Once a modest online seller of books, Amazon is now one of the largest companies in the world, and its former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s most wealthy person. We track developments, both of Bezos and Amazon, its growth as a video producer, the popular Prime service, as well as its own hardware, which includes the Amazon Kindle e-reader, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV streaming boxes.
Ring’s Super Bowl ad focused on how its cameras could be networked to find a missing dog, but for a lot of people, it highlighted the surveillance power hiding in those devices. Now Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has sent a letter to Amazon saying, “Get this creepy technology away from our homes.”
You can read it in full here, but here’s a snippet:
The Search Party ad showed Jamie Siminoff’s vision of what connected cameras can do, and it seems to suggest they will only use that power to find lost dogs.
Amazon’s drones have had a… let’s say, rocky history. On Wednesday, one hit the side of a building in Richardson, Texas, before falling to the ground in smoke. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and damage to the building was minimal, according to Amazon.
Hemsworth’s latest action scene isn’t in an Avengers movie, but a stand-off with Amazon’s AI assistant, which he fears is planning elaborate ways to kill him. Maybe Ultron is still fresh in the Thor actor’s mind. It’s far from the only ad for AI in this year’s Super Bowl.
CEO Andy Jassy told investors that the investment will go toward accomodating the “very high demand” for AI workloads on AWS. Amazon reported earning $213.39 billion in the last quarter of 2025, with AWS making up $35.58 billion.
While Top Gear has spent years trying to replace Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond with mainstream celebrities, Amazon is instead appeasing British broadcasting execs’ obsession with online content creators. The Grand Tour season 7 presenters are viral trainspotter Francis Bourgeois, alongside James Engelsman and Thomas Holland, who run the Throttle House YouTube channel.
At NiemenLab, Laura Hazard Owen shows how Jeff Bezos’ statements have changed since purchasing it in 2013. From curiosity at the start and “genuine” but corny bits like #democracydiesindarkness, to the abandoned endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 and last year’s cancellation-driving changes.
Today, sweeping layoffs of 300-plus sliced its sports desk, international reporters, tech reporters (including its Amazon reporter), and others. Former EIC Marty Baron called it one of “the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
The partnership will allow AT&T to use Amazon Leo — the ecommerce giant’s low Earth orbit satellite network — to deliver fixed broadband services to businesses. Amazon launched its gigabit-speed Leo Ultra antenna last November, but it’s only available for commercial use for now.
Ahead of the finale for Fallout season 2 next week, Amazon has started dropping episodes of the first season on YouTube so you can get a taste of the post-apocalyptic series for free. That finale, meanwhile, will be available a little early, streaming at 9PM ET on February 3rd.
Amazon announced in October that it would be ditching MMOs and cranking out party games, and now Hartmann is departing, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reports. We spoke with Hartmann in 2021 about Amazon’s gaming strategy at the time; things have changed since then.
The closure of its physical Amazon Go and Fresh stores also brings an end to the Amazon One palm ID service by June 3rd for retail locations, including over 500 Whole Foods stores, with all biometric data deleted. Amazon One will continue to function at healthcare facilities “until further notice.”
The previously-rumored cuts follow an accidental calendar invite sent last night. They come after 14,000 corporate jobs were cut in October, attributed partially to advances in AI. This latest round of layoffs is less than 5 percent of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate workforce.
We’ve been working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy. While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now.
If you’re wondering what kind of access a gold-and-Gorilla-Glass statue, a $1 million donation, and endless fawning buys you, well, it gets a special advanced screening of a state-sanctioned propaganda documentary film about the First Lady. Okay, it buys more than that, this is just a nice bonus.
They could start as early as Tuesday, Reuters reports. The cuts would follow Amazon laying off 14,000 corporate jobs last October.
The new trailer for Amazon MGM’s live-action Masters of the Universe film starring Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man and Jared Leto as Skeletor raises a few questions, like, why does this exist? Who is it for? Will anyone actually see the movie when it hits theaters on June 5th?
The new red-purple hue will be available on January 28th, adding a more vibrant alternative to the original “Graphite” version we reviewed last month. However, it looks like the “Fig” color will only be an option for the more expensive $679.99 64GB version of the Scribe Colorsoft.
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After February 9th, it will discontinue support for the button that has let Microsoft 365 users send Word docs from within the app to devices like the Scribe for reading and annotation, ever since it was added in 2023.
You can still send Word documents to your Kindle, but you’ll need to use Amazon’s official Send to Kindle tool via its website instead.
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