Monthly Amazon Prime subscription now available in US, coming to UK?

Amazon has finally added a separate payment option for its Prime membership other than having to pay for the whole shebang in one yearly lump. In the US, subscribers can now choose to pay monthly for the service too.

Hopefully, a similar scheme will also be introduced to the UK.

US Amazon Prime members can now opt to pay $10.99 a month for the service. Previously, the only choice was to pay $100 annually.

Naturally, paying monthly will be more than $32 a year extra, but it enables members to spread the cost. What’s more, they can cancel at any time, so aren’t committed to a 12-month contract.

You can cancel at any time with the annual subscription, but you will still have paid for the entire year up front.

Prime membership in the UK costs £79 with no monthly option currently.

READ: Can I get Amazon Prime Now one-hour deliveries in my area?

Also added in the US is the ability to pay for Prime Video separately, if you don’t want the other benefits of Amazon Prime. For $8.99 a month, US subscribers get access to unlimited movies and TV shows on the service, including Ultra HD video with HDR.

The UK has always offered a separate Prime Video subscription option, at £5.99 a month.

As well as Amazon Prime Video, full Amazon Prime membership includes free shipping, unlimited music streaming, free eBooks to “borrow”, early access to Lightning deals, free same-day delivery in eligible areas.

In the UK, you also get unlimited photo storage.

Australia tests mail delivery drones

If you needed any further proof that drones can be mail couriers, you just got it. Australia Post has successfully field-tested a drone system that would deliver small packages, particularly time-sensitive goods like medication. It was only a closed test this time around, but the move clears a path for trial deliveries to real customers later in the year — this isn’t just a preview of long-term plans, like you’ve seen with other services.

The initiative should take delivery drones one step closer to legitimacy, but it’ll also underscore the limits of current technology. Australia’s vast size makes it unlikely that drones will provide anything approaching coast-to-coast coverage. They just don’t have the range to deliver to a village hundreds of miles away from the nearest large town, unfortunately. Even if drone service takes off, rural dwellers will likely have to make do with old-school airmail and delivery trucks.

Via: Reuters

Source: Australia Post

‘Drone’ hits British Airways plane at Heathrow Airport

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed it is investigating an incident at Heathrow Airport after British Airways plane was hit by what is believed to be a drone. BBC News reports that the pilot of aircraft BA727, which was approaching Heathrow after flying from Geneva with 132 passengers on board, contacted police shortly after the collision at 12:50PM. The Met has yet to confirm specifics, but if it is proven to have been a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), it will likely be the first recorded incident where a drone has struck a plane.

A spokesperson for the airline confirmed that the aircraft “landed safely” and after careful examination was “cleared to operate its next flight.” Drones and other aerial vehicles are banned around airports, but there have been a number of near misses in the past year. In September, a drone helicopter and quadcopter narrowly missed planes in separate incidents at Heathrow and there have been similar incidents at City Airport, Gatwick, Stansted and Manchester.

Drones now ship with positioning systems that restrict their operation at airports and restricted airspaces but the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) also explicitly states that they should not be flown above 400 feet and pilots should never lose sight of their vehicle. Another rule bans them from flying within 50 metres of another person, vehicle or structure (that includes prisons and football stadia) that are not under the pilot’s control. Drone pilots are ignoring this safety advice, leading calls for tougher rules and sentences to be put in place.

Source: BBC News

Amazon Prime Video is now a standalone monthly service

Starting tomorrow, you won’t need to pay $100 in one shot to sign up for a year of Amazon Prime, according to the New York Times. The retail giant will not only launch a monthly option for its full Prime service at $10.99 per month, but will also break out its Prime Video service for $8.99 a month. The streaming option appears to be a concerted effort by the retail giant to take on Netflix, which recently increased the price of its services to new users from $8.99 to $9.99.

Sprint recently started offering monthly Amazon Prime subscriptions (but not Prime Video) for the same price. That may have served as a live test for Amazon, which liked the results enough to launch the service itself. However, Amazon tried offering Prime as a monthly $7.99 a month service back in 2012 and quietly dropped the idea.

The $99 annual option is still available and is a much better deal, assuming you can afford to pay in one chunk. Going with the full Prime option by the month would cost you an extra $32, while the $8.99 per month Prime Video subscription would be $107.88, still more than an annual subscription to Prime. However, thanks to Netflix, people have gotten used to a monthly subscription model, so this time, Amazon’s foray into periodic pricing might work.

Source: The New York Times

Study: we can ditch fossil fuels in 10 years, if we want to

The quest to end the use of fossil fuels might not be as daunting as you think. A University of Sussex study claims that humanity could drop coal and oil within a decade, based largely on historical evidence that many tend to overlook. Professor Benjamin Sovacool notes that energy transitions have happened quickly whenever there was a combination of “strong government intervention” with economic or environmental incentives to switch. It only took 11 years for the Canadian province of Ontario to abandon coal energy, for example, while nuclear power surged to 40 percent of France’s electricity supply within 12 years. In the case of fossil fuels, it’s a combination of climate change worries, dwindling resources and advanced technology that could step up the pace.

The researcher admits that these handovers tend to move slowly if left to their own devices, such as the decades it took for electricity to see widespread adoption. However, Professor Sovacool argues that the mainstream notion that these transitions must happen slowly doesn’t really hold water. They just need a concerted, collaborative effort, he says.

Of course, actually creating that effort is another matter. While electric cars and renewable energy are quickly hitting their stride, there’s also stiff opposition from the fossil fuel industry (and the politicians that protect it) to the sort of regulation that would speed up the use of cleaner power sources. Also, developing countries seldom have the luxury of dropping fossil fuels — it’d cost too much, or leave too many people without reliable electricity. An accelerated transition might not happen until the political and economic advantages are so overwhelming that even the staunchest opponents concede defeat.

Via: Phys.org

Source: University of Sussex, ScienceDirect

You can predict city gentrification through check-ins and tweets

Do you dread the thought of gentrification jacking up real estate prices (and stifling culture) in your neighborhood? In the future, you might only need keep tabs on social networks to know when your part of town is changing — British researchers have learned that Foursquare check-ins and Twitter posts can help predict gentrification. If many people start visiting unfamiliar locations in materially-deprived neighborhoods (say, trendy new restaurants) with their friends, that’s usually a good sign that these areas will be gentrified before long. Accordingly, places that are dominated by locals and regulars tend to resist that shift, no matter the income levels.

Moreover, the very people who tend to use Foursquare and Twitter work to the advantage of this predictive model. The researchers believe that the people who most often use these networks tend to be the affluent types who create gentrification. The very fact that they’re showing up in a given region, however temporarily, may be proof enough that demographics are changing.

There’s only been a limited amount of testing so far, but it’s promising. The check-ins and tweets accurately predicted the gentrification of London’s Hackney area in recent years, and they’ve already identified a few additional areas (Greenwich, Hammersmith, Lambeth and Tower Hamlets) that could be next. Provided this method holds up, it could give communities a chance to mitigate the negative effects of gentrification before it’s too late, such as by working on affordable housing.

Via: Wired

Source: University of Cambridge

Amazon rolls out monthly subscriptions for Prime and Prime Video

Amazon is now offering monthly subscription plans for its Prime service, which is available for $10.99 a month. The retailer is also targeting Netflix by making Prime Video available as a standalone service for $8.99 a month.

A yearly subscription of Prime costs $99, which includes full access to Prime Video. Opting for the monthly route will set you back $131.88 over the course of a year, or 25% more than the annual subscription fee. And that does not include Prime Video. But if you are looking to avail the benefits on offer with Prime — such as free two-day shipping — and not be tied down to a yearly commitment, the new plans are worthy of consideration.

The monthly subscription plans will be available to customers in the U.S. from later tonight, according to CNNMoney.

See at Amazon

Beverly Hills is creating its own fleet of self-driving cars

Picture the streets of Beverly Hills and you probably imagine seas of ultra-luxurious cars piloted by celebrities or their chauffeurs. However, you may have to get used to a new sight in the future: hordes of vehicles with no drivers at all. The city’s council has voted to produce a fleet of self-driving cars that would provide on-demand shuttle service around town. The system would lean on a city-wide fiber optic network, already in the design stages, to keep these driverless rides talking to the neighborhood and each other. The first phase of the resolution would have Beverly Hills forming partnerships with autonomy-minded car brands like Google and Tesla, so this would be more of a collaboration than a from-scratch project.

There’s no concrete timetable for the fleet, but Beverly Hills is potentially very well-suited to an experiment like this. The burg is both very small (just 5.7 square miles) and wealthy — it can afford to blanket its entire area with self-driving service in a way that would be impractical for most any other metropolis, at least in the next few years. If Beverly Hills’ plan works reasonably well, though, it could serve as a template for larger-scale autonomous driving efforts in other parts of the world.

Via: Hollywood Reporter

Source: City of Beverly Hills (PDF)

Sphericam creates live 4K VR video in 360-degrees, as if you were there

The future of broadcast is in virtual reality, where viewers feel as if they’re really in the action with a 360-degree view. It’s Sphericam that’s going to help bring that future closer.

The Sphericam 2 is a VR camera that, unlike others out there, can stitch together the video from its 4K60p cameras live. That means there’s no need for editing afterwards and that the footage can technically be broadcast live, as it’s happening.

It also means the entire process happens within the camera itself which is battery powered and the size of a baseball. That means it can easily be mounted via a pole that allows for a 360-degree perspective. It also means the footage captured is, as the company says, “Oculus ready” to be viewed directly in virtual reality.

That should mean that Sphericam 2 does for VR video capture what GoPro did for high quality action camera recording. This could put the power of live VR broadcasting into the hands of far more people. Here’s hoping VR continues to catch on so there’s an audience waiting to enjoy it all.

Despite being a world first the company aims to sell the Sphericam 2 for $2,500 when it becomes available later in the summer after going into full production from July.

READ: Samsung Gear 360 camera preview

Venus probe’s first detailed results reveal strange clouds

Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft almost didn’t make it into orbit around Venus, but it’s clear that the effort to put it back on track is paying off. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency recently obtained the first detailed scientific results from its once-wayward probe, and it’s clear that we still have a lot to learn about our closest planetary cousin. For one thing, its clouds don’t entirely behave the way researches expect. Infrared images of its dense, multi-layer cloud layers suggest that cloud formation is more complex than once thought, and the unusual bow-shaped cloud formation (shown at right) appears to rotate in sync with the surface, not the atmosphere. It’s possible that features on the ground are having a strong effect on the sky.

The probe has its share of challenges. Its orbit is far more elongated than JAXA originally planned, so it’ll only have a very brief window to snap high-detail pictures. Also, the years-long delay in getting to Venus nearly cost the team valuable data — accumulated water vapor rendered one camera inoperable for about a month. Still, the team is optimistic about the future. Akatsuki is just now beginning regular operations, and the highly eccentric orbit will provide an opportunity to track Venus’ major features over long periods.

Source: Nature