Inside the Secretive R&D Lab Behind the Amazon Phone - Businessweek

Excerpt from a Brad Stone Amazon Lab126 profile

"More than 1,600 people claim Lab126 as their employer on the professional networking site LinkedIn. Just a few months ago, Amazon investors might reasonably have demanded to know what those expensive engineers and product managers—and many others working on device hardware and software from Amazon’s offices in Seattle and in Cambridge, Mass.—were actually doing.

But this is turning out to be a big year for Lab126. Amazon released its Fire TV set-top box in April, to good reviews and endless promotion on the Amazon home page. Around the same time the company started quietly distributing the wand-like Amazon Dash, which lets users of its AmazonFresh grocery service scan barcodes of everyday items and add them to their online shopping lists. Tomorrow’s announcement—and refreshes to the e-reader and tablets that are no doubt coming later this year—will make this the most productive year for Lab126 since Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos established the group to pursue a digital reading device back in 2004."

Inside the Secretive R&D Lab Behind the Amazon Phone - Businessweek