VENTURE CAPITAL POST

Amazon Echo is a smart device that was launched on November 7, 2014, it can respond to human voice when users call its name, "Alexa." After a year in the market, new functionalities are added to make it a better smart device.

Online shopping has not been limited to non-perishable goods, clothes and beauty products. The continuously growing online demand for perishable products has raised the competition level among many shopping retailers, who are struggling to maintain their position by offering affordable packages.

Approaching Thanksgiving, Amazon offers a great price for its Fire gadget series. It cuts Kindle Fire price to $35 and Fire TV to $25. According to Time Magazine, starting Thanksgiving, Amazon will drop $15 of prices for Fire tablet, its number one best-selling product to $34.99.

US retailers have started flexing their muscles to meet the buying demand during the forthcoming holiday season. Retailers such as Amazon have started hiring in number running over thousands.

Amazon will close its mobile point-of-sale system Amazon Register, and users only have until Feb 1, 2016 to switch to another service provider. Bidnes Etc reported that Amazon.com, Inc, which was just launched last year, is considered unsuccessful. The company no longer welcomes new registration for the mPOS. It will close down after February 1, but it will still provide transaction histories until February 28, 2016.

Lenovo recently announced its strategic partnership with Nutanix, an enterprise virtualization company. Their partnership will develop a hyperconverged applicances for agile and scalable cloud computing. It will be a great benefit for Lenovo who just purchased IBM Intel server division last year.

The significant jump in shares of Facebook and Amazon took them into $300-billion club on 4 October. The market capitalization of Facebook soared to $303.6 billion surpassing General Electric's (GE) $299.1 billion.

A stiff competition in productivity apps between Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Work is heating up. Both Microsoft and Google have made their move to win more corporate customers.

A bizare idea just occurred recently in the Twitch live streaming video platform. A group called themselves "twitchintheshell" planned to install Linux on a virtual machine, based on the most popular keystroke entered by Twitch users. The idea named asTwitch Install has ended in a couple of days after being hijacked by botnet installing other Linux distro.

Amazon is opening its first physical bookstore on Tuesday this week. The store is located in the University Village shopping center, an upscale outdoor mall north of the University of Washington, Seattle.

Amazon launched its Black Friday Deals store in the first day of November as start of a countdown to one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

The European Commission ruled on Wednesday that Starbucks Corp and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles benefited from illegal tax deals with the Dutch and Luxembourg authorities, sending shock waves to MNCs who have been using such profit-shielding tax deals in the past.

The world's largest online retailer has posted encouraging performance for the third quarter ending September 2015. The higher sales in the US and cloud computing business pushed its bottom line to swell. Amazon announced profits for the consecutive second month. Adding to this, the cost control measures and expanding beyond online marketing helped Amazon perform better. Amazon Web Services (AWS) propelled Amazon's overall revenues to grow further.

Amazon is one of the giant retail online stores that are hoping to meet the increase in customer traffic this coming holiday seasons. From a workforce of 80,000 last year, it is now hiring more employees to reach the 100,000 figure. It is surpassing the holiday hiring practices of its competitors Macy and Walmart.

Amazon is filing a lawsuit over 1,114 fake reviewers of Amazon products identified under the website Fiverr, a website for hiring freelance writers.