Mohamed A.Tabouti
Amazon’s Dash Button to Automate Your Orders
Amazon is taking on a initiative to harness the power of the internet of things before the things get to our homes. This reminds me of the the talking point we brought up in class which was that we may not need every appliance in our houses to have a microprocessor, rather a central unit of command that takes input from everything else (smartphone in this case.)
In my opinion, this Dash Button thing is going to fail because it isn’t a seamless integration into people’s life and could be easily substituted by a technology that consumers would own anyways likes smart watches. However, this initiative will enforce the idea that automating time consuming parts of our lives (such as doing groceries) doesn’t have to be a high tech solution.
So you have a great tech idea, where to start?
The convention has always been you get a new idea, you write a proposal, request funding, assemble a team, build it, perfection it and implement it then hope that it would work. Or if you’re an entrepreneur, you write your business plan, you seek funding build your idea, launch it and hope that it would work.
The problem with this approach is that no amount of surveys or data analytics can predict that your audience will actually use your new product; so you deplete a considerable amount of resources then hope that the end it didn’t all go to waste.
The cure for this problem is the new lean methodology approach. The concept is borrowed from manufacturing and applied to tech. It was made famous by Eric Ries in his book, The Lean Startup.
The ida is to seek validation before investing or building anything significant. The following article does a great job introducing the methodology.
This is related to what we discussed in class about the risk that comes with investing in big IT projects. If big organizations learn from startups and find a way to accurately test the validity of their ventures, they would reduce their risks to a more reasonable level.
Do you guys think that this method would be effective?
Is there any industries where this method wouldn’t apply?
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