Tag: Amazon

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Amazon Will Have Two Prime Shopping Events This Year, Second One Coming in Q4

Amazon Will Have Two Prime Shopping Events This Year, Second One Coming in Q4
  • Amazon is planning to hold a “Prime Fall deal event” in the fourth quarter, according to a notice viewed by CNBC.
  • The company recently notified third-party merchants about the event.
  • Amazon is increasingly looking beyond Prime Day to drum up sales and attract new members to its discount club.

Amazon plans to hold a second shopping event for Prime members this year, in the fourth quarter, according to a notice viewed by CNBC. It will be the first time Amazon will hold two shopping events exclusively for Prime members in the same year, and comes as the company is gearing up for for Prime Day, its big annual sale designed to attract new Prime subscribers, which is happening July 12 and 13.

The company recently began notifying select third-party merchants of a “Prime Fall deal event” via its internal seller portal, called Seller Central. The notice doesn’t name a date for the event, but it instructs sellers to submit limited-time “lightning deals” by July 22nd, well in advance of the fourth-quarter event.

“The Prime Fall deal event is a prime-exclusive shopping event coming in Q4,” the notice states. “Submit recommended Lightning Deals for this event for a chance to have your deal selected!”

The fall event could help drum up additional sales for Amazon, which booked the slowest revenue growth for any quarter since the dot-com bust in 2001 in its latest earnings report. It could also help retailers clear out some of the extra inventory they’ve accumulated, as inflation squeezes shoppers, and they shift their spending to areas like travel and entertainment.

Analysts have voiced concerns that Prime Day has lost some of the momentum it once had, pointing to slowing sales growth, smaller order sizes and more muted promotion on Amazon’s website. Jefferies analysts on Monday predicted Prime Day will contribute $8.1 billion in gross merchandise volume this year, which is “consistent with the Summer event last year.”

Amazon has increasingly looked beyond Prime Day to hook shoppers, launching new deal events focused on specific categories. The company last October held its first beauty products event, and in May it held an “Amazon Pet Day” discount event.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the event, which was previously reported by Business Insider.

WATCH: If you have a longer time horizon, I’m extremely bullish on Amazon, says Zillow co-founder

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Amazon Rekognition Introduces Streaming Video Events

Amazon Rekognition Introduces Streaming Video Events

AWS recently announced the general availability of Streaming Video Events, a new feature of Amazon Rekognition to provide real-time alerts on live video streams.

The managed service for image and video analysis can help camera manufacturers and service providers detect objects such as people, animals, and packages in live video streams from connected cameras. Streaming Video Events triggers a notification to the device as soon as the expected object is detected. Prathyusha Cheruku, principal product manager at AWS, explains how it works:

The service starts analyzing the video clip only when a motion event is triggered by the camera. When the desired object is detected, it sends a notification that includes the objects detected, bounding box coordinates, zoomed-in image of the objects detected, and the timestamp. The Amazon Rekognition pre-trained APIs provide high accuracy even in varying lighting conditions, camera angles, and resolutions.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/connected-home

Amazon Rekognition Video relies on Kinesis Video Streams to receive and process the video stream: the AWS::Rekognition::StreamProcessor type creates a stream processor used to detect and recognize faces or to find connected home labels.

To better manage the machine learning inferencing costs, customers can specify the length of the video clips to be processed (between 10 and 120 seconds) and can choose one or more objects such as people, pets, and packages, minimizing false alerts from camera motion events. Cheruku clarifies the benefit of Streaming Video Events over traditional motion detectors:

Many camera manufacturers and security service providers offer home security solutions that include camera doorbells, indoor cameras, outdoor cameras, and value-added notification services to help their users understand what is happening on their property. Cameras with built-in motion detectors are placed at entry or exit points of the home to notify users of any activity in real time, such as “Motion detected in the backyard”. However, motion detectors are noisy, can be set off by innocuous events like wind and rain, creating notification fatigue, and resulting in clunky home automation setup.

According to AWS, service providers can use the feature to create better in-app experiences, for example Alexa announcements such as “a package was detected at the front door”. In a separate article, Mike Ames, Prathyusha Cheruku, and David Robo explain how 3xLOGIC uses the new feature to provide intelligent video analytics on live video streams to monitoring agents.

Streaming Video Events is not the only new feature of Amazon Rekognition. Among the 2022 announcements, Rekognition Video added new languages for text detection, introduced new Face APIs for improved accuracy and improved content moderation.

Video Streaming Events is a feature available in a subset of AWS regions, including Northern Virginia, Ohio, Ireland and Mumbai. The label detection is charged at $0.00817/min, with minute increments. The processing of Kinesis Video Streams is charged separately.

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Amazon Rekognition Introduces Streaming Video Events

Amazon Rekognition Introduces Streaming Video Events

AWS recently announced the general availability of Streaming Video Events, a new feature of Amazon Rekognition to provide real-time alerts on live video streams.

The managed service for image and video analysis can help camera manufacturers and service providers detect objects such as people, animals, and packages in live video streams from connected cameras. Streaming Video Events triggers a notification to the device as soon as the expected object is detected. Prathyusha Cheruku, principal product manager at AWS, explains how it works:

The service starts analyzing the video clip only when a motion event is triggered by the camera. When the desired object is detected, it sends a notification that includes the objects detected, bounding box coordinates, zoomed-in image of the objects detected, and the timestamp. The Amazon Rekognition pre-trained APIs provide high accuracy even in varying lighting conditions, camera angles, and resolutions.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/connected-home

Amazon Rekognition Video relies on Kinesis Video Streams to receive and process the video stream: the AWS::Rekognition::StreamProcessor type creates a stream processor used to detect and recognize faces or to find connected home labels.

To better manage the machine learning inferencing costs, customers can specify the length of the video clips to be processed (between 10 and 120 seconds) and can choose one or more objects such as people, pets, and packages, minimizing false alerts from camera motion events. Cheruku clarifies the benefit of Streaming Video Events over traditional motion detectors:

Many camera manufacturers and security service providers offer home security solutions that include camera doorbells, indoor cameras, outdoor cameras, and value-added notification services to help their users understand what is happening on their property. Cameras with built-in motion detectors are placed at entry or exit points of the home to notify users of any activity in real time, such as “Motion detected in the backyard”. However, motion detectors are noisy, can be set off by innocuous events like wind and rain, creating notification fatigue, and resulting in clunky home automation setup.

According to AWS, service providers can use the feature to create better in-app experiences, for example Alexa announcements such as “a package was detected at the front door”. In a separate article, Mike Ames, Prathyusha Cheruku, and David Robo explain how 3xLOGIC uses the new feature to provide intelligent video analytics on live video streams to monitoring agents.

Streaming Video Events is not the only new feature of Amazon Rekognition. Among the 2022 announcements, Rekognition Video added new languages for text detection, introduced new Face APIs for improved accuracy and improved content moderation.

Video Streaming Events is a feature available in a subset of AWS regions, including Northern Virginia, Ohio, Ireland and Mumbai. The label detection is charged at $0.00817/min, with minute increments. The processing of Kinesis Video Streams is charged separately.