It’s like Kickstarter for Alexa. Artists, startups and organizations often turn to Kickstarter to launch new products and reach a specific funding goal to help the project take off. Now Amazon is doing something similar, except that the trillion-dollar company certainly doesn’t need help raising money for its production process.
If a concept reaches Amazon’s pre-sale goal, it will arrive at your doorstep this summer. If interest is lacking, Amazon will not pay and buyers will not be charged.
If Amazon relied on this Kickstarter model more often, it would effectively obtain additional user data that could help it launch numerous products – some perhaps similar to others already on the market – while minimizing the chance and cost of any failures in the process , potentially making it much more of a fearsome competitor.
The three new concepts presented this week come from Amazon inventors, designers and engineers: For starters, there’s a $ 89.99 handsfree smart sticky note printer the size of a receipt printer that you see next to a box register. It works with Alexa to print shopping lists, reminders and calendar events on small Post-it notes. Meanwhile, a $ 34.99 smart scale lets you ask Alexa to weigh 200 calories from blueberries and provides nutritional information for thousands of ingredients and foods based on weight. Finally, the cuckoo clock ($ 79.99) features a pop-out mechanical cuckoo bird, built-in speakers for timers and alarms and can be mounted on the wall or sitting on a shelf.
The company said it produced some viable models for each item to ensure that development was possible.
The company told CNN Business that it will not publicly list the target value for the new products, but the product pages will display a percentage progress bar to show how close they are to the benchmark.