Tag: amazon’s
Amazon’s stock just racked up its highest close in more than two years
Amazon’s Cloud Boss Likens Generative AI Hype to the Dotcom Bubble
Lord of the Rings Online ‘is not going away’ just because Amazon’s making a Lord of the Rings MMO: ‘It is beloved, it is sixteen, it is evergreen’
Lord Of The Rings Online Dev Reacts To Amazon’s New Game Announcement
The developers of The Lord of the Rings Online have reacted to the news this week that Amazon Games is creating its own Lord of the Rings MMO that will seemingly exist alongside the older game.
LOTRO developer Standing Stone Games said in a forum post that it has received “a number of notes from excited and concerned community members” regarding Amazon’s new game. Some said they are concerned that Amazon’s game coming to market might signal the end of the road for The Lord of the Rings Online, but that is not the case.
“LOTRO is not going away!” Standing Stone Games said.
Amazon’s new Echo Buds are already on sale — and just a third of the price of its 2021 earbuds
SAVE 20%: Amazon announced new Echo Buds on May 17, and though they’re only available to pre-order at the moment, they’re just $39.99, down $10 from their $49.99 list price. The earbuds will officially be released on June 7.
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Amazon dropped some new Echo Buds today (along with a few other Echo devices), and already, they’re on sale. Even better — the markdown puts them at just a third of the price of the 2021 Echo Buds.
Yes, you read that right. The 2023 Echo Buds are available to pre-order at just $39.99 (instead of the full price of $49.99 Amazon announced they would be mere hours ago). That’ll save you 20%, and ensure you a pair of buds that’ll officially release on June 7.
And as we mentioned up top, it’s a huge price cut from the Echo Buds that came out two years ago (now known as the “Echo Buds with Active Noise Cancellation”), which retail for $120 with a wired charging case.
So what’s the difference? The latest buds ditch any noise cancellation, which certainly accounts for the much lower price point. They also have a completely new design, and look much more like generic AirPods-like earbuds with a semi-in-ear fit. Per charge, you’ll get up to five hours of battery life and three additional charges with the case, with 20 hours of battery overall.
You’ll also get multipoint pairing, which allows you to connect with up to two devices at a time, and customizable touch controls for your music, phone calls, and more.
Overall, the new Echo Buds don’t offer a host of exciting features, but they definitely have the foundation to be a solid pair of basic earbuds at a pretty unbeatable price.
UPDATE: May. 17, 2023, 3:05 p.m. EDT This story has been updated to clarify that the 2023 Echo Buds are brand new earbuds, not a third-generation model.
Amazon’s new AI focus could place items higher in search results if they’re nearby
Somehow Amazon’s Open Source Fork of ElasticSearch Has Succeeded
OpenSearch shouldn’t exist. The open source alternative to Elasticsearch started off as Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) answer to getting outflanked by Elastic’s change in Elasticsearch’s license, which was in turn sparked by AWS building a successful Elasticsearch service but contributing little back. In 2019 when AWS launched its then Open Distro for Elasticsearch, I thought its reasons rang hollow and, frankly, sounded sanctimonious. This was, after all, a company that used more open source than it contributed. Two years later, AWS opted to fork Elasticsearch to create OpenSearch, committing to a “long-term investment” in OpenSearch.
I worked at AWS at the time. Privately, I didn’t think it would work.
Rather, I didn’t feel that AWS really understood just how much work was involved in running a successful open source project, and the company would fail to invest the time and resources necessary to make OpenSearch a viable competitor to Elasticsearch. I was wrong. Although OpenSearch has a long way to go before it can credibly claim to have replaced Elasticsearch in the minds and workloads of developers, it has rocketed up the search engine popularity charts, with an increasingly diverse contributor population. In turn, the OpenSearch experience is adding a new tool to AWS’ arsenal of open source strengths….
As part of the AWS OpenSearch team, David Tippett and Eli Fisher laid out a few key indicators of OpenSearch’s success as they gave their 2022 year in review. They topped more than 100 million downloads and gathered 8,760 pull requests from 496 contributors, a number of whom don’t work for AWS. Not stated were other success factors, such as Adobe’s earlier decision to replace Elasticsearch with OpenSearch in its Adobe Commerce suite, or its increasingly open governance with third-party maintainers for the project. Nor did they tout its lightning-fast ascent up the DB-Engines database popularity rankings, hitting the Top 50 databases for the first time.
OpenSearch, in short, is a bonafide open source success story. More surprisingly, it’s an AWS open source success story. For many who have been committed to the “AWS strip mines open source” narrative, such success stories aren’t supposed to exist. Reality bites.
The article notes that OpenSearch’s success “doesn’t seem to be blunting Elastic’s income statement.” But it also points out that Amazon now has many employees actively contributing to open source projects, including PostgreSQL and MariaDB. (Although “If AWS were to turn forking projects into standard operating procedure, that might get uncomfortable.”)
“Fortunately, not only has AWS learned how to build more open source, it has also learned how to partner with open source companies.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon’s working on a secret new home robot that could be more like Rosie
As a smart home reviewer of a certain age, all I’ve ever wanted for my home is a Rosie the Robot. The Jetsons’ mechanical housekeeper was the example I held Amazon’s Astro to when I tested the company’s first home robot — and it unsurprisingly failed. Not just because it had no arms, but because it couldn’t really do anything.
Now, according to internal documents from Amazon seen by Insider, the company thinks it has found the keys to unlock Astro’s potential. Burnham is a secret new AI robot project Amazon is developing that, according to the documents, adds a layer of “intelligence and a conversational spoken interface” to a smart home robot, reports Insider.
An upgraded Astro powered by Burnham could use large language models, and…
Amazon’s Omni QLED TVs Have Three New Sizes, Start at $450
Amazon announced in March that it was expanding its QLED Fire TV models with three more sizes available. The new versions are now available, giving you more options for a high-quality but affordable smart TV.