With the target date set fourth being the 1st of February of 2012, Amazon will be striving to open its first outpost in the Greater Boston area. As we've discussed in previous blog posts, there has been a massive boom for tech-savvy firms to establish themselves in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These high tech firms are mainly settling their new Boston area offices on and around Kendall Square in Cambridge. Here, the plethora of talent spilling out of universities and the already growing technology-based corporations have attracted many to stay in the northeast.
Amazon is searching for approximately 40,000 square feet of space in Kendall Square where its future research team of potentially 100-150 individuals can call home. Not wishing to be too public on the matter, Amazon has taken the position of being a confidential company when dealing with potential landlords as opposed to using their name. This, supposedly, is because nothing at the moment has been set in stone for their move to Massachusetts yet.
There are many working opportunities that will be upcoming for Amazon. The 23rd of January will spark a weeks initiative for Amazons engineering team who are flying in to Boston to search out potential employees for its future Cambridge facility. Such positions that will soon be available are tasks concerning software engineering, engineering managers, and finally, quality assurance engineers, whom will focus primarily on the Kindle e-books, Amazons Cloud Drive storage services, Amazons MP3 store, and online delivery.
Amazon actually has already had an impact on the industry in the Greater Boston area dating back to the late 1990s when they bought out companies PlanetAll and Exchange.com. Despite this, Amazon never had their name in the Boston area as a legitimate operating business. Perhaps the reason behind their ambitions to now establish themselves in such a thriving area like Cambridge is because of sales tax. Currently, there is a sort of penalty for online retailing firms such as Amazon. This has occurred when businesses have created a branch in a location of the United States that has a significant number of employees and business operations in effect. This evidently has ruled out an online retail firm like Amazon from wishing to be in Boston. Despite this, in this new year, there is federal legislation in Washington, D.C. that is likely to pass that would eliminate any such restriction to firms who do their business in densely populated business centers such as Boston and Cambridge.
Subsequently, it is clear that we will soon have an Amazon Cambridge! The implementation of these massive corporations into our markets is only going to show a trickle down effect, benefiting countless people and businesses all around Massachusetts.
More Information: Boston.com
