Amazon is getting into prepackaged, prepare at home meal kits with Amazon Meal Kits, and has submitted an application to trademark the slogan “We do the prep. You be the chef,” saying in its application to the USPTO that it will be using the trademark on, according to the filing, “Prepared food kits composed of meat, poultry, fish, seafood, fruit and/or and vegetables and also including sauces or seasonings, ready for cooking and assembly as a meal.”

There is a new kind of war going on up in the clouds, and it does not involve anyone from the pantheon of Greek mythology. Its mega-retailer Walmart versus mega-retailer Amazon, and the pawns in their battle are the vendors who want to do business with Walmart.

If you have been frustrated trying to figure out how to export the list of songs and music from your Amazon Music playlist, well, you’re not alone. In fact, a search for this holy grail of playlist exports shows that people have been trying to export their Amazon playlists for years, to no avail. Now we’ve cracked the code – at least until Amazon finds this article and figures out how to thwart this method.

The world woke up to this astounding business news this morning: online retailer Amazon is buying natural food wholesaler Whole Foods in a deal reported to be north of $13 billion.

Last month we told you about the privacy nightmare that is Amazon’s new Echo Look. At the time we knew that it had a built-in video camera (hence the privacy nightmare). Now the Echo Look has gone on sale – no, wait! No, they’ve added a video screen! Now it’s the Echo Show that’s on sale (well, pre-sale on Amazon, it actually ships June 28th).

We thought it was weird that Alexa will soon be able to detect your moods, and when we wrote about the hidden dangers of the Amazon Echo, we never dreamed that Amazon would up the ante by adding a hands-free video camera to the Echo! But that’s exactly what they’ve done with the Amazon Echo Look. And they expect you to use it in your bedroom, or bathroom, or wherever you get dressed, so that your Echo can give you wardrobe feedback with Amazon’s new Alexa-based ‘Style Check’ service.

Last month the Neitzel family of Dallas, Texas discovered that their 6-year-old daughter Brooke had ordered a doll house on Amazon by simply saying “Alexa, can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?” But that’s not all. When this story was picked up and reported on San Diego’s CW6 (stay classy, San Diego), CW6’s anchor Jim Patton said, on air, “I love the little girl, saying ‘Alexa ordered me a dollhouse’,” triggering a legion of Amazon Echos in the San Diego area to attempt to order a dollhouse of their own.

Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) and Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services) is down at this very moment (Tuesday, February 28, 2017, at 3:30 p.m. EST, and people are understandably freaking out.

Trekkies across the country are rejoicing at hearing that as of today Amazon has added a new ‘wake word’ to their Echo’s vocabulary: computer. (The other three options to wake up your Echo are ‘Alexa’, ‘Echo’, and ‘Amazon’.) Here’s how to change your wake word and make your Echo respond to the word ‘computer’.

Here’s a nifty, little known service offered by Amazon: text message (i.e. SMS) notifications of when an Amazon order is delivered to your door, as well as when an order has been shipped, when a refund has been posted to your account, etc.. In this day and age of so-called ‘porch pirates’ (people who follow the UPS truck and steal your packages as soon as they are delivered) this is proving to be a very useful service!

If you didn’t yet get a notice from Amazon about a credit from the settlement of the anti-trust price-fixing lawsuit against Apple and book publishers, you may be wondering “Am I entitled to the Amazon credit from the lawsuit settlement?”. You may even have come to the conclusion that you aren’t going to receive credit from the settlement, even though you are sure that you purchased ebooks from Amazon before April of 2012. Well, just because you haven’t received the notice yet, doesn’t mean that you don’t have a credit coming. Here’s how to find out if you are getting a credit from that lawsuit settlement.

While the new Kindle Lending program may be good news to a lot of people, not everybody loves it. In particular, if you are an author or publisher whose book is carried on Amazon in Kindle format, you may not want people sharing your copyrighted material freely with others. If that describes you, here’s how to opt out of Kindle lending of your book.

Amazon has announced that it will be building a series of physical, brick-and-mortar convenience stores. The new Amazon grocery stores will be competing with your corner store and gas station convenience store for your purchases of perishables such as milk, meat, eggs, and produce. Amazon also plans a series of drive-up convenience stores, so that you can order food and other products online, and then have same-day delivery curbside to your car.

Confused by a confirmation of a new Amazon “Prime Acct Gift” order that landed in your inbox today, when you know that you haven’t placed any such order? You’re not alone. The order with the subject ‘New-order #20953735 – confirmed’ (although the order number on yours may be different) from aaroncasey@realoffersnow.com (although your ‘from’ address may be different) is 100% a scam.

You may have heard the news that Amazon has opened up their Dash Wand to everyone, meaning that it is no longer just for users of their Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service. Here’s what the Dash Scanner Wand is, and what it isn’t.