How BIG is Amazon? (They Help Power the CIA and Netflix!)

you are watching television my head [Music] hi welcome to another ColdFusion 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 in a proverbial Ecco 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 I was working at a Wall Street firm called Essure & 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 of a painting that every film ever shot could be viewed instantly in your home for an information superhighway Bezos also saw the potential of the internet and noticed its rapid increase in users during discussions between Bezos and Shore 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 suppliers apparel and music 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 Mackenzie and a start-up veteran shell Cap'n Bezos first registered his new idea in July 1994 is Cadabra Inc unfortunately the name was often misheard as cadaver 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 becoming the biggest online retailer globally sites were also listed alphabetically back then and he wanted his site to be among the first web page as 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 3rd 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 2000 and 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 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 homepage of a new site called Yahoo Amazon became swamped with orders and within the first month they have sold books in 45 countries in late 1995 Amazon was granted 1 million dollars in investment capital to expand their business and keep up with increasing demand through server upgrades and the hiring of more staff Lazos predicted 74 million dollars 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 dollars 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 dollars and valuing the company at a 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 into new products DVDs and music were chosen between 1998 and 2000 Amazon acquired IMDB tella butch 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 the 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 five million dollars in profit Bezos said that this was because he emphasized customer experience over profits financial disaster struck in the year 2001 the.com tech bubble finally burst several the companies that Amazon had acquired went under and Amazon stock price dropped from a hundred and seven dollars to a brutal seven dollars 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 began to recover and in 2003 they grew their product lineup to include a software development center Amazon Prime and a Paris Hilton jury lion over the next seven years Amazon would acquire a clothing site a grocery store and would purchase the company audio wall for 300 million dollars launched the Kindle digital ereader and also launched Amazon Web Services this provides many companies with a whole range of on-demand computing from the 2010 Amazon will go from strength to strength solidifying their name as one of the tech giants today Amazon currently employs over 240,000 employees this is over four times the number Google how's 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 hitting 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 more water than 10,000 Olympic swimming pools one former employee is quoted as saying he walked 11 miles per shift or 17.7 kilometers and 15 Amazon made 107 billion dollars 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 apples 53 billion and alphabets 16 billion as of the fourth quarter of 2015 the retailer had more than 304 million active customer accounts worldwide amazingly there's still a lot of room to grow for Amazon currently global online retail constitutes 7.2 percent of total retail this is predicted to grow to eight point eight 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 begin after the product arrived into the building they are immediately scanned the products are then placed by stackers and what seems to outsiders as a haphazard way a book on Buddhism and Zen resting next to mrs. Potato Head doesn't make any sense to me does it make sense to you it does what because those two things you look at how these items fit in a bit yeah Oh optimized or utilizing the available space of 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 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 a 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 labels gadgets known as shoes sort and divert the boxes to the appropriate spiral chute based on the postal code the boxes are then loaded onto a waiting trucks which are assigned to particular regions Raleigh North Carolina in this case ok so almost at the end of this video but what are some cool things about Amazon some fun facts number eight Amazon is planning to use planes to make delivery is faster and more efficient Amazon is taking to the skies 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 control of its own delivery process yeah well Amazon spends an inordinate amount of money getting you tissue boxes toilet paper Amazon devices all started sorts of stuff like that right to your door in faster and faster time so the Mora can actually control in that deliver network hopefully the lower the cost will actually be for the company what this does give us the opportunity to do is we will be able to run flight 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 seven Amazon Prime air prime air is a future delivery system designed to get packages safely to consumers within 30 minutes or less using drones these vehicles we 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 six with a sales record of 600 million cells per 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 seven hundred and seventy five million dollars in 2012 as of last year there were up to thirty thousand baht not only does Amazon plan increasing the number it also plans on automating the process of picking items from shelves to achieve this Amazon set up the Amazon picking challenge a competition where robotics researchers compete for a $25,000 prize to design the best pickin robot number five Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services sells computer infrastructure like storage databases and computing power 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 enterprise --is um big government institutions like the CIA CIA does that prevent any conflict for you 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 service the web server business has generated 2.6 billion dollars for Amazon within the first quarter of 2016 very lucrative the flexible inexpensive and easily accessible web service allows thousands 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 four 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 at the customer service 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 is a very rich a bunch of books because all of them are proven bestsellers so you're not 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 in 2014 Amazon launched Amazon echo a voice-activated assistant with his own hardware in the same year they also required twitch a massive online streaming platform number one to this day Jeff Bezos is still the largest shareholder and currently holds 18 percent of shares he is now the fifth richest person on earth valued at almost 70 billion dollars 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 but anyway back to the big picture all of what you've just seen and heard all began from just selling books online it's 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 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 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 browse around 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 cold fusion it's me thinking [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: ColdFusion

Views: 2,029,410

Rating: 4.8942418 out of 5

Keywords: Coldfusion, TV, Dagogo, Altraide, Technology, Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Tesla

Id: tCUuvyVwbJs

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 29 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/akmalhot]

I wish I could go back in time and slap myself freshman year.

My roommate was a tech guy and said Amazon was goign to be the next titan - this was when it was < 100 / share.

I sat there and considered buying a few shares, if I had I surely would have kept a close eye on it and continued buying all the way up :/

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/madmads]

At one point, Dagogo says that they broke the record, having 600 million sales per second. That is most definitely not true. I hope he meant to say 600 items per second, which is true.

[u/flashtone]

back when yahoo was THE search engine, i never thought it would dwindle to what it is today. scary how much has changed on the internet in just a short 20 years. No telling how online retail will be like in the next 20 years

[u/callmeradical]

I think people still get surprised by the Netflix statement because a lot of people view them as competitors. I thought it was more surprising to find that the Nasdaq has a significant amount of workloads in AWS.

[u/just_hating]

As big as you may think this company is, it's bigger.

And it is getting bigger by the second.

[u/ThePancakeChair]

Maybe Amazon will be the next to merge into the Verizon- Chipotle - Exxon power grid.

[u/mikesername]

You really don't realize how many companies and government agencies rely on services from other companies to run. Everything in the modern era that uses information needs a massive amount of space and worldwide orchestration. Besides Amazon, there are a million companies and services you've never even heard of that are literally the backbone of things you use every day.

[u/bergamaut]

Only a $25,000 prize for winning a robot competition that will save Amazon tons of money? That's laughably small.