Amazon's yearly online shopping event, Prime Day 2019, beat all previous company records to become Amazon's largest online shopping event ever. The now two day shopping event reserved for its Prime members, who number around 100 million, resulted in over 175 million products being purchased. For Amazon, that makes this years Prime Day sales larger than last year's Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined. Amazon's Prime Day success has not gone unnoticed among competitors with over 300 unique competitors running Prime-Day related offers (up from 27 in 2016), according to RetailMeNot. 

The reality is that many retailers have been successfully able to piggyback off of the annual event to boost their own sales, with close to 38% even using the word Prime in their messages to consumers. According to Adobe Analytics, large retailers saw a huge increase, 64%, in their e-commerce sales on Prime Day when compared to an average Monday. The increased revenue, was lead by an increasing in traffic from visitors, accounting for close to 66% of the lift. This was followed by an increase in conversions, which accounted for 27%, and an increase in consumers' basket sizes, 7%. 

Adobe Analytics predicted that US e-commerce sales would be pushed to over $2 billion when Prime Day is all said and done, making it the third time outside of the holiday season (after Labor Day 2018 and Memorial Day 2019) when sales have reached that milestone. 

Amazon Prime members pay an annual subscription fee of $119 per year for a number of benefits, and bring in almost $12 billion in revenue to Amazon from their annual fees alone. 

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Microsoft is developing AI for its Word online software, called Ideas, that will use machine learning to help improve the clarity, concision, and inclusiveness of your writing. In addition to features that help improve your writing, Ideas will also have features that assist in reading and styling documents. Test versions of Ideas will become available in June and the software is expected to roll out to everyday users in the fall of this year. 

Ideas will be able to not only suggest grammar changes but also provide recommendations for how to rewrite phrases. When it comes to reading assistance, Ideas will be able to use machine learning to estimate reading times  and explain acronyms and potentially even select the key points from a selected text. Microsoft has also revealed that Ideas will come with a designer feature that will assist users in styling parts of their documents (ex: tables). 

Google has also recently announced it's own AI-based writing assistance tool that will come its online Google Docs software. The tool, according to Google, will not only be able to identify grammar mistakes but will also detect "nuances" in language. 

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Three of the world's largest automakers announced today that they would be joining together to create a consortium along with SAE International, an automotive engineering group, to help establish "safety guiding principles to help inform standards development" for autonomous vehicles. The new group will be called the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium and will work together on data sharing, safe testing guidelines and vehicle interactions. While the world watches and waits, the United States has yet to successfully pass legislation in its ongoing attempt to discover how to properly regulate self-driving cars. The goal of the consortium will be to expedite standards development and facilitate rule making. 

Concerns about autonomous systems have increased following a fatal crash of an Uber self-driving vehicle in 2018  and two crashes of the highly automated Boeing 787 MAX. The crashes have put regulators' ability to assess the safety of autonomous systems into the spotlight.

The Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium cited a standards group which helped create close to 4,500 aerospace standards as a successful model. 

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Through a blog post on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained how Facebook's new vision for the future is to become a privacy-focused social networking platform.  In the post, Facebook's CEO discussed how he believes Facebook's future will be centered around private, ephemeral, encrypted communication rather than the company's current, open platform news feed. According to Zuckerberg, these changes will occur over the next few years and should also open the way for new online commerce and payments services. ​

In Zuckerberg's Facebook post, he details Facebook's new privacy-focused platform will be built around the following principles:

• Secure data storage - "People should expect that we won't store sensitive data in countries with weak records on human rights like privacy and freedom of expression in order to protect data from being improperly accessed."
• Interoperability - "People should be able to use any of our apps to reach their friends, and they should be able to communicate across networks easily and securely."
• Safety - "People should expect that we will do everything we can to keep them safe on our services within the limits of what's possible in an encrypted service."
• Reducing Permanence - "People should be comfortable being themselves, and should not have to worry about what they share coming back to hurt them later. So we won't keep messages or stories around for longer than necessary to deliver the service or longer than people want them."
• Encryption - "People's private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone -- including us -- from seeing what people share on our services. "
• Private Interactions - "People should have simple, intimate places where they have clear control over who can communicate with them and confidence that no one else can access what they share."

This announcement comes at a time when Facebook is under increased scrutiny over the spread of "fake news," which has resulted in public pressure on the social network company to better moderate its customer content. The new privacy focused social network envisioned above may be designed to address some of these concerns as content will become private from even Facebook itself, reducing its vulnerability to privacy issues.  

A couple of the more concrete changes and policies outlined by Zuckerberg are listed below:

• Facebook will offer an opt-in option to its users that will enable them to send and receive messages across all its apps: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook.
• Facebook will expand end-to-end encryption to all of its messaging apps while using non-content details and meta-data to identify criminals on its services. The retention of this meta-data will be limited to safety and spam considerations, after which it will be deleted. 
• Facebook will let users control how long messages and chats are visible and message threads will have auto-delete on by default bringing ephemeral characteristics to the communication on its platform. 

Facebook's Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp are all used by more than 1 billion people each. This shift to a more privacy focused social network will make it harder for Facebook to continue generating the level of revenue from targeted advertising that has allowed it to become one of the largest companies in the world. As it undergoes the changes identified above, there is no doubt that the company will have to develop new revenue generating tools, services and strategies. 

It is important to note that Mark Zuckerberg did admit that elements of the plan could still change as the company speaks to experts over the next year. 

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Microsoft is partnering with Albertsons, the second largest grocery store chain in the United States, to create a "frictionless" customer experience inside their stores. As part of the deal, Microsoft will use their Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure services to apply data science, AI, and cognitive technologies to transform the shopping experience both in store and online. The partnership comes as Amazon is becoming increasingly more focused on the physical retail business with reports that it is planning to open several thousand Amazon Go stores in the United States by 2021. 

According to Microsoft, the two companies will work together to create this frictionless customer experience by helping employees track store inventory and restocking needs while also reducing waiting times and making it easier to find items. They will also work together to improve Albertsons' logistics and supply chain using data science. 

The two companies have already had two successful results from their partnership - Albertsons' eCommence platform and gas station app that allows customers to pay for gas using their phones both run on Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft also partnered with retail giant Walmart, last July, and and Kroger this January. Microsoft will be helping Kroger build high-tech grocery stores and bringing Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure to Walmart over the next 5 years. 

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Apple and Goldman Sachs will partner to help iPhone users manage their money by providing them with a credit card that will pair with their iPhones, according to the Wall Street Journal. The credit card will be able to track spending and rewards as well as set spending goals through the iPhone's Wallet application. The card will also offer cash back on most purchases of about 2 percent, with potentially even more from purchases on Apple services and products. According to the report, the card will undergo a testing period with employees soon and will launch officially later in 2019. The partnership will benefit both companies as they look to tap into a new revenue sources. 

Apple already gets a small portion of the purchases made through Apple Pay and use of this credit card will undoubtedly increase that amount. Apple is looking to increase its revenue from services as its iPhone sales dipped recently. The iPhone is Apple's largest contributor to company profits. 

Goldman Sachs is looking to offset decreases in its trading business by increasing consumer loans and has recently been making significant pushes into digital payments. The bank could also potentially offer more of its services to Apple customers in the future. 

The credit card will use Mastercard's payment network, according to the report.

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