THE BYTE

Welcome to the BYTE, where we serve up the latest home and tech news from the last week for you to sink your teeth into.

This week we’re taking a BYTE out of a company with everything from A to Z, natural disasters, awards in innovation, the time to build homes, and some new movement data. Dig in!

Generally

They Started By Selling Books…
…now Amazon sells everything under the sun and does so much more. The latest from them is their voice assistant, Alexa, will now be a team player with Microsoft’s Cortana. Also Amazon is looking to open a HQ number 2.

They’re Kind Of A Big Deal
With Amazon and Microsoft working together, we are seeing the first big bridge since voice assistants entered the world. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and many more all are trying to dominate the space, but they each have their pitfalls and honestly it’s getting hard for consumers to remember who they’re talking to. If more partnerships are in the future then we may see an actually useful voice assistant that can do it all.

Now, about that second headquarters. Amazon announced last week that it is going to build a completely second HQ somewhere in the U.S. and is taking bids from cities until October 19^th. Just about every big city has said, “Pick Me! Pick Me!” Which makes sense because this HQ will bring up to 50,000 jobs and upwards of $5 billion into the economy it chooses. Specific requirements that Amazon is looking for are: minimum 1 million people in population, stable, business friendly environment, proximity to major highways and international airports, and access to mass transit. The decision is expected for early 2018.

Taking A Beating

Texas, Florida, California, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, Montana
This end of summer has been a doozy. Two massive hurricanes, Harvey then Irma, and out west there are numerous fires burning and all together have burned an area larger than the state of Maryland, and many of the fires aren’t that close to being put out yet. With all of these areas being effected by various disasters, once things calm down going into winter there is going to be a lot of clean up and a lot of work to be done to get things back to normal. However, some are worried that there won’t be enough people to rebuild what has been broken or burned.

Take Notes

Motivation Monday
Fast Company awards companies, designers, brands, or just about anyone who have created something innovative in the last year. Their Innovation By Design Awards for 2017 have been announced. Some highlights include modular plane designs from Airbus, 4D printed shoes from Adidas, and much much more. If you’re looking for something to get your creative mind going this Monday, look no further.

Place Your Bets
NAHB looked at the average time it took to build a single family home and how long it took from getting a permit to starting to build. The average single-family house took 6.5 months to actually build to completion and about a month from authorization to start. However, it did vary greatly based off of area of the country. For example the South Atlantic only took 6.5 months to complete after permitting, whereas New England area took 10.5 months.

Uber Info
Uber has released a plethora of driving data and analysis via its new(ish) Uber Movement. Right now you can only see data from Bagota, Boston, Washington D.C., Sydney, and Manila. More data from other cities may be coming soon, but the goal is to use the data Uber has collected to help city planners, mayors, and the like better plan and build their cities.

Totally Unrelated

Wish I Was This Excited About Most Things
We should probably all make it a goal to be as excited about something this week as this little guy is about paint samples.