LA Times:

Ring doorbells are already being used by 2 million customers. Its improbable success comes five years after its founder, serial entrepreneur Jamie Siminoff, was rejected on the TV show “Shark Tank.”

Rejected isn’t quite right. He got offers, just none that made sense to him.

But the company proved there was demand for video-enabled doorbells, which enable users to see outside their homes via smartphone or computer. The technology provides a sense of security and a salve for one of the most nagging problems in the e-commerce era: package thieves.

There’s a certain irony there. Seems to me, the biggest victim of package thieves is Amazon, who ponys up a replacement when its packages don’t make it into customer hands.

Ring is also an excellent complement to Amazon Key, the program that allows package delivery services access to your house to leave a package under your lock and key.

One last thought on this. I’ve long thought one critical piece of the Amazon Echo ecosystem (echosystem?) that was missing was an Alexa phone. Amazon’s Fire Phone was a product ahead of its time. It was a commercial failure.

Alexa runs as a second class citizen on iOS and Android. There, but without that frictionless access to the hardware that makes Siri and Google person so easy to summon. I think Alexa is the demand card that Amazon’s phone was missing the first time around. If an Alexa-phone hit the market now, I think it’d be a very different story.