Jay-Z’s ‘4:44’ album makes its way to most streaming services

After a week of Jay-Z’s 4:44 being a Tidal and Sprint exclusive, the new album comes to most major streaming services. We say most as Spotify is missing from the list of services it’s available in. We’re not surprised as the hip-hop mogul pulled his catalog from the service a few months ago. He seems to be in better terms with Apple as 4:44 is available on both iTunes and Apple Music. The album is also available on Google Play Music and Amazon Music. Some of the services even have “The Story of O.J.” animated video.

Source: Engadget

An Amazon patent won’t let you check online prices from rival retailers inside stores

With Amazon’s push into brick-and-mortar stores, it seems they want to stop you from buying products online (at least from rivals) while you’re inside their establishments. The online retailer has been granted a patent for “controlling online shopping within a physical store or retail location.” So, if you use the in-store Wi-Fi at an Amazon-owned store, your browsing will be monitored and blocked if you visit a competing retailer’s site. It’s basically like a firewall for accessing specific URLs or web addresses. One way to circumvent that, though, is by using your mobile data to do some comparison shopping. It is a patent so there isn’t any way to find out whether Amazon will use the technology yet.

Source: CNET + ZDNet

Amazon experiences rare outage in the US

A glitch seems to have affected Amazon earlier and ended up showing shoppers dog photos instead of product pages they were looking for. Shoppers in the U.S. home page got a message "Sorry something went wrong on our end" with a different picture of a dog each time. The outage seems to have happened around 2 p.m. Pacific Time yesterday. The cause of it unknown and Amazon hasn't commented yet on the matter. The outage seemed to have affected large parts of the Northeast and West Coast of the US. With Amazon considered as a big supplier of web servers, having outages like this will draw attention to them. Thankfully, it doesn't happen as often and it's been reported that the site is up again. 

Source: The Verge 

A new Amazon Echo is rumoured to have a built-in touchscreen

Amazon Echo speakers so far don’t come with speakers, but that might change. A new leaked image showing up online shows a bigger device sporting a display. This new Echo is reportedly codenamed “Knight.” If it is a new device, it’ll be like an Alexa-enabled Fire tablet with a speaker. This feature could improve the capabilities of Amazon’s Echo line and its Alexa assistant. Evan Blass (@evleaks) showed off images of the rumoured device and it comes in black (as seen above) and white. The tech company hasn’t commented yet about this rumoured device but we might hear more about it soon enough.

Source: CNET