Author: azeeadmin

In a tweet this morning, Amazon founder (and the world’s richest man) Jeff Bezos announced that he and his wife were creating a $2 billion fund to finance a network of non-profit preschools and donate funds to organizations helping homeless families.

“The Day 1 Families Fund will issue annual leadership awards to organizations and civic groups doing compassionate, needle moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families,” Bezos writes in a statement.

There’s also a Day 1 Academies Fund which will launch a network of free, Montessori-inspired schools in low income neighborhoods.

Bezos said that the schools will employ the “same set of principles that have driven Amazon .” Which, for Bezos, means an intense focus on the customer.

The funds are called the “Day 1” funds because they align with Bezos’ stated philosophy of “maintaining a Day 1 mentality.”

Starting a network of free schools for underprivileged children and giving out money to help organizations that are working to alleviate the needs of the nation’s homeless are inarguably good things, but it’s unclear whether these individual steps can work to address more systemic problems that underly problems of homelessness and a lack of educational opportunity that exists more broadly in the country.

Perhaps Bezos was inspired to battle the nation’s homeless plight when he saw this report on Vickie Shannon Allen, an Amazon employee who became homeless after a workplace accident cost her her job.

It’s also a bit rich to see Bezos tackle the issue of homelessness after his company was the mustache twirling arch nemesis of a bill in Seattle that would have created a tax to finance homeless shelters and low income housing.

Fortune has more on Amazon’s work to kill the measure.

Amazon opposed the tax, originally floated at $500 a year for each of its Seattle employees. To signal its displeasure, the company halted construction on a new tower, and suggested it might sublet 722,000 square feet it had just leased in a signature downtown building. When the council approved a reduced $275 tax, Amazon restarted construction on the tower. But it also joined Starbucksand other local employers to fund a group, No Tax on Jobs, that raised over $300,000 to pay for signature gatherers for a referendum to repeal the head tax. In a statement after the vote, Amazon vice president Drew Herdener said, “Today’s vote by the Seattle City Council to repeal the tax on job creation is the right decision for the region’s economic prosperity.”

With the new fund, Bezos joins a long line of incredibly mega-rich people (cf. Chan-Zuckerberg and Gates Foundations… and Warren Buffett) who are taking it upon themselves to fund programs for social good.

It’s part of philanthropy’s long history of ignoring broader structural issues as a way for billionaires to treat their contributions as a gift rather than an obligation.

Here’s Bezo’s tweet announcing the new funds.

Following reports that Amazon is preparing to launch a new device that would allow Fire TV owners to record live TV, Dish’s AirTV has just done the same. The company announced the launch of a “Local Channels DVR” feature for AirTV customers that lets users watch and record live TV both in and outside the home. The recorded content is made available within Dish’s Sling TV application, alongside subscribers other Cloud DVR recordings.

Dish first unveiled its AirTV Player, a 4K media streamer set-top box, at CES 2017, then later began doling out digital antennas to Sling TV subscribers with the AirTV Player as part of deal for pre-paying for the company’s streaming service.

This year, it expanded its hardware lineup to include a new device, just called the AirTV, which is a networked TV tuner that doesn’t connect directly to a TV, but rather streams local programming via Wi-Fi.

As with Plex – and, presumably, with Amazon’s forthcoming plans – being able to record and stream from live TV is one way companies are working around cable providers, or having to make content deals in order to expand their streaming line-ups. It gives cord cutters way to watch hard-to-access programming, like local news and sports, for example.

Dish’s new Local Channels DVR feature will require an external storage device in order to work, which is not included.

This means it’s similar to something like Tablo’s OTA DVR for cord cutters, which has customers attach their own USB hard drive. In AirTV’s case, the maximum supported drive size is 2 TB.

The DVR also supports dual-tuner functionality, so customers can record up to two shows at once, or watch one live while recording another.

TV show recordings can also be scheduled by the episode or by the series.

Once AirTV is set up, the recorded content is available through the Sling TV app across platforms, including iOS, Android, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku.

It will be found in the same menu as the Cloud DVR content – where you find the movies and shows you record through Sling TV’s DVR. But these recordings will have an OTA icon next to them to help users differentiate the AirTV content from the rest.

Upon playback, the content can be paused, rewound, or fast-forwarded. In addition, if watching a recording in real-time, users can pause the live TV stream.

To gain access to the feature, AirTV users will have to update their device and restart their Sling TV app.

iHeartMedia has agreed to acquire Stuff Media, the company that owns the HowStuffWorks podcasting business.

The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but both the Wall Street Journal and Variety are reporting that the acquisition price was $55 million.

According to the announcement, Stuff Media podcasts will retain their branding and the organization will remain headquartered in Atlanta, while President and CEO Conal Byrne joins iHeartMedia as the head of its podcasting division.

HowStuffWorks was originally founded in 1998 and had a number of owners before spinning out as an independent company and raising a $15 million Series A last year. In recent years, its focus has shifted from explainer articles and videos to podcasts, and in fact, it says those podcasts receive more than 61 million downloads and streams each month, with Stuff You Should Know surpassing 500 million downloads this year.

iHeartMedia, meanwhile, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. (The media company was formerly known as Clear Channel.) Prior to announcing the acquisition, it was already working with   Stuff Media on its true crime podcast Atlanta Monster.

“Stuff Media is the original trailblazer of the podcasting industry, and we’ve been impressed by its ability to grow a massive, loyal audience over the past decade, led by a strong, experienced and cohesive management team, who we welcome to iHeartMedia,”  said iHeartMedia’s chairman and CEO Bob Pittman in the announcement. “This strategic acquisition will pair Stuff Media’s wildly popular content and strong creative capabilities with iHeartMedia’s extensive resources and massive scale through our digital platforms, social reach and broadcast radio stations, introducing podcasts to the vast majority of the country and offering even more unique opportunities for advertisers to reach their consumers.”

The Danish Supreme Court has upheld large fines issued to several Uber drivers for operating without a taxi license, at a time when the ride-hailing giant was still running its non-licensed p2p driver UberPop service in the market.

The decision could mean more than a thousand additional Uber drivers who sold rides in Denmark could also be faced with a big bill.

The four drivers had appealed fines issues by the national court — of between DKK 40,000 (~$6,270) and DKK 486,500 (~$76,200) — but the Supreme Court judged the amounts to be appropriate.

The level of fines is based on the number of Uber rides each driver carried out. In the case of the largest fine the unnamed individual had apparently run up 5,427 Uber rides.

Uber drivers in Denmark have also faced demands for unpaid taxes this year, after Danish tax authorities found tax avoidance among almost all of them.

Meanwhile Uber pulled out of Denmark early last year, blaming a new taxi law which includes requirements such as mandatory fare meters and seat sensors. Though it says it continues to engage with local authorities to lobby for the kind of tech-friendly reform which would enable it to return.

When it left Denmark the company said it had more than 2,000 drivers in the market and 300,000 users.

According to AP, today’s Supreme Court judgement paves the way for fines to be issued against a further 1,500 people who had also driven for Uber without a taxi license. A spokesman for the Copenhagen police told Reuters it would assess the verdict and decide how to proceed next week.

At the end of 2016 Danish prosecutors sought to bring a test case against Uber’s European business, seeking to indict it on charges of assisting two drivers of breaking local taxi laws — likely contributing to Uber’s decision to shut up shop there.

In November of the same year the Danish Supreme Court also ruled Uber to be an illegal taxi service, rather than a ride-sharing platform as the company’s lawyers had sought to argue.

Since then Europe’s supreme court, the ECJ, has cemented that view of the business in the region, ruling at the end of last year that Uber is a transport company, not a platform — and locking the company into a new era of needing to work with local authorities to try to reform taxi laws, rather than just burning rubber over their rulebooks.

Under its current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber is certainly trying to put founder Travis Kalanick’s legacy way of doing business behind it — dispensing apologies and emollient words.

And seeking to enact a pivot to become a multi-modal transport platform — to be able to offer cities something other than just more traffic and congestion on already clogged and polluted roads.

This week it also debuted a new streamlined brand look, after hiring a new CMO Rebecca Messina, who spent two decades selling sugared water at Coca-Cola.

But even as Uber seeks to carve out a new, more progressive looking path its past practices keep coming back to bite it in the boot.

It’s not only the company’s ambitions being dented either; In Denmark, for example, it’s thousands of people who put their faith in its platform to sell driving services now faced with being on the hook for thousands of dollars worth of fines apiece.

Commenting on the Supreme Court ruling an Uber spokesperson told us: “We are very disappointed for the drivers involved and our top priority is to support them during this difficult time.

“We are changing the way we do business and are operating in line with local laws across Europe, connecting with professionally licensed drivers. Drivers who used the Uber app were key in providing a safe, reliable and affordable option to help hundreds of thousands of Danes get around Copenhagen.”

We also asked whether Uber would be paying fines issued to drivers in Denmark as a result of them offering an unlicensed service in the market. The company did not respond directly to our question, saying only that it is in the process of reviewing the Supreme Court ruling and its implications.

Cloud services — where our data, apps and computing power are all being managed in servers owned by others, many miles from where we are sitting — have taken off like a rocket in the decade with the rise of smaller devices, but in the business world, hybrid solutions — mixing cloud with on-premise architectures — remains the order of the day. And today, a provider of hybrid cloud services has raised a round of funding to capitalise on that. Datrium, a provider of back-up and other services for businesses that store and use data in hybrid environments, has raised $60 million in a Series D round of funding.

The company is not disclosing its valuation — we’re asking — but PitchBook estimates that it was at $222 million pre-money, putting it at $282 million post-money. This was an upround compared to previous raises, but it’s also playing on a more modest field than some of its competitors. As a point of comparison, another notable hybrid cloud back-up and data management startup, Rubrik, raised $180 million at a $1.3 billion valuation last year.

Interestingly, Datrium and Rubrik share an investor. This latest round was led by Samsung’s Catalyst Fund, with Icon Ventures, NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating. Lightspeed (whose investing partner founded and leads Rubrik) also backs Rubrik.

Large enterprises are gradually making the move to the cloud, but they are doing so while also continuing to use their legacy services and architectures — in part to continue sweating those assets, and in part because if something isn’t broken, it’s tempting fate to try to fix it. As a result of that, hybrid cloud services have been a big business up to now, with estimates that it will be a $44.6 billion market this year, and growing to $97.6 billion by 2023.

“As a world leader in memory and storage technologies, we’re always looking for novel and innovative ways to advance datacenter technology,” said Shankar Chandran, senior vice president and managing director, Samsung Catalyst Fund, in a statement. “At this unique moment in time—when data is powering the economy—cutting-edge infrastructure, like Datrium’s hybrid cloud platform, will help enterprises overcome major obstacles in data analysis and storage. We are excited to be an investor in their future.”

And with a market of that size, startups are not only ones targeting it. Google has gone all-in on hybrid; VMware is also interested; and HPE has made some acquisitions to expand its hybrid computing business, as has Microsoft (at least twice), and Cisco.

Datrium — with its flagship DVX platform — has been one of the hopefuls in providing a specific area of data services to enterprises operating hybrid environments: data management and data backup, with customers ranging from large players in healthcare and finance through to media and entertainment. Interestingly, it’s doing so at a time when others like Rubrik have gradually been building more cloud-only solutions to expand beyond hybrid environments customers relying on these.

With this round Michael Mullany of Icon Ventures — formerly a VP of marketing and products for VMware — is joining the board of Datrium.

“We are thrilled to partner with Samsung and Icon Ventures to expand our technical and geographical momentum,” said Tim Page, CEO of Datrium, in a statement. “Enterprises globally have the same problems in simplifying compute and data management across on-prem and cloud. Where SANs don’t even have a  path to cloud, traditional HCI has too many tradeoffs for core datacenters – backup requires separate purchasing and administration, and cloud DR automation is seldom guaranteed. Larger enterprises are realizing that Datrium software offers them a simpler path.”

In the 1990s when the web was young, companies like Yahoo, created directories of web pages to help make them more discoverable. Hacera wants to bring that same idea to blockchain, and today it announced the launch of the Hacera Network Registry.

CEO Jonathan Levi says that blockchains being established today risk being isolated because people simply can’t find them. If you have a project like the IBM -Maersk supply chain blockchain announced last month, how does an interested party like a supplier or customs authority find it and ask to participate? Up until the creation of this registry, there was no easy way to search for projects.

Early participants include heavy hitters like Microsoft, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, SAP and Oracle, who are linking to projects being created on their platforms. The registry supports projects based on major digital ledger communities including Hyperledger, Quorum, Cosmos, Ethereum and Corda. The Hacera Network Registry is built on Hyperledger Fabric, and the code is open source. (Levi was Risk Manager for Hyperledger Fabric 1.0.)

Hacera Network Registry page

While early sponsors of the project include IBM and Hyperledger Fabric, Levi stressed the network is open to all. Blockchain projects can create information pages, not unlike a personal LinkedIn page, and Hacera verifies the data before adding it to the registry. There are currently more than 20 permissioned networks in the registry, and Hacera is hoping this is just the beginning.

Jerry Cuomo, VP of blockchain technologies at IBM, says for blockchain to grow it will require a way to register, lookup, join and transact across a variety of blockchain solutions. “As the number of blockchain consortiums, networks and applications continues to grow we need a means to list them and make them known to the world, in order to unleash the power of blockchain,” Cuomo told TechCrunch. Hacera is solving that problem.

This is exactly the kind of underlying infrastructure that the blockchain requires to expand as a technology. Cuomo certainly recognizes this.”We realized from the start that you cannot do blockchain on your own; you need a vibrant community and ecosystem of like-minded innovators who share the vision of helping to transform the way companies conduct business in the global economy,” he said.

Hacera understands that every cloud vendor wants people using their blockchain service. Yet they also see that to move the technology forward, there need to be some standard ways of conducting business, and they want to provide that layer. Levi has a broader vision for the network beyond pure discoverability. He hopes eventually to provide the means to share data through the registry.

Sometimes fake news lives inside of Facebook as photos and videos designed to propel misinformation campaigns, instead of off-site on news articles that can generate their own ad revenue. To combat these politically rather than financially-motivated meddlers, Facebook has to be able to detect fake news inside of images and the audio that accompanies video clips. Today its expanding its photo and video fact checking program from four countries to all 23 of its fact-checking partners in 17 countries.

“Many of our third-party fact-checking partners have expertise evaluating photos and videos and are trained in visual verification techniques, such as reverse image searching and analyzing image metadata, like when and where the photo or video was taken” says Facebook product manager Antonia Woodford. “As we get more ratings from fact-checkers on photos and videos, we will be able to improve the accuracy of our machine learning model.”

The goal is for Facebook to be able to automatically spot manipulated images, out of context images that don’t show what they say they do, or text and audio claims that are provably false.

In last night’s epic 3,260-word security manifesto, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that “The definition of success is that we stop cyberattacks and coordinated information operations before they can cause harm.” That means using AI to proactively hunt down false news rather than waiting for it to be flagged by users. For that, Facebook needs AI training data that will be produced as exhaust from its partners’ photo and video fact checking operations.

Facebook is developing technology tools to assist its fact checkers in this process. “we use optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from photos and compare that text to headlines from fact-checkers’ articles. We are also working on new ways to detect if a photo or video has been manipulated” Woodford notes, referring to DeepFakes that use AI video editing software to make someone appear to say or do something they haven’t.

Image memes were one of the most popular forms of disinformation used by the Russian IRA election interferers. The problem is that since they’re so easily re-shareable and don’t require people to leave Facebook to view them, they can get viral distribution from unsuspecting users who don’t realize they’ve become pawns in a disinformation campaign.

Facebook could potentially use the high level of technical resources necessary to build fake news meme-spotting AI as an argument for why Facebook shouldn’t be broken up. With Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp combined, the company gains economies of scale when it comes to fighting the misinformation scourage.

Walmart is ramping up its grocery delivery business on the international stage with today’s announcement that it has acquired the crowdsourced, on-demand delivery marketplace Cornershop for $225 million. The rapidly growing service offers on-demand delivery from supermarkets, pharmacies and specialty food retailers in Mexico and Chile, which will continue following the deal’s close, Walmart says.

Founded in 2015, Cornershop last year raised $21 million in a round led by Accel, according to Crunchbase, in order to expand its service in Latin America. At the time, CEO Oskar Hjertonsson credited Instacart’s success in the U.S. as inspiring enthusiasm for grocery delivery in other international markets, as well, saying ” I think Instacart can build a profitable business in the US, as can we down here.”

To date, it has raised $31.7 million, Crunchbase says. Other investors include ALLVP, Creandum, NMT Network, Jackson Square Ventures, and Endeavour Catalyst.

Similar to Instacart, Cornershop works with contractors who visit the stores to shop then deliver customers’ orders. However, it also lets you order from several stores – like grocers, speciality wine or meat shops, and others – in one order.

The service has been expanding its reach a fast pace, Walmart’s announcement points out. Over the past 12 months, it has seen the number of unique customers double.

Cornershop’s three founders, including CEO Oskar Hjertonsson; COO Daniel Undurraga, and CTO Juan Pablo Cuevas, and their teams, will continue to run the business following Walmart’s acquisition.

“We are focused on making life easier for customers and associates by building strong local businesses, powered by Walmart,” said Judith McKenna, president and CEO of Walmart International, in a statement.

“Cornershop’s digital expertise, technology and capabilities will strengthen our successful businesses in Mexico and Chile and provide learning for other markets in which we operate. This is an opportunity to leverage both of our brands, as well as Walmart’s strong supply chain and store network. Combining Cornershop’s innovative, crowdsourced delivery platform with Walmart’s unique assets will allow us to accelerate growth for both companies, delighting our customers by saving them both time and money. We are excited to welcome Cornershop to the Walmart family,” she added.

The acquisition is one of several investments Walmart has made in order to compete on grocery delivery in international markets.

The retailer just last month announced it co-led a $500 million investment in Chinese online grocery service Dada-JD Daojia, which is part-owned by JD. And in January, Walmart partnered with Rakuten on a wide-ranging partnership that includes grocery delivery in Japan as well as the sale of Rakuten e-readers, e-books and audiobooks in the U.S.

Walmart’s top rival Amazon has also been focused on international expansions of its grocery delivery business, with launches in markets like London, Berlin and Tokyo, for example. It’s also aiming to bring its online shop to more countries through international versions of its site, as well as acquisitions of its own. Last year, Amazon bought SOUQ to go after the Middle East, and today it says SOUQ shoppers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can now shop over 1 million products from Amazon’s Global Store.

Walmart says the Cornershop acquisition will be subject to regulatory approval and is expected by the end of the year.

If you are a woman who has used the internet to buy something, particularly if you are a woman who has used the internet to buy something in the Bay Area, there’s a very high likelihood you have seen ads for Rothy’s everywhere you go on social media, particularly Facebook. In fact, they’ve likely been following you for years. The reason: spending big on Facebook and, to a slightly lesser extent, Instagram, has paid off hugely for the three-year-old, San Francisco-based company, which makes shoes out of recycled materials.

Its signature product is its ballet shoe for women, which comes in two silhouettes — a rounded and a pointed-toe version — and 21 patterns. But like most e-commerce brands, Rothy’s hasn’t been content to stop with one apparently winning product. Instead, earlier this year, the company introduced a women’s loafer, followed by a line of shoes for girls ages five through12 that mirror its ballet shoe line for grown-ups.

Today, it’s extending its product line again, introducing what it calls a sneaker, though it’s really a sneaker in as much as Vans classic slip-on skateboarding shoes are sneakers. In short, they’re fun and colorful, but you probably don’t want to play basketball in them.

Last summer, to learn more, we’d talked with Rothy’s cofounders Roth Martin and Stephen Hawthornthwaite about the company, which has so far raised just $7 million in funding — all of which closed around the time of our conversation.

Yesterday, we chatted with a newer executive at the company, Kerry Horton Cooper, who joined Rothy’s president earlier this year after working previously as the COO an CMO of ModCloth and as a VP at Walmart.com, among other roles. We asked if Rothy’s is raising another round any time soon. She also caught us up on what else is happening at the startup, which has now grown to 500 employees, including 450 who work out of the company’s own, 100,000-square-foot factory in Southern China.

TC: Rothy’s is a hot brand. Will we see another round close in 2018?

KC: We haven’t raised anything beyond that one institutional round that closed last summer. We’re profitable and cash-flow positive, unlike a lot of other [newer brands] so that hasn’t been an urgent issue, though it’s something we entertain as we think about what’s strategically important.

TC: How many shoes has Rothy’s sold?

KC: We don’t disclose that, but in May, we passed what we’d sold in all of 2017, and our sales in 2017 were probably 1,000 times the sales were generated in 2015. I think we clearly have product-market fit.

TC: You introduced some newer products earlier this year — a loafer and a kids’ line of shoes. Why?

KC: The durability and washability of our shoes appeals to a lot of people and to a lot of parents, some of whom especially enjoy the mommy-and-me look. The shoes are also easy to dress up and dress down, though it’s still a small part of our business.

TC: Are Rothy’s shoes still available exclusively through your website? 

KC: We also opened a store on San Francisco’s Fillmore street in May, an old cobbler’s store that we restored.

TC: Is that the first step to more stores in more cities?

KC: There are obvious other markets like New York and Washington and Boston — heavy transit cities. There’s probably a little more opportunity as we think of more locations here (in California). But we want to be measured in how we approach this to ensure the retail strategy is sustainable.

TC: Rothy’s has its own factory in China but I assume you are past the point of making your shoes to order.

KC: We aren’t doing made to order. There are core colors that we always want to have in stock, and we’re pretty clear about just how much we need to make. When it comes to newer colors, we have a supply chain we can chase. We’ll launch some things on a Thursday and basically, by the next day, we can tell what the winners are. We also produce limited runs of shoes to surprise and delight people visiting the store. We’ve played with embroidery, for example.

TC: Why introduce slip-on sneakers, too?

KC: It’s kind of an iconic stye that we’ve been watching for a while but we wanted to wait to introduce to get the right fit and appearance first, especially because we don’t have laces to make the fit right. But these, too, are made from all recycled materials. They’re machine washable. They also have a foam wedge that provides more cushioning.

TC: Has Rothy’s marketing strategy changed at all? Judging by my Facebook feed, it has not.

KC: Social media continues to be a really important channel for us, though the largest channel is word of mouth. It’s a very distinctive-looking shoe, so people stop and ask people about them, which increases returns as more people wear them. But Facebook and Instagram are the biggest drivers. On Instagram, our customers send us more beautiful photography than we could do ourselves and we’ve leveraged that. We’ve also dabbled with influencers, though less at the Kardashian level and more around interesting women with interesting style who other women look up to.

Mapillary, the Swedish startup that wants to take on Google and others in mapping the world by way of a crowdsourced database of street-level imagery, is taking an interesting step in the development of its platform. The company is now working with Amazon, and specifically its Rekognition API, to detect and read text in Mapillary’s database of 350 million images.

The first application resulting from the new feature will come from a large US city (that Mapillary will not name right now), which plans to use the information that will now be “readable” from parking signs to build a parking app.

“Parking is a super hot space and [parking information] is one of the most asked-for pieces of data that people want to use Mapillary for,” said Jan Erik Solem, CEO and co-founder of the Malmo, Sweden-based startup. He said that while parking will be the first application and one that he expects other cities to use as well, there will be other applications coming out from matching up text in Mapillary’s images, and subsequently being able to pinpoint exact latitude and longitude for specific locations. “We’re starting with parking signs in the US because parking is one of the biggest issues in towns today, but text recognition will apply to many different types of objects and images, such as building facades.”

While it might sound odd that a city might not have a grip on the state of its on-street parking, this is apparently the case: cities, Solem said, have general analogue maps indicating parking regulations, but many of them lack digitised versions, which means that when they want to build new services (and in particular services that help them raise revenues either from parking fees, or parking fines), or consider whether they need to build more parking, they lack the datasets to be able to either.

Mapillary cites research that says that parking problems collectively cost $73 billion in the US — presumably that includes not just the fines that people pay for overstaying, but the lost revenues in areas where they overstay, but no one knows.

Notably, Mapillary is referring to its use of the Rekognition API as a “collaboration” with Amazon, although when I asked about the wording, he was a little less willing to collaborate with me.

“I can’t comment on what Amazon is doing or why,” he said. “It would be nice to have that part of the announcement, but it ended up not working out this time.” It seems that the two have been working together for a while now, although that is all under NDA.

Amazon has been doing a lot in the world of mapping, however, both as a provider of data to third parties, and for its own services. For starters, the company is a logistics powerhouse, and part of the reason for that is because of its intelligent routing around areas to figure out how best to collect and deliver and distribute goods bought and sold on its marketplace.

But that is just one part of how mapping and location are used at Amazon. The company uses maps from Here, and had at one point been rumored to be one of the parties interested in buying the mapping firm. Meanwhile, it also has built (and acquired other mapping IP and talent in the process) a mapping API, similar to Google’s, for developers that want to build apps that use location services in any way for any Amazon device.

For now, that has mainly meant building apps for its Fire tablet and Amazon’s burgeoning range of Echo devices, but Amazon is also very focused on also having a role to play in other kinds of hardware, such as connected vehicles.

In January, Toyota announced that it would be working with Amazon to integrate Alexa into its cars, and separately, Amazon has also been racking up patents in the area of autonomous vehicles.

In other words, there is a clear opportunity for a company like Mapillary, providing a viable alternative to Google Maps in terms of street-level imagery, to work as a strong partner to Amazon in these services, specifically in indexing and providing information about what is around you, and how to route you most efficiently from A to B.

And as a side note, as with other artificial intelligence platforms, Rekognition is also learning from each time that it’s used in an application, so through its collaboration with Mapillary, it too is picking up more detailed data about street signs and what they say, and where they are used.

Mapillary itself is an interesting startup that I’ve long thought is one to watch. Solem is a computer vision specialist who sold his previous company, the facial recognition startup Polar Rose, to Apple; and his latest venture has raised $24.5 million so far from the likes of Sequoia, Atomico, Navinfo, BMW and Samsung — leading the way to building some interesting inroads with potential customers.

One of these happens to include Here, Amazon’s mapping provider. Others are under NDA. Together, they are now also feeding Mapillary images to contribute to its wider database, although Solem said about 80 percent of its content of 350 million images still comes from individuals, much like Waze. “Everyone either seems to have a need to solve some kind of problem, or a desire to fix maps around the world,” he said.

While text recognition and reading is one problem Mapillary is tackling today, the next will be helping people capture more images, more automatically. “The next iteration of our product will help people fill out coverage,” Solem said without elaborating more on the details. “We are building out tools to deploy capture tasking.”