On the day of its Q1 earnings release, many Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN 0.05% shareholders are hoping for a repeat of the company’s blowout 4Q14 earnings report back in January that drove the stock up 12 percent.
After all, how much could change in only three months?
When it comes to Amazon, three months is an eternity. Here’s a list of seven Amazon innovations since the company’s last earnings report.
1. Amazon Destinations
Amazon has a long way to go before it competes with the likes of The Priceline Group Inc PCLN 0.68%, Expedia Inc EXPE 0.56% and Orbitz Worldwide Inc OWW 0.17%, but after much anticipation, Amazon launched its own travel-booking service, Amazon Destinations, just this week.
The service does not offer flight-booking and instead emphasizes local getaways, including hotels, inns and bed-and-breakfast properties in several metropolitan regions in the U.S.
2. Dash Button
No, it’s not an April Fools joke. The timing of the controversial new Dash Button’s launch sparked debate about its legitimacy (and garnered the button plenty of publicity). The Dash Button is a pre-set, physical product-ordering button that Prime members can place inside their homes for convenience.
3. Amazon Home Services
Amazon launched Home Services in March, a platform that allows customers to request services such as home repair or personal lessons from independent local contractors.
Amazon Home Services looks to be Amazon’s attempt at dipping its toe into the market dominated by Angie’s List Inc ANGI 0.93% and Yelp Inc YELP 0.26%.
4. Prime Now
Prime Now is nothing new to residents of certain areas of Manhattan, but as of March, Amazon has expanded its one-hour delivery service to Baltimore and Miami for the first time.
5. Prime Music Radio App
In March, Amazon released an updated Prime Music iOS app that included Amazon’s version of Pandora Media Inc’s P 1.14% radio app and Apple Inc’s AAPL 0.82% iTunes Radio. Prime Music’s streaming artist and genre-based music stations had been available online for some time, but the new app allows iPhone users to easily enjoy the new stations for the first time.
6. STEM Toy Store
As part of Amazon’s busy month of March, the company also launched a new store dedicated entirely to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) toys for children of all ages. The launch of the STEM store was partially in response to the overwhelming popularity of the educational toys during the 2014 holiday season.
7. Elastic File System
The highlight of this quarter’s earnings report for many investors will be Amazon’s disclosure of its cloud division’s numbers for the very first time. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a global leader in cloud computing, and Amazon is constantly improving its services.
Earlier this month, the company announced the launch of a brand new storage service, Elastic File System (EFS). According to TechCrunch, EFS which will serve as “a common file system for multiple EC2 virtual machines on AWS through the standard NFSv4 protocol.”
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