Amazon unveils delivery by drone within 30 Minutes

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Amazon unveils delivery by drone: Prime Air. No, seriously

Summary: The retail giant is taking delivery to the next level by using unmanned drones. But don't hold your breath for the service to launch any time soon.




Not content with next-day delivery service through its Prime program, Amazon wants orders to land on people's front porches in as little as half an hour.
Just when you thought the technology industry couldn't get any stranger, the latest idea from the retail giant is to offer an audacious delivery-by-drone service.
The company has been working on the "octocopter" project in a secret research and development lab at its Seattle, Wash.-based headquarters for months in efforts to ramp up its competition against its rivals. According to the program, the octocopter drones will pick up packages in small buckets at Amazon's fulfillment centers and fly directly to customers' nearby in as little as 30 minutes after they hit the "buy" button.Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos unveiled the new service, dubbed Prime Air, to CBS anchor Charlie Rose.
But the service won't launch overnight. In fact, it may take as long as four to five years for Prime Air drones to take to the skies, as the program is still subject to safety and regulatory rules by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Bezos also admitted that it wouldn't work for everything, but would be ideal for smaller items.

The CBS show offered an unprecedented inside look at Amazon's warehouses where deliveries are processed and delivered. It also explored Bezos' ideas, thoughts, and where the company he founded in 1994 is forging ahead.

Microsoft still open sources more technologies than many think

Summary: Don't look now, but Microsoft is continuing to open source many of its own technologies, even though it is still competing with Linux and Android vendors.

Every once in a while, it's good to remember that Microsoft is a big company full of individuals with many different priorities, view points and strategies -- especially when it comes to open source.
While the company continues to pursue Android developers for alleged IP violations with one hand, it also is attempting to meet developers where they are by supporting open-source tools and technologies. Just last week, Microsoft released an alpha version of a Node.js plug-in for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013. The week before, members of the ASP.Net team at Microsoft talked up some of their projects in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA).
In the Reddit, the ASP.Net team participants noted that many of them have been at Microsoft five years or less. But "(s)ince then we've open sourced 90% of ASP.NET, MVC, Web API, all of Entity Framework, SignalR, VS Web Essentials, yada yada yada. We also have all the Azure SDK stuff open sourced on GitHub as well."
Scott Hanselman, one of the team members who took part in the Reddit AMA, noted on his blog that Node Tools for Visual Studio "is open source from the start, and has taken contributions from the very start. It supports Editing, Intellisense, Profiling, npm, Debugging both locally and remotely (while running the server on Windows/MacOS/Linux), as well publishing to Azure Web Sites and Cloud Service."
Microsoft had been working with Joyent since 2011 to get Node.js to work on Windows and Azure. Node is a tool/framework that uses JavaScript as its scripting engine.Hanselman also shared last week a slide that showed off a "partial list" of open-sourced technologies are part of Visual Studio 2013. It's quite the list.
There are even more Microsoft technologies, especially in the app-development and web-development space, available under open-source licenses these days. TypeScript, Microsoft's "superset" of JavaScript, is available under the Apache 2.0 license. HDInsight for Windows Azure is "100 percent Apache Hadoop." The Softies recently allowed projects hosted on CodePlex to include those under a GPLv3 license.
Yes, Microsoft is continuing to offload some of its home-grown projects developed under open-source licenses to the Outercurve Foundation. But it's worth remembering not everyone in Redmond believes "open source" and "Microsoft" are mutually exclusive terms.

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