Amazon's Alexa-powered Echo speakers now available in Canada

Amazon’s anticipated cloud-based voice service, Alexa, is now available in Canada along with three Alexa-enabled devices: Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Plus. The lineup of innovative voice-controlled speakers allows users to experience a new level of convenience and intelligence. From simply asking Alexa for the temperature, or the news of the day, to controlling your entire home’s lights and locks, Alexa’s capabilities are endless and ever-expanding. You can order your Echo device today at www.amazon.ca/echo. Hit jump for specs and pricing.

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Spotify compiles your top tunes of 2017

With the amount of data Spotify has on you and your listening habits, it’s easy for the streaming service to do its yearly roundup of your favorite songs and artists of the year. That time of the year has come and you can find what songs have been on repeat in your playlists through the 2017 Wrapped site. It’ll show you everything from how many minutes of music you’ve listened to for the year, the number of songs you’ve listened to, the genres, and artists. It’ll generate two playlists for you. One is your top 100 songs of the year and the other it calls the “ones that got away,” which are songs Spotify thinks you should give a listen to based on what you’ve listened to throughout the year. You can, of course, share these results, if you dare, on social media.

Source: Mashable

Alexa-enabled Ultimate Ears BLAST and Ultimate Ears MEGABLAST speakers coming to Canada

With the introduction of Amazon Alexa in Canada, Ultimate Ears is proud to announce full availability in Canada starting on December 10th for the recently released Alexa-enabled Ultimate Ears BLAST and Ultimate Ears MEGABLAST - both portable, wireless, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth speakers with immersive 360-degree sound and hands-free voice-control, for at home and on-the-go. Also available is Ultimate Ears POWER UP, a sleek charging dock that makes charging easier and more seamless for BLAST and MEGABLAST. With POWER UP, you can say goodbye to messy wires and keep the music playing while charging.

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Instagram will let you put your favorite stories in your profiles

It might be taking away from the initial intention of the Instagram Story feature but as Instagram’s Yichen Wang justifies, “It’s a pretty carefree way to capture moments in your day, but it doesn’t mean they’re low-quality moments.” Instagram just updated its app to do a few new things. One is you now have the option to save in a private archive the stories you post. Another is you can pick the stories you have, put these in albums of sorts that you can name, and display these on top of your profile. The ability to create these albums hasn’t shown up on my phone yet but saving to archive is already available. Perhaps I need to start taking more Stories for the option to be available for me.

Source: Fast Company