Articles about Amazon

While smart televisions are very common nowadays, not all are created equally. Some of them can have laggy performance and poor user interfaces. Amazon aimed to change that with its "Fire TV Edition," which integrates its quality video experience into the television itself -- no need to add a dongle or box. This is clearly designed to compete with Roku's similar integrated platform.

Today, Element Electronics announces the first ever models of televisions with the aforementioned Amazon Fire TV Edition experience. What makes these sets particularly special, however, is that they also offer 4K UHD resolution. You can even access the Alexa assistant using the included voice remote.

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Public cloud providers have ultimate control over our data, applications, and data flows on their platforms. This capability is the main cause of anxiety and a top reason for many companies to shy away from public cloud.

One of the possible solutions to the problem is to implement a "lock and key" mechanism for public clouds. This would allow re-balancing of data control. The question is whether cloud providers want that.

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It leaked last week, but now Amazon has officially announced its latest Echo family member. The Echo Show is different from Amazon's other Alexa-powered devices thanks to the inclusion of a 7-inch touchscreen.

This will allow Alexa to show you things, such as YouTube videos, music lyrics, photos, video from connected security cameras, weather forecasts, and to-do lists, but it will also let you make and receive video calls.

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It would appear that the Apple Watch is losing its shine. A number of big-name apps have dropped support for the wearable, including Google Maps, Target, eBay and Amazon. It's not clear exactly why support was dropped, but as it took a little while for users to notice and start complaining on social media, a general lack of interest is likely to blame.

Google has offered a vague promise that Google Maps will return to Apple Watch "in the future," but gives no sense of timescale, and there are no similar assurances from any of the others who have quietly killed off their apps.

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Amazon Echo, and the associated Alexa voice assistant, are wildly popular. This is fairly surprising, as you would expect such a successful product to come from Apple or Google. While the latter has since launched its "Home" competitor, Amazon's offering still reigns supreme in the hearts and minds of consumers.

Not satisfied with resting on its laurels, today, Amazon announces that it is pushing the envelope even further. You see, the company will be launching a new product -- Echo Look. This device works with Alexa like the other Echo products, but with a unique twist -- it has a camera. No, it is not designed for communications, but instead, for fashion. The Echo Look will help you look stylish, by taking your photo or video in an outfit, and making suggestions.

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The problem with unleashing any child onto the internet is keeping track of what they are up to, and trying to ensure they're not accessing content you'd rather they didn't. With this in mind, Amazon has launched two new services for its Fire for Kids tablet.

Parent Dashboard and Discussion Cards not only give parents the chance to keep an eye on what their kids are doing, but also to encourage dialog about apps and content. Amazon says the aim is to connect parents and children, but it's also about managing time limits and setting educational goals.

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In the dash to move systems to the cloud many organizations neglect the need to safely backup their information.

Secure file services specialist CTERA Networks is addressing this problem for Amazon cloud users by making its Cloud Server Data Protection Platform available on the AWS Marketplace.

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Everybody deserves a quality wireless router in their home, but understandably, not everyone can afford the latest and greatest. If you opt for a no-name budget offering, you may be in for a world of pain -- dropped connections and needed reboots. Luckily, there are plenty of affordable routers from reputable manufacturers that can get the job done. Sure, they may not be loaded with features, but they can be dependable.

One brand that you can often depend on for quality routers is Linksys. Its best models can be a bit expensive, but they are well worth the money. Today, the company launches a new 802.11ac wireless router that has high end features, such as tri-band wireless and MU-MIMO, but doesn't break the bank. Called "Max-Stream EA8300," it has a rather unique feature -- Amazon Alexa support!

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Amazon today announced details of Amazon Cash, a new way to shop online that does not require shoppers to have a bank card. The system allows shoppers to print out a barcode -- or display it on the screen of their iOS or Android phone -- and make a payment in brick-and-mortar stores.

Launching in the US, Amazon Cash can be used to add money to a customer's Amazon Balance, and a number of big names including CVS Pharmacy, Speedway and Sheetz are among the stores participating in the scheme.

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Amazon has announced a new contact center solution aimed to "power millions of customer conversations." The solution, named Amazon Connect, is a cloud-based offering, with customers paying by the minute of usage.

It all starts with the "Virtual Contact Center" solution, integrated deep within AWS. According to Amazon, it only takes a couple of minutes to set the feature up and it requires no special training to use. Payment by the minute goes on top of telephony costs, a pricing model AWS uses in its cloud services, too.

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Thousands of Alexa developers can now build and host most Alexa skills for free using Amazon Web Services (AWS), thanks to a newly released Amazon program.

Previously, developers have had at their disposal the AWS Free Tier, offering a million AWS Lambda requests and a total of 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) -- monthly, for free. However, exceeding these limits also meant monthly fees.

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Following a ruling by a Pennsylvania court that Google would have to turn over emails stored overseas, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Cisco have come together to file an amicus brief in support of the company.

Filing an amicus brief is a way in which companies or people not directly involved in a case can show their interest in it to a court. In this situation, it is in the best interest of the companies that filed the brief that US law enforcement remains unable to access customer data that is currently stored outside of the US.

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When a large portion of the Internet went offline earlier last week, no one could have guessed that the reason for it would be a simple typo. Yet, that’s exactly what happened, as Amazon gave an explanation to the incident.

A number of big websites (and an even greater number of smaller ones) went offline for five hours -- Trello, Lonely Planet, Medium, IFTTT, Quora, and pretty much every site built on Wix.

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If you happen to have an Amazon Prime account then you're aware of the benefits that come along with your annual fee. There's the free two-day shipping, the streaming video service, the music, and more.

Amazon is also producing its own original shows, several becoming big hits, like The Man in the High Castle and Transparent.

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The explosion of digital information flooding the modern enterprise today creates its own unique challenges. Organizations strive to integrate multiple disparate systems, connect to a global ecosystem of partners and customers, and transfer large files and data sets securely -- basically, do business today -- but doing so efficiently and securely challenges even the largest and most skilled IT teams.

Amazon recently launched a service to literally drive a truck to your data center, load it up with all of your data, and drive it back to an Amazon server farm to plug it in and push it to the cloud. The rationale behind this offering stems from the idea that businesses looking to move massive amounts of data -- terabytes and petabytes of information -- to Amazon’s cloud don’t have a fast, affordable option to do so over the internet. But what if they did?

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