ColdFusion - How GIGANTIC is Amazon? (They Help Power the CIA and Netflix!)

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Starting point is 00:00:30 Hi, welcome to another cold fusion video. Even a decade ago, the idea of browsing online for almost any item that you wanted and having it delivered to your door within the same day would have been seen as impractical and even science fiction. But this is what Amazon does in Europe and the United States on a daily basis. Amazon has streamlined and perfected its internal process so much that this science fiction has become a reality. The company hosts the sale of 350 million products in 185 countries. But that's not all. From scientific research to vast web servers, the full scale of what Amazon is involved in, may surprise you. So how did this company start? And how big are they today? And what are some interesting facts about Amazon? In this video, we'll explore and find out.

Starting point is 00:01:25 In a proverbial echo to Apple's founding, Amazon was also started in a garage, though in Seattle, Washington this time and not Silicon Valley. The company was started by Jeff Bezos and the idea first came to him while he was working at the Wall Street firm called D.E. Shore & Co. as vice president. The founder of the Wall Street firm, David Shaw, had used the internet during his days as a professor in the early 1990s and he saw the potential it held for the future. Imagine a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and every film ever shot could be viewed instantly in your home via an information superhighway. Bezos also saw the potential of the internet and noticed its rapid increase in users. During discussions between Bezos and Shaw, the concept of an online store with unlimited products came up and the idea for Amazon was born. Bezos concluded that at first, an online store that sold everything would be impractical. He decided to narrow down the list to 20 possible product categories, including computer software, office supplies, apparel and music.

Starting point is 00:02:33 The option that seemed to fit best for a first product was books. Books were the same no matter where you bought them from and offered diversity in terms of choice. Together with his wife McKenzie and a startup veteran, Shell Caphan, Bezos first registered his new company idea in July 1994 as Cadabra Inc. Unfortunately, the name was often misheard as Cadava Inc. A company name that could be misheard as a dead body wasn't ideal so they decided to pick a new one. While searching for a new name in October 1994, Bezos came across Amazon in the dictionary. He used Amazon because it was the largest river and mirrored his goal of becoming the biggest online retailer globally. Sites were also listed alphabetically back then and he wanted his

Starting point is 00:03:16 site to be among the first web pages shown. On November 1st, 1994, Amazon.com was registered. To leave a high-paying, high-profile Wall Street job to start an internet company in 1994 was crazy, but Jeff Bezos had a strong vision. Upon beginning Amazon, one of their driving goals, was to build better products than existing online bookstores at the time. The first book was sold April 3, 1995. It was a computer modeling book. A few months later, the site went live and became visible to all users of the web. It opened a searchable database of over 1 million titles, even though it only had around

Starting point is 00:03:55 2,000 in stock at the Seattle warehouse. The rest would be ordered as needed from wholesale sellers. Interestingly, there was no one assigned to pack the books at Amazon at the time, so they They would take orders during the day and pack books during the night. The books would then be driven to the post office the next morning. After being featured on the home page of a new site called Yahoo, Amazon became swamped with orders and within the first month they had sold books in 45 countries. In late 1995, Amazon was granted $1 million in investment capital to expand their business and

Starting point is 00:04:27 keep up with increasing demand through server upgrades and the hiring of more staff. Mezos predicted $74 million in sales by the year 2000 if things went moderately, and $144 million if things went extremely well. In actuality, sales in the year 2000 amounted for $1.6 billion. After receiving the investment capital, Amazon began to frantically expand. The motto back then at the time was get big fast. On May 15, 1997, Amazon had its IPO, raising $54 million and valuing the company, at 438 million. Jeff Bezos had a good sense of foresight and he predicted that the small reading community would be the bottleneck for their growth so they decided to move

Starting point is 00:05:13 into new products. DVDs and music were chosen. Between 1998 and 2000 Amazon acquired IMDB, Telebutch and Book Pages which gave them strategic access to customers in the UK and the German market. During this time they also expanded their product line to include toys and electronics. By this stage, Amazon was rapidly growing, and the world took notice. This was evident by Jeff Bezos being awarded the Person of the Year by Time magazine in 1999. Surprisingly, Amazon didn't post any profit until the fourth quarter of 2001, where they made $5 million in profit. Bezos said that this was because he emphasized customer experience over profits.

Starting point is 00:06:00 Financial disaster struck in the year 2001. the dot-com tech bubble finally burst. Several of the companies that Amazon had acquired went under and Amazon stock price dropped from $107 to a brutal $7. Amazon went into crisis mode and shifted their focus to cutting costs. 1,300 employees were laid off and a distribution facility was shut down. After some tough times, Amazon... Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive.

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Starting point is 00:06:49 Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. ...began to recover, and in 2003, they grew their product lineup to include a software development Center, Amazon Prime and a Paris Hilton jewelry line. Over the next seven years, Amazon would acquire a clothing site, a grocery store, and would purchase the company Audible for $300 million, launch the Kindle Digital E-reader, and also launch Amazon Web Services. This provides many companies with a whole range of on-demand computing. From the 2010s, Amazon would go from Strength to Strength, solidifying their name

Starting point is 00:07:28 as one of the tech giants. Today, Amazon currently employers over 240,000 employees. This is over four times the number Google has. That being said, this does include both part-time and full-time workers. During seasonal spikes, up to 80,000 additional seasonal workers are added to deal with the influx and sales. As of January 2016, 183 million unique visitors were recorded heating Amazon's website per month. This is the seventh largest site in terms of traffic volume. The company has fulfillment centers or warehouses as large as 1 million square feet, it has more than 80 of these worldwide. To get a sense of scale, these warehouses could hold

Starting point is 00:08:10 more water than 10,000 Olympic swimming pools. One former employee is quoted as saying he walked 11 miles per shift or 17.7 kilometres. In 2015, Amazon made $107 billion in revenue. For comparison, Apple made $233 billion, Microsoft, $85 billion, and alphabet, $74 billion. But when you look at actual net income, The story changes quite a bit. In 2015, Amazon took in about 600 million, which is very little compared to Apple's 53 billion, and Alphabet's 16 billion. As of the fourth quarter of 2015, the retailer had more than 304 million active customer accounts worldwide.

Starting point is 00:08:54 Amazingly, there's still a lot of room to grow for Amazon. Currently global online retail constitutes 7.2% of total retail. This is predicted to grow to 8.8. percent in 2018. So with that out of the way, let's go a little bit deeper. How exactly do Amazon get their products to their customers? Here's a short excerpt from 60 Minutes explaining. Amazon Vice President Dave Clark showed us how the process began.

Starting point is 00:09:22 After the products arrive into the building, they are immediately scanned. The products are then placed by stackers in what seems to outsiders as a haphazard way, a book on Buddhism and Zen, resting next to Mrs. Potato Head. It doesn't make any sense to me. Does it make sense to you? It does. What? Because those two things, if you look at how these items fit in the bin, they're optimized for utilizing the available space. Oh, I see. And we have computers and algorithmic work that tells people the areas of the building that have the most space to put product in that's coming in at that time.

Starting point is 00:09:57 Amazon has become so efficient with its stacking, it can now store twice as many goods, in its centers as it did five years ago. Once your orders placed, they so-called pick ambassador walks the aisles, plucking and scanning your items before placing them in bins. Those bins eventually wind up in front of a packer who knows exactly how big of a box to use based on the weight and amount of items. Your address is slapped onto the box and then a picture is taken of your address label. Gadgets known as shoes sort and divert the boxes to the appropriate

Starting point is 00:10:32 spiral shoot based on the postal code. The boxes are then loaded onto awaiting trucks which are assigned to particular regions, Raleigh North Carolina in this case. Okay, so almost at the end of this video, but what are some cool things about Amazon, some fun facts? Number 8. Amazon is planning to use planes to make delivery is faster and more efficient. Amazon is taking to the skies.

Starting point is 00:11:00 No, we're not talking about drones just yet. The e-commerce giant on Friday unveiled its first branded cargo plane, a Boeing 767-300 named Amazon One. It's one of 40 planes the company plans to lease in order to speed up and control more of its own shipping networks. So how does this play into Amazon's larger business model? Why is this important for Amazon to take more and more control of its own delivery process? Yeah, well, Amazon spends an inordinate amount of money getting you tissue boxes, toilet paper,

Starting point is 00:11:30 Amazon devices, all sorts of stuff like that, right to your door in faster and faster time. So the more it can actually control in that delivery network, hopefully the lower the cost will actually be for the company. What this does give us the opportunity to do is we'll be able to run flights seven days a week. We'll be able to run a very custom point-to-point routes today that are optimized for our network versus a holistic transportation network that maybe some of our providers would operate. Number 7. Amazon Prime Air Prime Air is a future delivery system designed to get packages safely to consumers within 30 minutes or less using drones.

Starting point is 00:12:08 These vehicles will use obstacle avoidance technology to operate within a safe range of 10 miles or more. Prime Air Development Centers are based in the US, UK, Austria and Israel. Number 6. With a sales record of 600 million sales per second, the digital. Second, the delivery from Amazon's warehouses needs to be streamlined. To help streamline the process, Amazon purchase Kiva, a company that makes factory automation robots at $775 million in 2012. As of last year, they were up to 30,000 bots.

Starting point is 00:12:44 Not only does Amazon plan increasing the number, it also plans on automating the process of picking items from shells. To achieve this, Amazon set up the Amazon Picking Challenge, a competition where Robotics researchers compete for a great news the federal EV rebate is back eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select

Starting point is 00:13:04 2027 volt and 2026 Equinox EV models visit your local Chevrolet dealer today for more details AI is moving fast across the enterprise but without visibility it's just chaos different tools, different models different teams using AI

Starting point is 00:13:21 in completely different ways service now turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit service now.com. $25,000 price to design the best picking robot. Number five, Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services sells computer infrastructure like storage, databases, and computing power.

Starting point is 00:13:55 Startups and more established companies rent these in place of high-powered servers. Amazon has some big-name clients. These include Pinterest, General Electric, Tinder, Reddit, Adobe Systems, Netflix, Instagram, some major banks, and even the CIA. Other than Netflix, who else uses AWS? Oh, big enterprises, big government institutions. Like the CIA. The CIA, does that present any conflict for you?

Starting point is 00:14:25 the fact that you provide the cloud that the CIA uses for its data. I don't think so. We're building what's called a private cloud for them, Charlie, because they don't want to be on the public cloud. To give you an idea of how much data some of these clients use, Dropbox at one point was using a petabyte per day on Amazon web servers. The web server business has generated $2.6 billion for Amazon within the first quarter of 2016.

Starting point is 00:14:48 Very lucrative. The flexible, inexpensive, and easily accessible web service allows thousands of of new startups to flourish and played a large role in the transformation and innovation of industries such as finance, health, science and oil. Number 4. Amazon's current logo has a hidden meaning behind it. The arrow which looks like a smile is a representation of the wide range of available items for retail, from A to Z. Number three, Amazon employees spend two days every two years working up the customer service

Starting point is 00:15:23 desk, even the CEO. This ensures that every single employee understands the customer service process. Unfortunately, by at least one internal account, Amazon's relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction often happens at the expense of some employees making it a difficult and unpleasant company to work for. Number two, Amazon is planning to build brick and mortar stores. The store is a very rich bunch of books, because because all of them are proven bestsellers. So you know going in that anything that you're looking at is going to be popular, it's going to be a good read. Here's a couple more little facts.

Starting point is 00:16:02 In 2014, Amazon launched Amazon Echo, a voice-activated assistant with its own hardware. In the same year, they also acquired Twitch, a massive online streaming platform. Number one. Till this day, Jeff Bezos is still the largest shareholder and currently holds 18% of shares. He is now the fifth richest person on earth valued at almost $70 billion. With some of that money, he bought himself the Washington Post. Now, to have one individual owner media outlet isn't really something that I agree with, but it is what it is.

Starting point is 00:16:36 But anyway, back to the big picture. All of what you've just seen and heard all began from just selling books online. It sometimes really is crazy how things can turn out. If you go back in time 18 years, I was driving the packages to the post office myself. and we were very primitive. When I was driving the packages myself, one of my visualizations of success is that we might one day be big enough

Starting point is 00:16:58 that we could afford a forklift. Sometimes being the first to do something and doing it better than your competitors can be an incredibly successful combination. So anyway, I hope you learned something from that. That's the story, size, and some cool facts about Amazon.com. Thanks for watching, guys.

Starting point is 00:17:16 Give this video a thumbs up if you liked it. Subscribe to this channel if you just stumbled across it. And if you want to see more videos, about the size of companies and how big they are, how they got started and some cool interesting facts about them. Feel free to have a browser on this channel. There's plenty of videos like that. All right so I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Thanks again for watching. Cheers guys, have a good one.

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ColdFusion - How GIGANTIC is Amazon? (They Help Power the CIA and Netflix!)

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