ShinyShiny snippets: Amazon closes all its physical bookstores
Amazon.com Inc said on Wednesday it plans to close all 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores, pop-ups and shops carrying toys and home goods in the United States and United Kingdom, ending some of its longest-running retail experiments. The news, which Reuters was first to report, marks a turning point for a company that began as an online bookseller and helped drive established rivals such as Borders to bankruptcy. Amazon said it would focus more on its grocery markets and a department store concept going forward. After opening its first book shop in Seattle in 2015, Amazon has tried out an array of ideas in retail: convenience stores without cashiers, supermarkets, and a format called “4-star” in which it sells toys, household items and other goods with high customer ratings. Reuters
Ukraine’s government has said it will issue non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to fund its military as they defend the country against the Russian invasion. The announcement by deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov comes in the same week the country raised more than £200m from the sale of war bonds. The bonds are one of a number of ways Ukraine is using to raise funds. The government is also in talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank over emergency help. In a Tweet, Mr Fedorov said the NFTs will be launched “soon”. BBC
Satellites as small as a shoebox are giving the public eyes and ears on a conflict zone as never before, Sky News has been told. The military has had access to crisp battlefield images for many years, but great strides in technology have made it possible for private companies to launch their own satellites that give an independent view of troop movements and bomb damage. Sky News has been inside the dust-free “clean room” of Spire, which builds nano-satellites on a Glasgow business park. It already has around 120 satellites in orbit, measuring just 10cm x 10cm x 30cm. They can listen in to signals from ships and aircraft, tracking their location as well as details of their origin, destination, and purpose. Sky News
This time last year, social media was ablaze with MyHeritage’s viral ‘Deep Nostalgia’ tech, whose AI wizardry animated our old family photos with disturbing realism. Well, if you were freaked out by that, wait till you see the new feature it’s just launched called LiveStory. This time, the online genealogy company’s tech doesn’t just create a little 10-20 clip based on an old photo of your relative. Instead, LiveStory goes further by creating a longer animated video of your ancestor telling their entire life story, complete with lip-synced audio and a slideshow of old photos. Tech Radar
Laws to protect young people online will be “all bark and no bite” unless tech bosses are held criminally liable, the NSPCC says. The children’s charity will today say that there needs to be significant toughening of the online safety bill for it to be “fit for purpose” when it is published in the next month. They want the Government to make named directors in tech firms criminally liable for illegal content on their platforms so that they could be prosecuted over serious breaches of their duty of care to combat child abuse. The draft bill, published last year, set out fines worth up to 10pc of a social media platform’s global turnover, as the main sanction open to the watchdog Ofcom. Telegraph
