Search Results for: Amazon

Online retailers sales see their highest growth on record in April

Dianne Jacobs
Amazon CloudFront Edge

Online retailers are seeing Black Friday-like sales due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their business. According to new data from Adobe’s Digital Economy Index, U.S. e-commerce jumped 49% in April, compared to the baseline period in early March before shelter-in-place restrictions went into effect. Online grocery helped drive the increase in sales, with a 110% boost in daily sales between March and April. Meanwhile, electronic sales were up 58% and book sales have doubled. The data comes from Adobe’s index of the digital economy, which analyzes more…

Apple Mulling a launch to the Cloud Computing Space

Editor
Apple

Apple plans to focus on streamlining and expanding its software and cloud-based services such as iCloud, Apple Music, News Plus, etc. along with the production of iPhones, iPads, and Macbooks. However, to ensure that these cloud-based services run across Apple’s 1.5 billion active devices efficiently, Apple is reliant on its cloud division as well as on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon that offers cloud computing solutions. As a matter of fact, CNBC reckoned that Apple pays $30 million monthly to Amazon’s cloud division and is one of…

Embrace internet tech to keep key sectors in operation

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Video Game

Covid-19 is reminding workers that the digital economy is one that best absorbs the shocks of any disease that discourages physical contact and social grouping. The novel coronavirus that first appeared in mainland China has now spread across the world, with more than 82,000 reported cases and nearly 3,000 deaths, as of Thursday. And right alongside the outbreak is the deployment of myriad types of AI-powered tech that is now being put on full display. Economies are at a standstill, with key sectors under serious existential threats of extinction. It…

The rise of the anti-drone technology

Dianne Jacobs
Drone

One of the first drone deliveries was operated not by a tech giant from Silicon Valley but by small-time criminals who saw potential in the new technology. In late 2013, days before Amazon announced its futuristic plan to operate a fleet of automated vehicles, four people were arrested for attempting to smuggle contraband into a Georgia state prison using a drone. Guards had noticed a remote-controlled helicopter hovering above Calhoun prison. Later, they found the six-rotor drone in a nearby car alongside what appeared to be its cargo: pouches of tobacco and…

Data Breaches Faced by Indian Internet Consumers

Dianne Jacobs
Safaricom

Over the last few years, India has been making headlines with a steady stream of data breaches  ranging from the Aadhaar scandal and Quora row, to the muck-up between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. In fact, data breaches cost Indian organisations ₹12.8 crores on an average between July 2018 to April 2019, making the country the second-most cyber affected region in the world. The first half of 2019 witnessed a 22% jump in cyber attacks due to the increased deployment of IoT. With industries like healthcare, financial institutions and other businesses getting breached regularly,…

Millions of Instagram influencers data scraped and exposed from a Mumbai-based Chtrbox database

olivia Craig

TechCruch has detailed massive database leak containing contact information of millions of Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts has been found online. The database, hosted by Amazon Web Services, was left exposed and without a password allowing anyone to look inside. At the time of writing, the database had over 49 million records — but was growing by the hour. From a brief review of the data, each record contained public data scraped from influencer Instagram accounts, including their bio, profile picture, the number of followers they have, if they’re…

MPESA option now available on Aliexpress App

olivia Craig

Shopping online can seem like a daunting task to some people, especially considering the  limited payment options and security issues that bog online transactions. Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform, AliExpress, has slowly but steadily gained popularity in Kenya as the platform opens up the Chinese vast goods market to Kenyans. International shopping in Kenya has mainly relied on third-party services such a Vitumob or Something Random, that aim to connect locals to the well-established platforms like Amazon but recently we have seen these shopping websites make an effort to directly reach their…

Facebook handed over 150 companies intrusive access to your data

Facebook gave over 150 companies almost unfetted intrusive access to users’ data than previously admitted, exempting them from its usual privacy rules, according to the New York Times. It has emerged that companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and Yandex had special arrangements to retain access to users’ data (and data on their friends), despite platform changes in 2014 that restricted the practice. For example: — Netflix and Spotify were able to read users’ private messages — Microsoft had access to the names of virtually all users’ friends, without consent…

Competitive Edge: Tech Giants spent a combined $80 billion last year on big-ticket physical assets stockpile

Editor

General Motors Co. and Google couldn’t be more different. GM musters an army of people and machines to produce the 10 million cars it sells each year. What Google makes doesn’t really exist: You type on a laptop or click play on a YouTube video, and Google zips back bits of digital information. But Google parent Alphabet Inc. and the other four dominant U.S. technology companies—Apple, Amazon​.com, Microsoft, and Facebook—are fast becoming industrial giants. They spent a combined $80 billion in the last year on big-ticket physical assets, including manufacturing…

Google reportedly paid millions of dollars in secret data deal with Mastercard to track retail sales

Editor
Facebook

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for. The revelation comes amid heightened concern about how much consumer data is consumed by tech companies like Google. Earlier this year, Facebook was criticized when data on as many as 87 million people was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, raising…