Amazon’s Bull Run To Continue
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This illustration picture taken in Bretigny-sur-Orge on May 19, 2020 shows a sign with the company’s … [+]
Amazon’s stock (NASDAQ
Tag: Amazons
Amazon’s Prime Day Sales Seen Sharply Exceeding 2019 Level
Online retailer Amazon’s annual Prime Day shopping extravaganza starts at midnight U.S. Eastern Oct. 13 and sales are expected to exceed those of last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.
The Seattle tech provider and online retailer’s event, which runs two full days, could net $9.9 billion in total sales, eMarketer estimates.
That figure is more than 38% above last year’s Prime Day. Amazon doesn’t release sales figures for the event, but researchers pegged last year’s sales at roughly $7.16 billion.
J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth more conservatively estimates Amazon will take in $7.5 billion of revenue from the event this year, up 42% from an estimated $5.3 billion in 2019.
“The biggest difference this year is that Prime Day is running three months later than its typical mid-July timing. [And] as such Amazon is promoting the event as an early start to holiday shopping vs. Prime Day’s typical
Amazon’s ‘Crucible’ Is Officially Dead
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RIP Crucible
Perhaps it was just bad timing. Perhaps if Amazon Game Studios had released Crucible sooner, it would have been a hit.
Or perhaps it was marketing—or the lack thereof—that sunk the quirky competitive shooter, giving it one of the shortest lifespans in AAA game development.
Crucible was released on May 20th of this year, was promptly delisted from Steam in July and returned to Closed Beta status. Now, Amazon is now pulling the proverbial plug on November 9th when servers will officially go dark. That’s not quite half a year.
Then again, maybe Amazon simply shouldn’t have named its competitive shooter after the competitive mode in Destiny 2—a far better, more polished game. Just a thought.
Don’t get me wrong, when I previewed Crucible just before its launch, I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. Not enough to make it a regular part of my
Amazon’s Blink Indoor is a decent, battery-powered security camera for inside your house
This new, $80 Blink Indoor camera system is the indoor counterpart to Blink’s new weatherproof outdoor camera. It shares a similar design with the outdoor model, minus the weather-resistant housing, as well as the same set up, features and performance. That makes it a fine option, particularly if you want the mobility of a battery-powered indoor camera. But the Amazon company’s decision to ditch its excellent free cloud storage plan for the new Blink Subscription Plan is disappointing.
Like
- The $80 one-camera kit is pretty affordable.
Don’t Like
- Blink now charges for cloud video storage.
I’m an advocate for free cloud storage in general, despite many companies (like Nest and Ring) never offering it, but it’s even worse when a company offers it and then gets rid of it later.
As I mentioned in the Blink Outdoor review, Blink is offering a free trial of its cloud
Amazon’s palm reader offers a new way to pay at stores
Palm reading has arrived at two Amazon Go stores.
Amazon
Amazon already got rid of checkout lines at its brick-and-mortar Amazon Go stores. Now it wants to make getting into those stores easier too. Last week, the retail giant started letting people use its latest biometric tech — a palm reader dubbed Amazon One — to enter two Amazon Go locations in Seattle. Amazon unveiled the new tech ahead of its annual Prime Day shopping event, which will take place Oct. 13-14 this year.
“Amazon One is a fast, convenient, contactless way for people to use their palm to make everyday activities like paying at a store, presenting a loyalty card, entering a location like a stadium, or badging into work more effortless,” Dilip Kumar, Amazon’s vice president of physical retail and technology, said Sept. 29 in a blog post. “The service is designed to be highly secure
Survey Says: Shoppers Might Just Love Amazon’s Contactless Checkout Technology
It would be easy to chalk up technological developments from Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) as par for the course. The company is perpetually throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks.
A recent product unveiling, however, may mean far more than most realize.
The new device is the Amazon One, which can be used for contactless payments and is up and running in two Amazon Go stores. The device facilitates a completely hands-free interaction. Amazon says the palm print reader could also be utilized for things like granting access to restricted areas or in place of a loyalty card. Amazon is using it for its own purposes right now, but plans to sell the tech to third parties in the future.
Amazon One puts the e-commerce giant smack in the middle of a contactless shopping market that’s worth billions already, but could double in size in five years now that consumers
Is Amazon’s new flying drone camera private? What we know about Ring Always Home Cam
The Ring Always Home Cam is a security drone that flies around the inside of your house.
Amazon
What if your security camera wasn’t fixed to a wall, but free to move around your house and check from room to room while you’re away from home? Does that sound wonderful, creepy or something in between? However you feel about it, it’s the premise of Amazon’s new Ring Always Home Cam, a security camera that’s — get this — also a drone that flies around the inside of your house shooting video it then can stream or upload to the cloud.
Wait, what?
You read that right. Amazon announced its new flying security camera alongside updated Echo and Echo Dot smart speakers and a mailbox sensor, but this out-of-the-box approach
Every new Alexa feature announced at Amazon’s fall hardware event: Hunches, Guard Plus and more
Amazon
Amazon’s annual hardware event has come and gone, with a slew of product announcements, from a brand new Echo speaker and Echo Show display, to a cloud-based gaming platform. But the star of Amazon’s smart home is, as always, Alexa. Amazon’s voice assistant continues to expand its reach, connecting with over 140,000 smart home devices, and boasting more than 100 million Alexa-compatible devices installed across its user base. But Alexa’s power isn’t just in its rapidly growing scale and ever-expanding reach.
When I spoke to Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of smart home and Alexa mobile, before the hardware event, he said Alexa is becoming more independent too. Alexa will soon be able to act on Hunches without asking, to listen for and react to sounds other than a wake word, and to protect your home more actively with an upgrade to Alexa Guard.
Amazon’s Prime Day is the latest shake-up to the tech calendar
amazon / Getty Images / WIRED
No iPhone launch in September, next-gen console confusion, Google Pixels announced three months in advance and now an Amazon Prime Day sale in October. Like, well, everything else, the tech calendar has never seen anything like coronavirus.
The construction of a tech ‘calendar’ of expos, launches and sales, particularly over the past decade or so, has helped to shift products by building a reliable cycle of hype and supply. CES in January, MWC in February, E3 in June, IFA and Apple launches in September, Black Friday in November etc etc. Like clockwork.
The first Prime Day, Amazon’s one-day sale to drive subscriptions to its Prime membership scheme, took place on 15 July, 2015 and it has always been a summer sale since then. In 2018, it was 36 hours long and last year, it lasted two full days.
This year, it’s two days again
Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming already seems much different to Google Stadia
Is Amazon Luna just a subscription service — or is it an umbrella for all future streaming gaming?
Amazon
A year after Google launched Stadia, Amazon seems like it’s doing the same thing for cloud gaming. The just-announced Amazon Luna service is entering a streaming games market that’s suddenly quite crowded, alongside Stadia, Microsoft’s Game Pass Ultimate and Sony’s PlayStation Now.
Luna has a controller, like Stadia. It has Alexa on it, like Stadia has Google Assistant. Luna has big publishers on tap, like Ubisoft. Luna has Amazon-owned Twitch as a connected video platform, like Stadia has Google-owned YouTube. And Luna is starting in early access, with a beta-like vibe that Stadia also had last year.
Cloud gaming services are popping up to compete for your