Amazon has once again grown its portfolio by gobbling up the ever so popular company “Ring“, showing how determined they are to squeeze into your daily life at home. This comes only a few months after they acquired Blink (December), another company specializing in smart cams, doorbells and more.
Ring is one of the most successful smart-doorbell and camera companies in the market, gaining steam all over thanks to their clever marketing using actual (as well as mock) videos showing thieves or other misfits being caught in action by their products. Great for putting an end to package thieves menacing the neighborhood or seeing if its the in-laws, allowing you to pretend your not home without coming anywhere near the door; they have proven to deliver a reliable cloud service for their recorded content, as well as a wonderful neighborhood watch feature (allowing you to alert everyone near you of incidents by sharing select videos you capture).
The news came today (Tuesday) with no information on how much this purchase has cost Amazon, but Reuters is confident based on a source of their own, that it cost them well over $1 billion to pull off.
This will give Amazon one of the biggest pushes ever into smart homes around the country, coming close to the impact that Echo (Alexa) devices have had. Ring is already compatible with Amazon’s Echo Show devices, so the groundwork is already there, thus maybe this acquisition will help open the Ring products to a much wider selection of third party solutions (hopefully IFTTT and hubs like Vera or SmartThings). You can also bet they will most likely find a way to integrate it with their Amazon Key service, that allows Amazon delivery personnel to briefly come into your home while you’re away to “securely” drop the package inside your door (which still scares the willies out of us).
Buy gobbling up Ring, it doesn’t just stop with their camera/doorbell solutions since Ring recently acquired a company called “Mr. Beams“, a successful company that specializes in wireless battery-powered (and motion sensing) lights, that allow you to decorate your home and landscaping as you see fit.
Hopefully they decide to keep the competitive pricing that Ring offers its customers ($3/month per camera, or $10 /month for unlimited cameras). Their pricing has proven to be quite successful when it comes to the competition when paired with the reliability of their network (and neighborhood features). Of course free would be better (as long as quality doesn’t take a hit), but we can’t be too greedy I guess.
