Comment by toephu2 4 days ago
What problem was it solving though? NFC contactless payments is already pretty fast and convenient. I feel like Amazon One Palm was invented to solve for a problem we didn't really have. Thus the failure.
Also in Seattle and at my gym I scan a barcode off my phone and keep my personal biometric data secure. It’s great. Fantastically, no need to explain anything to a front desk person, either.
I’m team “solution in search of a problem”
The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster. And it would link to my Prime account so I could get my discounts/points. All with just me showing my palm.
Using your palm print (and actually blood vessels network) could be also more secure than tapping a card (NFC contactless).
I enjoyed using the technology. I did test other biometric payments like with face at the Intuit Dome in LA. But it felt more creepy and far less secure... as I was walking by some gates would open and some random person could enter as me... and possibly charge my linked payment. Using the hand with Amazon Go felt safer.
Wondering if Amazon would be willing to sell the technology, as I could see being deployed in lots of retail stores. The fact that it was made by Amazon, likely prevented to sell the technology to other retailers. Someone like Verifone, Ingenico or even a POS like Micros should go after the technology...
I don't know that there is much technology to sell, palm vein imaging is decades old in the access control industry. The reason you don't see it anywhere is because it was already a commercial failure in that application, by the end of the 1990s.
Amazon was even trying to sell the technology for access control applications, but their sales material were remarkably devoid of any reason to choose it over other biometrics.
Biometrics were a very crowded market during the 1980s and 1990s when it was a newer idea and electronics were starting to make things practical. Lots of ideas were tossed around before the industry pretty well consolidated on fingerprints with a side of iris imaging and hand geometry in some more security-sensitive niches. It mostly came down to cost: fingerprint scanners, even before the modern capacitative type, came down in price much faster than other types of imaging (visible rather than IR sensors, glass platen allowed for fixed focus, etc). The widespread use of fingerprint comparison in criminal forensics also mean that there's an older and stronger academic literature on fingerprint comparison, whereas other types of biometric sensors often involve proprietary match algorithms and you have to rely on the vendor's assertions about reliability.
Of course everything around cameras has come down in cost tremendously since then, so palm imaging is probably reasonably priced now, but it lacks a clear enough advantage over better-established methods for anyone to switch over. Besides, just the fact that you have to position your palm the way you do makes it difficult to install them in most practical door situations. Fingerprint sensors turn out to be very compact and fairly intuitive to use.
I scoured Amazon's sales materials around Amazon One very closely, because I found it fascinating that they were seemingly trying to revive the technique. I was surprised they were doing it as a payment device, but it made more sense when I found materials (I think old FCC filings) that suggested that it was originally designed as an access control product and perhaps "pivoted" to payments later. The strangest thing about it though was how unconvincing the sales materials were, it felt like they were really grasping at straws for a reason to select it over other options.
From what I could find it doesn't appear to have been an acquisition; the regulatory paperwork was all filed under some LLC but it seemed to just be a front company for Amazon which is fairly common for that kind of thing. So my best guess is that it was a pet project of someone influential enough to burn some R&D on it, and maybe pivoting to payments and putting them in Whole Foods was thought to maybe be the hail Mary that would turn it into a real business.
The actual integration with the PoS in the stores was clumsy too, they Velcro'd an NFC antenna to the side of the credit card terminal to use to make payments by proxy card. I originally got obsessed with it because I was trying to ID the suspicious device Velcro'd to the payment terminals at Whole Foods!
> The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.
My watch was already there for those situations where literal seconds matter.
Ironically, they were 'retrofitted' onto the payment terminals at the local whole-foods. They used the same "magnetic stripe simulator" tech that samsung was shipping in their phones for a few years about a decade ago.
If you had jumped through the hoops to set it up to associate a palm print with payment details, the system is still just swiping a virtual card in the payment terminal which is objectively less secure than the chip/nfc that has more or less replaced the old mag stripes.
The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.
Except they didn't in the real world.
The only place I ever saw these was at Whole Foods, and the store's POS terminals don't let you tap or palm until all items are rung up and there's a total available.
Usually when the cashier is down to the last two items, I have my card already out and hovering over the chip reader. The transaction completes in under two seconds.
Palm scanning is slower than any payment method other than cash or checks.
It solved Amazon’s blind spots regarding detailed purchase information and biometric collection in a way that could give them datasets from merchants who weren’t otherwise providing data to Amazon. No intrinsic benefits at all to consumers that I know of, though; presumably leading to zero adoption and why they ended it.
perhaps Amazon needs to rein in the rapid proliferation of low-value six-pagers and the resulting two-pizza teams.
solutions that often look brilliant on paper but are poorly executed or inadequately supported in practice (Amazon GO, Fire Phone, Dash Buttons, Astro, Amazon Wallet, etc, etc)
The said problem statement as described in Amazon 6 pager
Problem Statement Traditional authentication methods like ID cards, passwords, and physical keys are cumbersome, prone to loss or theft, and inefficient in high-traffic environments. In retail, healthcare, and enterprise settings, these lead to delays, security vulnerabilities, and increased operational costs. Biometric alternatives like facial recognition can raise privacy concerns and vary in accuracy due to lighting or masks. There’s a need for a secure, frictionless system that leverages unique, non-intrusive biometrics while giving users control over their data.
There are certain enterprise applications that particularly like biometrics.
Gym entry system where you can't share your entry fob with a buddy
Corporate access control system, no need for a guard to deal with people who've forgotten their cards.
Time clock where it's impossible for workers to clock other people in/out.