Last week (28 April), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) stock skyrocketed after the company announced financial results for its first quarter, ended 31 March, 2016. AWS accounted for 56% of the company's profit this quarter and is the most profitable business at Amazon.

Amazon exceeded expectations across the board: Revenue came in at US$29.1bn (£19.8m), up 28% from last year and beating expectations of US$27.99bn (£19.03bn); earnings per share (EPS) came in at US$1.07 (£0.73), way above expectations of US$0.58(£0.39); but, most impressively, revenue for Amazon Web Services (AWS) came to US$2.57bn (£1.75bn), again, above analysts expectations.

Amazon's achievements in cloud-computing are impressive. AWS provides storage services to some of the world's best-known digital natives, such as Netflix, Instagram (part of Facebook), and Spotify, as well as more traditional companies like General Electric. AWS revenue is up 64% from the first quarter of last year, and its operating income is up 170%. Growth of that rate is rarely seen in a commoditised sector.

Net sales increased 28%, to US$29.1bn (£19.8bn) in the first quarter. Net sales increased 29%, compared to first quarter 2015.

Amazon are also doing well in the consumer technology space. “Amazon devices are the top-selling products on Amazon, and customers purchased more than twice as many Fire tablets than first quarter last year”, said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Earlier this week, the US$39 (£26.52) Fire TV Stick became the first product ever — from any manufacturer — to pass 100,000 customer reviews, including over 62,000 5-star reviews, also more than any other product ever sold on Amazon. Echo, too, is off to an incredible start; and we can’t yet manage to keep it in stock, despite all efforts. We’re building premium products at non-premium prices, and we’re thrilled so many customers are responding to our approach.”

Product Highlights

Amazon have a plethora of products that are less well-known, certainly in the UK, that could a) transform how consumers interact with technology and b) open up huge revenue streams, if the company chose to monetise these products via advertising. Below are a few examples.

– Amazon announced two Alexa-enabled devices: Amazon Echo Dot, a hands-free, voice-controlled device that uses the same far-field voice recognition as Amazon Echo – for less than US$90 (£61); and Amazon Tap, an Alexa-enabled portable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi speaker for under US$130 (£88).

– Alexa added hundreds of new skills, which include requesting a car from Uber, ordering a pizza from Domino’s, checking your credit balance with Capital One, getting fitness information from Fitbit, receiving election updates from NBC News, and many more. Alexa also supports more smart home devices, including thermostats from Nest, ecobee, Insteon, and Honeywell, so customers can control the temperature in their homes using only their voice.

– Amazon Studios acquired the rights to several high-profile films, including Woody Allen’s Café Society, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship, and 2016 Sundance Film Festival titles Manchester by the Sea, Gleason, Author: The JT Leroy Story, and Wiener-Dog. Following its theatrical run, each film will become available exclusively to Prime members through Prime Video.

– Prime Music teamed up with Macklemore & Ryan Lewis to live stream their album release concert for This Unruly Mess I’ve Made. The live stream was available to all Amazon customers at no cost.

– The Amazon Global Store on Amazon.cn has grown to over 10 million items, providing Chinese customers with an easier and more convenient shopping experience with authentic products curated from the Amazon.com website.

– Amazon Home Services, providing customers with a simple way to buy and schedule professional services, now serves more than 40,000 US zip codes, with more than 1,200 service options, across 45 categories.

– Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Amazon Lumberyard, a free, cross-platform, 3D game engine for developers to create the highest-quality games, connect their games to compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch. Amazon Lumberyard helps developers build beautiful worlds, make realistic characters, and create stunning real-time effects

– AWS announced the general availability of the AWS Database Migration Service, a fully managed service that allows customers to migrate their production Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL databases from on-premises data centres to any of these engines, or Amazon Aurora on AWS, with virtually no downtime. So far this year, customers used the AWS Database Migration Service to move more than 2,000 databases to the AWS Cloud.

– AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Inspector, an automated security assessment service that helps customers improve the security and compliance of their applications deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

– AWS further enhanced its block storage service, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), announcing two new low-cost hard disk drive (HDD)-backed storage options that offer customers predictable performance for big data workloads. Amazon EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1) volumes deliver consistent baseline performance with the ability to 'burst' to higher throughput to meet the performance needs of big-data applications, like processing streaming data or performing data analytics.