Month: October 2016

(credit: Rachel Murray / Getty Images)

Amazon has already infiltrated the grocery business with its Fresh delivery program, and the company now has its sights set on physical stores. A report from The Wall Street Journal claims Amazon is planning to open grocery stores where people can buy items like produce, milk, meat, and other perishable items. Some of those locations are also rumored to have curbside pickup programs where employees will deliver orders directly to consumers' cars.

According to the report, these stores will primarily sell perishable items, letting customers pick their own produce—or at least allowing employees to pick things fresh for orders. There are also plans to let customers order other grocery items, like peanut butter and cereal, from a mobile app or devices in the store, for same-day delivery. The project, known internally as Project Como, will first be available to current Amazon Fresh members. Amazon Fresh used to cost $299 per year, but the company recently lowered the price to a $15 per month fee that Prime members can pay in addition to their annual $99 membership fee if they want to take advantage of the grocery delivery program.

If and when Project Como gets off the ground, Amazon would be directly competing with numerous grocery chains across the country, not to mention brick-and-mortar behemoth Walmart, which has expanded its curbside pickup efforts recently. Walmart plans to bring that service to a quarter of its stores nationwide by the end of 2017. Amazon would also be competing with startups that specialize in grocery delivery like FreshDirect, Instacart, and Delivery.com.

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Amazon has launched an aggressively priced music streaming service to take on Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and others in what is now a crowded market.

Subscribers to Amazon Music Unlimited—which promises access to a library of "tens of millions" of songs—will be able to control it vocally via the online retail giant's voice service, Alexa.

Subscriptions in the US start at $3.99 (£3.26) per month for users who own an Amazon Echo device (the Amazon Echo sells for £150, and the Echo Dot for £50; however, the Tap isn't yet available in the UK.)

Enlarge (credit: Joseph Okpako/WireImage)

“We are looking at sensory immersion. The ideal scenario with virtual reality is to get it as near to real as possible for you to maximise that environment.

“From the autonomous driving point of view, it’s a big thing.”

Brian Waterfield is virtual reality and high-end visualisation technical lead at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), and he is not talking about virtual reality’s potential in the near future; this is technology he is developing and working with right now.