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Amazon has been steadily growing its logistics operation over the last decade, and it now delivers more than half of all Amazon packages in the US, according to an estimate from Morgan Stanley published on Thursday and reported by CNBC. That’s a staggering increase over the course of the last few years. It means Amazon, which now operates its own freighters and cargo planes, is accelerating its push to own the entire logistics chain and end its relationship with companies like FedEx and UPS.

At the current rate, Amazon is set to pass both FedEx and UPS in US package volume, with the company currently delivering 2.5 billion packages per year compared to FedEx’s 3 billion and UPS’s 4.7 billion, Morgan Stanley says. Amazon’s number doubled in just the last year alone, from delivering about 20 percent of all of its own packages to now about half. A substantial contributing factor here is Amazon’s new one-day Prime shipping initiative, which it kicked off earlier this year and promises to bring to more markets and more products as time goes on.

“Customers love the transition of Prime from two days to one day — they’ve already ordered billions of items with free one-day delivery this year. It’s a big investment, and it’s the right long-term decision for customers,” CEO Jeff Bezos said of one-day Prime shipping on an earnings call in October. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding its package volume.

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WASHINGTON – A U.S. Naval Research Laboratory-built camera mounted on the NASA Parker Solar Probe revealed an asteroid dust trail that has eluded astronomers for decades.

Karl Battams, a computational scientist in NRL’s Space Science Division, discussed the results from the camera called Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) on Dec. 11 during a NASA press conference.

WISPR enabled researchers to identify the dust cloud trailing the orbit of the asteroid 3200 Phaethon.

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The power shift continues.

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has developed complex supply chains, from designers to manufacturers, from distributors to importers, wholesalers and retailers, it’s what allowed billions of products to be made, shipped, bought and enjoyed in all corners of the world. In recent times the power of the Internet, especially the mobile phone, has unleashed a movement that’s rapidly destroying these layers and moving power to new places.

The Internet is the most powerful mechanism we can imagine to match perfectly individuals that need something, and people with something to offer. The moment started slowly by reducing complexity and removing the middle layer in the late 1990s. From insurance to early PC makers like Dell to travel agents, this time seemed to be an age where “direct” became a desirable moniker. This time seemed to favor scale and efficiency over service or brand, for commodities like insurance cover or processing power, the overheads of sales, marketing and retail footprint were stripped away.

Continue reading “The Battle Is For The Customer Interface” | >

Open-source software powers nearly all the world’s major companies. This software is freely available, and is developed collaboratively, maintained by a broad network that includes everyone from unpaid volunteers to employees at competing tech companies. Here’s how giving away software for free has proven to be a viable business model.

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Continue reading “The Rise Of Open-Source Software” | >

Researchers at Duke University have engineered a bandage that captures and holds a pro-healing molecule at the site of a bone break to accelerate and improve the natural healing process.

In a proof-of-principle study with mice, the bandage helped to accelerate callus formation and vascularization to achieve better bone repair by three weeks.

The research points toward a general method for improving bone repair after damage that could be applied to medical products such as biodegradable bandages, implant coatings or bone grafts for critical defects.

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