Amazon

Say “thank my driver” to an Alexa-enabled device, or search for the phrase on the Amazon website or app, and Amazon will give your most recent delivery driver $5 at no added cost. Just like last year, Amazon will continue the program until it reaches 2 million thank yous.

Even Amazon Music is getting in on the yearly recap trend, as its app will now show your top songs, artists, and podcasts of the year, along with other interesting stats under the “2024 Delivered” banner.

Amazon has added games like Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, Tomb Raider: Underworld, Dredge, and Gunslinger: Call of Juarez to its list of free game downloads for Prime members.

That’s in addition to other freebies already offered, like Bioshock Remastered and the beautiful, H.R. Giger-inspired Scorn.

Workers in more than 20 countries including the US, India, Germany, Japan, and Brazil are currently on strike or protesting, coinciding with Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Amazon workers have planned similar strike actions in the past around the shopping weekend. The “Make Amazon Pay” movement is demanding better wages and working conditions, and that Amazon allows workers to join unions.

According to The Information, the retail giant might be unveiling its flagship LLM at its AWS re:Invent conference next week. The AI model can reportedly analyze images and videos and find specific scenes via text prompts, such as a winning basketball shot.

The AI should help Amazon reduce its dependency on Anthropic’s Claude, after pouring $8 billion into the startup.

Bloomberg explores Amazon’s $8 billion partnership with Anthropic that could advance Amazon’s Trainium hardware and software tools enough for the AWS provider to cut into Nvidia’s stranglehold on the $100-billion-plus market for AI chips:

Trainium2 is the company’s third generation of artificial intelligence chip. By industry reckoning, this is a make-or-break moment. Either the third attempt sells in sufficient volume to make the investment worthwhile, or it flops and the company finds a new path.

The TikTok show Boy Room tours the disgusting bedrooms of men, cigarette butts, dirty clothes, and all. It’s gross, funny, and weirdly revealing — and now much more sanitized via an Amazon partnership.

In an HGTV-esque reboot, the show will now give home makeovers featuring Amazon furniture and decor. It serves as a front end to Amazon: Boy Room is also promoting the products via affiliate marketing.

Sources tell Reuters that EU regulators will likely look into whether Amazon is favors its own products on its retail platform — a violation of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.

In March, the European Commission confirmed that it was looking into Amazon’s ranking practices. At the time, an Amazon spokesperson said the company’s practices were compliant with the DMA.

The company is dropping its legal battle in favor of an 11-year settlement for domestic and global rights to “a significant amount of NBA content,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

WBD’s TNT will still lose NBA games to Disney, Amazon, and NBCUniversal next year, but got one consolation:

In addition, these people said, ESPN will sublicense Big 12 conference college football and basketball games to Warner Bros. Discovery that it can air on TNT, as well as on its Max streaming service.

Amazon announced a $20-and-under “Haul” section yesterday to compete with platforms like Temu — and it’s already filled with questionable listings.

ModernRetail rounded up a few, and scrolling through Amazon, it’s not totally clear to me whether images are AI-generated or just very poorly edited (probably both). You have to hand it to Amazon, though: it does look exactly like Temu.

It’s also offering monthly treatment options for erectile dysfunction and eyelash growth. Amazon says Prime members only have to pay for the cost of consultation and the treatment plan, which ranges anywhere from $2 / month to $43 / month.

The National Labor Relations Board ruled that captive audience meetings, or meetings employees must attend where the employer expresses how it feels about unionization, are unlawful. The ruling came in a case involving Amazon, which hasn’t been a fan of unions.

The company recently updated its Send to Kindle for Mac app with support for transferring books and other documents to Kindles with a USB cable. The feature is limited to the Kindle Scribe and “2024-released Kindle devices” but is compatible with Macs running Intel or Apple processors. Previously, Kindle users had to rely on third-party apps like Calibre or Android File Transfer.

Firewalk Studios’ Concord may no longer be with us, but the game is still going to have another (short) moment in the sun when Amazon’s Secret Level anthology series premieres on December 10th.

The plan, which is part of the retail giant’s push to get staff back into offices five days a week, will make it harder to get permission to work from home.

Here’s a snippet from Bloomberg’s report:

The company recently told employees with disabilities that it was implementing a more rigorous vetting process, both for new requests to work from home and applications to extend existing arrangements. Affected workers must submit to a “multilevel leader review” and could be required to return to the office for monthlong trials to determine if accommodations meet their needs.