It’s like Kickstarter for Alexa. Artists, startups, and organizations typically turn to Kickstarter to pitch new products and meet a certain funding goal to get the project off the ground. Now Amazon is doing something similar, except the multi-billion dollar company certainly doesn’t need any help to raise money for its manufacturing process.
If a concept hits Amazon’s pre-order goal, it will hit its doorstep this summer. If there is no interest, Amazon will resign and shoppers will not be charged.
In fact, if Amazon were to rely on this Kickstarter model more often, it would collect additional user data that could help it market numerous products – some similar to others already on the market – while reducing the likelihood and cost of any potential flops in the process, potentially making it much more of a formidable competitor.
The three new concepts introduced this week come from inventors, designers, and engineers at Amazon: For starters, there’s a hands-free $ 89.99 smart notebook printer the size of a receipt printer you’d see next to a cash register. It works with Alexa to print shopping lists, reminders and calendar events on small post-it size notes. Meanwhile, a $ 34.99 smart scale allows you to ask Alexa to weigh 200 calories of blueberries and provide nutritional information for thousands of ingredients and foods by weight. Finally, the Cuckoo Clock ($ 79.99) has a mechanical pop-out cuckoo bird, built-in speakers for timers and alarms, and can be wall mounted or placed on a shelf.
The company said it produced some workable models for each item to ensure development was possible.
The company told CNN Business that it will not publicly list the target amount for the new products, but the product pages will display a percentage progress bar to show how close they are to the benchmark.