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Amazon Opens its First Pint-sized Cashier-free Amazon Go Store in Seattle

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There is nothing, which the biggest retailer, Amazon, does not want to try its hands in. After building the largest empire of online business, Amazon has also entered into the bricks-and-mortar world, with its large Amazon Go cashier-less stores, operating successfully in Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle.

amazongo
Image source: pymnts.com

This time, Amazon has launched the tiny version of its Amazon Go stores in Seattle- the eighth cashier-less store. The store is located on the sixth floor of the Macy’s building in downtown, Seattle. It is this first store of the chain of small stores, Amazon intends to launch for airports, office lobbies, and hospitals. This tiny store is quarter the size of the other big Amazon stores, almost about the size of a 450-square-foot New York City studio apartment.

Unlike the other Amazon Go stores, the small store does not have any checkout lanes. The buyers need to scan an in-app code, through the Amazon Go app, on the entrance of the store, and the cameras will take care of whatever they pick from the shelves. As the store is also a cashier-less one, for the checkouts, the customers will make the payments through their Amazon accounts.

The store is isolated with glass walls and an enclosed ceiling, with all the cameras and sensors attached to it. Amazon has built those stores, especially for its employees. The stores contain a wider variety of pre-made food, grocery, salads and snacks, etc., so that the customers can buy the items on the go.

Gianna Puerini, vice president of Amazon Go, said, “We wanted something from a design perspective that would fit nicely into open spaces. You can bring it in pieces and assemble it on site.”

There were news making rounds, in September this year, that Amazon is planning to build over 3000 such stores across the world. However, there has been no confirmation on the topic from the company.

New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe Pre-load Live on Switch eShop

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Image Source: nintendo.co

Nintendo is still prepping for the new Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe launch, which is set to be in January 2019, and besides, it made the pre-load of the game already available on the Nintendo Switch eShop for the Switch console. The company has also revealed a bit of information regarding the game, that is enough to make the Mario lovers be more excited about it.

The new Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is very much similar to the Wii U game that was released back in 2012 but with few enhancements. With the updated graphics the game, this time, will include the New Super Luigi U, raising the difficulty level for the gamers.

For the gamers in the United Kingdom, the game is full price at £49.99, same as the Wii U port game Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and for the U.S. players, the full price is set at $59.99. The gamers need to have a 2.5 GB space on their Switch console to run this new game, just around 100MB more than New Super Mario Bros. U and New Super Luigi U combined, on Wii U.

The game will be released in languages including Japanese, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, and Chinese languages. For the online subscribers, the game will also have the cloud save data support and can be played in all TV, handheld, and tabletop modes.

For encouraging the pre-order of the game digitally, Nintendo has offered double Gold Coins on the early purchases. Usually, the offer includes a 5% of the price back in Gold Coins, but this time the buyers will get 10%; providing the buyers with an acceptable reason to get the game early.

Slack Prepping for its IPO in 2019; Hired Goldman Sachs as its Lead Underwriter

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Slack, the business chat and direct message provider company, has announced that it is going to become public in the coming year, and has hired investment bank Goldman Sachs as the lead underwriter for its highly anticipated IPO.

In September this year, there were already reports making rounds about the company preparing for its debut in the stock market in the early quarter of 2019, with an expected valuation of the company well in excess of the $7.1 billion.

Slack
Image Source: mybroadband.co

The company had reported a total of 8 million daily active users in August this year, that is double the number of users it had in the summer last year. In the same month, the company had a funding round of $427 million, led by Dragoneer Investment Group and General Atlantic. The company’s major investors include SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund, Dragoneer Investment Group, General Atlantic, T. Rowe Price Associates, Wellington Management, Baillie Gifford, and Sands Capital, etc.

Slack, which is based in San Francisco and Vancouver, is one of the Silicon Valley companies valued over $1 billion, which is now hoping to fetch a valuation of over $10 billion in its IPO. Slack is one of the business messaging service provider, that is in a competitive race with Microsoft’s Teams, Alphabet’s Google Hangouts Chat and Cisco’s Webex Teams and its users are increasing by a rapid rate.

Last month, Slack’s co-founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield told Fortune, “The company had no specific timeline for an IPO. We’ve been on a path to public company readiness for several years now, and we’re continuing on that path.”

2018, had a total of 188 companies went public on the U.S. exchanges, more than the number of companies last year, including 40 tech companies like Dropbox, Zuora, Uber, Lyft, and DocuSign. Other companies that are also planning for their IPO include Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, Palantir and Stripe, etc. Among which, Lyft already filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, on Thursday, for its planned IPO ahead of other companies.

Mozilla & Qualcomm to Launch a Native Firefox version for Windows 10 on ARM

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On Thursday, the two tech giants, Mozilla and Qualcomm, announced that the two are working together on a native version of Firefox for Windows 10. Mozilla stated that it is going to develop a new version of Mozilla Firefox, compatible with the Snapdragon-powered Windows computers on ARM. The browser will be a 64-bit version of Firefox that will provide high-performance and better connectivity.

firefox
Image Source: cnbeta.com

Usually, Microsoft uses a number of emulation techniques to run the Windows 10 application on ARM-based machines, among which, the native apps run faster than the other. Mozilla has kept that in mind and has specifically designed the Firefox run on an ARM machine. Firefox will use individual cores to run every tab, and Qualcomm will provide an adequate amount of it for those tabs.

Senior Director of Firefox Product at Mozilla, Marissa Morris, said, “Mozilla is excited to be collaborating with Qualcomm and optimizing Firefox. We can’t wait to see Firefox delivering blazing fast experiences for the always on, always connected, multi-core Snapdragon computer platform with Windows 10.”

On the other hand, Qualcomm also announced its brand-new processor, the Snapdragon 8cx. The ‘X’ in the 8cx stands for ‘extreme’. The processor is specially designed for the Windows’ always-connected laptops and 2-in-1 convertible Pcs. It is a 7nm chip, the biggest of all chips, Qualcomm has ever made for a laptop or a PC. The chip will provide better performance, better battery life as well as better cellular connectivity, i.e. up to 2Gbps. The chip is specifically developed for the Window Pcs and is the first one of its kind.

Microsoft had just made the announcement of completely shutting down the Edge browser. Now with the improved Mozilla Firefox, there will be only two competitors left in the field, Firefox and Safari. Although Microsoft is also working upon its chromium browser with Google, Mozilla’s new browser may arrive sooner.

Google Shutting Down Allo; Now will Experiment with Rich Communication Services

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A few days ago, the news regarding the shutting down of Google Hangouts was circulating all over the internet, that later Google had denied completely. Now, again there is news that Google will soon shut down its two years old messaging app Allo.

allo
Image source: arstechnica.net

Allo is a Google Assistant empowered app, that was launched as a competitor for Apple’s iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and other chat applications. The device is built for both Android and iOS devices, enabled with end-to-end encryption. Google had launched Allo two years ago, as its another messaging app experiment, that too failed.

The vice president of Chrome, Comms, and Photos (at Google), Anil Sabharwal, said in a statement, “Google noted that Allo as a whole has not achieved the level of traction we’d hoped for.”

The app was facing some problems with its functionalities, so in April month this year, Google stopped investing over Allo and put a pause on its development and marketing work. The company now is entirely focusing on the Android Messages instead, and the Allo team has also been implanted to work on the same.

On the other hand, Verizon has come with its new messaging app RCS (Rich Communication Services), a combination of the best features of Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and WhatsApp, as one platform. Verizon has initially launched the app on the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL. The company is planning to replace the ages-old SMS (Short Message Service) by its new RCS app. Google has worked hard to get its own android chat, but it seems that now it is going to work with its competitor’s app, i.e. RCS.

And for Allo, it is already down for many users and will be discontinued by the March month next year.

Microsoft Edge will be Soon Replaced by a Chromium-powered Web Browser

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Microsoft-Edge
Image Source: valuewalk.com

Three years ago, the software giant Microsoft introduced its Edge browser, in order to replace its own old Internet Explorer and also, give a competition to the Chromium Browser from Google. Though the design and appearance of the browser had an impressive impact on its user, its browser engine (EdgeHTML) could not match the level of the Chromium-based browsers.

Now, after three years, Microsoft has given up on the Edge browser, and currently, it is working on a new chromium based browser that is codenamed Anaheim. The Edge browser was developed in 2015, especially for the users of Windows 10, and also, as an alternative to Chrome, Firefox, and other. But now, the new Anaheim browser is going to replace the Edge browser as it has been facing some compatibility issues, and has brought Microsoft under a lot of businesses and consumers pressure for the improvements.

The new browser from Microsoft will use the browser engine Blink from Google, which is used to interpret the website coding to display it on the screen. As soon as the browser is launched successfully, the developers will be more happy, as the testing work will be reduced to an extent. Microsoft had tried hard to encourage Windows users to adopt Edge as their default browser, but failed most of the time, because of the availability of more popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

Maybe because of the popularity of Google Chrome, Microsoft has decided to develop its new browser on the same Chromium technology. There have been no official comments on the matter from Microsoft. But considering the reports from the Windows Central, it is estimated that Microsft will announce the browser in the coming week, and it may be out in the early half of next year.