Police: Amazon Alexa didn’t call 911, but it did call us about domestic dispute...
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By admin
I replied her Mark zuckerburg might be listening us.
She laughed.
We laughed
Alexa laughed
Siri laughed.
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By admin
Jeff Bezos first named the company as Cadabra, after the magic slogan “Abra-Cadabra”. When he first mentioned this to his lawyer over the phone, his lawyer misheard it as “Cadaver ???” . Bezos knew right then, that the name would not stick.
Bezos had the customer-centric approach to the business, right from the start. So, he had proposed to change the name to “Relentless Inc”, a way of saying that the company would be relentless in its approach to customer satisfaction. In 1994, the company’s then de-facto CTO was Shel Kaphan. He was not very amused by the proposal. So, Bezos continued to look for options for the company name.
In the 1990s, the number of websites were finite, and countable by humans. The websites were sorted alphabetically on the “internet directory” of those days. After a bunch of research, Bezos settled on Amazon Inc for two reasons -
Amazon river has the largest collection of flora and fauna in the world. Amazon Inc will represent the largest collection of retail items on the internet Amazon-dot-com will appear in the first pages of the internet directory, making it easier to attract users and customers.
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By TheWorldNewsOrg
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By Money & Finance
Amazon's done it to books. And electronics. And clothing. Now it wants to rule the grocery aisles.
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By SciTechPress
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By admin
An Amazon Alexa speaker recorded a user’s conversation inside their home and sent it on to one of their stored contacts, reports The Wall Street Journal. Amazon confirmed the incident and said the device mistook a conversation for commands. The episode “raises questions about the security of such voice-operated devices,” per the Journal.
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By Guest Nicole
From the company that brought you the option of letting a courier inside your homecomes a new service: package delivery inside your car.
Amazon is expanding its in-home delivery service called Key to include deliveries to trunks and back seats of cars. The service is available only to Amazon Prime members in 37 cities who have a 2015 or newer Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac or Volvo with an active OnStar or Volvo On Call account.
Essentially, these are already connected cars that can be remotely unlocked — in this case for package delivery, which Amazon promises within a four-hour window. The shopper has to confirm that they've parked within range of the delivery location — in a publicly accessible area — and can track the progress through the Amazon Key app.
Amazon has devoted much effort to figuring out how to stop its packages from being stolen from porches and public spaces, which is costing the company a pretty penny. With in-car service, Amazon can use shoppers' cars as secure mail drop boxes.
Amazon, which recently started an offer to deliver packages inside people's homes, now offers to deliver inside people's cars.
Amazon
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By TheWorldNewsOrg
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By Guest Nicole
Amazon is testing a service that provides two-hour deliveries directly from Whole Foods stores, the tech giant’s latest push toward selling groceries in a way that allows customers to avoid physical stores altogether. According to the Seattle Times,Prime account holders in Austin, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Virginia Beach can order items online and an employee will go and remove them from the shelves at his or her Whole Foods. (You thought Whole Foods employees had a lot to cry about right now …) A Prime courier will then collect and deliver the items in the one- or two-hour time window, the website promises.
Amazon says it’s already working on expanding. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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By TheWorldNewsOrg
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By admin
Coming soon to an office near you: Alexa for Business. Amazon’s virtual assistant is entering the workplace as a new tool for booking conference rooms, launching meetings, and maybe eventually getting your coffee order right.
A leader in the voice-recognition field with the Echo, Amazon’s making professional waves— Hello guest! Please register or sign in (it's free) to view the hidden content. is already on board with the service. New Alexa “skills” will give workers the ability to dim lights, adjust room temperature, and send a notification to refill the printer (this will only get confusing for the office intern, Alexa).
The effort to bring Alexa to work comes as the service is flanked by competitors Google, Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana. But that shouldn’t hamper growth too much. Alexa device usage could reach 128 million by 2020.
It’s still up in the air whether companies will be comfortable having a smart-speaker listening in on sensitive conversations, but Amazon insists nothing is sent to the cloud until a user says “Alexa.”
“Alexa, please don’t share our company secrets.”
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By MS60F7
Just think what we could do if we all shopped on smile.amazon.com and designated the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society as our charity. I did this over a year ago and, well, my purchases sent $73.45 to the society. But with others, we have contributed $21,439.23 to the society - that could build two kingdom halls in Africa!!
Spread the word to use this feature and switch to
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By Guest Nicole
Andy Rubin said Wednesday that his new startup's anticipated Essential Phone is now "in full mass production" and he plans to announce next week when the $699 device will become available.
The phone's launch is delayed after Rubin, the creator of Google's Android, first promised a June release. So, to prove that Essential's first product is in fact coming soon, Rubin posted three pictures on Twitter of the production of the phones.
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By TheWorldNewsOrg
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By Guest Nicole
If you thought Amazon’s retail domination would slow down any time soon, you were mistaken.
Just a day after it announced it’ll let Prime shoppers try on clothing at home for free before charging them, Goldman Sachs notified clients that Amazon is inching toward a wholesale partnership with Nike. Until now, Nike has only been available on Amazon through third-party sellers. Competitors Adidas and Under Armour already sell directly to Amazon, but Nike is one of the many brands that have held out, likely because of Amazon’s rampant counterfeit problem. According to Goldman Sachs, Nike is “close to commencing a direct relationship selling product on Amazon.com.”
This partnership could give Nike $300 million to $500 million more in revenue. As Gordon Haskett analyst Chuck Grom notes, the impact of this new partnership would be devastating to other stores. It could essentially wipe out a massive chunk of business for struggling department stores like Kohl’s and J.C. Penney, which are in a dire state and rely on business from popular and approachable brands like Nike. Stores like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Foot Locker, businesses that mainly rely on a brand like Nike, could also see colossal effects.
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By TheWorldNewsOrg
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By admin
Amazon is giving a price break on its prime service to low-income consumers on food stamps and other government assistance.
Customers who receive benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, can pay $5.99 per month for membership, which would include free shipping and unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Prime Video.
Customers will need to qualify for the discount by having a valid EBT card, which are typically used to disburse funds for food stamps and other government aid programs, such as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF.)
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By admin
Amazon is customer-obsessed to the point that everyone has to be able to work in a call center. As part of a training session each year, Jeff Bezos asks thousands of Amazon managers, including himself, to attend a two-day call center training program. In the early days, Bezos had brought an empty chair to the meetings and informed his top executives that they should consider the empty seat as being occupied by a customer, who is "the most important person in the room."
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By Guest Nicole
Amazon is dominating the voice-controlled speaker market, according to a new forecast from eMarketer out this morning. The maker of the Echo-branded speakers will have 70.6 percent of all voice-enabled speaker users in the U.S. this year – well ahead of Google Home’s 23.8 percent and other, smaller players like Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon, and Mattel, who combined only account for 5.6 percent of users.
The new report backs up another from VoiceLabs released in January, which also found that Amazon was leading the voice-first device market, thanks to Echo’s popularity.
While the market itself is not expected to be a winner-take-all scenario, competitors like Amazon and Google will win entire homes, as most consumers have said they wouldn’t consider buying a competing device once they already own one voice-controlled speaker.
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By Guest Nicole
A handful of apps are no longer supported on the Apple Watch, according to a report by Apple Insider. Major apps like Google Maps, Amazon, and eBay appear to have quietly abandoned the Apple Watch App Store, without giving a heads-up or providing any explanation to users.
AI reports that Google pulled support for its Maps app on watchOS a few weeks ago, while recent updates to the Amazon and eBay apps no longer reference support for the Apple Watch. Other affected apps include Target (the main one, not its coupon app Cartwheel) and TripAdvisor. A TripAdvisor thread dating back to February questioned the changes, but users said they emailed technical support and received no response.
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By Guest Nicole
Amazon has the potential to meet the expectations of investors. But success will bring a big problem
AMAZON is an extraordinary company. The former bookseller accounts for more than half of every new dollar spent online in America. It is the world’s leading provider of cloud computing. This year Amazon will probably spend twice as much on television as HBO, a cable channel. Its own-brand physical products include batteries, almonds, suits and speakers linked to a virtual voice-activated assistant that can control, among other things, your lamps and sprinkler.
Yet Amazon’s shareholders are working on the premise that it is just getting started. Since the beginning of 2015 its share price has jumped by 173%, seven times quicker than in the two previous years (and 12 times faster than the S&P 500 index). With a market capitalisation of some $400bn, it is the fifth-most-valuable firm in the world. Never before has a company been worth so much for so long while making so little money: 92% of its value is due to profits expected after 2020.
That is because investors anticipate both an extraordinary rise in revenue, from sales of $136bn last year to half a trillion over the next decade, and a jump in profits. The hopes invested in it imply that it will probably become more profitable than any other firm in America. Ground for scepticism does not come much more fertile than this: Amazon will have to grow faster than almost any big company in modern history to justify its valuation. Can it possibly do so?
It is easy to tick off some of the pitfalls. Rivals will not stand still. Microsoft has cloud-computing ambitions; Walmart already has revenues nudging $500bn and is beefing up online. If anything happened to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and boss, the gap would be exceptionally hard to fill. But the striking thing about the company is how much of a chance it has of achieving such unprecedented goals
A new sort of basket-case
This is largely due to the firm’s unusual approach to two dimensions of corporate life. The first of these is time. In an era when executives routinely whinge about pressure to produce short-term results, Amazon is resolutely focused on the distant horizon. Mr Bezos emphasises continual investment to propel its two principal businesses, e-commerce and Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud-computing arm.
In e-commerce, the more shoppers Amazon lures, the more retailers and manufacturers want to sell their goods on Amazon. That gives Amazon more cash for new services—such as two-hour shipping and streaming video and music—which entice more shoppers. Similarly, the more customers use AWS, the more Amazon can invest in new services, which attract more customers. A third virtuous circle is starting to whirl around Alexa, the firm’s voice-activated assistant: as developers build services for Alexa, it becomes more useful to consumers, giving developers reason to create yet more services.
So long as shareholders retain their faith in this model, Amazon’s heady valuation resembles a self-fulfilling prophecy. The company will be able to keep spending, and its spending will keep making it more powerful. Their faith is sustained by Amazon’s record. It has had its failures—its attempt to make a smartphone was a debacle. But the business is starting to crank out cash. Last year cashflow (before investment) was $16bn, more than quadruple the level five years ago.
If Amazon’s approach to time-frames is unusual, so too is the sheer breadth of its activities. The company’s list of current and possible competitors, as described in its annual filings, includes logistics firms, search engines, social networks, food manufacturers and producers of “physical, digital and interactive media of all types”. A wingspan this large is more reminiscent of a conglomerate than a retailer, which makes Amazon’s share price seem even more bloated: stockmarkets typically apply a “conglomerate discount” to reflect their inefficiencies.
Many of these services support Amazon’s own expansion and that of other companies. The obvious example is AWS, which powers Amazon’s operations as well as those of other firms. But Amazon also rents warehouse space to other sellers. It is building a $1.5bn air-freight hub in Kentucky. It is testing technology in stores to let consumers skip the cash register altogether, and experimenting with drone deliveries to the home. Such tools could presumably serve other customers, too. Some think that Amazon could become a new kind of utility: one that provides the infrastructure of commerce, from computing power to payments to logistics.
A giant cannot hide
And here lies the real problem with the expectations surrounding Amazon. If it gets anywhere close to fulfilling them, it will attract the attention of regulators. For now, Amazon is unlikely to trigger antitrust action. It is not yet the biggest retailer in America, its most mature market. America’s antitrust enforcers look mainly at a firm’s effect on consumers and pricing. Seen through this lens, Amazon appears pristine. Consumers applaud it; it is the most well-regarded company in America, according to a Harris poll. (AWS is a boon to startups, too.)
But as it grows, so will concerns about its power. Even on standard antitrust grounds, that may pose a problem: if it makes as much money as investors hope, a rough calculation suggests its earnings could be worth the equivalent of 25% of the combined profits of listed Western retail and media firms. But regulators are also changing the way they think about technology. In Europe, Google stands accused of using its clout as a search engine to extend its power to adjacent businesses. The comparative immunity from legal liability of digital platforms—for the posting of inflammatory content on Facebook, say, or the vetting of drivers on Uber—is being chipped away.
Amazon’s business model will also encourage regulators to think differently. Investors value Amazon’s growth over profits; that makes predatory pricing more tempting. In future, firms could increasingly depend on tools provided by their biggest rival. If Amazon does become a utility for commerce, the calls will grow for it to be regulated as one. Shareholders are right to believe in Amazon’s potential. But success will bring it into conflict with an even stronger beast: government.
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By The Librarian
Preaching in the Amazon region in Brazil. Photo shared by @likke_miller
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By James Thomas Rook Jr. · Posted
That's nothing ... I have a Starship Warp Drive fueled by old copies of "The Village Voice", and the "New York Times" (the old gray, senile lady ...), because nothing travels faster than bad news. -
By James Thomas Rook Jr. · Posted
... that's why I raise chickens! -
By James Thomas Rook Jr. · Posted
I also used to enjoy Tetris ... then I started designing chemical plants and refineries, which is sorta like the same thing, except getting paid very well does have its attractiveness. Sigh ... I guess I will be buying the new Flight Simulator ... and the yoke ... and the pedals ... and the throttle... Sigh ... so much for that new 26.5 inch long Remington gas operated shotgun I wanted .... I suppose either one will be helpful during a Zombie or Liberal Apocalypse. -
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