Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1033

This morning the first Amazon Go store opened to the public in downtown Seattle. It’s more convenience store than grocery store, but the big deal is that there are no cashiers and no lines.

You enter the store through a gate and with your phone and Amazon’s app. As you walk around the store and pick up items they get automatically added to your online cart on Amazon. So everything goes right into the offline bag you’ll be leaving the store with. Place an item back on the shelf and it is instantly removed from your “cart.” Walk out of the store and you’re automatically charged.

It’s not yet clear how exactly the technology works, but Amazon says that all of this is accomplished through sophisticated computer vision (cameras), machine learning, and lots of sensors. 

What’s really remarkable is that it doesn’t rely on every product having a special chip or sensor attached to it. I would think that was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in order to remove the pain point of grocery store lines.

Now that this is up and running, I can only imagine the customer behavior data that they must be collecting. Heat maps of every shelf showing conversion rates for every imaginable customer segment. (Are tall people more likely to buy products displayed higher up?) Correlating people’s food purchases to their broader Amazon shopping habits. And the list, I’m sure, goes on. 

There is even speculation that Amazon will begin licensing this technology to other retailers, similar to what it does with Amazon Web Services. That seems like a reasonable assumption given the data play we just talked about. Assuming the tech works, it’ll get copied. So they may as well embed themselves.

In case you were wondering, the Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the number of cashiers in the US at about 3,555,500 (2016 number). And this number is projected to remain more or less flat until 2026.

That doesn’t feel right to me.

This is an interesting post on the size of “the iOS economy.” 

About 70% of customer spending on Apple’s App Store goes to developers. The remaining ~30% is kept by Apple. 

In 2017, iOS developers earned $26.5 billion. This is up about 33% from the year prior and is higher than McDonald’s revenue in 2016. Cumulatively, Apple has paid out about $86.5 billion to developers.

And this past new year’s day, a new record was set with $300 million in App Store purchases. According to Horace Dediu, this year should average closer to $100 million per day.

Also, this year’s App Store revenue is expected to surpass the film industry in terms of global box office sales. And we’re only talking about Apple. This does not include Android revenues.

Click here to check out the full post.

Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash

This week I saw it reported that in this decade alone, the Seattle area is set to deliver more new rental apartments than it did in the prior 50 years combined. 

And as a result, the sentiment is that new housing supply is finally starting to keep pace with demand and put downward pressure on rents. 

Do you remember who was the crane capital of the US a year ago? They may still have that title.

In some of the most desirable neighborhoods of Seattle – where much of the new supply is coming online – rents dropped 6% compared to the prior quarter. At the county level, this last quarter was by far the biggest drop of the decade according to the Seattle Times .

Funny how that works.

It’s also worth noting that the US as a whole is building far more rental apartments than condominiums. Here is a post I wrote in August 2015 which pegged condos as a percentage of overall multifamily construction at around 5.5%. That’s a tiny percentage.