Friday, December 26, 2014

Millions of People Try Amazon Prime Shipping for the First Time

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Amazon Prime currently has 35 million members in the US and 50 million worldwide. There are many benefits to the $99 per year subscription, each as a free eBook every month, access to Amazon Instant Video and Prime music. Lots of people buy Prime for this very reason, you can simply get a lot more value for your Kindle Fire.

Loyal Amazon shoppers are quite aware that you get free two day shipping if you are a Prime member, but many Kindle owners just buy e-Books. This year though, the number of Prime members who took advantage of the free shipping for the first time were staggering.  More than 10 million new members worldwide tried Prime for the first time. Amazon customers also benefited from low prices this season, including more than 25,000 Lightning Deals.

"We are excited to welcome more than ten million new members to Amazon Prime this holiday season, who benefited from unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on their holiday gifts. Prime members can also borrow more than 700,000 books, listen to one million songs and hundreds of playlists, save unlimited photos and watch tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes including the Golden Globe nominated show from Amazon Studios, Transparent," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "We are working hard to make Prime even better and expanding the recently launched Prime Now to additional cities in 2015."

Millions of People Try Amazon Prime Shipping for the First Time is a post from: Good e-Reader

Digital Newspapers Grows 15% in Australia during 2014

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Australians have begun to adopt digital newspapers in record numbers as advertising campaigns from the leading national publications appear to be paying off. In 2014 digital has grown over 15% with eight million people on average consuming the news on a monthly basis.

The Sydney Morning Herald was Australia's most-read newspaper across print and digital with 5.6 million readers, followed by The Daily Telegraph's 4.4 million, The Herald Sun (4.3 million), The Age and The Courier-Mail (both with about 3.3 million).

Many of the top papers offer digital only subscriptions to their content, which has a price of about $3.00 a week on average. They also have various tiers where you can combine digital with the print weekend edition and also the most common level that gives you the paper every single day + full access to digital.

The average person tends to read the news on their computer, but traction is starting to mount for dedicated apps for Android and iOS. In a recent report, 221,000 Australians aged reported using the Sydney Morning Herald's app, while 199,000 used The Age's app. Apps produced by The Australian, the Herald Sun and the Daily/Sunday Telegraph were also popular with 95,000 people using it daily.

Australian publishers are also turning to dedicated newspaper ecosystems like PressReader, which has all of the daily editions and national papers. One of the big advantages is being able to get their content distributed properly to folks living or traveling abroad.

Digital Newspapers Grows 15% in Australia during 2014 is a post from: Good e-Reader

Adafruit capacitive Christmas shenanigans

I got up late today; it’s Boxing day. And there in my inbox was a festive message from our friends in New York, PT and LadyAda, who found themselves at a loose end in the Adafruit factory on Christmas Day and took some video of a beta test they did for a new Raspberry Pi HAT (coming soon to a store near you!)

Merry Christmas from all of us at Pi Towers to everybody reading – we hope your Christmas holiday is as much fun as ours is this year!

A quick housekeeping note: we are not committing to the usual blog post per day this week because we’re supposed to be taking a break, but if we get bored with hanging out with our families, you’ll find something here, so keep checking. I’m off to make a sandwich out of leftovers.