Get Ready For A Very Amazon Christmas Nothing can get Amazon down, not even brouhahas over warehouse labor relations. Instead, the e-commerce giant would rather put on its Douglas Fir-colored glasses and get into the spirit a little early. Amazons earnings may be dismal, but its e-commerce business remains the core of its business. With that, theres a lot of pressure to make the most out of the holiday shopping season. In addition to discounts—in particular, big upcoming Black Friday deals—the companys courting the public with free holiday music, as well as a couple of new digital offerings for Fire tablet users. See also: The Fire Phone May Have Cratered, But It Hasnt Dented Amazons Tech Delusions Call it an all-out Amazon assault on the bah-humbugs. Amazons First Deals Are The Quickest When did the holiday season begin stepping on Halloween’s toes? Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally kicked off the season. But these days, retailers lick their chops as soon as we put away our costumes and wigs. On the Web, the fervor has only just begun. But Amazon’s not waiting until Black Friday (or its cohort, Cyber Monday). It’s striking first with additions to its Lightning Deals lineup starting tomorrow. The site will start adding new deals every 10 minutes or so for eight days straight. It will also offer three Deals of the Day, beginning midnight on Thanksgiving, with three more tacked on when Black Friday arrives. All that piles on to the regular rotation, with thousands of limited-time Lightning Deals. How you shop Amazon could change this season too. The companys partnership with Snapchat—which itself just paired with Square for SnapCash—has yielded a new way to send gift ideas, recommendations and Snapchat-exclusive temporary deals that vanish in seconds. The first snap” goes out today. See also: Snapchat: Our New Snapcash Wont Disappear—Oh, And Neither May Your Snaps To further help spread the cheer (or shopping addiction), the company just released the free holiday soundtrack you never knew you wanted. Now you can ape the in-store experience by playing the sort of Christmas songs that retailer love to play in the background, while you (of course) cruise Amazon’s goods. The catch: You have to be an Amazon Prime member, since the collection comes courtesy of Prime Music. You can click here right now to access 40 songs—from O Holy Night to I’ll Be Home For Christmas to I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas”—online, or on an iPhone or Android device. Fire Perks For A Cold Season When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post last year for $250 million, people wondered what he was up to. Now we know: Papa Bezos wanted to drop some journalistic knowledge on users of his Fire tablets. The Post, and its newsroom of nearly 700 staffers and 60 Pulitzer Prizes, comes to Fire tablets courtesy of its brand-new app. The Washington Post Fire tablet app, available in the Amazon Appstore, costs nothing for the first six months. That includes the app and a digital subscription to the newspaper. Users get a pinch view” that lets them flip through virtual pages like a magazine. The editorial team won’t skimp on stories for this version either—it will release two editions daily: at 5 a.m. ET and 5 p.m. ET. For now, the app will be exclusive to Fire tablets, including the Fire HDX, Fire HD, and Kindle Fire HD, but it will come to additional devices next year. If you’re not into shopping or reading, Amazon Game Studios has another trinket up its sleeve: Today, it launches a new family-friendly game, Tales From Deep Space. The company describes it as a comedic mis-adventure set on Big Moon, the most eccentric space station in the galaxy.” Players help a traveling salesman and his loyal luggage drone, CASI, escape from the locked-down Big Moon by fighting battles and solving puzzles. Supports both single-player and two-player mode. While this ones not free (it costs $6.99), people with the Kindle Fire HDX or any 2014 Fire tablet get an extra benefit: They can play in a local, two-player co-op.” Think of it as being connected directly, but not necessarily with the latency of playing online. In this mode, each person controls their avatars on their own tablets. The studio also partnered with comiXology on a free Tales From Deep Space prequel comic, which offers some background narrative on just how E ended up on Big Moon. The comic is available on Fire tablets and 2013 Kindle Fire tablets. Amazons Robotic Santas (Or Scrooges?) While Amazon puts its holiday face on for the public, behind the scenes, it’s gearing up like mad to get ready for the thongs of shoppers of its physical goods. With no Santa Claus on the payroll, the company knows it will take an army to fulfill all the gifts that will shuttle through its pipeline. To manage the load, Amazon will have a fleet of robots ready to arm its warehouses, or so reports The Wall Street Journal. Short, squat and orange, as many as 10,000 wheeled machines could make for an imposing lot—not entirely unlike Doctor Who’s Daleks. But instead of “destroy!” their chant may be “deliver!” The robotic workers bypass the need to have human employees searching the vast product warehouses for goods, wrote the paper, which cited people “familiar with the matter.” The sources also say that Amazons 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse in Tracy, Calif.—roughly 60 miles east of San Francisco—is first up, with four floors of fixed shelving replaced by the robots, which bring products to the human “pickers” who standby waiting to receive. Of course, if this initiative takes off, the holiday spirit may not extend to the actual flesh-and-blood employees in its 40-warehouse network of fulfillment centers. See also: What To Do When A Robot Takes Your Job They’ve been on a roller coaster ride lately, as Amazon and its workers just reached a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board. The company agreed to change some of its rules, to allow its U.S. warehouse staff to communicate about pay and working conditions. Previously, Amazon took a dim (sometimes punitive) view of such behavior. Now the company will let people air grievances. The settlement also compels Amazon to allow posted notices informing employees that they have the right to unionize and collaborate on collective benefits—which would be a first at the Seattle, Wash.–based retailer. But machines don’t complain or unionize, which at least partly helps to explain why the company has been exploring drone delivery and bought robotics maker Kiva in 2012. Robots replacing people has been a long-running fear for warehouse staff, factory workers and others in distribution or manufacturing. Given that, as Amazon customers enjoy their deals and freebies—perhaps delivered more efficiently and cheaply than ever—the workers that have been the company’s lifeblood until now may not share in the cheer. Product photos courtesy of Amazon; Jeff Bezos photo by Steve Jurvetson; Robot photo courtesy of Kivan Systems ReadWrite ift.tt/1yuLQqi
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 20:12:54 +0000
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