Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos yesterday said Donald Trump should accept scrutiny by the press instead of trying to shun the media.
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Bezos’s comments came on the day that Trump escalated his feud with members of the media, calling a television reporter a “sleaze” and sarcastically calling another male TV newsman “a beauty”.
Amazon is estimated to be a third of the size of market leader Flipkart but has reached this point from scratch in under three years. He noted that when the website first made ground India, some investors believed it would go the China way.
Statistically, that’s true. According to a report released in January from the Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, the number of Amazon Prime memberships jumped 35% in 2015, up to 54 million. “I think of it as a gold standard culture for innovation and pioneering work”. One of the reasons why it’s so successful is because domestic players are being fiscally irresponsible and making a lot of business mistakes. We can only assume Amazon doesn’t think Android TV is enough of a competitor to remove it, but then why not offer the Prime Video app on that device?
Bezos said, “It’s hard to overstate how big of an impact this will have on society over the next 20 years”.
With 1,000+ people working on Alexa software and Echo hardware, there is now no other company that brought about resources to this level.
When Amazon pulled the Google Chromecast and Apple TV streaming hardware from their storefronts back in October, it set the tech world on fire. The answer to that is simple: the retail giant is waiting for “acceptable business terms”.
“You always heave to ask yourself, how do you want to spend your time and your energy?”
“I’m very proud of the culture we have at Amazon”, Bezos said. “It’s really the only effective defense”.
Bezos talked about wonderful progress in natural language and other areas such as computer vision, which he said are driven by new and better algorithms, vastly improved computing power, and huge amounts of data coming together to solve new problems.
“Let me assure you, this is the best planet”.
“Move forward; don’t lose sleep over it”.
Thiel is reported to have waged a decade-long war on the news site, including bankrolling a recent lawsuit by Hulk Hogan against Gawker.
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Bezos didn’t specifically defend Gawker. “We live in this awesome democracy with wonderful freedom of speech”. We need to protect it, and the way we will is by going out into space.
