Amazon to purchase Roomba maker iRobot in US$1.7 billion deal

Source iRobot

Amazon has just signed an agreement with iRobot, the company behind Roomba robot vacuum cleaners, to buy the company for US$1.7 billion (around CA$2.2 billion). It'll be an all-cash transaction for US$61 (approx. CA$79) per share. Colin Angle, iRobot's CEO, will remain in his position.

As CNET noted, Amazon has been a market leader in smart home devices, but a vacuum cleaner hasn't been introduced in its wheelhouse yet. The company didn't detail how it plans to integrate iRobot with the rest of the company.

EU consumers can unsubscribe to Amazon Prime in two clicks

The new Amazon cancellation process includes a “prominent and clear” cancel button and short explanatory text. (Source: The Next Web)

It will be much easier for consumers in the EU to unsubscribe to Amazon Prime. It'll now let EU and European Economic Area consumers unsubscribe from the service with just two clicks, using a prominent and actual "cancel" button. The last option required several steps and a method the EU calls "confirm shaming" that makes users feel like they'll lose out if they continue the process.

Extensive lobbying by EU and EEA consumer organizations helped bring about this change. They even penned a 2021 report entitled, "You Can Log Out, But You Can Never Leave." This is a change we definitely hope to see implemented on more platforms and in more countries.

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An Amazon Alexa feature can mimic the voice of your dead relatives

Here's one Amazon Alexa feature I don't think I'll ever want to try. Amazon is experimenting with its AI assistant to let it mimic the voices of users' dead relatives. The company demoed it recently during its MARS conference, where they showed a video of a child asking Alexa to read a bedtime story in the voice of his dead grandmother.

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Amazon finally adds epub support to the Kindle

Photo by Rishikesh Sreehari on Unsplash

It's taken so long (like 15 years), but Amazon's Kindle will finally support the widely-used epub format on its e-reader by the end of the year. It will allow the Send to Kindle function to convert epub files into a file format that can be opened on the Kindle. This news will be widely welcomed by Kindle users who have had to grapple with manually converting their ebook library just so it can work on a Kindle device.

This update means that Kindle will lose support for the MOBI format. This older French file format served as Amazon's proprietary ebook format, which it got when it acquired Mobipocket in 2005. The company then rebranded that to AZW. Those old files will still be accessible on your Kindle, but there won't be any new ebooks in that format.

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