Report claims Amazon collects over a third of seller revenue, bringing in $121B in 2021

A new study claims that Amazon makes far more from fees on its Marketplace platform than even the cash cow known as AWS. The report says that Amazon’s fees for participating effectively on its store have grown to the point where sellers now give the company about 34% of their earnings — and this has lately become Amazon’s primary revenue stream. The...

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Daily Crunch: Spotify packs its 2021 year-end recap with new sharing, social features

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 1, 2021! Yes, we’ve made it to the final inning of the year, which means that the news cycle will slow and we all get some time off? Right? Probably not, but in alternative...

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Razer launches handheld dev kit with brand new Snapdragon G3x chip

Snapdragon’s G3x is Qualcomm’s fantastically exciting bid to embrace the gaming market — a brand new reach for the manufacturer, which introduces powerful GPUs, 5G-enabled connectivity, the ability to power external screens, immersive audio capabilities, haptic feedback and a slew of other features that handheld gaming manufacturers have had to cobble...

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Square is changing its name to Block

The fintech giant Square is changing its name to Block, effective December 10. The name change, which has been in the works for over a year, is intended to house the company’s various products — including music streaming service Tidal, Cash App, TBD, and of course, Square — under one brand. This announcement comes just days after Square founder and...

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Gift Guide: The smarter home

If you’re just starting to build out a smart home, look no further than Zack Whittaker’s excellent starter kit guide, which should lay the groundwork for a connected home experience. But if you’ve already taken the plunge and find yourself with the key ingredients in place for a smart home, let’s look at some options that can take it to the next level...

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DAOs as the future? Hard pass, thanks

Bob Greenlee Contributor Share on Twitter Bob Greenlee is the COO of Tusk Holdings and has advised the Tezos Foundation, Circle, Neema, eToro and others in the crypto space. It seems like just yesterday that exchanges like Coinbase opened the eyes of the traditional economy to the...

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American Express taps Opy for its first US third-party BNPL offering

Credit card companies are seeking to push further into the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) market. American Express (Amex) announced today that it plans to partner with Opy, the U.S. subsidiary of Australian fintech Openpay, to allow all of its U.S. cardmembers to pay in installments for qualifying purchases in the healthcare and automotive segments. The...

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Ahead of public market debut, Better.com lays off 9% of its staff

One day after announcing an amendment to its SPAC agreement, digital mortgage lender Better.com confirmed today that it is laying off roughly 9% of its nearly 10,000 person staff. Doing the math, that amounts to about 900 people. The company declined to comment beyond the following written statement from CFO Kevin Ryan: “A fortress balance sheet and...

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How to execute an amplified marketing strategy

Lindsay Tjepkema Contributor Share on Twitter Lindsay Tjepkema is the CEO of Casted. Content marketers today face a constant struggle between keeping up with the volume of content they’re expected to produce and getting creative to produce rich, quality work that deeply impacts their...

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Amazon Lex brings automated call transcript review to chatbot building

Today, at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced the Amazon Lex automated chat bot designer in preview, a new feature that simplifies the chatbot training and design process by bringing a level of automation to it. “We are excited to announce the Amazon Lex automated chat bot designer, a new capability that reduces bot design from weeks...

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