Amazon Discontinues Astro for Business Robot Security Guard To Focus on Astro Home Robot (geekwire.com) 20
Astro is leaving its job to spend more time with family. From a report: Amazon informed customers and employees Wednesday morning that it plans to discontinue its Astro for Business program, less than a year after launching the robot security guard for small- and medium-sized businesses. The decision will help the company focus on its home version of Astro, according to an internal email. Astro for Business robots will stop working Sept. 25, the company said in a separate email to customers, encouraging them to recycle the devices.
Businesses will receive full refunds for the original cost of the device, plus a $300 credit "to help support a replacement solution for your workplace," the email said. They will also receive refunds for unused, pre-paid Astro Secure subscription fees. Announced in November 2023, the business version of Amazon's rolling robot used an HD periscope and night vision technology to autonomously patrol and map up to 5,000 square feet of space. It followed preprogrammed routes and routines, and could be controlled manually and remotely via the Amazon Astro app.
Businesses will receive full refunds for the original cost of the device, plus a $300 credit "to help support a replacement solution for your workplace," the email said. They will also receive refunds for unused, pre-paid Astro Secure subscription fees. Announced in November 2023, the business version of Amazon's rolling robot used an HD periscope and night vision technology to autonomously patrol and map up to 5,000 square feet of space. It followed preprogrammed routes and routines, and could be controlled manually and remotely via the Amazon Astro app.
Odd! (Score:2)
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From Amazon's perspective, the real problem with their current Alexa strategy is - even if they get their device into your house, it's in a fixed location. That means there are times they can't eavesdrop on you - which means lost money. With a mobile robot, they can have a microphone in close proximity to you 100% of the time.
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I'm puzzled as to how you could be **SO** important that the company would violate every internal and external rule in order to "eavesdrop on you". Maybe if you were the CEO of some Fortune 500 company or a major politician, but unless network, processing and storage have suddenly become free since I left the company a couple of years ago it's not worth the expense. They can accumulate all the information they want, and a lot more, just by buying it from Google and your cell provider and it's a LOT cheape
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Astro-nomical invasion of privacy (Score:2)
Once upon the time our brick-and-mortar homes were impenetrable to the prying eyes of sales and marketing companies, and they didn't like it. So they created home robots. Now they can see what we have, record what we do and say, and how we interact with each other to build an even more impressive marketing profile and try to sell us stuff we don't need for the money we can't afford to spend. Perfect!
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Once upon the time our brick-and-mortar homes were impenetrable to the prying eyes of sales and marketing companies
Mind still is. There's absolutely nothing about have a surveillance device in my home - that I paid for - that interests me. I didn't even have to do anything to achieve this. Quite the opposite; all I had to do was nothing.
I must be crazy (Score:3)
But if I buy a robot, I expect it to continue working - perhaps without warranty or support - regardless of whether or not the company still wants to sell the product, until it has a failure that renders it unusable.
The idea that you could buy one of these devices and Amazon just says, "Yeah, about that, we're disabling it remotely because we don't like it any more" and people still bought them... damn, but people are stupid.
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All the money in tech is dedicated to "forever tethered" crap. Sadly, not a lot of resources available for companies/people that want to do the right thing.
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But if I buy a robot, I expect it to continue working - perhaps without warranty or support - regardless of whether or not the company still wants to sell the product, until it has a failure that renders it unusable.
Your error is in believing you have bought the device. You did not. You rented it.
This is not a mistake Amazon would ever make.
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But if I buy a robot, I expect it to continue working - perhaps without warranty or support - regardless of whether or not the company still wants to sell the product, until it has a failure that renders it unusable.
The secret is to install the software before the purchase, and see how it behaves. If it requires an account to be set up before it'll show you a UI, don't buy it. An app without a 'local only' mode is an app that can only ask someone else's computer to tell 'your' device what to do.
Avoiding hardware that requires online accounts is one of the best ways to avoid this problem.
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I bought the Amazon watch. When they decided not to support it any longer they sent me my money back and gave me easy instructions about recycling. In this case they went a step further and gave customers an extra $300. If you don't want to send Astro back to be recycled then there's nothing stopping you from writing a new OS for it and continue using it. You just can't continue to use AWS's facilities to manage it any longer.
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I wonder how many people get what ^H^H^H means nowadays? I don't think I've had that happen to me on a terminal since maybe the early 2000s.
Maybe they came across the BOFH. (Score:2)
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
And a few more.
Two words (Score:2)
Two words: Chopping Mall.
OmniCorp Lesson (Score:2)
perhaps they had their own ED-209 style fiasco.
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"Please put down that extra helping of lasagna. You have 20 seconds to comply."
WILL NEVER HAVE (Score:2)
Too small to be useful (Score:3)
My thought about Astro since the beginning is that if I want something a foot and a half tall to follow me around so that I can trip over it I already have a dog. As a security device it's pretty obvious that they never asked any of their own security personnel about it. It can't do stairs, can't open doors, can't use elevators, can't see over a desk much less a cubicle wall, and can't even badge card readers. All in all the thing is too small to be useful.
In a way this surprises me, as a nine year veteran of the Amazon security team we would have been happy to provide them with input. We did it for quite a few other projects, some of them only very peripherally associated with security at all. This lack of internal communications and consulting was quite unusual, in my experience there.