Amazon should hack the next pop-up loft location with Analytics

by Marcos Ortiz

It’s Day One !!! This mantra is always in Amazon’s crew minds. The company is always trying to reinvent to itself, looking for new ways how to make profits with 500% customer focusing; even if the actions in the beginning means to lose some capital. The same thing have happened several times: the Kindle Fire’s device family which entered in the Mobile era, and have placed a lots of services around it like Amazon Prime, the vibrant App Store for the devices, the revolutionary Amazon Silk (the ultra-fast cloud-accelerated web browser); or the reinvention of e-commerce using highly complex recommendation algorithms to predict what the user wants; or Amazon Web Services who have become in the de-facto Cloud Computing platform.

But to keep innovation so engaging and live until now, they raised the bar again with the pop-up shop, a new kind of “physical store” where they sell services, not any physical thing.

But, What is the pop-up store?

The pop-up store is basically one place “a-la-Apple-Store” where you can buy any service provided by Amazon Web Services; with professionals dedicated to help you to take your servers (if you use EC2 for example) and to push them to the limits; always trying to obtain the best performance for the best Return of Investment(ROI).

Why Amazon did this move? It seems that the AWS re:Invent, the events dedicated to gather in one place to Amazon’s customers, Amazon Web Services’s Solution Architects, Cloud Computing experts, investors, startups teams, etc; are not enough and they are looking for new ways to keep customers satisfied, and this decision is a live prove of the commitment that Amazon has with its customers, placing the first of these stores in the heart of Silicon Valley; where there are a lot of new startups, new companies interested in the vast resources and benefits of AWS.

Bu the SF store could be just the beginning. Like I said before, Silicon Valley is perfect for the first one, but I think that they should make one in every tech hub of the world. Ideas? New York(USA), Berlin(GER), London(UK), Singapore(SG), Santiago de Chile(CL), Sao Paulo(BRA), Hong Kong, Tel Aviv(IRA), Abu Dhabi(UAE), Amsterdam(NED), Barcelona(ESP), Sydney(AUS), Cape Town(South Africa), etc; So, one problem can emerge: How they could decide the location of the next pop-up store?

Data Analytics is the answer for this problem

Actually, it could be solved using a combination of techniques like:

  • Text Mining: to extract insights from AWS’s forums
  • Data Mining: for Clustering and Item-based recommendations algorithms. The first one to make groups of users and customers of AWS by language, location and combination of services; and the second one is for services recommendation based in similar ocurrences in the same region.
  • Data Analytics from the own AWS customers database
  • Statistical Analysis from the last Internet Trends 2014 Report by KPCB’s Mary Meeker, particularly the stats about USA Technology Capital Financing (Slide # 22) and Global Technology IPO Issuance (Slide # 21)

All these data sets could help to answer questions like:

  1. Which are the locations with more AWS customers and the major % growth?
  2. Which language is the dominating one in that region/location?
  3. Which region has more Venture Capital ready to fund new companies?
  4. Which are the most requested AWS services in that location?
  5. In these cities, Which is the “centroid” of the points where most recognized companies/startups are located?

Based in the answers of these questions, Amazon could identify the right location to place the next pop-up store, and with the centroids results could determine the exact blocks in the city where the store could be placed. My favorite cities? Berlin and Singapore.

Berlin

For Berlin, I would calculate the centroid among five main locations: Wooga, Mister Spex, SoundCloud, Rocket Internet and Zalando (the last two are planing for upcoming IPOs) . In that set of blocks Amazon could find a good location, comparing too with easy ways to arrive like metro, taxi and bus lines.

Singapore

Singapore is one of my favorite locations around the world to create a business or a company for its amazing human resources, low taxes, double taxations treaties, and a strong economic and political stability. For those reasons, there are lot of founders and investors interested in this tech hub. If you have used AWS at least once, you should know that it is divided in several regions around the globe, and in APAC, Singapore and Japan are the designated location to host them; so Amazon knows exactly the importance of Singapore in this Cloud business. Even, if I had the chance, I would apply for a job based in Singapore, but that’s a topic for another post.

Now, to follow the same idea, I would calculate the centroid between Viki.com HQs, Singapore’s Financial District and Marina Bay Sands Hotel.

With all this information, Amazon could make sure that AWS (current and prospective) customers could arrive to the store simply walking or with a small trip without much effort; which could be a very good thing for their purposes.

But, there is more. Singapore has a lot of Venture Capital firms ready to invest in elegant and profitable business plans; so these firms could help Amazon to find new founders, the main prospective customers interested in AWS. So, AWS representatives in Singapore should establish a strong partnership with these investment firms to know from the first hand that they are interested in AWS. If you are looking for leading VC firms, I will let some names here:

Two of the guys that could help to Amazon to know the investment ecosystem and the Singaporean tech bubble are Mohan Belani, founder and writer at E27.co ( the main site for tech investments and funding in Singapore) and Vanessa Tan, Head of Product and Marketing at Tech in Asia ( another of the portals in the APAC region to analyze tech investments in all the region).

But if you need more names from highly connected people, you can choose from here:

Conclusions

It’s simple. Amazon wants to use its vast resources to combine the knowledge of Apple with its stores; and its amazing expertise in customer satisfaction and loyalty to delvier an unique experience for them with the pop-up store. A terrific idea !!! They are constantly looking for good professionals with a singular interest and vision for this kind of challenges, so you can visit the new Amazon Jobs portal and to search what exactly are you looking for.

Good luck in your job search !!!Marcos Ortíz Valmasedaabout.me/marcosortiz @marcosluis2186