Amazon is making Alexa more robust by adding features that work in third party skills

Amazon ramps up Prime membership fee to $12.99 and leaves annual fee intact

Amazon is increasing the monthly price option for Prime from $10.99 to $12.99 as it continues to expand the reach and benefits of the popular fast-shipping program.

Amazon said the price increase does not affect the annual membership option, which will remain at $99. With the price increase, the monthly option will now equal slightly less than $156 for a year. Amazon has been investing heavily in Prime, bringing it to new markets and creating additional benefits and original content. Those moves, plus regular increases in fees from shipping partners, are among the factors contributing to the price increase.

Amazon says it has no preference on the annual versus monthly option. However, offering a monthly service with no contract or guarantee carries with it a cost to manage and volatility that isn’t present with the more dependable annual option.

The increase begins today for new members, and existing monthly Prime subscribers will see the cost jump after Feb. 18.

Prime membership for students, discounted at half the monthly cost after a six-month trial, rises to $6.49 under the new pricing structure. The standalone Prime Video subscription of $8.99 per month and a discounted program for people on government assistance will stay at current prices.

The introduction of a monthly Prime subscription and the standalone Prime Video option in April 2016 gave Amazon a comparable offering to streaming rival Netflix. Today’s move shows Amazon is still tinkering with the monthly option to find the right formula.

Amazon said Prime has grown from 20 million eligible items a few years ago to more than 100 million today. One-day and same-day delivery is now available in more than 8,000 markets.

Earlier this month, Amazon said it shipped 5 billion Prime items in 2017. To ship all those items and fill all those orders, Amazon upped its global footprint of distribution centers by 30 percent last year. In the U.S. alone, more than 6,000 trucks and 32 Amazon Air planes traversed the roads and skies, packed with Amazon packages.

The post Amazon ramps up Prime membership fee to $12.99 and leaves annual fee intact appeared first on Retailnewsfeed.com.

#amazon

Amazon is a ‘monster’ set to continue its winning streak, analysts say

The wins just keep coming for Amazon.

The e-commerce giant has risen every trading day so far this year and is on track for its 10th straight day in the green, its longest winning streak since mid-2013. Those gains have pushed Amazon to the highest level of its two decades as a public company.

This streak isn’t over yet, according to two market watchers.

“They’re just executing on every possible front which is incredibly unusual for such a large company,” Boris Schlossberg, managing director of foreign exchange strategy at BK Asset Management, said Friday on CNBC’s “Trading Nation.”

“Amazon is a monster and has multiple streams of possible income,” he said.

Those revenue streams include Amazon Basics, advertisements through its search platform, its artificial intelligence program Alexa, and its new reputation as a creative powerhouse, said Schlossberg. Earlier this month, Amazon’s streaming service won a Golden Globe for its latest series, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

Max Wolff, chief economist of The Phoenix Group, agrees that Amazon has potential for more gains.

“In a melt-up market where people are buying a lot of quality names like it’s going out of style , this one looks like it’s got legs to go,” said Wolff, joining Schlossberg on “Trading Nation.”

Even in a market hitting new highs, Amazon has managed to outpace its peers. Since the beginning of the year, the stock has close to 13 percent, nearly triple the S&P 500‘s year-to-date gain. Amazon has also exceeded the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF’s 5 percent rise and is the second best-performing FANG stock of the year, coming in behind Netflix.

There is some risk to Amazon’s ascendancy this year that could be delivered directly from the White House, said Schlossberg. President Donald Trump has frequently targeted Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and the owner of The Washington Post. Among Trump’s tweeted attacks, he has suggested levying an internet sales tax against Amazon and said that its cheap delivery prices are devastating the United States Postal Service.

“But policy by Twitter is not a risk you can handicap,” Schlossberg added.

Wolff has a price target of $1,400 to $1,500 on Amazon shares, representing 7 percent to 15 percent upside to current levels. Schlossberg does not have a price target on Amazon shares.

Other analysts generally have a positive view of Amazon and its chance for growth. BMO Capital recently upped its price target to $1,600 from $1,200, the highest forecast among analyst firms. Of those surveyed by FactSet, more than 80 percent have a buy rating on the stock. The average target price of $1,343 a share represents 2.5 percent upside to current levels.

 

Disclaimer

The post Amazon is a ‘monster’ set to continue its winning streak, analysts say appeared first on Retailnewsfeed.com.

#amazon

Amazon’s health ambitions confirmed? Company seeks medical data compliance leader for mysterious new initiative

Amazon zeroes in on video and the smart home in its newest patent filings

Amazon has developed an arsenal of patents over the years and this is unlikely to change with 500 more pending at the moment.

The company’s recent focus is on augmented reality, video and the smart home. All these patents may not necessarily transform into products or services but historically Amazon has filed some notable patents that have given it an edge over competitors. The company’s patent for one-click shopping for example, gave it an advantage over other retailers and brought in loads of money through licensing fees before it expired last year. That patent, issued in 1999, lets customers buy things in one click of the button without re-entering their shipping or billing information.

This past December, Amazon was given a patent for a “smart” sensor-packed package delivery air vehicle in line with its envisaged drone delivery system. In the same month it was issued with a patent for technology that would enhance user privacy on the Echo’s video mode through pixelization. Other patents obtained include one for detecting hacked autonomous cars and another for an augmented reality mirror.

The augmented reality mirror allows users to use a variety of backgrounds with cameras and lights to try on clothes virtually. This will come in handy as the retail giant gets into fashion.

Its patent on technology to detect hacked autonomous cars could be licensed to third parties such as Uber Tesla or Alphabet who are already leaders in the field of self-driving cars. The technology on pixelization will help users to mute the video on their Echo devices when video conferencing through image blurring.

Amazon obtained patents related to cloud computing early on which has made it difficult for late entrants like Google and Microsoft to compete giving the company a huge lead. Now that cloud computing has become a mainstream adoption, Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, is now a leader in its field and the company’s most profitable division.

Amazon has been amassing this huge compilation of patents since the dotcom bubble and hasn’t stopped. Today the company has over 6,000 patents and counting under its wings giving it an dvantage that no other company among the Fortune 500 can match.

The post Amazon zeroes in on video and the smart home in its newest patent filings appeared first on Retailnewsfeed.com.

#amazon

Taking a different approach can lead to riches, Cramer says

CNBC’s Jim Cramer says that investors who go against the old adage of assuming that a bubble has to burst may actually make money.  He alludes to the old days when it was always obvious that a wave such as the dotcom one, which led to artificially overrated internet stocks, would eventually burst – and yes, it did.

Eventually people began to associate any hype around tech stocks with that dotcom bubble leading to a lot of caution even where investors would have made a kill.

Speaking on his “Mad Money” program, Cramer said that having been in the business that long he has realized that the if  investors took that kind of caution they would have missed the billion-dollar stocks we see today. He singled out the top tech stocks like Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet and Netflix as a phenomenon that was treated differently by investors coming out of the dotcom bubble. They put their money in companies that had every likelihood of going the dotcom way and had faith that this time around it was going to be different – and yes indeed it was different.

These unknown entities of that time have grown to dominate the world today. Facebook has grown from a Harvard craze to become a $521 billion company straddling every continent. Amazon has matured from a mere online retailer where one hoped they would deliver a product after giving them credit card information to a $629 billion conglomerate that keeps growing bigger.

Google has ballooned into a $782 billion behemoth after starting off as a simple website where one got information by typing in anything and an unknown company that rented out DVDs has transformed itself into Netflix, a $95 billion video streaming giant.

According to Cramer, anyone who held the old thinking that everything would be the same, lost out on a gamble that has produced four companies that have made billions for those that dared to believe.

The post Taking a different approach can lead to riches, Cramer says appeared first on Retailnewsfeed.com.

#amazon

Dreamers receive boost from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in their quest for education

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, donated $33 million to fund scholarships for 1,000 undocumented immigrant high school graduates to go to college.

The money will go to TheDream.US, a nonprofit that has been helping send such kids, known as the dreamers, go to college. The group is already funding scholarships for almost 3,000 kids currently in college, with backing from the foundations of other techies, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Pierre and Pam Omidyar.

Bezos said his father immigrated to the United States at age 16 from Cuba. “He landed in this country alone and unable to speak English,” Bezos said in a statement. “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.”

Dreamers, who were typically brought into the country as young children, are not eligible for federal grants and loans or state aid in 44 states. The group has become a political cause, after President Trump last year rescinded a 2012 order by President Obama allowing immigrants who entered as minors to avoid deportation and obtain work permits. Trump and lawmakers in Congress are discussing a deal to revive the arrangement as part of a broader immigration reform.

Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.

Unlike former Microsoft (msft) head Bill Gates, Bezos has not yet decided how to give away the bulk of his vast fortune. Bezos passed Gates to become the richest person in the world last year. Last June, Bezos tweeted that he was looking for suggestions for his charitable giving.

“I’m thinking I want much of my philanthropic activity to be helping people in the here and now—short term—at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact,” the Amazon (amzn) CEO wrote.

The post Dreamers receive boost from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in their quest for education appeared first on Retailnewsfeed.com.

#amazon