by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate Jobs, Employment, Marketing Basics, Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology, World
By Barry Ellsworth,
Trenton, Canada: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Amazon jointly announced Monday that the online retailing giant will add 3,000 employees to its Vancouver operation.
In addition, Amazon will build a new office tower that is expected to open in 2022.
Trudeau said at a press conference in Vancouver that Amazon chose Canada for a number of reasons, including the availability of skilled labor talent.
“There are many reasons why industry giants like Amazon choose to settle and grow in Canada,” he said.
“Our workforce is highly educated, skilled and diverse. Folks across the country are ready to take on the jobs of tomorrow and help companies like yours (Amazon) shape the future — a future where innovation drives economic growth and helps improve the lives of middle class Canadians and people working hard to join it.”
Alexandre Gagnon, vice-president of Amazon Canada and Mexico, agreed with Trudeau.
“Amazon is excited to create 3,000 more highly skilled jobs in Vancouver,” he said.
“Vancouver is home to an incredibly talented and diverse workforce, and these thousands of new employees will invent on behalf of our customers worldwide.”
The new operation will be in addition to Amazon’s 156,000-square-foot building opened in Vancouver in 2015.
Amazon, the world’s third largest retailer behind Walmart and Alibaba according to Forbes magazine in 2017, already employs more than 6,000 workers in Canada, with more than 1,000 of them researchers at the Vancouver operation.
—AA
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Online retailer Amazon has decided not to sell any of the new products from Google’s smart home division Nest, once its current stock runs out, the media reported.
Amazon, in a conference call late last year, told Nest that it would not be listing any of Nest’s new products, including smart thermostat and home security products, among others, on its website, the Business Insider reported.
After weeks of being unresponsive to Nest, Amazon informed the company that the directive “came from the top,” something Nest took to mean that it had been handed down by CEO Jeff Bezos.
However, there has been no direct confirmation on this, the report said.
As a result of Amazon’s decision, Nest decided to stop selling any of its products through Amazon, meaning the limited number of Nest devices listed on Amazon are expected to disappear from the site once current inventory is sold out.
The company has also determined to remove its current set of older products from Amazon because it wanted to be able to offer its full portfolio of devices, or nothing at all, the report said.
Amazon’s move marks the latest development in their rocky relationship over the future of the smart home.
The online retailer had steadfastly refused to sell some Google-branded products like the Google Home voice assistant speaker and the company’s Pixel smartphones.
In December 2017, the online retailer said it would restart sales of the Chromecast streaming device, but has not been done yet.
Last summer, Amazon launched a Prime Video app for Android, but it’s yet to add support for streaming its content with a Chromecast.
On its part, Google had removed YouTube from Amazon’s Fire TV streaming products and the Echo Show/Spot, claiming that Amazon has violated its terms of service with those implementations of the YouTube app.
Both Nest and Amazon has declined to comment, the report said.
Acquisition of Ring, a maker of smart home doorbell and in-home camera last month, has put Amazon in a much better position to integrate its products with Alexa, accelerating its ability to compete with Google’s own smart home ambitions, the report said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Jeff Bezos
By Barry Eitel,
San Francisco: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced Friday that he and his wife MacKenzie are donating $33 million to fund college scholarships for undocumented immigrants.
Bezos said the grant will allow some 1,000 undocumented high school students to attend college.
The students will all be Dreamers, meaning they have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status. DACA was an executive order signed by former President Barack Obama in 2012 that granted some protections for qualifying undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children.
The program was thrown into question last year when President Donald Trump rescinded the order. Congress has until March to make a decision about the 800,000 people impacted by it.
The grant from Bezos was submitted through Dreamer Scholarship Fund TheDream.US.
Bezos noted that his adopted father was an immigrant who fled from Cuba.
“My dad came to the U.S. when he was 16 as part of Operation Pedro Pan,” Bezos said in a statement.
“He landed in this country alone and unable to speak English. With a lot of grit and determination – and the help of some remarkable organizations in Delaware – my dad became an outstanding citizen, and he continues to give back to the country that he feels blessed him in so many ways. MacKenzie and I are honored to be able to help today’s Dreamers by funding these scholarships.”
After shares of Amazon surged on Wall Street earlier this week, Bezos took over the top position as the richest man in history with a fortune of over $105 billion.
Bezos has been noticeably less charitable than some of his billionaire peers, like the now-second richest man ever, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
TheDream.US has partnered with over 70 colleges across 15 states and provides $33,000 in scholarships for Dreamers. Currently, some 2,850 college students receive aid from the program.
Trump’s DACA decision was never directly mentioned by organizers, but the White House’s ire about immigrants was hinted at by Candy Marshall, president of the scholarship fund.
“It is a shot in the arm for Dreamer students at a time when some are questioning whether they should be in the United States at all,” she said in an announcement.
“We would invite anyone who questions the value of Dreamers to please come meet some of our students. We started this program to benefit the Dreamers, their families, and the United States of America.”
—AA
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Online Marketing, Technology
Canberra : Online US retail giant Amazon has officially launched operations in Australia on Tuesday, with the brand looking to make an impact in the lead up to the busy Christmas period.
Their 24,000-square-meter warehouse in the outskirts of Melbourne will offer 23 consumer categories ranging from books, electronics, clothing, home improvement, kitchen goods, health and beauty and baby products, reports Xinhua news agency.
Australian country manager Rocco Braeuniger told local media that “by concentrating on providing a great shopping experience and by constantly innovating on behalf of customers, we hope to earn the trust and the custom of Australian shoppers in the years to come”.
But not everyone is happy about the e-commerce platform’s expansion into Australia.
Among the hardest hit by the new player will be Aussie department stores like David Jones, Myer, Harvey Norman and JB HiFi, who are already under heavy pressure from a weakening retail sector down under.
Adding fuel to the fire, Amazon has offered a one-day delivery service across Sydney and Melbourne over the Christmas holiday period.
In 2018, Amazon also plan to take on the country’s largest supermarket chains with their brand AmazonFresh, offering delivery services for fresh food online.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Corporate, Corporate Reports, Marketing Basics, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Sales, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Essentially a hardware-focused firm, Apple is falling behind in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) race with Google and Amazon racing ahead while embracing the open-source and collaborative approach in the emerging field of AI, Fortune reported.
According to Mohanbir Sawhney, McCormick Foundation professor of technology at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, sheets of glass are simply no longer the most fertile ground for innovation.
“That means Apple urgently needs to shift its focus and investment to AI-driven technologies, as part of a broader effort to create the kind of ecosystem Amazon and Google are building quickly,” Sawhney wrote in Fortune.
According to him, Apple has reached its peak with “super premium” iPhone X and “does not represent the beginning of the next 10 years of the smartphone, as Apple claims”.
Apple launched the iPhone X globally on Friday.
Players pursue innovation along a vector of differentiation until the vector runs out of steam.
“When that happens, the focus of innovation shifts to a different vector and new market leaders emerge. We have seen this pattern several times in mobile phone innovation over the past three decades,” Sawhney said.
The vector of differentiation is now shifting from hardware to AI and AI-based software and agents.
“As AI-driven phones like Google’s Pixel 2 and virtual agents like Amazon Echo proliferateaToday’s smartphones will likely recede into the background,” he stressed.
Google Pixel phones offers great photo-enhancement features and deeper hardware-software integration driven by AI-based technology.
The second edition of Pixel features 5-inch display, 4GB RAM, 12MP rear and 8MP front camera, and 2,700mAH battery.
Google will bring Pixel 2 XL (6-inch display) into the Indian market from November 15 onwards.
The Amazon Echo enables natural conversations through the Alexa virtual agent.
“Apple has only to look at Motorola, Nokia, and Blackberry to understand how quickly a leader can fall from the peak in this market, and do its best to avert this outcome,” Sawhney added.
—IANS
