Amazon’s in-garage delivery is now available in 4,000 US cities

For all the myriad ways Amazon has made shopping more convenient, the last-mile delivery can be an issue. The company’s Key service is an attempt to address those issues, offering a way for packages to get delivered even when residents aren’t home or are otherwise unreachable.

Currently the company offers home, car and garage delivery options. The latter, which launched in 2019 with 50 cities, now reaches more than 4,000, according to the company. The cities include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston, Atlanta and Phoenix. There are thousands of nearby smaller cities and towns on the list, as well. Shout out to Astoria, New York.

The feature is open to Prime members who have a myQ garage door opener, which drivers can access. In addition to the existing delivery features, Amazon is adding in-garage grocery delivers in a handful of cities starting today, including Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. The feature will be limited to select areas and will be expending to other U.S. cities at some unspecified point in the future.

Amazon opens Key delivery to garages

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/12/amazons-in-garage-delivery-is-now-available-in-4000-us-cities/

Python creator Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft

Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, today announced that he has unretired and joined Microsoft’s Developer Division.

Van Rossum, who was last employed by Dropbox, retired last October after six and a half years at the company. Clearly, that retirement wasn’t meant to last. At Microsoft, van Rossum says, he’ll work to “make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows).”

A Microsoft spokesperson told us that the company also doesn’t have any additional details to share but confirmed that van Rossum has indeed joined Microsoft. “We’re excited to have him as part of the Developer Division. Microsoft is committed to contributing to and growing with the Python community, and Guido’s on-boarding is a reflection of that commitment,” the spokesperson said.

The Dutch programmer started working on what would become Python back in 1989. He continued to actively work on the language during his time at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in the mid-90s and at various companies afterward, including as Director of PythonLabs at BeOpen and Zope and at Elemental Security. Before going to Dropbox, he worked for Google from 2005 to 2012. There, he developed the internal code review tool Mondrian and worked on App Engine.

I decided that retirement was boring and have joined the Developer Division at Microsoft. To do what? Too many options to say! But it’ll make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows :-). There’s lots of open source here. Watch this space.

— Guido van Rossum (@gvanrossum) November 12, 2020

Today, Python is among the most popular programming languages and the de facto standard for AI researchers, for example.

Only a few years ago, van Rossum joining Microsoft would’ve been unthinkable, given the company’s infamous approach to open source. That has clearly changed now and today’s Microsoft is one of the most active corporate open-source contributors among its peers — and now the owner of GitHub. It’s not clear what exactly van Rossum will do at Microsoft, but he notes that there’s “too many options to say” and that “there’s lots of open source here.”

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/12/python-creator-guido-van-rossum-joins-microsoft/

Amazon sues online influencers engaged in a counterfeit scheme

Amazon on Thursday announced a lawsuit against over a dozen bad actors, including online influencers and other businesses, who attempted to evade Amazon’s anti-counterfeiting measures by promoting luxury counterfeit products on social media sites, like TikTok and Instagram, as well as on personal websites, then using Amazon seller accounts to fulfill those orders.

The suit alleges that defendants, Kelly Fitzpatrick and Sabrina Kelly-Krejci, conspired with sellers to run a scheme that involved posting side-by-side photos of a generic, non-branded product which could be found on Amazon, and a luxury counterfeit product. The text on the posting would read “Order this/Get this.”

The “Order this” pointed to a generic product being falsely advertised on Amazon. “Get this,” meanwhile, was referencing the luxury counterfeit products the consumer would receive instead.

Image Credits: Amazon court filing

By only posting generic product photos on Amazon.com directly, the defendants and the sellers they worked with, were aiming to bypass Amazon’s anti-counterfeiting measures while making claims about the counterfeit goods elsewhere across social media and the web. They also promoted the high quality of their luxury counterfeit goods using videos on Instagram, TikTok, and personal websites, and sent users to Amazon and other e-commerce websites, like DHgate, to transact.

Of note in this case is the fact that Fitzpatrick had been a member of Amazon’s Influencer Program while the counterfeiting scheme was underway. From Nov. 23, 2019 through March 6, 2020, she participated in the program under the username Kellyfitz02-20. When Amazon detected her activities, she was banned from the program and it closed her Associates account.

She then attempted to open new Associate accounts and continued to advertise the counterfeit items on social media, where she directed her followers to her own website for purchases, as well as to other e-commerce sites.

Instagram had shut down Fitzpatrick’s prior accounts, but she would create new ones when that occurred.

Though Fitzpatrick made her current Instagram account private, her website is still online where it shows her promoting the so-called “hidden links” on Amazon where consumers could buy the counterfeits.

Image Credits: styleeandgrace.com

Similarly, Kelly-Krejci used her website to direct users to “hidden links” on Amazon where they could buy counterfeit products, saying in one video, she “know[s] some people feel weird ordering from hidden links but in this case you will get something fabulous.”

Image Credits: budgetstylefiles.com

The lawsuit alleges the defendants ran their schemes from around November 2019 through the filing of the complaint.

Investigators working on Amazon’s behalf were able to confirm the scheme by placing orders through the links and receiving the advertised counterfeit goods. The court filing shows several examples of these items, which included wallets, purses, belts, and sunglasses, which were designer dupes of brands like Gucci and Dior.

Among the other defendants in the case are businesses and sellers in China who helped source the dupes. In some cases, the sellers took steps to hide their identities and whereabouts from Amazon by using fake names and contact information and unregistered businesses, Amazon says..

Amazon has been working over the past several years to take a harder stance on counterfeiting, having acknowledging the practice harms consumer trust in its online store. In 2017, it launched the Amazon Brand Registry, which gives a rights owner tools to proactively locate and report infringing items. The following year, it launch a product serialization service, Transparency, that helps to eliminate counterfeits for enrolled products.

And last year, Amazon launched Project Zero, a self-service counterfeit removal tool for brands to remove counterfeit product listings on Amazon in minutes. Over 10,000 brands are now enrolled.

The retailer has increasingly engaged in lawsuits against counterfeiters as well, to dissuade others from participating in counterfeiting schemes.

The current lawsuit asks the court to ensure the defendants are barred from ever advertising, promoting and selling on Amazon, opening Amazon Vendor, Selling, and Associate accounts, aiding or abetting counterfeiters, and pay damages, attorneys’ fees, and other relief.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/12/amazon-sues-online-influencers-engaged-in-a-counterfeit-scheme/

On-demand delivery app Glovo is spinning up a b2b logistics unit for super speedy urban delivery

Spain’s on-demand delivery app, Glovo, is gearing up to be able to deliver a much wider range of products within a 30-minute timeframe by rolling out a b2b logistics play — drawing on a network of city centre warehouses that it plans to massively expand over the next twelve months.

It’s just announced the launch of a new business unit, called Q-Commerce — the ‘Q’ standing for quick — to accelerate development of a b2b service that will see it offer to stock third parties’ products in its warehouses and have the couriers that operate on its on-demand platform make deliveries for other businesses too — offering what it bills as a “turn-key” logistics solution for businesses of all sizes to underpin their own online stories. 

It is already working with retail brands like Unilever, Nestle and L’Oreal and supermarkets including Walmart, Carrefour and Kaufland to stock and sell their goods from its network of so-called ‘dark stores’ — which are currently located in Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon and Milan — offering users there speedy delivery for selected groceries and other items under its ‘Glovo Market’ brand (currently with the carrot of free 24-hour delivery and no minimum spend). But it’s aiming to ramp up across the board — expanding the reach of its Glovo Market offer to more cities and launching a b2b offer to power others’ online stores — saying it plans to have more than 100 dark stores up and running by the end of 2021.

Commenting in a statement, Daniel Alonso, global director of Q-Commerce at Glovo — and former ecommerce director at Walmart — said: “With shops closing down and lockdowns globally, consumers now want and expect more items than ever to be delivered to their doorstep. With this has brought new demands — it is no longer a case of waiting 24-48 hours for a delivery. Rather, the expectation for this is now a matter of minutes. At Glovo we’re committed to thirty minutes or less with all products available on Q-Commerce. As we continue to expand our enhanced offering, we’re excited to launch Q-Commerce in other parts of Spain and the rest of Europe, Eastern Europe and Africa over the next 12 months.”

Glovo says it wants Q-Commerce to power delivery of a wide range of products — not just meals and food from restaurants and supermarkets but anything sold in toy, music, book, flower, beauty and pharmacy stores.

There are some obvious gaps in that list: Clothes and shoe stores, for example, which are more likely to have their own online shopping infrastructure already. Plus clothes shopping is also more complex — given the propensity for returns when items don’t fit or suit. But it looks like Glovo is going after almost everything else.

It says its Glovo Market service has more than 50,000 active users, at this point — touting the delivery of around two orders every minute. It also says it’s delivered more than 12 million “multi-category” orders globally to date, while in Spain the number of orders for grocery items doubled this year to more than 1 million. Its overall growth rate in 2019 was more than 300% year-on-year, it added.

The Deliveroo and Uber Eats rival has always touted itself as a ‘deliver everything’ app because it offers the option for users to request anything (within bike-able reason) be brought to your door by one of its gigging couriers, even though the majority of the business involves biking fast food around cities.

Meal deliveries were making up three-quarters of its revenues at the start of this year — but Glovo has ambitions to beat Amazon at the urban convenience game of delivering all sorts of stuff really, really fast. And it’s got investors on board with the plan. Last year it raised a $169M Series D and a $166M Series E in quick succession.

It’s further beefed up its balance sheet this (pandemic) year by offloading its LatAm ops — selling them to European rival Delivery Hero for $272M — which means it’s concentrating its market focus on Southern and Eastern Europe (it also has a small footprint in sub-Saharan Africa, in Kenya and Ivory Coast).

Presumably it sees that footprint as a better fit for the ‘get stuff now’ convenience push it’s making with Q-Commerce combined with a network of its own city center warehouses (aka dark stores). Though last year it also said it wanted to work on building a path toward profitability over the next year+ so fierce competition in LatAm may have pushed those markets out of reach.

Glovo says it has more than 9 million monthly active users, at this point — and 55,000 “associated partners” globally; aka the gig workers who do the heavy lifting of making actual deliveries for its platform.

The startup is facing ongoing legal uncertainty in its home market over its classification of ‘glovers’ (as it calls couriers) as ‘self-employed’. Spain’s supreme court recently found a rider to be in a laboural relationship with the platform — and any move to force the business to reclassify the thousands of couriers it relies upon in the country would radically rework its push for profitability, to put it mildly.

Spain’s top court rejects Glovo’s classification of couriers as self-employed

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/12/on-demand-delivery-app-glovo-is-spinning-up-a-b2b-logistics-unit-for-super-speedy-urban-delivery/

The gift of results

When Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered statistics in order to save countless women from dying in childbirth, his fellow doctors refused to believe him. They ignored his work, didn’t wash their hands and it was another twenty years before his insights on the spread of disease were adopted.

We live in a faster, more competitive world than he did.

When Jethro Tull wrote about the rotation of crops, many farmers continued to do things in the old way. Over time, though, the yields don’t lie. You don’t have to like the idea, but you can see that it works.

Results show up. They’re easy to see, easy to measure and they persist.

The bridge falls down or it doesn’t. Market share goes up or it doesn’t.

We can view results as a threat, or see them as an opportunity. It depends on whether we’re defending a little-understood status quo or seeking to make things work better.

Results don’t care about our explanation. We need a useful explanation if we’re going to improve, but denying the results doesn’t change them.

As the world has become ever more filled with results, it has crowded out each individual’s personal narrative of how the world works. Particularly in times of change and negative outcomes, this can cause a lot of distress.

Our narrative is ours, and it informs who we are and the story we tell ourselves.

Beliefs are powerful. They’re personal. They can have a significant impact on the way we engage with ourselves and others. But results are universal and concrete, and no matter how much we’d like them to go away, there they are.

When people talk about how modernity has changed humanity, they often overlook the fundamental impact that results have had. Competitive environments create more results, at greater speed, and those results compound over time.

We still need a narrative and we still need our individual outlook. But over the last century, we’ve had to make more and more room for the systems that create results. Our shared reality demands it.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/638648020/0/sethsblog~The-gift-of-results/

PUBG announces return to India: New game, $100 million investment

PUBG Mobile will make its return to India in a new avatar, parent company PUBG Corporation said on Thursday. TechCrunch reported last week that the South Korean gaming firm was plotting its return to the world’s second largest internet market two months after its marquee title was banned by the country.

Additionally, the company said it plans to make investment worth $100 million in India, one of the largest markets of PUBG Mobile, to cultivate the local video game, esports, entertainment, and IT industries ecosystems. “Thanks to overwhelming community enthusiasm for PUBG esports in India, the company also plans to make investments by hosting India-exclusive esports events, which will feature the biggest tournaments, the largest prize pools, and the best tournament productions,” it said in a statement, adding that it also plans to hire over 100 employees in the country.

The company did not share exactly when the new game, which it says has been specially created for India, would release.

New Delhi has banned over 200 apps with links to China — including PUBG Mobile and TikTok — in recent months over cybersecurity concerns. To allay concerns of the Indian government, PUBG Mobile has cut ties with Chinese internet giant, Tencent, which is its publisher in many markets, in India. The company last week announced that it had inked a global deal with Microsoft to move all PUBG Mobile data — as well as data from its other properties — to Azure.

In a statement on Thursday, PUBG Corporation said, “privacy and security of Indian player data being a top priority for PUBG Corporation, the company will conduct regular audits and verifications on the storage systems holding Indian users’ personally identifiable information to reinforce security and ensure that their data is safely managed.”

Prior to the ban in early September, PUBG Mobile had amassed over 50 million monthly active users in India, more than any other mobile game in the country. It helped establish an entire ecosystem of esports organisations and even a cottage industry of streamers that made the most of its spectator sport-friendly gameplay, said Rishi Alwani, a long-time analyst of Indian gaming market and publisher of news outlet The Mako Reactor.

PUBG Corporation’s move today could also set a precedence for other impacted apps to chart their returns to the country. One thing that remains unclear for now is whether the Indian government has approved PUBG Corporation’s move.

Not surprising to see PUBG Corp take this route.

PUBG Mobile was the #1 grossing mobile game in India, and its ban was felt by both the developers and players.

This new custom version will aim to satisfy regulators, but it remains to be seen if this will be enough. https://t.co/uQDc2qK5B5

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) November 12, 2020

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/12/pubg-mobile-announces-return-to-india-new-game-100-million-investment/

Ring doorbells recalled over fire threat

Amazon-owned Ring devices have long been under scrutiny of privacy advocates. Now the brand is dealing with another issue entirely, as the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has posted a recall notice for its second-generation doorbell. Some 350,00 units in the U.S. and 8,700 in Canada are being recalled over fire and burn concerns. The devices were on sale through Amazon’s sites and retail locations.

The recall comes in the wake of 23 reports of fire and eight reports of minor burns related to the model. According to the CPSC, the issue relates specifically to the use of incorrect screws during the smart doorbell’s installation. Ring says the issue should not impact users, so long as they only use the screws included with the system. Incorrect use, on the other hand, could directly damage the doorbell’s battery, leading to the aforementioned issue, which, in turn, can cause bodily harm or property damage.

The commission’s site lists the specific details for units impacted by the news and adds that Amazon is voluntarily conducting the recall. Per the CPSC, “Consumers should immediately stop installing the recalled video doorbells and contact Ring for revised installation instructions.”

After purchasing Ring in 2018, the brand has been a source of controversy for both privacy and security concerns. In September, the company promised to add end-to-end encryption for videos captured with the devices.

Ring to offer opt-in end-to-end encryption for videos beginning later this year

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/11/ring-doorbells-recalled-over-fire-threat/