some type of wearable. I don’t think this product niche is ever going to amount to much, but wearables (smartwatches, Google Glass, and the like) are a hot topic right now. Amazon might want to put a team together just to explore the possibilities.
The market for wearables is awfully small at the moment and populated by marginally functional products, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t grow. In fact, the ebook reader market in 2007 looked a lot like the wearables market does today. Perhaps Amazon might be able to upset the wearables market with a new product just like they did with the Kindle?
P.S. Amazon might also be recruiting developers for a software product; an app can be just as revolutionary as a new gadget. Would anyone care to guess what that might be?
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