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Apple snags Amazon's A9 head to lead Siri team
Companies poach each other's employees and execs all the time. But, Apple's latest score, William Stasior, is a pretty substantial one. For the last six years he has served as president and CEO of A9, Amazon's search and ad subsidiary. Before that he held other search-related roles at Amazon and worked at AltaVista, departing around the time of the Yahoo! acquisition. In his new role at Cupertino, Stasior will be leading the Siri team. The MIT Ph.D will be taking the helm of the voice-powered virtual assistant, which has led some to speculate that Apple could be stepping up search and advertising game. Considering the on-going drama between Mountain View and the purveyors of all-things-i, we wouldn't be entirely surprised to see the two go head to head on Google's home turf. But we'd say such a move would be a long term goal, at best.
Amazon Flow strikes low blow to brick and mortar, converts barcode scans to online sales
Remember when you had to "walk" to a "store" to buy things? Our grandkids are gonna weep uncontrollably when we explain queuing up at Our Price to buy VHS tapes. We'll recall the date the final nail was driven into brick and mortar's coffin: November 2nd, 2011 -- the day Amazon's A9 released Flow free on the App store. With Flow, you just walked into a store, scan the barcode of a book, DVD or jar of Nutella and it came back with Amazon's price, reviews and "multimedia content". It wasn't the first app to do the job, but we just couldn't help ourselves indulging in another. It wasn't long before the store detectives cottoned on to all the barcode snapping and started issuing automatic take-down tackles if they saw you holding a phone. After that, of course, war was inevitable. (But hey, it was worth it.)
