Amazon sellers are getting ready for Halloween.

Amazon has stocked up on items for celebrating Halloween on October 31. You’ll find hanging bats, a 200-inch spider web, and the Spirit of the holiday in the form of a sitting scarecrow.

Amazon is cutting back on packaging.

As of October 2024, Amazon removed all plastic air pillows from our delivery packaging used at global fulfillment centers. As part of this transition, Amazon able to quickly expand our use of paper filler made from 100% recycled content across North America to replace plastic air pillows, biggest reduction in plastic packaging in North America to date.

Amazon continues to innovate to create new paper-based packaging for products. This includes the new paper-padded envelope with a shock-absorbent, 100% paper-based lining, available in Europe. The ridged lining keeps products in the envelope safe, and absorbs stress put on the package during its journey to customers’ homes. This new paper-padded envelope is 100% recyclable in household recycling.

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for discoveries in the field of neural networks.

The prize winners were John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton. Both physicists began their work with neural networks back in the 1970s.

American scientist John Hopfield is known for developing “associative memory” - a method that allows images and data to be restored even if they are partially distorted. The approach is based on the physical properties of atoms and involves searching for the “most similar” among the remaining data.

The Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, created the Boltzmann machine, a neural network that can recognize key elements in images. In 2012, Hinton, together with Ilya Sutskever, developed a neural network capable of analyzing arrays of photographs and recognizing objects in them.

Hamster died?

Now one Hamster Kombat is selling for $0.0038. Two weeks have passed since the listing of the token - the price has already fallen by 70%.

Amazon has shown what a workday for the Proteus robot looks like.

Proteus is one of the hardest-working robots at Amazon. It moves packages around fulfillment centers so they can be loaded onto trucks that transport them to the next stage of the fulfillment process. Proteus doesn’t need barriers or stickers. It has sensors that allow it to navigate the work area and quickly stop when something gets too close.

This could be a cart, a chute, another robot, or even a person. On a typical workday, Proteus works two shifts of around 10 hours each. The Proteus robot was invented back in October 2022 and was Amazon's first autonomous mobile robot at the time.

A giant plush remote from the Nintendo museum is being sold on eBay.

The Nintendo Museum opened in the company’s hometown of Kyoto, and it is already limiting some gift shop items to one per person in an attempt to discourage visitors from flipping exclusive merch online.

The two-story museum highlights the company’s history dating back to 1889, when Nintendo started making hanafuda playing cards. It also features interactive exhibits letting visitors play Nintendo games in unusual ways, including using oversized NES controllers and Wii Remotes that need two people to operate.

What’s generated even more buzz than the museum’s exhibits are the exclusive items available in the museum’s gift shop. Some of the items, which were available during preview events at the museum, have already shown up on sites like eBay with huge markups. A giant plush Wii Remote is currently going for $474, while a complete set of controller cushions, including the Super Famicom and N64, is asking $1,399.

"The Achievements of Kamala Harris" have stunned Americans.

A book with the same title about the Vice President is gaining popularity on store shelves in the U.S. "The Achievements of Kamala Harris" consists of 191 blank (!) pages. The annotation states that this is the most comprehensive description of Harris’s 20-year political career, aimed at convincing readers to vote for her as a presidential candidate.

The book has already received a high rating on Amazon, and the Republican PR campaign behind it is rightfully considered one of the most successful of the current election cycle.

In 2023, Amazon proactively blocked more than 250 million suspected fake reviews from its stores worldwide.

Amazon pursues people who attempt to profit off of fake reviews. The company filed its first lawsuit against fake review brokers in 2015, and continues to pursue fraudsters through legal means. In 2023, Amazon pursued legal action against more than 150 bad actors attempting to engage in review abuse across the U.S., China, and Europe.

In July 2024, Amazon filed its first ever joint lawsuit against review brokers with the Better Business Bureau (BBB). The lawsuit seeks to hold an illegitimate business called ReviewServiceUSA. com accountable to the full extent of the law, and prevent them from facilitating fake reviews targeting Amazon’s store, the BBB, and other legitimate companies and organizations.

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A company called OpenAI sues a company called Open AI.

The case, formally named OpenAI Inc. v. Open Artificial Intelligence Inc., showed up on the docket for the US District Court in Northern California, to zero fanfare, in August of last year. Companies with near-identical names entangled in a lawsuit usually means trademark infringement—more the makings of a one-liner than a riveting story.

Still, it did involve the OpenAI, the generative AI kingpin and maker of ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft Corp. to the tune of (at the time) $13 billion.

Amazon Ads launches new AI tools for advertisers.

Аmazon Ads announced a new feature that uses generative AI technology to make it easier for advertisers to create more interesting and relevant video ads for customers.

The new feature, Video generator, creates visually rich video content in a matter of minutes and at no additional cost. Using a single product image, Video generator curates custom AI-generated videos tailored to a product's distinct selling proposition and features, leveraging Amazon's unique insights to vividly bring a product story to life.

Amazon introduced a new Kindle.

Amazon is introducing an entirely new lineup of Kindle devices, including the first-ever color Kindle, a reimagined Kindle Scribe, the fastest Kindle Paperwhite ever, and a new entry Kindle in a fun, new Matcha color.

The new Kindle Scribe offers a first-of-its-kind in-book writing experience and a more powerful notetaking experience. With Active Canvas, you can write your thoughts directly in the book when inspiration strikes. Your note becomes part of the page, and the book text dynamically flows around it—if you increase the font size, change the font style, or the book layout changes, the note remains visible exactly where you want it so you never lose any meaning or context.

Coming soon, you’ll also be able to write your notes in the side panel and easily hide them when you are done. The all-new, built-in AI-powered notebook enables you to quickly summarize pages and pages of notes into concise bullets in a script font that can be easily shared directly from the notebook tab.

Apple plans to overtake Amazon in developing home devices.

For years, Apple Inc. has sold the go-to devices for our pockets, wrists, backpacks and desks. But it has struggled to achieve that kind of success in other key areas: the car, the face and the home.

But now the company is setting out to conquer the smart home with an aggressive new strategy: putting Apple screens and software throughout the house in a way that creates an end-to-end experience. The renewed effort follows years of mediocre performance in this category, with Amazon. com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google taking the lead. One reason Apple has struggled is its focus on making premium products that work in a closed ecosystem. That hasn’t been an effective strategy in the smart home, where consumers want equipment that can work with a wide range of other products.

For Apple’s next slate of home hardware to be successful, it has to support as many accessories as possible — and the company is preparing to do just that. It helped develop a smart home protocol called Matter that allows Amazon, Google and Apple devices to all play nicely together.

Amazon announced financial results for its second quarter 2024.

Net sales increased 10% to $148 billion in the second quarter, compared with $134 billion in second quarter 2023. Excluding the $1 billion unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 11% compared with second quarter 2023.

North America segment sales increased 9% year-over-year to $90.0 billion. International segment sales increased 7% year-over-year to $32 billion, or increased 10% excluding changes in foreign exchange rates. AWS segment sales increased 19% year-over-year to $26 billion.

A Bitcoiner sued the city mayor for $647 million for banning trash dumping.

About 10 years ago, the guy's ex-girlfriend accidentally threw away his hard drive with 8,000 bitcoins, which are now valued at half a billion dollars. And for many years now, he has been coming to the city landfill in search of the lost disk.

The man has assembled a whole team of “gold miners” who turn over the landfill day and night, but the city mayor recently officially forbade him from going there.

Amazon has started building mini nuclear power plants.

Data centers consume energy like Netflix consumes your evening — continuously and without remorse. Wind turbines and solar panels? That's last century. Amazon, Google, Microsoft — they’re all in on it: small nuclear reactors (SMRs) are now the main characters in the technological drama.

$500 million. All for what? So that your cat photos keep loading in the cloud. By 2039 — 5,000 megawatts. For reference, that’s the amount of energy needed for an entire city with a population of 2.5 million people in a single day! Not a month, not a year — a day. Imagine — a whole metropolis powered by nuclear energy, all just to keep your servers from overheating and to ensure AI continues generating pictures for you.

Amazon helps fight cybercriminals.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed criminal charges against two leaders of a highly disruptive cybercriminal operation, which targeted hospitals, government agencies, telecommunications services, cloud providers, and a range of other organizations.

The DOJ acknowledged contributions from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its security experts to the effort to bring the leaders of this group, named Anonymous Sudan, to justice. Anonymous Sudan is one of dozens of cybercrime-for-hire operations that AWS security teams have been instrumental in disrupting over the past two years. This group, in particular, deployed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks for money.

A Seattle entrepreneur shared how he works with Amazon.

For six years now, the entrepreneur from Seattle has been working with the Amazon Flex program.

Amazon Flex is a program that allows individuals to work with Amazon as independent contractors to deliver packages. Drivers can sign up for the program, using their own vehicles to deliver orders. They have access to a mobile app where they can choose delivery blocks (typically 2-4 hours) and deliver packages to customers.

Amazon Flex workers can deliver various items, including:

📍Packages from local Amazon distribution centers,
📍Groceries and items from Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods,
📍Products from other Amazon partner services.

This allows people to earn flexibly by choosing convenient working hours, with pay depending on the number of packages delivered and the time spent on deliveries.

Amazon has stocked an Advent calendar for fishermen.

This advent calendar for adult teens contains 10 hard lures, 8pcs spoon lures, 6pcs soft lure worm. Each day unveils a thrilling, high-quality bait, promising an unforgettable December.

Chinese Hackers Broke Crypto — and no, this is not just a sensational headline.

Scientists from China, using a quantum computer, have cracked algorithms used in the banking sector and cryptocurrency.

They employed the quantum annealing method and attacked AES-256, one of the most secure encryption standards today.

Experts are raising alarms: the threat is real, and by 2027, quantum machines could be capable of breaking cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin.