The last mile of logistics in getting food from the warehouse into the consumer's house is getting exciting.
Schwan's has a very large delivery area for quite awhile, but only with frozen food. Amazon Fresh has
expanded to L.A. Safeway is expanding quickly too. Peapod has been in this space for awhile but hasn't
expanded very far. But sometimes, you just need a
Whopper delivered. Daily milk delivery doesn't seem to be on the radar.
posted by Brent Parker
on Jun 12, 2013 -
64 comments
Franco believes that governments must increase efforts to preserve indigenous cultures. “The Indians represent a special culture, and resistance to the world,” argues the historian, who has spent three decades researching isolated tribes in Colombia. Martínez says that the Indians have a unique view of the cosmos, stressing “the unity of human beings with nature, the interconnectedness of all things.” It is a philosophy that makes them natural environmentalists, since damage to the forest or to members of one tribe, the Indians believe, can reverberate across society and history with lasting consequences. “They are protecting the jungle by chasing off gold miners and whoever else goes in there,” Franco says. He adds: “We must respect their decision not to be our friends—even to hate us.”
posted by jason's_planet
on Apr 13, 2013 -
21 comments
"..it is refreshing to
see Jason Merkoski, a leader of the team that built Amazon's first Kindle, dispense with the usual techo-utopianism and say, “I think we’ve made a proverbial pact with the devil in digitizing our words.”
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Apr 9, 2013 -
90 comments
"
It's become a tradition among Amazon users: Find the stupidest products for sale on the site, and write sarcastically glowing reviews of them. The examples are legendary: the
Three Wolf Moon T-shirt, of course, and also
Bic for Her pens. Now, the latest idiotic product to get a ceremonial roasting is the
Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer, a little plastic gizmo that lets you "slice an entire banana with one quick motion." Universally panned as something completely unnecessary, the product is thus being faux-celebrated as a milestone of human invention."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 5, 2013 -
99 comments
"Hi, my name is Paul Rosolie. I'm a naturalist based out of southern Peru and today I'm headed into the jungle to show you a place that very few people have gotten to see. I'm in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, this is the far western Amazon and some of the deepest jungle on earth."
posted by stbalbach
on Feb 20, 2013 -
10 comments
Twitter is
experimenting with online shopping:
"American Express card holders who connect their card numbers to their Twitter accounts can post on Twitter to trigger a purchase of select products, including discounted American Express gift cards, Kindle Fire tablets from Amazon.com Inc. and jewelry from designer Donna Karan. The program will roll out over the next few days."
[more inside]
posted by Wordshore
on Feb 12, 2013 -
65 comments
Amazon just announced AutoRip, a service to provide MP3 versions of any song you buy on CD from their store. That's all well and good, but the kicker is that "Amazon is retroactively giving free MP3s to any customer who has purchased an AutoRip compatible CD since its Music Store first opened in 1998". Looks like I'll be knee deep in Blink 182, Cake, and The Spin Doctors again.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 10, 2013 -
137 comments
The book publishing world is merging into behemoths in order to better negotiate with Amazon. Rupert Murdoch (HarperCollins) has
made an offer to buy Penguin for
$1.6 billion. This just hours after Penguin said it was in talks to merge with Random House to create a 'Random Penguin' with nearly 25% of all English-language book sales. Either way the reputation of Penguin
could soon be in tatters. As one agent said, "Authors have told me they are frightened by a Random House takeover, but terrified by a HarperCollins one."
posted by stbalbach
on Oct 29, 2012 -
77 comments
RJ Ellory's secret Amazon reviews anger rivals. [guardian.co.uk] "Crime bestseller caught using sock puppets to trash colleagues and hymn his own 'magnificent' work." Under the pseudonym "Nicodemus Jones":
"All I will say is that there are paragraphs and chapters that just stopped me dead in my tracks," he wrote. "Some of it was chilling, some of it raced along, some of it was poetic and langorous and had to be read twice and three times to really appreciate the depth of the prose … it really is a magnificent book."
posted by Fizz
on Sep 3, 2012 -
40 comments
But now, Bic has saved me! With these easy-to-manage lady pens, I too can record my grocery lists and the agenda for my weekly sewing circle! Yes, that's right; due to these pens' soft grips and lightweight build, even my useless, made-from-porcelain hands can manage to wield them. And what's more, their sweet and rosy color palette is soft on my frail lady eyes! It really is a dream come true!
posted by the young rope-rider
on Aug 26, 2012 -
93 comments
Have you ever wanted to sort a particular Amazon's reviewer's reviews by their number of stars? Amazon has never added this feature to its user profile pages, but here's a
workaround. Or perhaps you need a tool that lets you see ratings, dates of reviews, helpful and unhelpful votes, and number of comments, all in a helpful sortable list. Maybe you need to download and install the
Amazon Reviewer Analysis Tool.
posted by shivohum
on Aug 6, 2012 -
9 comments
The E-Book Wars: Amazon Versus the Rest. Publishers, distributors, booksellers, and authors weigh in on Amazon's ever-increasing presence and influence in the electronic publishing world. The author also takes a stab at forecasting the future for the major players in the e-book industry.
posted by Rykey
on May 26, 2012 -
32 comments
Why book publishers will give up on Digital Rights Management. Short answer: because they are more afraid of Amazon becoming a monopsony than they are of consumer piracy. I don't know if he's right, but it's an interesting discussion of the immediate future in book publishing, and the way the Kindle has changed everything.
posted by Chocolate Pickle
on Apr 21, 2012 -
105 comments
The Seattle Times has just published a largely unfavorable four-part series about Seattle-based Amazon.com. In
Part 1, the newspaper questions how much Amazon is doing for the local community.
Part 2 suggests that Amazon is damaging the publishing industry.
Part 3 asks if Amazon's tax-free status gives it an unfair advantage. And
Part 4 wonders whether Amazon is bad for its own workers.
posted by twoleftfeet
on Apr 3, 2012 -
145 comments
"NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds. It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore." An undersea expendition funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
has discovered the spent
rocket engines used to power
Apollo 11.
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Mar 29, 2012 -
59 comments
Hugh Howey was a self-published novelist of no real success. Until
WOOL, that is - a 15,000 word "little throwaway story" he uploaded to Amazon's Kindle Marketplace one day and promptly forget about. The story he didn't blog, didn't tweet, and didn't even sell on his site hit #2 on the Kindle SciFi Bestseller list and "
changed the course of e-books."
[more inside]
posted by DarlingBri
on Jan 15, 2012 -
140 comments
The London Geographical Journal, the preeminent publication in its field, observed in 1953 that “Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest.” Fawcett was none other than
Percival "Percy" Harrison Fawcett,
British soldier, trained as a surveyor of unknown lands, doubling as a British spy. But
his true love was exploration, and not simply to mark boundaries on a map. His final goal was the same that had been the demise of many explorers:
a mighty lost civilization in South America.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Dec 29, 2011 -
6 comments
