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.
GM — on the latest Decoder — used the word “cobot” in a transparent bid to assuage workers concerned that the robots operating alongside them will soon replace them. As we learned this week from Amazon’s proposed usage of the friendlier term: human replacement is definitely the plan.
This detailed summary shows some of the issues that caused the October 20th outage and took swaths of the internet offline for roughly 15 hours.
Amazon says its changes in response include temporarily disabling DynamoDB DNS Planner, adding “additional protections” to prevent applying incorrect DNS entries, and improving its testing to identify the kind of recovery problems that caused the outage to drag on.
[Amazon Web Services, Inc.]
Amazon’s reimagined version of its cloud gaming service, which has a bigger focus on party games, is launching today. With a Prime subscription, you can access more than 50 games, including one featuring an AI-powered Snoop Dogg.
Jamie Siminoff’s new book, Ding Dong, charts how his video doorbell startup turned into a home security behemoth.
As part of its explosive reporting on Amazon’s plan to curtail US employment through automation, the NYT published a companion piece on Sparrow, Cardinal, and Proteus — “the robots that, step by step, are replacing human workers in the company’s warehouses.”
[nytimes.com]
The major AWS outage is affecting Slack huddles in an interesting way: “We’re currently investigating an issue where some users remain stuck in a huddle after attempting to leave,” Slack says.
Gives you lots of time to catch up with your colleagues, I guess.
[Slack]
Amazon just added a “Plus” to its Fire TV Stick 4K, but if they were looking for a rebrand they should have just followed a time-honored industry approach: copy whatever Apple just did.
spypol:
They should rename it Apple TV
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Amazon now sells its new $200 4K Outdoor Cam Pro with your choice of one of five free Halloween camera costumes, or you can 3D print your own. Sticking a camouflaged camera behind your bowl could be a deterrent to candy thieves, but it’s also a creepy way to avoid trick-or-treaters.
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According to the companies, these will be secure AI workspace systems that can be tailored to draw only from internal documents and information. Google’s Gemini Enterprise and AWS’s Quick Suite both offer AI agents, chatbots, and automated workflows to take on repetitive tasks.
Amazon’s two-day shopping blitz is over, but you can still score great deals on some our favorite gadgets and gear.
Amazon’s two-day sales event ends at 3AM ET on October 9th, which means these discounts won’t last much longer.
After years of false starts, the promise of ambient intelligence has arrived, but will it be worth the price?
After sorting through thousands of deals lasting through Wednesday, here are the best of the best.
