When Amazon is being coy about how it plans to bring a new initiative to life, the best place to look for insights is on the Careers tab of the company’s website. After all, outsiders can be kept in the dark, but job candidates need to know what skills are needed and how they might be used.
This time, as usual, the job listings don’t disappoint. There are some interesting details to glean from the engineering postings, such as the fact that the drone development team will be based in San Francisco (not in Amazon’s Seattle headquarters), or that Amazon right now is more concerned about building out its expertise in software, rather than hardware.
For the fullest glimpses of what project leaders Gur Kimchi and Daniel Buchmueller have in mind, though, turn to the non-technical listings. What caught my eye are notices for full-time communications manager and a full-time patent lawyer to help get this project off the ground. The jaunty tone of those listings underscore Bezos’s willingness to charge ahead, no matter what everyone else is saying.
There’s plenty to be learned, from Amazon’s hunt for a lawyer specializing in drone patents. Bear in mind that Amazon already is famous for its gung-h0 approach to patenting the intellectual property (IP) associated with more than 1,000 of its online retailing ideas. Now it looks as if Amazon wants to build up either an unshakeable edge over other retailers and shipping companies — or a set of proprietary technologies that it can profitably license to anyone else wanting to use drones.
As Amazon declares in its patent-lawyer job notice: “Responsibilities include direct client counseling, third party IP investigations and actively working with outside counsel to manage filing, prosecuting and maintaining our growing US and foreign patent portfolio.”
Source: Forbes