Holiday shopping season is getting a big head start this year. Amazon today announced that it will hold Prime Day — its annual mega global sale event on a big range of items, including toys, TVs, electronics, fashion, beauty, kitchen, home and Amazon Devices — on Tuesday, October 13 (midnight PT) and carrying on through […]

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Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, America’s roughly 640 billionaires have seen their fortunes soar by $845 billion in combined assets or 29% collectively, widening the already yawning gap between the very richest and the rest of the U.S. Many of those billions were made by tech founders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and […]

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Amazon announces a new game service and plenty of hardware upgrades, tech companies team up against app stores and United Airlines tests a program for rapid COVID-19 testing. This is your Daily Crunch for September 24, 2020. The big story: Amazon unveils its own game-streaming platform Amazon’s competitor to Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud is […]

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Shopify blames “rogue” employees for a data breach, Google Maps adds COVID-19 data and China pushes back against the TikTok deal. This is your Daily Crunch for September 23, 2020. The big story: Shopify confirms data breach The e-commerce platform blamed two “rogue members” of its support team, alleging that they stole customer data from […]

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From new Ring flying indoor drone cameras to an adorable new kids version of one of its most popular Amazon home products, Jeff Bezos’ Seattle retailer unveiled a slew of new hardware goodies just ahead of the holiday shopping season. Echo updates Amazon kicked off its latest hardware showcase by unveiling a new version of […]

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Amazon announced the Echo Show line in 2017, and today, it’s finally gaining access to Netflix. The video service joins Hulu and Prime Video as the only officially supported video streaming apps. The news came from Amazon’s yearly Echo event where the company unveiled a series of new products and services including redesigned speakers and […]

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Amazon today announced a redesign Fire TV experience along with an updated Fire TV Stick and a new, lower-cost Fire TV Stick Lite. The updated interface for the Alexa-enabled smart TV platform will introduce a handful of new features, including support video calling and other options for using Fire TV as a way to video […]

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At its Devices and Services event, Amazon launched its own cloud gaming competitor to Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud . It’s called Luna. The company is launching the product in early access at an introductory price of $5.99 per month. Users will be able to stream titles wirelessly without downloading the games and can play […]

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Amazon today announced a lot of new products including the new Echo speaker line. And the products look dramatically different. Gone are the cylinders. They’re spheres now and look like nothing else on the market. The lights are now on the bottom, while there are still rounded buttons on the top. The Alexa software got […]

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So this is crazy. Amazon’s new Echo Show 10 swivels on its base to follow you around the room. The on-board camera is capable of recognizing a person and spins around to follow them — essentially taking the person tracking feature found on Facebook’s Portal and Google’s Nest Hub Max to the next, creepier lever. […]

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Ring built its entire business on reinventing the doorbell — and now it’s taking a similar approach to the humble home security camera, with the Ring Always Home Cam, set to be available sometime next year. You might not guess from its name, but this security camera is actually mobile: It’s a drone that flies […]

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Amazon -owned Ring is expanding from home and neighborhood security to the automative world, with three new products it debuted today at Amazon’s expansive devices and services extravaganza. These include Ring Car Alarm, Ring Car Cam, and Ring Car Connect – two new devices and one API/hardware combo aimed at automotive manufacturers, respectively. Each of […]

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At its annual hardware event, Amazon today announced new capabilities for its Alexa personal assistant that will allow it to become more personalized as it can now ask clarifying questions and then use this personalized data to interact with the user later on. In addition, Alexa can now join a conversation, too, starting a mode […]

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Amazon today introduced a redesign of its best-selling smart speaker, the Echo Dot. The company is bringing a new spherical design to the Echo Dot, Echo Dot with Clock and a new Echo Dot Kids Edition — the latter which now features colorful animal character designs. Instead of a flatter, hockey puck-shaped device that can […]

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Amazon kicked things off at today’s big (virtual) hardware event in Seattle by introducing a very new and very round take on the Echo. The biggest change appears to be aesthetic, turning the smart speaker into a big, fabric covered call. That’s a nice improvement from a sound perspective, doing a better job of offering […]

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Blue Origin founder and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has made no secret of his ambition to eventually create orbiting space stations that act as places for people to live and work — he outlined a vision based on space settlement designs first conceived by physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, including its lunar lander reveal, at a […]

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WhyLabs, a new machine learning startup that was spun out of the Allen Institute, is coming out of stealth today. Founded by a group of former Amazon machine learning engineers, Alessya Visnjic, Sam Gracie and Andy Dang, together with Madrona Venture Group principal Maria Karaivanova, WhyLabs’ focus is on ML operations after models have been […]

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Nature, a Japanese hardware startup that focuses on IoT home devices, announced the launch of Remo 3, its home appliance smart remote, in the United States and Canada today. Priced at $129, the Bluetooth-enabled Remo 3 allows people to control with their smartphones or smart speakers multiple appliances that use an infrared remote, including air […]

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Yesterday, a fitness equipment maker called Echelon Fitness announced its latest product, the so-called Prime Bike. At $500, it’s nearly a clone of Peloton’s $1,900 product. The company said it had developed the bike “in collaboration with Amazon.” Amazon is now saying that’s not true and has removed the product from its site and issued […]

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More than seven years after Amazon began its e-commerce operations in India, and two years after its shopping service added support for Hindi, the most popular language in the country, the American giant is embracing more local languages to court hundreds of millions of new users. Amazon announced on Tuesday its website and apps now […]

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At its (virtual) Ignite conference, Microsoft today announced the launch of Azure Orbital, a new service that is meant to give satellite operators a complete platform to communicate with their satellites and process data from them — including the ground stations to receive those signals. The company is specifically positioning the services as a solution […]

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Amazon teamed up with Echelon to build and sell the Prime Bike. The $500 exercise bike is a virtual clone of the $1,900 Peloton bike minus the screen — even the color scheme and design are the same. The bike is available now from Amazon (and Walmart, with slightly different branding). Echelon builds several fitness […]

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Last year, Amazon announced its Sidewalk network, a new low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol it developed to help connect smart devices inside and — maybe even more importantly — outside of your home. Sidewalk, which is somewhat akin to a mesh network that, with the right amount of access points, could easily cover a whole neighborhood, […]

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Twitter takes preemptive steps to avoid election-related hacks, we check out the new Apple Watches and Facebook launches new business tools. This is your Daily Crunch for September 17, 2020. The big story: Twitter tightens security ahead of election Twitter said today that “high-profile, election-related” accounts in the United States will be receiving notifications telling […]

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Hulu was one of the first major streaming services to introduce a “co-viewing” feature that allows friends and family to watch Hulu content together from different locations. The feature, Hulu Watch Party, was initially only available for subscribers on the the ad-free tier of Hulu’s streaming service. Now, the company is making Watch Party available […]

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Amazon is making it easier for Alexa devices owners to use Routines. The feature, which has been around for years, allows Alexa users to combine multiple tasks into a single voice command of their choosing. For example, you could make a routine that turns off your lights, plays relaxing music, and locks your doors when […]

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Pachama, the forest carbon sequestration monitoring service that tracks how much carbon dioxide is actually captured in forestry offset projects, has raised $5 million in fresh funding from a clutch of high profile investors including Amazon, Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The investment is one of several deals that Amazon has announced today through its Climate Pledge […]

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When you look at the Asia-Pacific (APAC) regional cloud infrastructure numbers, it would be easy to think that one of the Chinese cloud giants, particularly Alibaba, would be the leader in that geography, but new numbers from Synergy Research show Amazon leading across the region overall, which generated $9 billion in revenue in Q2. The […]

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Redwood Materials, the recycling startup founded by Tesla’s longtime CTO and co-founder JB Straubel, has landed Amazon as a new investor and customer. Amazon’s investment in Redwood Materials is one of a handful announced Thursday that stems from the e-commerce giant’s $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund. Amazon announced in June that it would commit to […]

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Alexa just read me Monday’s baseball scores. It was great for two reasons. First, the A’s shut out the Mariners 9-0 in the second game of a doubleheader. And second, she did so in Samuel L. Jackson’s voice. With Amazon based in Seattle, I assume they’re happy I’ve chosen to focus on the latter fact […]

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