Amazon

When Amazon’s Invincible series returns for its third season, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) is going to be rocking some new blue threads that might become his signature look as the show continues into its just-announced fourth season.

That means mapping developers can access the 2.3 billion unique buildings, 54 million places of interest, 200 million addresses, and other global data collected by the Overture Maps Foundation. The open-source initiative launched in 2022 with the goal of offering a free alternative to mapping data provided by Google and Apple.

There will be plenty of traditional television series like Shōgun and The Bear in the running at the 76th Emmys in September. But given how many Netflix, HBO, Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, and Amazon projects were just nominated for awards, this year’s competition seems like it could easily go to the streamers.

The agency wants more information about Amazon’s maneuver to hire most of the Adept team and license its technology. Adept said its plans to build “useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product” would have required “significant attention on fundraising.” The informal inquiry might not lead to an investigation or enforcement, but enforcers are keeping close watch of tech giants and AI.

A report from Bloomberg highlights how a couple’s washable swim diaper business suffered after Amazon’s returns service recirculated a used diaper, leading to a scathing review that hurt sales:

The Barons told Amazon repeatedly that they weren’t at fault and that the review should be taken down. Yet it remains on the site, inflicting lasting harm. The couple says they’re $600,000 in debt, including a loan secured by their home that complicates the prospect of filing for bankruptcy.

Amazon’s brand-specific reordering buttons only lasted from 2015 through 2019, but in that time, they made enough of an impact to earn an eventual featured spot as a Button of the Month.

Some people did try to keep using them — let us know if your hacks are still working.

As explained by Front Office Sports, the NBA is waiting to see if TNT parent Warner Bros. Discovery will try to match any part of the reported $76 billion in offers from NBC, ESPN, and Amazon.

WBD’s (not-HBO) Max could try to match Prime Video, but with a smaller audience than Amazon’s service, matching might not be enough.

The tech giant and comedian Dax Shepard agreed to an $80 million deal for his Armchair Expert podcast, The Wall Street Journal reports. Spotify had landed the show as an exclusive in 2021 before allowing it to be on other platforms last year.

E-book borrowing is the new hot trend, and to use their local libraries, people are buying Kindles. Though paper books are still more popular than digital ones, “Kindle sales have grown in double-digit percentages for each of the past two years and are on track for similar gains this year.”

Amazon has a new 3D “Gaming Zone” online showroom, which feels like it was designed to fit a marketing executive’s idea of “gamer aesthetic.” Also, the showroom is a chore to navigate. And you can’t even play the arcade cabinets!

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An Amazon engineer blogged about how they test the durability of Kindles. The process sounds like every toddler’s dream come true, complete with throwing food at prototypes, drowning them in baths, attempting to poke, prod, and crush them in half with heavy contraptions, and even chucking a few into dryer-like machines.