Amazon Prime Video : Pay To Remove Ads

Amazon-Prime-With-Ads

Amazon has announced that from 5 February 2024, its Amazon Prime Video customers in the UK and Germany will see “limited” ads unless they pay £2.99 per month to remove them.  Why?  Amazon says that in view of the fact it won’t be making changes in 2024 to the current price of Prime membership, and…

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Amazon Launching ‘Q’ Chatbot

New Amazon Chatbot Q

Following on from the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard (and Duet), Microsoft’s Copilot, and X’s Grok, now Amazon has announced that it will soon be launching its own ‘Q’ generative AI chatbot (for business).  Cue Q  Amazon has become the latest of the tech giants to announce the introduction of its own generative AI…

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Amazon’s Satellite Broadband :100% Success

Amazon's Satellites

Amazon’s ‘Project Kuiper’ satellite broadband moved one step closer following a reported 100 per cent success rate for its first two prototype satellites.  Project Kuiper  Like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, with Project Kuiper, Amazon hopes to set up its own low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband network, i.e. 311 miles (500 kilometres) above Earth. It is…

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UK Joins Amazon’s Fast Drone Delivery Expansion

UK Joins Amazon's Fast Drone Delivery Expansion

Amazon has announced that it will be expanding its ultra-fast Prime Air drone delivery operations to the UK, Italy and also to an as yet unnamed US city by the end of 2024.  Prime Air Drone Delivery  Amazon Prime Air is a service is intended to (safely) deliver packages to customers in 30 minutes or…

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Subscription Sales Scrutiny

Following the news that US Federal regulators have sued Amazon, alleging that people have been “tricked” into buying hard-to-cancel Prime memberships, we take a closer look at ‘inertia selling’.  What Happened With Amazon Prime Subscriptions?  Back at the end of June, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it was taking action against Amazon.com…

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Amazon Launches AI App-Building Platform

Tech News : Amazon Launches AI App-Building Platform

Amazon has announced the launch of ‘Amazon Bedrock,’ a new service which it says is the easiest way for customers to build and scale generative AI-based applications using foundation models (FMs).  What Is A Foundation Model (FM)?  A foundation model is an “ultra-large” machine learning model that generative AI uses. FMs, which are machine learning…

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Amazon’s Sparrow Robot Could Replace Humans

Amazon’s Sparrow Robot Could Replace Humans

Amazon is reported to be testing the machine learning ‘Sparrow’ robot arm that could handle 65 percent of its 100+ million diverse parcels.   Challenge  Although Amazon already uses robot arms called ‘Robin’ and ‘Cardinal’ to re-direct boxed-up pre-delivery items around its warehouses, the challenge has been to create a robot arm that can detect, recognise,…

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Ereaders? Amazon, Kobo … And The Others

Ereaders? Amazon, Kobo ... And The Others

In this insight, we look what ereaders are, their strengths and weaknesses, and popular makes and models.  Ereaders  Ereaders / e-book readers / e-book devices are mobile electronic devices that look similar to tablets and are designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books, newspapers and magazines which the user downloads to the device.…

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Alexa’s Shocking Suggestion

A mother took to Twitter to complain that Alexa had suggested to her 10-year-old daughter that she play a game that involves touching the prongs of a live plug with a penny! Playing The mother, Kristin Livdahl (of Minnesota, USA), was reported to have been doing physical challenges indoors on Boxing Day with her 10-year-old daughter because…

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One Million UK households May Be ‘Brushing’ Scam Victims

A report from Consumer watchdog Which? reveals that as many as 1.1 million people in the UK may have been caught up in a parcel delivery ‘brushing’ scam. What Is Brushing? Brushing is where people are sent packages of goods to their address that they didn’t order, apparently purchased on Amazon, by a person not…

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