Maureen Carolina

Amazon is not just disrupting industries, it is single-handedly disrupting the whole economy, according to Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee. The investor, in his appearance on CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Wednesday, was commenting on the apparent deal between Amazon’s cloud business and Cerner, one of the world’s biggest health tech companies . Amazon has been looking for a way into the health-care industry. McNamee said he sees this move as a “typical Amazon” approach to the type of disruption it is causing in virtually every industry. “Any industry that has been reluctant to adopt cloud services has been at risk for being disrupted by amazon,” McNamee said. “Health care is one of the places where the cloud has had much less impact than it could have or should have.” Much of Amazon’s success, McNamee argued, comes from the company’s robust and expanding cloud services. In addition to its health investments, Amazon Web Services looks to expand into the public sector, announc...

Amazon set to splurge $7 Billion on delivery alone in Q4 posted first on http://retailnewsfeed.com/

Allrecipes is teaming up with Amazon to help cooks get their groceries delivered. The online recipe giant today announced a new integration with Amazon’s grocery delivery arm AmazonFresh, making it easier for customers to get ingredients shipped to their doorstep. It’s the latest example of Amazon’s growing interest in selling grocery items as the tech giant tries to make its way into your kitchen. Allrecipes users will now see an AmazonFresh widget within recipe pages, alongside other grocery store options like Target and Walmart. Users can add all required ingredients for a given recipe to an AmazonFresh shopping cart; the purchase is completed on Amazon’s website, where users can tweak the recommended food brands provided by Allrecipes. The option is available to people living in regions where AmazonFresh delivers. Allrecipes said this is the first direct API integration with AmazonFresh, which costs $15 a month on top of a $100 per year Amazon Prime membership. The integration...

Wal-Mart isn’t afraid of Amazon . No, not even in the slightest. The big-box retailer is laser-focused on internal initiatives, according to Wal-Mart’s head of U.S. e-commerce, Marc Lore. That includes luring more high-end brands to sell on Walmart.com and across its stores, expanding an online grocery pickup service and keeping prices competitive but not necessarily at rock bottom . Wal-Mart’s stock rocketed more than 10 percent Thursday , reaching an all-time high, as Wall Street rallied behind the company’s upbeat third-quarter results and heavy momentum heading into the holiday season. “The discount giant is clearly reaping the benefits of its massive investments in associates, stores, technology, and acquisitions,” Retail Metrics’ Ken Perkins wrote in a note to clients. “Walmart is taking share and growing its food business.” Food was a notable bright spot in Wal-Mart’s latest quarter, even in the midst of Amazon buying supermarket chain Whole Foods and beginning to slash pri...

Chinese internet search giant Baidu on Thursday introduced a speaker and two robots as part of its Raven series in a serious push into the highly competitive smart home market. The products, introduced at the Baidu World conference in Beijing , are powered by the company’s DuerOS conversational artificial intelligence technology. That system is similar to virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, the Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. The smart speaker is called Raven H and will be available for purchase in December for about 1,699 yuan ($256). Design-wise, the speaker looks like a stack of thin, colored square blocks and it comes with a touch-sensitive light-emitting diode (LED) display controller. The controller can be detached from the speaker base and used as a voice-powered remote for all Raven-compatible smart home devices. The speaker was designed by Raven Tech, a start-up that Baidu acquired in February , and Swedish consumer electronics manufacturer Teenage Engin...

Enjoy.com CEO and founder Ron Johnson thinks Amazon should be really worried about competitor Walmart , but could fight back with another big acquisition. “I think this is a decade-long price fight. Every quarter is a new round, but Walmart’s coming back,” Johnson said on CNBC’s “Fast Money.” The former J.C. Penney CEO has been bullish on Walmart since at least February, when he appeared on “Fast Money” and called the big box retailer’s rally. On Thursday, Walmart shares had their best day in nine years. With stock up 44 percent year-to-date, Walmart appeared to confirm Johnson’s predictions that it could be Amazon’s biggest threat. Amazon may be growing fast, but Johnson thinks Walmart has a decided advantage with its preexisting brick-and-mortar infrastructure. He explained that most Americans live near a Walmart where they can buy most of what is available on Amazon. As Amazon continues to invest in its distribution centers, Walmart has chosen to slow store growth , focusing in...

‘Lord of the Rings’ fantasy books to become television series courtesy of Amazon posted first on http://retailnewsfeed.com/

Wal-Mart is creating a home for luxury fashion online. The big-box retailer announced Monday it has partnered with Lord & Taylor to create an online “flagship store” for the apparel retailer. The landing page will launch on Walmart.com in spring 2018. “Our goal is to create a premium fashion destination on Walmart.com,” Denise Incandela, head of fashion for Wal-Mart’s U.S. e-commerce division, said in a statement. “We see customers on our site searching for higher-end items, and we are expanding our business online to focus on adding specialized and premium shopping experience, starting with fashion.” Incandela previously worked as chief marketing officer for Saks Fifth Avenue, which, like Lord & Taylor, is part of Hudson’s Bay . She just moved to Wal-Mart in October and is responsible for the company’s fashion business across Walmart.com, Jet.com and Shoes.com. Through this partnership, Walmart.com will provide Lord & Taylor dedicated space on its website, as the depa...

Amazon is said to be building a free video streaming service that will run alongside Prime Video, its paid version. According to unconfirmed reports, the e-commerce giant is talking to movie studios and TV networks about the viability of such a service. The new service would be funded by ad revenue which would be shared with content creators. The content providers would own channels on the platform while Amazon would provide the infrastructure and gather analytics for advertisers. The company’s Prime video is a video streaming service that is part of Prime membership. Prime members pay an annual fee of $99 or a monthly fee of $10.99. This gives them access to numerous benefits including a library of millions of songs, free two-day or one-day delivery, streaming video, unlimited photo storage, video games and many more. For $8.99 per month a user will have access to Prime Video. A free video service that is supported with ad revenue would be a clever way for Amazon to engage new users...

Amazon will be selling part of its cloud services in China to its technology partner in that country, Beijing Sinnet Technology. In a regulatory filing in China , Sinnet said it is buying the stake for $301 million (2 billion Chinese yuan) in order to help it comply with the country’s laws and enhance the value and security features of the company’s AWS cloud services. The Chinese firm has been operating Amazon’s cloud business in the Asian nation under a deal that was signed in August 2016. Amazon however clarified in a statement that it wasn’t quitting China, the world’s second-largest economy, but was simply selling certain physical infrastructure assets to Sinnet to comply with Chinese law which prohibits non-Chinese firms from owning or deploying select technology in cloud services. The e-commerce giant added that it will retain the intellectual property for AWS globally and will continue providing its cutting edge AWS services to Chinese customers, noting that the market is exh...

To spice up the holidays, Amazon is setting up branded pop-up stores at limited Whole Foods locations across California, Florida, Colorado, Illinois and Michigan. The shops, to be unveiled mid-November, will be manned by Amazon staff and will showcase Amazon devices and services. Shoppers will therefore have an opportunity to understand the offerings from Amazon including memberships and even being able to try out devices. Whole Foods revealed last week that over 100 of its locations stock Amazon devices. The devices available in these stores range from Kindle e-readers, Fire TVs, Fire tablets, Echos and Echo Dots. The company also disclosed that in the week before Thanksgiving, the grocery chain will unveil Black Friday deals targeting Amazon products with huge discounts on various items. Some of the deals announced are; $30 off the new Echo Plus, $30 off Fire HD 8 tablet, $20 off the new Amazon Echo and $20 off the Echo Dot. When Amazon acquired Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in A...

With a $4 delivery fee, Postmates dares Amazon and Instacart as it venture into the grocery arena posted first on http://retailnewsfeed.com/

Amazon to sell the Fire TV Stick Basic Edition in more than 100 countries posted first on http://retailnewsfeed.com/

Amazon is the dominant player in smart home automation having sold 20 million Echo units since their launch in 2015. According to a study by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners  (CIRP) that surveyed 500 device owners, the increasing range of Alexa-powered devices is giving Amazon an edge but the new offerings from Google will keep up the fight for dominance for a long time. From the CIRP estimates, Amazon had sold 5 million Echo units a year ago and Google has sold 7 million Google Home devices since the launch of the smart speaker last year. This shows that sales of smart speakers have exponentially grown over the past 12 months. In CIRP’s study conducted in October, Amazon’s lead stands at 73 percent of the U.S. home automation market while Google takes 27 percent. This represents a drop for Amazon’s Echo products which stood at76 percent in a previous study in September. Google Home devices on the other hand have gained ground from their previous position of 24 percent mar...

Amazon Fresh is closing operations in multiple locations across nine states in the United States. The closures were revealed in emails to customers in Virginia, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, California, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland informing them of discontinuation of the grocery delivery service. According to Amazon, the service will be ceasing in several zip codes but the business will continue operating countrywide. Amazon Fresh is a grocery delivery service that costs $15 per month in addition to the $100 that Prime members pay per year. With Amazon’s acquisition of whole Foods, it”s clear that the company is growing its grocery business despite the difficulties Amazon Fresh is facing in an attempt to remain profitable. When Amazon finalized its acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion on August 28, the first move was to reduce of prices, and that seems to have brought results. According to Foursquare, there was a 25 percent surge in foot traffic a...

Amazon has unveiled plans to open a new office in Vancouver, B.C., which will occupy 150,000 square feet. The new office, which will be located at 402 Dunsmuir, is expected to become operational in 2020 and will increase Amazon’s employee count in the city to 2,000 from the current 1,000. Amazon’s Canadian employees stand at 5,000 according to its latest quarterly report. These workers are represented across Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia. These members are expected to grow with the company’s announcement of plans to have a new fulfillment center in Calgary. The Seattle-based tech giant commands a 541,900 – strong workforce worldwide. Amazon’s expansion plans are multi-pronged, covering diverse regions. The company is taking up space at Macy’s in downtown Seattle and has announced plans to move its film production division to a famous Hollywood studio location where it will occupy 280,000 square feet in the iconic Culver Studios , in Culver City, California. Amazon said in a pr...

A new Alexa skill will let shoppers use the digital voice assistant to find and grab deals from Best Buy in an unprecedented partnership with Amazon.   mazon and Best Buy are often thought of as competitors, but the two companies seem to have found some benefits to working together. Today Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tweeted about a new Alexa skill that lets users locate and shop Best Buy deals through the voice assistant. Congrats to the @BestBuy team on their new Alexa skill. Customers can now find and shop Best Buy deals on Alexa. Nice! pic.twitter.com/wWuvIkvgD1 — Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 3, 2017 Best Buy said in a press release that the Alexa skill, which features a tailored list of recommendations taken from Best Buy’s catalog of laptops and TVs, is just the beginning of its plans for voice-based shopping. This isn’t the first tie-in between Amazon and Best Buy. This summer, Best Buy began dedicating parts of more than 700 stores to showcase the abilities of sma...

Leo Varadkar, the first openly gay Prime Minister of Ireland has praised his country’s close ties with Seattle’s tech community. He pointed out tech giants Amazon and Microsoft as leading the way in what he described as a growth curve in the relationship between Washington state and Ireland. In a tweet the prime minister was excited about the ties; Beautiful setting of Chihuly Gardens for our business lunch. Strong Ireland-Seattle links: +800k people in Wash State claim Irish heritage pic.twitter.com/3QVod6RsD7 — Leo Varadkar (@campaignforleo) November 1, 2017 Speaking to GeekWire, the prime minister, who is the first first head of government in Ireland with Indian heritage, spoke of the ties that date back to 1985 when Microsoft opened a manufacturing facility in Ireland. He pointed out that Amazon, Microsoft, Tableau and other tech companies have invested billions of dollars in Ireland and he hoped that the growth in ties will be sustained. He singled out his government’s interve...

Amazon has acquired three domain names that are associated with cryptocurrency in a move that would be interpreted in many different ways. The company may be having plans to enter the cryptocurrency business or planning to start accepting cryptocurrencies as a mode of payment. It may also be trying to protect its brand name from malicious use. The domains acquired by Amazon and registered on Tuesday are amazoncryptocurrency.com, amazoncryptocurrencies.com and amazonethereum.com. This is not the first time Amazon has laid hands on a domain related to cryptocurrency. The company acquired amazonbitcoin.com three years ago and redirected it to Amazon.com. The most famous cryptocurrency is bitcoin, which has grown exponentially, hitting the $6,600 mark last week on news of CME’s intention to unveil bitcoin futures before the end of the year. Bitcoin, which remains the most valuable cryptocurrency, has been getting occasional boosts including last month when it rallied on rumors that Amaz...

Most Americans uneasy at the prospect of an Amazon key into their homes posted first on http://retailnewsfeed.com/

Amazon’s imminent entry into the drug arena poses a huge threat to drug distributors and retailers. The mere prospect of it has led to massive losses on the stock market for these companies running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Pharmaceutical companies however, have welcomed the prospect, pegging their enthusiasm on the impact that the tech giant will bring on board by leveraging on technology to enhance efficiency. According to Allergan CEO Brent Saunders, disruption in the drug distribution sector is long overdue. He added that to bring in efficiency, the use of technology should be embraced in the same way breakthrough treatments have changed the course of science. Ian Read, Pfizer’s CEO echoed the same sentiments saying the company is ready to engage anyone who can change the distribution network in a way that ensures value for money. Amazon’s decision on whether to be involved in the drug business is expected by Thanksgiving. The company has already acquired wholesale ph...

New York emerges top ahead of San Francisco and Seattle in race for Amazon’s second HQ – study shows posted first on http://retailnewsfeed.com/

CVS Health is on the path to become a triple-pronged healthcare provider combining the advantages of an insurer, a pharmacy and a pharmacy benefit manager. CVS Health, a drugstore operator, is negotiating to buy Aetna, a health insurer, for a reported $200 per share in a move that will push aside any potential deal with Amazon. Previously, Amazon was reported to be negotiating with pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) in a move that could lead to partnerships or direct threats. PBMs act as the link between drug manufacturers and insurers, ensuring that the insurers’ pharmacy benefits are administered prudently. Due to their role in negotiating prices, the PBMs represent a vital component in the drug supply chain. If the deal between CVS and Aetna is finalized, CVS will have more muscle in negotiating prices for over the counter prescription drugs. Aetna on the other hand has a huge brick-and-mortar presence that it can leverage for in-store clinics and cost-effective distribution that c...

Amazon Studios poised to grow as it moves to famous Hollywood Studio location posted first on http://retailnewsfeed.com/