[NEWS] Amazon vows to go carbon neutral 10 years ahead of Paris deadline

The tech giant has vowed to go carbon neutral by 2040, beating the Paris Agreement by 10 years. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has encouraged other companies to follow suit. The move comes a day ahead of global climate protests.

Online retail giant Amazon on Thursday pledged to go completely carbon neutral by 2040. To this end, Amazon announced plans to purchase 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from Rivian, a start-up in which it has also invested.

Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos — the richest man in modern history — encouraged other firms to follow suit and help meet the carbon neutrality goals of the Paris climate accord 10 years early. The US announced in 2017 that it would withdraw from the historic agreement, but many states and entitities have vowed to follow the commitments.

Amazon delivers 10 billion items a year and has a massive carbon footprint.

"We want to use our scope and our scale to lead the way," Bezos told a news conference in Washington, announcing its "Climate Pledge."

"We're done being in the middle of the herd on this issue.

"If a company with as much physical infrastructure as Amazon ... can meet the Paris agreement 10 years early, then any company can."

He said other CEOs of global companies had seemed receptive to the idea when he spoke to them.


READ THE FULL STORY @https://www.dw.com/en/amazon-vows-to-go-carbon-neutral-10-years-ahead-of-paris-deadline/a-50505302?maca

Walmart is hiring more robots to replace human tasks like cleaning floors and scanning inventory

AS SEEN @ https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18302356/walmart-robots-labor-costs-replacing-human-tasks-floors-scanning-inventory

Walmart is hiring robots to replace human tasks that humans didn’t “enjoy doing.” In a bid to save on labor costs, it’s betting on robots to clean floors, sort inventory, and replenish out-of-stock items in its stores, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Walmart has several jobs in mind for the new robots. Robot floor cleaners are coming to 1,500 stores. (The company says that floor scrubbing was previously a task that could take a human worker two to three hours each day to complete.) Walmart is also adding 600 conveyor belts that can sort inventory automatically, and at least 300 bots that can check if shelves are running out of stock after Walmart initially began to test this technology in 2017.

All of this is coming at the cost of human labor. The more robots Walmart hires, the fewer people it needs for each task, and the more money it saves across its 4,600 stores in the US. Walmart says that although it’s cutting down on labor for tasks like flooring cleaning, it is hiring employees to focus on growing its online grocery business. The move also comes after retail companies like Target and Walmart announced slight wage increases for store workers.

Walmart appears to be trying to make its online grocery service competitive to AmazonFresh and Amazon Prime Now’s Whole Foods delivery, both of which are still expanding. It’s part of a long feud between the two retail giants. While the brick-and-mortar Walmart has been pushed to acquire Jet.com and establish more of an online presence, Amazon has added physical stores to its e-commerce offerings and began to follow the playbooks of more traditional brands. Just last week, Amazon announced a new round of price cuts at Whole Foods stores around greens and tropical fruits. The company also reportedly has plans to expand grocery stores in major US cities later this year.

[NEWS] Amazon preparing a wearable that ‘reads human emotions,’ says report

Time to strap Alexa to your wrist and let it know how you really feel

In a week of eyebrow-raising headlines surrounding the US-China trade spat, this latest report from Bloomberg still manages to stand out: Amazon is said to be working on a wrist-worn, voice-activated device that’s supposed to be able to read human emotions. This would be a rather novel health gadget, of the sort we’re more used to seeing in tenuous crowdfunding campaigns instead of from one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

Bloomberg has spoken to a source and reviewed internal Amazon documents, which reportedly show the Alexa voice software team and Amazon’s Lab126 hardware division are collaborating on the wearable in development. The device, working in sync with a smartphone app, is said to have microphones that can “discern the wearer’s emotional state from the sound of his or her voice.” In a mildly dystopian twist, Bloomberg adds that “eventually the technology could be able to advise the wearer how to interact more effectively with others.”

Lab126 has already been responsible for the Kindle, the Fire Phone, and the Echo speaker that first introduced Alexa to the world, and a report last year suggested the group is also developing a home robot. The unifying thread to all of Amazon’s hardware efforts right now is to build out an ecosystem of Alexa-capable devices, with the rumored robot making Alexa more mobile and the alleged emotion-sensing wearable giving the voice assistant access to a whole new dimension of user awareness.

The notion of a gadget that can sense emotions isn’t too far-fetched, as there are a number of measurable biomarkers that can suggest states like agitation. Research into all the information contained in the way people speak also bolsters Amazon’s case for an emotionally sensitive device. Achieving an accurate, or at least generally reliable, picture of a person’s emotional state, however, still seems like a hugely ambitious undertaking.

This is definitely one of those things that hasn’t yet been done because of how hard it is to do. Today’s report does conclude by saying that it’s not immediately obvious how far along Amazon’s project is or whether it’ll result in any sort of commercial product. So we should probably keep our emotions in check for now.

AS SEEN @https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/5/23/18636839/amazon-wearable-emotions-report

Amazon.cn website breakdown not an indicator of ending China business: employee

U.S. e-commerce giant Amazon's service site for the Chinese mainland, amazon.cn, became inaccessible for unknown reasons on Monday afternoon.

Users trying to visit the website on Monday afternoon encountered the notice "an accidental error occurred, and please try it later." The company also provided the link to its customer service center in the notice.

A Chinese employee with the company in China in Beijing told the Global Times on the condition of anonymity that the breakdown might have been a result of "too many visits" at the moment, and that the website is under repair.

A public relations representative of Amazon China told the Global Times that there was no problem with Amazon's website after Chinese users reported the website had become inaccessible on Monday afternoon.

The company said earlier this month that it will no longer operate a marketplace nor provide seller services on its Chinese website Amazon.cn from July 18.

Amazon's Chinese sales are small enough that the company does not break them out in its financial reports. It sells less in the country than in Japan, the smallest market that it does report, which had $13.8 billion in sales last year, about 6 percent of Amazon's business globally, according to a report in the New York Times on April 18.

However, the Amazon Beijing employee told the Global Times that the company will not pull out of China, and the company is even trying to recruit more people in the country and that there are many posts available for Chinese candidates.


as seen @http://www.ecns.cn/news/2019-04-29/detail-ifzhtktn3339939.shtml

Amazon now has 45,000 robots in its warehouses

DATE: 03/01/2017
RETRIEVED: 04/01/2017
SOURCE: BUSINESS INSIDER UK



Amazon significantly expanded its army of warehouse robots in 2016, according to a report by The Seattle Times.

The newspaper — based in the same city as Amazon's global headquarters — wrote last week that the e-commerce giant now has 45,000 robots across 20 fulfillment centres.

That would be a 50% increase from the same time the year before, when the company said it had 30,000 robots working alongside 230,000 people.

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Beyond the warehouse, Amazon is also looking at automating other aspects of its business. In December, the company announced it had made its first delivery by an automated drone in the UK. It's also filed a patent that would allow it to use automated drones to deliver packages from large airships in the future.



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http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazons-robot-army-has-grown-by-50-2017-1

Tech’s Next Battle: The Frightful Five vs. Lawmakers

DATE: 04/01/2017
RETRIEVED: 04/01/2017
SOURCE: NYTIMES


In the technology industry, the sharks have never long been safe from the minnows. Over much of the last 40 years, the biggest players in tech — from IBM to Hewlett-Packard to Cisco to Yahoo — were eventually outmaneuvered by start-ups that came out of nowhere.

The dynamic is so dependable that it is often taken to be a kind of axiom. To grow large in this business is also to grow slow, blind and dumb, to become closed off from the very sources of innovation that turned you into a shark in the first place.

Then, in the last half decade, something strange happened: The sharks began to get bigger and smarter. Nearly a year ago, I argued that we were witnessing a new era in the tech business, one that is typified less by the storied start-up in a garage than by a posse I like to call the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

Together the Five compose a new superclass of American corporate might. For much of last year, their further rise and domination over the rest of the global economy looked not just plausible, but also maybe even probable.
Continue reading the main story

In 2017, much the same story remains, but there is a new wrinkle: The world’s governments are newly motivated to take on the tech giants. In the United States, Europe, Asia and South America, the Five find themselves increasingly arrayed against legal and regulatory powers, and often even against popular will.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/technology/techs-next-battle-the-frightful-five-vs-lawmakers.html

If Amazon Echo Answers the Cops, There will Be Legal Precedent

DATE: 29/12/2016
SOURCE: AMERICAN HERALD
VIA: BING

Arkansas detectives contacted Amazon Inc. in a bid to cooperate in a criminal case. The authorities are pursuing a confidential disclosure that may as well offer evidence that can convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. The criminal case is already one-year-old. The house of the suspects was filled with Internet of Things devices. Among these was a personal digital assistant bot, namely the Amazon Echo.

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This means that if there is going to be another criminal act, the detectives can obtain such digital evidence from another Amazon Echo more easily. While this situation can solve many cases from now on, it will also turn devices against their owners.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @

http://www.americaherald.com/legal-precedent/28126/