Amazon’s planned office in downtown Seattle includes massive biodomes

Plants. That’s going to be the secret weapon for Amazon if they get their way in Seattle as their plans (pdf) include three massive biodomes in the front yard of their proposed skyscraper offices in the downtown area at 7th Avenue and Westlake. In essence, it would be their own miniature version of an Amazon rain forest, only the rain would be left on the outside of the domes.

According to the proposal which is being reviewed by the Design Review Board, “In addition to a variety of workplace environments, the facility will incorporate dining, meeting and lounge spaces, as well as a variety of botanical zones modeled on montane ecologies found around the globe. The building will be anchored at either end by publicly accessible retail spaces entered from 6th and 7th Avenues.”

If approved, the move won’t be difficult. They’re only transferring from a few blocks away. Behind the biodomes will be their primary campus, three 37-story towers with 3.3 million square feet of office space.

Here are some images from their proposal:

Why the second generation Nexus 7 tablet is a huge win for Google

From a software perspective, Google has been doing very well. Their Android platform for smartphones is dominant and on tablets it’s been making its mark. Unfortunately, the company still doesn’t see a ton of revenue from it with over 96% of their money coming from online advertising.

Hardware is where they want to be and the original Nexus 7 tablet launched last June did pretty well with an estimated 4.7 million sold. This year, they hope to far exceed this with unconfirmed reports of the second generation Nexus 7 tablet launching in July.

Google is aiming to ship as many as eight million of the Asustek-made tablets in the second half of the year, throwing down the gauntlet to other low-end tablets such as Amazon.com Inc‘s Kindle Fire and Apple Inc’s iPad mini, the sources with knowledge of the new product said.

If true, this will be a huge win for the tech giant for three reasons:

The timing is perfect, allowing for the buzz to get built up prior to school and with plenty of time to be prepared for the holiday season rush.
The rumored price point of $149-$199 allows it to continue to be competitive with Amazon and Microsoft while giving it a cost-savings edge over the $300 iPad Mini.
It’s a second-generation device following a 1st-gen device that has a chance of success.

The last point is the key for Google. Despite tremendous success in other areas, they haven’t been able to really crack the hardware arena as well as they’d like. Their smartphone lines have played second fiddle to other devices on the same platform and they haven’t really been a player in other mobile devices despite a handful of half-hearted attempts. By putting out a second-generation tablet, they’re staying along a verifiable course.

In the world of gadgets, consumers are fickle. Other than the iPad, iPhone, and Galaxy S smartphone series, it’s hard to find devices that have been able to garner loyalty. Google is making a play to put out a product that people will buy now and upgrade later.

If the new Nexus 7 tablet and its Qualcomm Snapdragon processor are able to make a real splash in the market, it will represent the first true hardware success for the company. That’s important as they look to the future and realize that advertising dollars are not enough to let them take over the world.

Amazon tops satisfaction index but corporate America is clearly not liked

The good news for tech companies is that America seems to like them the best. Amazon topped the list, followed by Apple at #2 and Google at #4. The bad news for all American corporations is that nearly of Americans feel that corporate America in general is “poor” or “terrible” while two-thirds of Americans think that corporate America is “fair” at best. Only 9% perceive corporate America as “excellent/very good”.

What does this mean? It says that tech companies are easier to trust, to like, and to do business with, likely because most of the interactions with them are online. Once face-to-face or telephone interactions enter the equation, the satisfaction levels go down. A clear foil to this perspective is Disney, which beat Google to come in 3rd as the only non-tech company in the top 4. Johnson and Johnson rounded up the top 5.

As Techcrunch notes, the tech vs non-tech sentiment was pretty strong up and down the list.

Technology also stood out in the rankings in another way: it topped Harris’ list of industries for overall reputation dominance, with a 79% positive reputation. Another marker of how tech continues to become increasingly mainstream.

Is it that online interactions are simply more convenient or have Americans grown to not enjoy face-to-face activities as much? We’ll check the trends this time next year.

Daily deals are dying

In 2011, we wrote about how Groupon must fail to save the internet. At the time, there were already some fishy things happening in the Daily Deals segment of eCommerce and more fishiness continues to pop up even today. What happened to the promising future of Groupon and its biggest competitor, LivingSocial?

With Amazon revealing that LivingSocial lost $650 million in 2012, it’s clear that both of the daily deals juggernauts are slipping. It seems like yesterday that Google was getting their $6 billion offer rejected by Groupon. What has changed? Why is the industry failing?

To answer that, we have to look at the business model itself. There are definitely some actual significant discounts associated with daily deals such as the one pictured above. $5 for a $10 Starbucks gift card is a real discount regardless of how you slice it. However, the business models require big discounts to make it the whole system work. To give big discounts, companies have to be willing to take either bump up their prices to fit the deal or take losses. That’s the problem.

All too often, companies will inflate their prices to make it possible to meet the strict discount requirements of Groupon and LivingSocial. A 10% discount won’t hack it on those sites. They want big. Unfortunately, that means fudging the numbers from time to time. This leads to distrust as people start realizing more and more that the deals aren’t always as great as they sound.

The rumors about how daily deals really works started circulating a couple of years ago, not from disgruntled consumers, but from businesses themselves. They were being told by their Groupon or LivingSocial sales reps to make the deal favorable in some way, even if that meant “charging” full retail to get to the discounted numbers. In other words, a store might sell a widget normally for $10 even if the MSRP is $18. The daily deals sites will tell them to put the deal together at $18 with a 50% discount, making them $9. Not much of a deal, but that’s how the system works.

Unfortunately, it’s not working. The reality of bulk buying didn’t turn out to be as lucrative for the seller or as beneficial to the buyer as most had originally believed. The results – lost value, lost trust, and lost credibility. There are still many people that swear by daily deals sites. Google is still considering buying Groupon, though at a much lower price tag than before. There’s something there. They just haven’t put the business model together properly yet. They may never be able to, in which case the death of the daily deals phenomenon that was so promising two yours ago may become a reality sooner than later.

Amazon’s planned office in downtown Seattle includes massive biodomes

Why the second generation Nexus 7 tablet is a huge win for Google

Amazon tops satisfaction index but corporate America is clearly not liked

Daily deals are dying

Things to do on TECHi

Tech Intelligence Whitepaper