Amazon re:MARS

The Six Five team dives into the Amazon re:MARS event.

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Transcript:

Patrick Moorhead: Daniel, let’s move on to the next topic, which is Amazon re:MARS. You and I spent, gosh, two and a half days there, which is a pretty big commitment. And what an exciting show! I mean, what does MARS stand for? First of all, this show is put on by Amazon and AWS, and MARS is essentially machine learning, automation and AI. The R is robotics, and the S is space. I can’t think of two more exciting topics to get into. But Daniel, it was just a cornucopia of geek. We got the chance to talk to the leaders from pretty much, I think, every one of the groups except for robotics. And you can read my stuff on Forbes. I cranked out another article last night about it. You can read my tweet stream. But I want to look at more of the bigger picture.

Daniel Newman: Also, our pods, man.

Patrick Moorhead: Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, we’ll have four pods coming out as soon as our editors can get it out. But net net, MARS, this is the next generation of technology. I think it’s very clear to say that Amazon is the leader in digital e-commerce with amazon.com. They are the number-one market-share leader in IaaS and PaaS for the cloud. But it’s like what’s next, right? And to me, this is an expression to investors. This is an expression to potentially people who they can hire. This is their way of getting in on the next-generation opportunities out there. And also, I think, in many ways, it can be good for society, right? We saw technologies like BCI that can help people who don’t know how to communicate to communicate, people who can’t walk learn how to walk. In space, the ability to have data and process it, by the way, inside of the ISS, that can help people know when there’s a forest fire within three minutes of it happening in Brazil, to be able to stamp that out. So a lot of content, a great show, Daniel. Yeah. What’d you think about it?

Daniel Newman: Yeah, you hit it on the head, Pat. I couldn’t help the shameless plug for our shows, Six Five on the Road at re:MARS. We had a lot of fun talking… Pat, by the way, what I loved most about re:MARS is it just let us talk about things at a different level, call it maybe a different altitude, which is appropriate, than how we typically talk about it. Like, putting a Snowcone in space. We talk about Edge a lot. We talk about connectivity, IoT networking, but the idea that basically you’re going to build a cloud in space that’s going to look and feel a lot like the cloud we’ve built here on Earth is pretty neat. It’s pretty unique. Or the idea of how AI and ML is used in collaboration with neuroscience to create a brain-computer interface that allows someone that deals with severe paralysis and is no longer able to speak or communicate using traditional methods to now be able to communicate with the world.

I mean, it’s pretty mind boggling. I mean, an inch away from telepathy, right? The idea that our brains can still function, communicate, and that there’s people working on these really hard problems, these really interesting and hard challenges that our society face, and not just hyper focusing on some of the day-to-day things that, by the way, I love, but I like to sometimes get out of my comfort zone. So learning about lower-Earth-orbit space exploration, and the fact that Amazon Blue Origin is already working on developing and, by the way, pre-selling the ability for people that want to get to space. I mean, space is kind of becoming cool again. It’s certainly controversial, but it’s becoming cool again.

But I like they talked about things like extinction events, and I know that nobody wants to talk about that because it’s negative. But the idea that we want to talk about sustainability all the time and climate, but we don’t want to really talk about the fact that we continue to populate at a somewhat breakneck pace and we don’t really know what the capacity of our world is. You’ve got a company like these that… Not just Amazon, but the companies that they’re working with, looking to actually try to solve where do we put people when we’ve hit the edge of the resources that this particular planet can offer? And I think the question during that first keynote, Pat, was is it 15 billion people? I think we have seven, eight on the earth right now. Is it 10? How far are we away from the point where there is no more capacity?

So these are the things that, like I said, for me, I don’t know, as an avid and continuous learner, someone that never wants to be at the end of my rope, that I really enjoy the sit-downs that we had. And then by the way, some of just the pragmatic launches. You had some great shares this week, Pat, on LinkedIn about some of the coding capabilities that AWS announced.

Patrick Moorhead: Hey, let’s do a shameless plug for this interview that we did with Clint Crosier.

Daniel Newman: Oh, so good.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I’m really excited about all four of the pods that we did there. But this is Clint, who runs AWS’s Space and Satellite business, him holding an AWS Snowcone, which by the way, we couldn’t say the day of, but the day after we were allowed to say that, “Hey, along with Axiom, this is an actual picture of a Snowcone being used inside of the International Space Station.” And I can’t think of anything more impressive and that defines edge computing than something like this. But yeah, sorry for the interruption there, though, but a real highlight there and…

Daniel Newman: Yeah, no. I mean, I was even thinking about our conversation with Broughton about just the abilities to… You know, how everybody right now when we’re using, whether it’s Google or Microsoft Word, and we can have our sentences fit. Well, now we’re doing that for coding. AWS is doing that for machine learning, where you can actually help coders code faster by using machine learning to train coders and train code to move quicker. Just a lot of cool things. So we could talk about a lot more, Pat, but there’s some very practical things.

Patrick Moorhead: Oh, yeah. Talk about practical, I mean, Michael MacKenzie, the interview. He’s AWS GM of Industrial IoT and Edge. His grasp of what it’s going to take to accelerate the industrial IoT, 100% spot on, so much that they’re actually building hardware modules at AWS to put on engine parts to help do predictive maintenance. So anyways, exciting stuff, exciting stuff, Daniel. Anything else you wanted to add to re:MARS?

Daniel Newman: No. Basically, keep your head in the clouds and, you know, always good.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Kind of stay tuned. Our videos should be out hopefully on Monday. So super excited about that.