Amazon Suspends Non-Essential Product Orders in Italy and France
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| Amazon Suspends Non-Essential Product Orders in Italy and France | |
| Number | 1081 |
| Broadcast Date | MARCH 23, 2020 |
| Episode Length | 4:49 |
| Hosts | Rich Stroffolino |
Amazon announced orders of non-essential products are suspended in Italy and France, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi calls for gig workers to be included in the stimulus package, and IBM helps to launch the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium.
Headlines
- Amazon announced it will stop shipping non-essential products to customers in Italy and France to allow fulfillment centers to focus on more needed supplies. Customers can still order non-essential products from sellers that do not use fulfillment by Amazon. In other Amazon news, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sent a company wide memo to employees saying that he is "now wholly focused on COVID-19 and on how Amazon can best play its role.”
- In a letter to US President Trump, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called on the Administration and Congress to "act quickly to provide protections for independent workers" in the upcoming stimulus package, additionally calling on an update to labor laws to remove the "choice between flexibility and protection" for workers.
- IBM announced it is helping launch the COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium and will help coordinate offering over 330 petaflops of computing power to researchers working on COVID-19. Other members include the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, as well as several universities and national labs. The consortium will evaluate proposals and prioritize resources based on the "most immediate impact", providing 16 systems with a combined 775,000 processor cores and 34,000 GPUs.
- As part of the local state government’s lockdown order, riding hailing platforms Uber and Ola suspended all rides in Delhi until March 31st. Uber suspended all shared rides in India last week, and Ola said it is restricting ride options in the country, focusing vehicles on healthcare workers and those that support public services.
- A new report from Strategy Analytics shows that global smartphone shipments in February decreased 38% on the year, from 99.2 million units to 61.8 million. This is the largest annual drop in shipments, with the report noting that COVID-19 outbreak in Asia dropping both supply and demand.
- Disney+ will still launch in most of the EU on March 24, but committed to reducing bandwidth utilization from the service by 25%. Disney announced the launch in France is delayed until April 7th. The company also indefinitely suspended the launch of the service in India, originally scheduled for March 29th.
- The World Health Organization launched a chatbot on WhatsApp for COVID-19 information. Information is updated daily and launches with English support with Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish support arriving "in the coming weeks." Meanwhile, Facebook announced it will provide free services to government health organizations and UN health agencies to use Messenger to scale their response to the COVID-19 crisis. Facebook developers will help automate answering commonly asked questions and provide a way to send out mass updates with new information. And Apple updated Siri in the US to provide a CDC-approved conversation flow to answer user questions if they have COVID-19 symptoms.
- Google launched its dedicated COVID-19 information site at google.com/covid19. The site is available in English with a Spanish version on the way, and offers “state-based information, safety and prevention tips", search trends related to COVID-19, with information from the World Health Organization and the US CDC as well as links to US states local health sites. All this information will also be provided in information cards for people searching for COVID-19 related topics.
- A new note from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that a new high end 6.7-inch iPhone scheduled for 2020 will feature sensor-shift image stabilization on the rear camera, with the technology expanding to multiple models in 2021. Current iPhones offer optical image stabilization on telephoto and standard wide cameras through their lenses. Kuo also predicts that in 2022, Apple will introduce a periscope lens to allow for more telephoto range.
- Apple dropped its two-device limit on iPhones on its online store, with Reuters testing carts in the US, China, and Hong Kong that let customers buy more than 10 devices. Device limits still apply to iPads and Macs.
- Amazon began rolling out user profiles for its Prime Video service. Accounts can have up to six different profiles, including ones for children with limited content. Profiles will let users track viewing progress, manage watch lists, and get personalized recommendations.
Links
| Preceded by: "Week in Review for the Week of 3/16/20" |
Amazon Suspends Non-Essential Product Orders in Italy and France |
Followed by: "Instagram Announces Co-Watching DM Feature" |