Amazon to invest in the UK's least popular delivery service

With Prime subscriptions on the rise, Amazon is constantly exploring ways to cut the cost of regular home deliveries. One option the retail giant is considering is to invest in the companies that deliver its parcels, with UK courier firm Yodel currently the object of its desire. The Guardian reports that the two companies have agreed a deal that could see Amazon acquire 4.2 percent of the UK's least popular parcel delivery service for £8.7 million. While Yodel is now the second biggest service of its kind behind recently-privatized Royal Mail, customers haven't been so supportive, putting the company at the bottom of the delivery polls for the second year running. Amazon continues to use a variety of delivery firms across the world, but the company has recently begun using its own trucks to deliver parcels in the US. It's not clear whether Amazon could amass a bigger fleet on the other side of the Atlantic, but strategic investments such as this suggest it could be a possibility.

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Source: Guardian

Tags: amazon, courier, delivery, uk, uk-origin, yodel Next: Ducati's new bike jacket turns you into a human airbag .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Glassholes: at least you know who they are

Commentary Too many people dismiss Google Glass without considering how social norms can evolve or how much mobile phones and other technology can do surreptitiously what Glass can do overtly. CNET's Stephen Shankland urges us to look at the bigger picture.

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Google glitch flooded at least one poor guy's inbox

Users around the world dealt with Gmail woes earlier today, but at least one faced an even stranger Gmail problem. David Peck, a private banker from Fresno, California, has been receiving thousands and thousands of emails from strangers -- all because of a bizarre Google search result glitch that apparently kicked in yesterday.

The culprit? A dodgy link that appeared when users perform a Google search for "Gmail." If they were logged into a Gmail account at the time, clicking that link opened a blank email aimed at Mr. Peck's Hotmail address, and more than a few curious users decided to fire off messages. Some of those myriad emails were questions, some were blank, but Peck told TechCrunch that he was receiving about 500 emails an hour.

Turns out, Mr. Peck may not have been the only victim here. Earlier this week, Search Engine Land reported a similar link issue that pointed to yet more people's email addresses. We haven't received reports of other inboxes getting slammed by strangers, but a Google spokesperson just confirmed that the now-fixed glitch caused "some email addresses on public webpages" to "appear too prominently in search results." Peck's story started making the rounds on the heels of a widespread Google app outage, but that was just bad timing -- the company also stated that the two issues were unrelated.

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Source: TechCrunch

Tags: email, glitch, Gmail, google, hotmail Next: Samsung's slumping sales suggest China is the next mobile battlefield .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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