layoffs

Last year we covered news that Amazon was thinking of entering the wearables space. The future of that mysterious, unannounced product is now in question following layoffs and restructuring at Amazon’s Silicon Valley hardware development center, lab126. Despite the recent successes of Dash (the WiFi connected reorder button) and Echo (a connected speaker with virtual assistant), the complete failure of the Fire Phone hit the company hard. In Q3, 2014 Amazon took a $170 million charge on inventory and supplier commitments, disclosing that the company was sitting on $83 million of Fire Phone inventory. Largely in reaction to that massive failure, for the first time Amazon is laying off employees at lab126.

The layoff are part of a restructuring effort resulting in large number of projects being shelved. Some of the canceled projects have leaked to the press and include