Eyes in the sky
Amazon has been granted a patent for a concept that envisages using delivery drones to scan the properties of parcel recipients to see if they may be in need of extra services. In the patent, which was filed on 25 September 2015 and published last Tuesday (25 July), Amazon gives an example of how this might work in practice: “A user, who has opted-in to the service described herein, may order an item for delivery from an electronic marketplace. Service provider computers associated with the electronic marketplace may provide instructions to an unmanned aerial vehicle to deliver the ordered item to the user’s home according to a delivery plan.
“Thereafter, as the unmanned aerial vehicle is in flight and delivering the item, data may be captured by the vehicle and transmitted back to the service computers for data analysis.
“For example, the unmanned aerial vehicle may capture video data that includes brown and dying trees located near the user’s home.
“The service provider computers may utilize image and/or video recognition techniques and software to identify that the trees require service (e.g., services that can be provided by an arborist).
“The service provider computers may, in response to identifying that the trees near the user’s home are dying, generate and provide a recommendation to the user that includes information about arborist services or items such as fertilizers that can help the user’s trees.
“The recommendation may be provided to the user via an email, a short message service (SMS) text, or it could appear as a notification the next time the user visits a web page associated with the electronic marketplace.”
You could describe this as a useful and proactive system that would allow Amazon to go “above and beyond” to satisfy its customers’ needs – even before the customers themselves have identified those needs. Alternatively, you could see it is an intrusive sales technique, but Amazon did take care to specify that the system would apply to a customer/user “who has opted-in to the service”.
