Amazon’s Prime Members Start To Get Benefits From Other Digital Stores

Amazon is truly committed to pushing Prime membership to stratospheric heights, and a new expansion that sees it bringing benefits to Prime customers from e-commerce websites beyond its own walls should prove its commitment to the program. Prime members can now get free, next-day shipping on purchases made at British retailer AllSaints’ online store (via Re/code). The arrangement also sees AllSaints bring its products to Amazon.com search results, though clicking through to purchase will still take customers to the AllSaints website.

Curiously, Amazon only makes, essentially, an affiliate fee for directing clients to AllSaints.com, though customers use their Amazon logins and payment information to complete their purchases through a partnership introduced in September. But Prime rules all at Amazon: It’s a growing source of revenue and profit for the online retailer, and studies have shown that Prime members end up buying almost double the amount as non-Prime members from Amazon’s own store.

Already today, Amazon announced free, unlimited photo storage via its cloud services department for Prime subscribers, which is a big benefit in a world of constantly connected camera devices, including tablets and smartphones. Amazon also raised the price of Prime membership this year, but it has introduced a streaming music service, bulked up its video offerings through partnerships and original content creation, and now offers these additional benefits.

It’s unclear how far-reaching this new attempt to partner with outside retailers will be – Re/code reports that Amazon has had issues in the past getting others on board, including Abercrombie & Fitch and Neiman Marcus. Many are wary of giving Amazon too much access to data about their sell-through and customers, and they also have been reluctant to associate their brands with a marketplace that sells basically anything under the sun, including basically dollar store goods.

One thing is clear, however: Amazon wants you to buy Prime, and it’s probably not done giving you reasons to do so. If Prime continues to extend beyond Amazon’s border, it could be the next evolution of an airline-miles type loyalty points program, but with rewards that span the breadth of the web.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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