Tag: amazon

Amazon is buying the ‘Amazon of the Middle East’

Amazon wants to be a one-stop shop for the entire world, but has struggled to get a foothold in the Middle East. After months of deliberations , the company has finally purchased Souq.com, the “Amazon of the Middle East.” Russ Grandinetti, Amazon VP, says that the deal is a no-brainer, since both sites “share the same DNA, ” adding that the pair will now “work hard to provide the best possible service” in the region. The price hasn’t been disclosed, but rumors from the back-end of 2016 claimed that Souq’s founders were looking for a cool $1 billion. TechCrunch believes that the price was haggled down during negotiations, and thinks that the final fee was closer to $650 million. For that chunk of change, Amazon will now have a strong presence in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE with plenty of the knotty issues of doing business in the Middle East already fixed. For example, credit cards aren’t ubiquitous in the area, so Souq developed a prepayment card where users top up in retail stores before ordering goods online. There’s also no unified logistics platform in many locations, or addresses, so Souq had to build a network of local couriers who knows where people live. There’s no word on if Amazon will look to rebrand Souq with its own logo, although it’s not that likely given its normal procedure. After all, Zappos, Twitch, and IMDb aren’t called Amazon Shoes, Amazon Game Videos or Amazon Movie Database for nothing. Then again, the fact that the site is gaining a foothold in a new region, there may be a temptation to bring everything under the classic brand. Source: Amazon (BusinessWire)

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Amazon is buying the ‘Amazon of the Middle East’

Amazon will collect state sales taxes nationwide April 1st

While Amazon has resisted collecting state sales taxes, over the last few years it has bent, state by state . Now CNBC reports that as of April 1st, it will collect sales taxes in every state that imposes one, as Hawaii, Idaho, Maine and New Mexico join the list. Even if Amazon (or another online retailer) doesn’t collect sales tax, consumers may be on the hook to pay via a “use tax.” For companies like Amazon, however, bringing warehouses, services and data centers closer to where customers live has closed the loophole, and they’ve begun collecting the tax on their end. Between the taxes and universal pricing policies, the gap between Amazon and local retailers (big box or small) is getting closer. Of course, the convenience of Amazon Prime and the addition of other services (Fresh, Local, etc.) may keep things tipped in its favor. Source: CNBC

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Amazon will collect state sales taxes nationwide April 1st

Fill In Those Wi-Fi Dead Spots With a $20 Range Extender

Wi-Fi range extenders can’t work miracles, but if there’s one spot in your house with spotty coverage, they can be a much cheaper solution than buying a new router. So for $20, why not give this one a try? Most complaints about this model seem to stem from its setup process, but if you can get through that, people… Read more…

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Fill In Those Wi-Fi Dead Spots With a $20 Range Extender

Looney Tunes and other classic cartoons get a streaming service

Your favorite Saturday morning cartoons are going digital. Turner and Warner Bros. are teaming up for a new standalone video subscription service called Boomerang. It’ll offer over 5, 000 titles from the Hanna-Barbera, Looney Tunes and MGM animation libraries when it launches this spring. Boomerang launched in 2000 as a digital TV channel, but this is the first time it’s offering classic franchises like Scooby-Doo , Tom & Jerry , The Jetsons and The Flintstones on a streaming platform. It will also stream exclusive new episodes of Scooby-Doo , Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry , along with brand-new original series like a Wizard of Oz spinoff and a remake of the 1968 show Wacky Races . Both Turner and Warner Bros. are owned by Time Warner, which has a firm foothold in the direct-to-consumer streaming market. It’s a co-owner of Hulu and it partnered with the Criterion Collection to launch Filmstruck , a Netflix-style service for classic movies. Boomerang will be available ad-free on the web, iOS and Android devices for $4.99 per month or $39.99 annually. Turner and Warner Bros. plan to expand to several more platforms after launch, including Amazon, Roku and Apple TV. Source: Time Warner

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Looney Tunes and other classic cartoons get a streaming service

Amazon cloud sputters for hours, and a boatload of websites go offline

Enlarge (credit: Amazon) When the Amazon infrastructure-as-a-service cloud goes down, Internet users are going to notice. Amazon Web Services, which powers a whole bunch of websites and online services, has been struggling today, and numerous sites that rely on Amazon infrastructure have gone offline as a result. Appropriately enough, ” Is It Down Right Now? ,” a site that tells you whether other sites are down, has been struggling to stay online. Other apparent victims include The AV Club , Trello, Quora, IFTTT, Open Whisper Systems , and websites created with Wix . Oh the irony! https://t.co/UlVux2PETS is down now too. #aws #s3 — Gillian Owen (@gilliancowen) February 28, 2017 Amazon itself was initially having trouble providing updates to its service health site. But the company posted this note at 2:35pm ET: “We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard…. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amazon cloud sputters for hours, and a boatload of websites go offline

Sony’s ‘world’s fastest’ SD card writes data at 299 MB/s

Sony’s upcoming SF-G series of SD cards will be available this spring, the company announced today . When that time comes, Sony said they “will be the world’s fastest SD cards.” Boasting a maximum write speed of 299 MB/s, that claim is right on point. The cards (available in 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB sizes) also have a slightly higher top read speed of 300 MB/s. Speed is a priority, so the cards also support the UHS-II interface, which adds a second row of connecting pins to the card for increased transfer rates on compatible hardware. More than any card before it, the SF-G series will be able to handle quick-shooting cameras smoothly, as well as capturing 4K video and other technically demanding uses. To fully take advantage of the tremendous speed, Sony also revealed it will offer a specialized card reader so users can quickly transfer files to and from their computers. The SF-G series will take good care of your files, too. In addition to being compatible with Sony’s file rescue software , these SD’s are also waterproof, temperature resistant, shockproof and X-Ray proof. For comparison, B&H Photo Video says that two of the fastest SD card lines out there today, SanDisk’s Extreme PRO UHS-II series and Lexar’s Professional 2000x UHS-II series, can achieve read speeds of 300 MB/s and write speeds of 260 MB/s. For the more casual user, Amazon’s best-selling card, the 32GB SanDisk Ultra Class 10 SDHC UHS-I , tops out at 80 MB/s for read and write speeds. Sony has yet to announce the pricing for these cards, but the 32GB version of the aforementioned SanDisk card sells for about $60 . The SF-G cards are technically superior, though, so expect them to retail for a bit more than that. Source: Sony

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Sony’s ‘world’s fastest’ SD card writes data at 299 MB/s

Schedule Your Lights (Or Pretty Much Anything Else) With This $11 Outlet Swtich

This WenTop outlet switch can’t take orders from Alexa or integrate with IFTTT like Wi-Fi connected smart plugs, but it’s far cheaper at $11, and can be pre-scheduled to turn on and off up to eight times per day. That means you can wake up to a well-lit house, never worry about forgetting to turn off the lights at… Read more…

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Schedule Your Lights (Or Pretty Much Anything Else) With This $11 Outlet Swtich

Amazon plans to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Kentucky

We may be decades away from the flying warehouses Amazon wants to build, but the e-commerce giant is growing its shipping and distribution network in different ways. The company has just announced that it plans to build its first air cargo hub at Northern Kentucky Airport to house its current and future fleet of planes. It’s expected to cost Amazon over $1.5 billion in investment and might eventually have buildings and material-handling equipment. According to The Wall Street Journal , this move signifies that Amazon is “ramping up its expansion into transporting, sorting and delivering its own packages.” When the 2-million-square-foot hub opens, it will certainly reduce the e-retailer’s dependence on UPS and FedEx in the area. It will initially employ 2, 000 people, but it could end up having more personnel. WSJ says Amazon’s end goal is to deliver packages for itself and other retailers — to ultimately become a legit courier and direct competitor to bigger companies like UPS. It helps that the cargo hub’s location is apparently within a couple of days’ drive from a densely populated area. While Amazon doesn’t have a timeline for the air cargo hub yet, it has already begun working on its shipping freight endeavor. A WSJ report from a few days ago revealed that the company has been coordinating shipments of containers from China since October as a freight forwarder. Source: The Wall Street Journal

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Amazon plans to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Kentucky

This Is Quite Possibly the Ugliest Bug Ever Found Trapped in Amber

Say hello to Aethiocarenus burmanicus , an ancient insect so strange—and so god awfully ugly—its discoverers had to create an entirely new scientific classification to catalogue it. Read more…

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This Is Quite Possibly the Ugliest Bug Ever Found Trapped in Amber

Amazon is now managing its own ocean freight

Amazon has been working for a while now to build out its shipping and distribution network. Now the online retailer has started coordinating its own shipments from Chinese merchants to its warehouses in the US via ocean freighters. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company doesn’t own any ships, but it’s working as a freight forwarder and logistics provider. These are the companies that reserve space on freighters and handle trucking shipments from port to a warehouse. WSJ says that Amazon has coordinated shipment of 150 containers from China since October. News of Amazon’s intent to get into shipping freight across the ocean first broke last year when the company gained approval from the Federal Maritime Commission to act as a Ocean Transportation Intermediary. During the 2015 holiday season, the retailer bought extra trailers to beef up its shipping capacity at the busiest time of the year. Earlier in 2015, Amazon began leasing planes for the so-called Prime Air that gave it more control over shipping logistics here in the US. Source: The Wall Street Journal

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Amazon is now managing its own ocean freight