Amazon

The Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company said it was bringing its retrofitted test vehicles to Los Angeles, equipped with safety drivers, as it gets closer to launching a public service. Zoox now operates test vehicles in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, and Miami. And it plans on launching publicly in Las Vegas and San Francisco later this year. LA is already has one robotaxi service operated by Alphabet’s Waymo — though its unclear when Zoox will make its vehicles available to the public there.

Amazon has agreed to license Nokia technologies for its video streaming services and devices, resolving a lawsuit initiated back in 2023 by the former mobile phone giant. Apple, Oppo, Reddit, HTC, RIM, Withings, Viewsonic... you name it, have all gone through this in one way or another.

Former Microsoft and now Amazon exec Panos Panay announced that Amazon has added the photo library feature everyone was asking for: shopping links. The image storage service’s search uses image recognition to analyze your photos and surface products it thinks you’re searching for, then pop up a lens icon over them so you can buy them on Amazon.

Amazon has introduced a new Kindle feature letting you tap the back and sides of the e-reader to turn pages and scroll lists.

The Alexa Fund, which has invested in companies like Ring and Ecobee, is broadening its scope to include more AI-powered technology. In addition to investing in the AI startup NinjaTech, the company has also announced investments in Hedra, an AI video generation platform; Ario, an AI assistant for parents; and HeyBoss, an AI website design tool.

Now, instead of having to go to every platform individually to ensure their product works with each platform, manufacturers can submit their Matter-certified devices to the Connectivity Standards Alliance Interop Lab and get approved for all four smart home platforms in one go.

On March 28th, Amazon will disable an optional privacy setting that kept your voice recordings local on some Alexa-powered smart speakers.

Panos Panay told Bloomberg they’re re-engineering Alexa devices for Alexa Plus with new designs and materials, new silicon with edge processing, and better sound. There will also be a new “signature” tier, with the first devices arriving this fall.

Associate editor and columnist Ruth Marcus has left the Post after it refused to publish a column “respectfully dissenting” from owner Jeff Bezos’ new limits on opinion coverage, reports The New York Times’ Ben Mullin and Semafor’s Max Tani. Marcus writes that the new policy “threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable.” It’s also reportedly lost the Post at least 75,000 subscribers.