Amazon (company)

Amazon has announced the launch of its second-generation wireless earbuds "Echo Buds", featuring a more comfortable design as well as improved active noise cancellation and better microphones.

“The all-new Echo Buds are better in so many ways—a smaller design, a more comfortable fit, Active Noise Cancellation technology, a new color and wireless charging option, and high-performance drivers for dynamic audio,” said Tom Taylor, Senior Vice President, Amazon Alexa.

The writer MacKenzie Scott has married again. Her husband is Dan Jewett, a teacher from Seattle. The couple made the marriage public in a letter to the Giving Pledge organization. MacKenzie Scott was married to Jeff Bezos for 25 years, one of the first employees of his Amazon company, during which time she helped build the mail-order company. In 2019, the couple separated.

With the divorce, Scott received four percent of Amazon shares, then worth about $38 billion. She announced she would donate most of the fortune to charity.

Amazon has announced that the "Amazon.pl" website has been launched and customers can now start shopping in Poland.

Alex Ootes, Vice President, European Expansion for Amazon has stated that Amazon is "thrilled to launch Amazon.pl and to be able to offer Polish customers a selection of more than 100 million products, including tens of thousands of products from local Polish businesses".

Twitch ran advertisements by its parent company Amazon on the live streaming platform that were advocating for Amazon workers to not unionize. Following criticism on social media, the advertisements have been removed and a Twitch spokesperson has stated that the advertisements "should never have been allowed to run" on Twitch as political advertisements are against the internal policies.

The alternative social network Parler has reopened after a month offline. In a press release, the company announced that the site is now accessible for users with existing accounts and will accept new signups starting next week.

Parler also said it had appointed Mark Meckler as its interim Chief Executive, replacing John Matze who was fired by the board this month.

The social network had gone dark after being cut off by Amazon, Google, and Apple, with the companies accusing the app of failing to police violent content related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Parler said its new technology cut its reliance on "so-called Big Tech" for its operations.

Amazon agreed with U.S. authorities to pay $61.7 million in response to complaints that it withheld tips from its independent delivery drivers for two and a half years. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported on Tuesday that the settlement resolves the complaint against Amazon for failing to deliver full tip amounts to drivers in its Amazon Flex program.

Amazon's quarterly figures have just been published. Here are the most important key figures:

Revenue is $125.56 billion (year-ago quarter $87.4/expected $119.7).

Earnings per share are $14.09 (prior-year quarter $6.47/expected $7.23).

For the current ongoing quarter, revenue is now expected to be $100-106 billion.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivered $12.74 billion in revenue (prior year $10/expected 12.8 today).

The stock is trading at -0.4 percent in after-hours trading.

Amazon has announced that its founder Jeff Bezos will step down as CEO during the third quarter of 2021 and will be replaced by Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy. Bezos will take on the role of executive chairman of Amazon’s board.

“I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO,” Bezos wrote in a letter to employees obtained by CNBC. “In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives."

The US company Apple is the most valuable brand in the world with a valuation of $263,375 billion, according to the Brand Finance Global 500 2021 ranking. Amazon and Google, which are also based in the USA, follow in the second and third place.

After Amazon, Google, and Apple forced Parler offline, the social network managed to make an online comeback on Sunday, even if not fully operational.

Parler's CEO John Matze wrote a post on the platform saying: "Our return is inevitable due to hard work, and persistence against all odds."

The social networking site went dark when Amazon stopped providing it cloud hosting services after it was revealed the platform was used to help organize the Capitol Hill attack on Jan. 6, which left five people dead.

Parler, a social network used to plan the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week, has been hit by a massive data scrape. Security researchers collected user data before the network went dark Monday morning after Amazon, Google, and Apple booted the platform.

Lead by Twitter user @donk_enby, a team of security researchers began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99.9 per cent of its content.

The scraped data includes user profile data and information, raw media files -- including geolocation metadata -- and posts, including deleted ones.

The US Senate has confirmed Trump nominee Nathan Simington to a five-year term at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with a 49-46 vote. Simington is a proponent of repealing Section 230, the law that protects internet companies, such as Twitter and Amazon, from being liable for things posted by users.

Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labour unions, environmental activists, and other social movements.

"The documents say Pinkerton operatives were inserted into an Amazon warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that warehouse workers were circumventing sort of the application process for applying to warehouse jobs, so I would say that it goes directly against what Amazon is saying. They indeed, at least in this one instance we know, if these documents are correct, that Amazon has used Pinkertons explicitly to spy on warehouse workers.", said Lauren Gurley of Motherboard magazine.

Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager announced that the Competition Department has opened a new investigation against the US company for commercial practices linked to its premium programmed which could constitute an abuse of its dominant market position. "We have come to the preliminary conclusion that Amazon has illegally abused its dominant position as a market service provider in Germany and France by using confidential data on a large scale to compete with smaller retailers."

As a service provider, the Seattle-based company has access to the private business data of its vendors, their volume of visits, sales and shipments, and even the complaints they receive from customers.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos sold shares in his company worth more than $3.0 billion this week. This was revealed on Wednesday from mandatory notifications to the US stock exchange supervisory authority SEC. According to SEC data, Bezos has already sold Amazon shares worth more than $10.2 billion this year.

The European Commission is working on a new legislative package in order to regulate major online platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others. According to an internal paper, one of the goals is to prevent "unfair practices". One rule could specify that the platforms would "not be allowed to pre-install their own applications exclusively" such as installing mobile apps on smartphones and preventing users to uninstall them.

In addition, there could be new restrictions on the usage of data generated by their services for their own commercial activities. This kind of data could only be used if made "accessible to other commercial users".

Amazon recently revealed that 19,816 of its US Amazon and Whole Foods Market front-line employees have tested positive for Covid-19, equating to 1.44% of the company's 1.37 million workers. The company made a quarterly profit of $5.2 billion, in the three months ending in June.

"We compared COVID-19 case rates to the general population, as reported by Johns Hopkins University for the same period, accounting for geography and the age composition of our employees to make the data as accurate as possible. Based on this analysis, if the rate among Amazon and Whole Foods Market employees were the same as it is for the general population rate, we estimate that we would have seen 33,952 cases among our workforce," the company wrote in a blog post.

After an invite-only phase, the first Amazon Fresh grocery store has opened its door to the public in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Amazon is also introducing Dash Carts, shopping carts featuring a scale and a variety of cameras and sensors to calculate your shopping total. Echo Show stations featuring Alexa will help customers find items and products in the store.

Amazon is being accused of price gouging on essential items during the early days of the pandemic in March, so Washington-based consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

"Amazon has fundamentally misled the public, law enforcement and policymakers about price increases during the pandemic," so Public Citizen's Alex Harman.

The group found that prices increased for various products, including face masks, antibacterial hand soap, disposable hand gloves and toilet paper. Amazon has refuted those claims, saying there was no place for price gouging on their website and that their systems were "designed to offer customers the best available online price."

Demonstrators gathered outside Jeff Bezos' mansion Thursday and constructed a guillotine outside his front door to protest Amazon workers' wages. The protest came the day after Bezos became the wealthiest person in history, according to Forbes, with a net worth surpassed $200 billion.

Protesters, led by former warehouse worker and outspoken Amazon critic Christian Smalls, called on the company to raise its minimum wage to $30 per hour.