All posts tagged: Amazon

Amazon announces three new serverless offerings to kick off re:Invent

Published by skeptic

Amazon kicked off AWS re:Invent, its annual customer conference, in Las Vegas tonight with a few new serverless offerings designed to make it easier to manage Aurora, Elastic Cache and Redshift serverless services. Matt Wood, AWS VP, says that Aurora Serverless is great for getting up and running very quickly with a cloud database, but over time, once you get to very, very high scale, and you’re  dealing with tens of millions of customers, or millions of different records, it becomes challenging for customers to deal with those kinds of numbers, forcing them to break the database into multiple pieces. “What you have to do as a customer to be able to kind of handle that scale, is you’ve traditionally had to split the data up into smaller and smaller segments, and then manage those segments independently. It’s called sharding. And it’s kind of a pain in the butt,” Wood told TechCrunch. “We’re announcing a limitless database, which handles all of that sharding for you under the hood completely automatically. So as a customer as …

Amazon workers begin Black Friday strike action, as UK consumer confidence picks up – business live | Business

Published by Sam

Key events Germany confirmed on brink of recession We have confirmation that Europe’s largest economy is on the brink of recession. Updated data shows that Germany’s GDP shrank by 0.1% in July-September, matching the initial reading. Ruth Brand, president of the Federal Statistical Office, says: “After the weak development in the first half of the year, the German economy started the second half of 2023 with a slight decline.” This follows stagnation in January-March, and 0.1% gowth in April-June. Today’s data will do very little to end the debate on whether or not the German economy is again the sick man of Europe, says Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro at ING. Brzeski adds: In any case, the German economy has become one of the growth laggards of the eurozone. This weak growth performance has a long list of explanations: there is the cyclical headwind stemming from inflation, still elevated energy prices and energy uncertainty, higher interest rates and China’s changing role from being a flourishing export destination to being a rival that needs fewer …

Amazon to sell cars online, starting with Hyundai

Published by skeptic

It was inevitable. Amazon, which got its start selling books, is getting into the car business. The e-commerce giant along with new partner Hyundai announced Thursday at the 2023 LA Auto Show that it will start selling vehicles on its website in the second half of 2024. Hyundai vehicles will be the first vehicles sold on Amazon.com’s U.S. store with other brands following later in the year. The Amazon car sales section will allow customers to shop for vehicles in their area based on a range of preferences, including model, trim, color, and features, choose their preferred car, and then check out online with their chosen payment and financing options. Customers will be able to buy a vehicle online and then pick it up or have it delivered by their local dealership, according to Amazon. Amazon already sells car accessories and operates an “Amazon Vehicle Showrooms” site that allows manufacturers to advertise. But until now, customers couldn’t actually buy that car, truck or SUV they were researching. Amazon says this shopping experience “will create another …

Amazon brings its home robot to businesses

Published by skeptic

In an acknowledgement that cracking the home robotics market is hard, Amazon is bringing its Astro robot to a decidedly more corporate audience. The company today announced Astro for Business, which repurposes Astro as a security robot for small- and medium-sized business customers. Astro for Business adds several new capabilities to Astro, including the ability to create multiple security monitoring routes and send alerts when the robot hears the sounds of smoke and carbon monoxide alarms or glass breaking. “[T]raditional security solutions can be too static or expensive for what businesses need. We think Astro for Business can help with that,” Anthony Robson, head of product for Amazon Astro, said in a canned statement. Astro for Business isn’t exactly cheap, though, starting at $2,349.99 — especially considering getting the full value out of the service requires subscribing to additional plans. To save video history and sync Astro with Ring alarms and motion detectors, Astro for Business customers have to pay $20 per month for Ring Protect Pro. Astro’s patrolling and alerting features, called Astro Secure, …

Amazon next in line for EU scrutiny over product risks and user rights

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Ecommerce behemoth Amazon has joined the growing list of tech giants getting formal requests for information (RFIs) from European Union regulators overseeing the bloc’s rebooted digital rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA). The European Commission said today it’s asked Amazon to provide it with more information on measures it’s taken to comply with DSA obligations related to risk assessments and mitigation measures to protect consumers online — with particular regard to the dissemination of illegal products and the protection of fundamental rights, as well as in relation to its recommender systems. The DSA came into force in late August for 19 larger platforms (aka very large online platforms, or VLOPs; and very large online search engines, or VLOSEs), triggering reporting requirements on them — which has led to tech giants publishing a range of data-points related to regional usage. While the DSA sets out a broadly applying governance framework for digital services (or will when it comes into wider application early next year) this subset of larger platforms (VLOPs/VLOSEs) are already expected to be compliant …

Amazon introduces new Buy with Prime perks, such as tracking and returns

Published by skeptic

Amazon’s Buy with Prime, a service that lets Prime members shop directly from third-party merchants and get Prime benefits like free shipping and returns, launched today new features, including the ability to track Buy with Prime orders through Amazon’s website and mobile app as well as access to 24/7 live chats with customer service. Amazon is also adding more drop-off sites for returns. Customers can now return eligible Buy with Prime orders at nearby UPS Store locations, Whole Foods Market, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores without a box or label. Additionally, shoppers can now see Amazon reviews on “off-Amazon product pages for participating brands that offer Buy with Prime,” the e-commerce giant wrote in today’s announcement. Theoretically, having reviews from real Amazon customers helps shoppers feel more confident about the products they’re buying on a third-party website. The new Buy with Prime features comes as the 2023 holiday season kicks off. Amazon is likely hoping to entice more customers to try out the service as well as nab fee revenue from additional online stores …

Amazon Games will close its Crown channel on Twitch and cut 180 jobs

Published by skeptic

Amazon announced another cluster of layoffs this week along with plans to discontinue the Crown channel, a flashy Amazon-run Twitch channel that featured television-like programming. Amazon will also shutter its Game Growth group, which helped creators in the gaming world market themselves. In a letter to staff, Amazon Games VP Christoph Hartmann characterized the decision as a move that would put more emphasis on offering free games to subscribers through Prime Gaming. “We’ve listened to our customers and we know delivering free games every month is what they want most, so we are refining our Prime benefit to increase our focus there,” Hartmann wrote. The layoffs will affect “just over” 180 roles across those groups. In April, Amazon eliminated around 100 roles in its games division. “After our initial restructuring in April, it became clear that we needed to focus our resources even more on the areas that are growing with the highest potential to drive our business forward,” Hartmann wrote. In February, Bloomberg reported that Amazon’s Crown channel on Twitch was inflating viewer numbers …

Amazon strikes deal with Snap to let users buy its products from ads on Snapchat

Published by skeptic

Amazon has entered into a partnership with Snap to allow users to buy its products directly from ads on the social app, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The news was first reported by The Information. The Amazon ads on Snapchat will display real-time pricing, delivery estimates, product details and Prime eligibility, the e-commerce giant told TechCrunch. Customers can choose to link their Snapchat account to their Amazon account through a one-time set-up. Once the accounts are linked, user can complete a checkout with Amazon in the product ad using their default Amazon shipping address and payment method, without leaving the social app. The company says in-app shopping with Amazon is available for select products advertised on Snapchat and sold by Amazon or by independent sellers in Amazon’s store. Amazon’s partnership with Snap will allow the e-commerce giant to better compete with TikTok, which recently launched TikTok Shop in the United States, allowing brands and creators to sell product directly on the social app. Although Amazon is massive and has a lot of clout, TikTok still …

TikTok’s newest feature lets you save favorite songs directly to Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music

Published by skeptic

TikTok is teaming up with streaming music services, including Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music on a new feature that will allow users to save the songs they hear in TikTok videos directly to their preferred streaming music app. The addition comes at a time when TikTok’s influence is increasingly a factor in music’s top charts and the discovery of new artists. Its impact can also be felt in Spotify’s TikTok-inspired redesign of its app earlier this year, which revamped the app with short-form discovery feeds for music and podcasts. Now, TikTok’s new “Add to Music app” feature will begin to appear as a button that says “Add Song” next to a track name at the bottom of a TikTok video in the For You Feed, allowing users to save the song to their streaming music app. The first time users tap this button, they’ll be able to set which music service they prefer as their default. Apple Music was not disclosed in TikTok’s press release about the feature, but is visible in the screenshots …

Meta and Amazon team up on new in-app shopping feature on Facebook & Instagram

Published by skeptic

Meta may have abandoned its efforts around live shopping on Facebook and Instagram, but the social networking company still believes in its apps’ potential as a shopping platform. That leads to today’s news that the company is now working with Amazon to allow customers to link their Facebook and Instagram accounts to their Amazon account to then shop through Meta’s social apps, where they can check out with their saved Amazon payment information and ship to their saved Amazon mailing address. “For the first time, customers will be able to shop Amazon’s Facebook and Instagram ads and check out with Amazon without leaving the social media apps,” an Amazon spokesperson, Callie Jernigan, confirmed in a statement to TechCrunch. “Customers in the U.S. will see real-time pricing, Prime eligibility, delivery estimates, and product details on select Amazon product ads in Facebook and Instagram as part of the new experience,” she said. Amazon also noted that the new in-app shopping feature will be available for select products advertised on Facebook or Instagram and sold by Amazon or …