What Did Amazon Do This Week? - 23-07-2023 [+60 LINKS]
Discover more from What Did Amazon Do This Week?
What Did Amazon Do This Week? - 23-07-2023 [+60 LINKS]
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AMAZON ONE TO ROLL OUT TO ALL WHOLE FOODS, ALREADY IN +200 LOCATIONS
Aside from paying $25 million to settle the child privacy lawsuit, everyone’s favourite cardboard abusers announced plans to roll out its pay-by-palm technology (‘Amazon One’) to all 515 Whole Foods stores in the United States by the end of 2023. Amazon One is a biometric payment system that allows users to pay for items by scanning their palm. No device, just the palm is scanned and boom, you’re good to shop. Here’s a very cute video that doesn’t explain any of the amazing the tech or science behind it:
Do people want this though? The data says…maybe. Amazon announced there have already been +3 million uses of Amazon One. Studies by Payleven (2018) and Ponemon Institute (2019) show mixed results regarding adoption with between 38-70% of people would be comfortable using the technology. The interesting play here might not be shopping though, companies could also integrate this for entrances and exits and that would get Amazon into even more interesting territories (and datasets). Panera Bread and stadiums have already implemented the payment system so there is existing corporate appetite and case studies for Amazon to tout to others.
SO WHAT?
Amazon has been testing the technology at select Whole Foods stores since 2020, and it has been well-received by customers - or perhaps there’s just been no revolt yet. The fast rollout shows commitment to the technology when its other computer vision technology and strategy seem to be losing their shine. The bigger reason why Amazon is pushing this is accuracy. Compared to facial recognition and fingerprints, palm scanning has a 0.1% error rate - which is many times less than the current rates for facial recognition. Do we need both? No? Is this a more natural way to interact with technology? Yes. Creepier? Also, yes. Did people balk at contactless in the same way? Yes indeed and now 51% of American adults are now using at least one form of contactless payment every month.
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Amazon extended the Prime Day Audible offer. /THR
Amazon is looking to woo tech and government officials with its new startup show. /Bloomberg
Amazon Freevee announced it will be “Expanding” YouTube Series ‘7 Vs Wild’ As Quintus is taking the German reality show global. /Deadline
Amazon will start streaming BBC shows in India. /Bloomberg
Prime Video announced the premiere date for ‘Gen V’, the Boys’ spinoff. /Variety
Prime Video dropped the trailer for season two of ‘The Wheel of Time’. /Deadline
Amazon announced it will build a $120 million satellite processing hub in Florida. /Reuters
Amazon is reorganizing some cloud-computing services, like EC2 and Lambda, into a new team, according to leaked email. /BI
AWS Supply Chain extended availability in Australia (Sydney) and Europe (Ireland). /AWS
Amazon announced it will put Amazon One in all Whole Food stores by the end of 2023. /CNBC
Amazon (and other big tech firms) pledged to comply With White House's AI safety framework to 'protect Americans from harm and discrimination'. /Variety
Amazon announced ECS is adding domainless gMSA authentication for Linux and Windows containers. /AWS
Amazon announced Aurora PostgreSQL supports Microsoft AD authentication in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. /AWS
AWS announced it is simplifying writing .NET 6 Lambda functions. /AWS
AWS announced Fargate enables faster container startup using Seekable OCI. /AWS
Amazon announced IVS now supports rendition filtering and higher frequency thumbnails. /AWS
AWS announced Elemental MediaPackage now available in AWS Canada (Central) region. /AWS
Amazon announced Connect Wisdom is now available for chat agents. /AWS
Amazon Redshift announced support of QUALIFY clause in SELECT SQL statement. /AWS
AWS announced Elemental MediaTailor now supports cue ad tags in Channel Assembly. /AWS
AWS announced Lambda and Amazon EventBridge Pipes now support enhanced filtering. /AWS
Amazon announced AWS Mainframe Modernization service is now PCI DSS compliant. /AWS
Amazon announced Llama 2 foundation models from Meta are now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. /AWS
Amazon Connect launched pre-defined Contact Lens conversational analytics metrics. /AWS
Amazon EC2 C6in instances are now available in additional regions. /AWS
Amazon introduced analytics on Amazon Lex. /AWS
Amazon announced EC2 X2idn instances are now available in Middle East (Dubai) region. /AWS
Amazon CloudWatch announced ML backed Logs Insights pattern query command. /AWS
AWS announced the enabling of real time translation of Docx files. /AWS
AWS announced significant updates to the Amplify JavaScript library. /AWS
Amazon announced SNS now supports mobile push notifications in twelve new AWS regions. /AWS
AWS announced IoT Device Defender now supports monitoring of device disconnect durations. /AWS
Amazon Redshift ML announced integration with Amazon Forecast. /AWS
AWS PrivateLink announced integration with Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights. /AWS
AWS announced WAF now supports URI path aggregation key for rate-based rules. /AWS
Amazon Connect launched CloudFormation support for routing profiles and queues. /AWS
AWS announced Amazon Route 53 Resolver now available on AWS Outposts rack. /AWS
Amazon launched a back-to-school-for-less campaign. /Retail Dive
Amazon announced it will add USPS Ground Advantage to Buy Shipping ‘Soon’. /ECB
Amazon announced it will be ditching plastic mailers. /Verge
Amazon agreed to pay a $25 million fine to settle allegations Alexa Voice Assistant violated children's privacy law. /Variety
Amazon announced the company will require some remote corporate employees to relocate as part of a mandate requiring workers to be in the office three days a week. /Bloomberg
Amazon announced 14 new benefits the company is offering employees—from free estate planning to free mental health care. /Amazon
Amazon suffered multiple in-van surveillance footage leaks from delivery drivers. /Verge
Amazon’s Chief Economist, Pat Bajari, is leaving the company. /The Information
Amazon Literary Partnership announced the 2023 grant recipients. /Amazon
Amazon will webcast its 2nd quarter earnings on August 3rd. /Amazon
Amazon (and Apple) were fined a combined €194.1M for colluding to limit the sale of Apple devices from competitors on Amazon's Spanish sites. /Reuters
Amazon announced its carbon emissions fell for the first time in 2022. /Bloomberg
EU regulators extended Amazon, iRobot decision deadline to Dec. 13. /Reuters
Amazon Studios TV Content Group set new executive roles for Kara Smith, Jon Wax & Andy Bourne. /Deadline
Amazon announced the company plans to hire 2,000 more staff for new UK fulfilment centre. /Reuters
Amazon was hit with an employment class action Wednesday in Pennsylvania Eastern District Court. /law.com
Amazon announced the company was named ‘Best Place to Work for Disability Inclusion’. /Amazon
The Alexa Fund has helped a startup digitally clone the world. /Amazon
Amazon Music promoted Ryan Redington to General Manager. /Variety
Amazon leaders are worried that a 'Day 2' mindset is seeping in at the company. /BI
Where will Amazon be in five years? /Fool