Liz Hamren has been CEO of Amazon’s Ring business for almost a year, as the successor in the role to Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, but it’s not the first time she’s been involved in home cameras. Earlier in her career, she led marketing at Dropcam, where she expanded its user base before its acquisition by Google.
“I honestly have some unfinished business from that time, because we sold early to Google, and there was still so much we wanted to do,” she said in a recent interview with GeekWire. “So I feel like I get to come full circle 10 years later, being able to work in a similar space on home monitoring products.”
Hamren’s position at Amazon builds on a career that spans both technology and marketing. An engineer by training, she has held leadership roles at companies including Microsoft, Facebook’s Oculus, and Discord, contributing to a variety of tech product launches such as Xbox consoles and Meta VR headsets.
At Amazon, in addition to leading the Ring business, Hamren oversees Blink cameras, the Amazon Key service and the Amazon Sidewalk neighborhood wireless network. While the market for in-home cameras has matured over the past 10 years, it continues to be reshaped by new technologies, such as AI and drones.
“There’s so much opportunity for growth,” Hamren said. “With improvements in computer vision and AI, there’s still so much more we can do to provide you with really great information about what’s happening.”
At times over the years, this push to give users visibility into their homes has come with downsides, as evidenced by a $5.8 million settlement between Amazon and the FTC in May over allegations that the company made misleading claims about its privacy and security practices, and failed to protect consumers’ video data from unauthorized access. Amazon disputed the claims even as it agreed to settle the case to put the issue behind it.
Hamren said this intersection of security, privacy, and features is a major focus for the Ring team.
“I think you have to recognize that there is a tension there,” she acknowledged. She cited the company’s efforts to provide privacy to users, give them control over their personal data, ensure accounts and systems are secure, and offer tools to protect the privacy of their neighbors and others around them.
On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we talk with Hamren about Ring’s direction under her leadership, the career path that brought her to this role, and how advances such as AI and drones are reshaping this part of the tech industry. She also drops some hints about new Ring features in the works.
Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Continue reading for additional highlights, edited for clarity and length.
The current state of the Ring business: We still have an incredibly healthy doorbell business. Our camera business is our fastest-growing, it’s growing at about 30% a year, and the business still continues to be quite healthy. And then we continue to grow [Ring’s home alarm business] as well. And we’ll continue to innovate with things like our glass-break sensor, so that you can really know what’s going on at home when you’re not there.
AI-driven Ring features: We’ve been doing computer vision for a long time, and anyone that’s been in this industry has been. And so it’s actually exciting that now there’s been so much innovation, and also so much awareness, and then just a lot more acceleration of underlying technology that we can leverage. .
- We’ve been continuing to improve what we’re doing with things like person detection, things like package detection. People want to know specifically what is happening and be notified only of those things. …
- Then there’s things like vehicles, which a lot of people have been asking for. So that’s maybe one hint, which is, we’re working on being able to detect vehicles and notify you of that. …
- Video search is coming. That is something that we are working on. … People have a whole host of saved clips. How do you find the thing that you’re most interested in?
Security and privacy: It’s a privilege for us to build these products for customers, and for them to invite us into their homes, and we take that privilege very seriously. And we want to ensure that we’re building tools, we’re being incredibly transparent, and we continue to evolve with new features that really address the needs of our customers, keeping their data secure, making sure they have the ability to customize their cameras and understand how and where their videos are being used.
Status of the Ring Always Home Cam flying security drone: We’re continuing to work on it. We will provide updates as they come. But it is definitely still a project that we are very excited about, that is very ambitious. So stay tuned.
Status of Amazon Sidewalk neighborhood wireless network: Back in the spring, we allowed third parties to use our SDK and order dev kits to start using Sidewalk. We’ve had incredible engagement with third parties and are working closely with a few to build out Sidewalk experiences. So the network is alive and well … and we’re also using it internally for testing different kinds of sensors that makes sense to be on the Sidewalk network.
Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Audio editing by Curt Milton.
