Connection Problem S05E24: Book-ish Stores & Cargo Bots

Just got back from a brief personal trip to the US. Good news: Traveling on a plane with an infant for the first time turned out to be not stressful! Bad news: I got back and was so tired and jetlagged that I dropped my phone and forgot to lock my bike. Phone dead, bike mysteriously still here. So on average, still pretty good, huh? Alas I didn't get to read quite as much as I usually do. But more than enough happened over the last two weeks since I sent out the last Connection Problem. So let's jump right in, shall we?
 

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As always, I appreciate a shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward!

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Dept of Personal Updates

So M and I took the little one to DC and Virginia for a friend's wedding. It was the first time in DC in like 10 years or so, I very briefly lived there nearly 15 years ago and used to travel there a fair bit for a while after. So it's hard for me to figure out if the city just Has Changed A Lot in the same way that every city Has Changed A Lot when you revisit after a long time, or if it has changed a lot more due to, shall we say the political developments of the last 2 years.

Impressions, unsorted:

• The perimeter around the White House was so large and the show of police and other security forces in white or black vans so strong it was reminiscent less of a government building (you know, of the people, by the people, for the people ) and more like something of the mansion of someone who really does not want to have anyone from the public near himself, and would like to make that very clear, thank you very much. So that felt weird. I remember that people would just stroll by the fence of the South Lawn, take a look and some pics, and that was that. How did it turn out like this?
• Boy, Virginia has some nice corners.
• Even though I've always spent a fair bit of time in the US for pretty much all my adult life (and a little before), one thing that'll never cease to catch me off guard when I first re-enter the country is the size of shopping carts at big box stores. I know shops that are smaller than one of these carts. Surely these have been designed to increase conversion rates or spending-per-customer by x percent in extensive testing; so I wonder how come that this particular size hasn't been adopted in Europe? (I sense an internet research rabbit hole in my immediate future.)
• When trying to re-enter the Schengen zone in Frankfurt airport, the automated passport scanners ("Easypass") had just crashed, and so we all stood there waiting for someone to switch it off and on again while staring at the red "access denied" crosses over our heads. Maybe it was just my travel-tired brain making haywire connections there, but I couldn't help but wonder what if Easypass crash but for all borders? I know you can de-automate this again and just put more butts on the human-passport-scanner chairs but in this case, there was no-one there to actually take over, just a few bored looking folks who probably were hitting the refresh button repeatedly under their desk, or something. Now there's a ransomware scenario I'd rather not see play out.
•  It's been interesting to see how electric vehicles—cars, scooters, bikes, kick bikes, and soon cargo bots—have over the last 3-5 years just started weaving themselves into the urban tapestry if you will. Nothing disruptive: They're just here now as if they always had been. Good!
• Even at the wedding, because this is of course DC and everybody's in politics, there were conversations about tech & policy and especially IoT and smart cities and trust and now here's a conversation I never expected to have at a wedding but there you go.

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I also published two things:

Offscreen mag with my op-ed is out now. It's print only, you can order a copy online (it's a great mag).

Over on Netzpiloten.de I wrote about IoT and the need for a trustmark, in German.

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Dept of What I've Been Thinking

Amazon's book(ish) stores: On our last day in DC we headed on over to Georgetown for breakfast and ended up walking into one of Amazon's book(ish) stores. I realize this is Very Specific, but hear me out.

So, over the last couple of years, Amazon has been opening a series of physical retail stores, including in Washington, DC. (Which appears to have opened very recently, like in March?) They are called Amazon Books, and yes, yes, the irony. But I found them surprisingly interesting in an admittedly somewhat inside baseball kind of way.

So it's books, some electronics (Amazon Basics like chargers and cables, Alexa/Echo and compatible smart home-y stuff, toys. Of course a local-ish coffee shop, because this is now par for the course for Big Corp Playing Nice With The Locals. And while friends online pointed out (rightfully) that it's a bit bland and book stores are about discovering surprise niche stuff, I'd argue that the same holds true for every chain book store: Indies are different, but that's not what large book chains are competing with. So let's put that argument aside for a moment.

I was interested mostly in the types of integration of online assets/processes and physical retail, which is of course the intersection where Amazon truly excels, and always has: Of course there's ratings printed out for every product (how many stars, by how many users, and a user comment). Of course there are shelves that use the same categories that you'll find on amazon.com: The 100 Top-selling Kids' Books, Most Popular Hardcovers, etc. etc. There's the whole ecosystem of Alexa-compatible smart home devices, of course. There are If you like this, you'll also like that... style recommendations.

Book recommendations in the Amazon Books store in DC.
 

Also, there's a conspicuous absence of price tags. You can find out the price by scanning a barcode with your Amazon app, which of course is smart because it's the key to unlocking yet more digital data even in the setting of a physical retail store. (If you're a crusty privacy nut—I'm kidding, obvs!—who accidentally walked into an Amazon store, you can also use a physical scanner somewhere in a dusty corner, presumably.)

I dunno. I have to say I kinda liked it, maybe more than I would have wanted to. What can I say? It's well done.

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Some folks testing a cargo bot on a DC sidewalk.

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Dept of Some Things I Noticed

• My good friend, the kind and brilliant Patrick Tanguay, has been guest editing kottke.org and doing an amazing job. If you don't already read it, I highly recommend you subscribe to his excellent newsletter Sentiers. It's one of my absolute favorites.
• Republica, Germany's blogger-meetup-turned-largest-tech-conference, was on last week. I didn't go because I was out of town but ended up schlepping myself there in a very wrinkled and braindead state for a quick meeting outside the town gate if you will: Turns out it brought to town all the folks who are researching trust & tech, which incidentally is something I've also been doing for a long time now. So that exploding interest in encouraging, and I already feel my brain doing that thing where I go omg everybody's doing that now I need to do something else which is stupid so I won't.
• Countdown: 3 weeks to GDPR. 3 more weeks of daily privacy policy updates across All The Apps.
• I'm so late to the party but Dirty Computer (Spotify) is quite the album.
• In a conversation with good buddy Gianfranco Chicco, author of the fantastic The Craftsman newsletter, I learned about Tourneur Goods, an indie SF-based apparel shop/curator. Which is extra cool because the founders Raphaël & Moka are good friends and yet I somehow had completely missed this. So we got one of their beautiful French Le Laboreur worker jackets out of moleskin in a color called hydrone blue which is beautiful and came along for the trip. Highly recommended.

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I wish you an excellent weekend.

Yours truly,
Peter

PS. Please feel free to forward this to friends & colleagues, or send them to tinyletter.com/pbihr

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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018, Peter is a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

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This picture and the one at the top are via the beautiful Public Domain Review.