Technology

Prime Day has once again broken records. Despite serious glitches at its start, Amazon announced this morning that Prime Day 2018 grew to become the biggest shopping event in its history, beating out Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and the previous Prime Day 2017. Of course, this yearPrime Day was longer & a full 36-hours, in fact. And while Amazon did make its comparisons to other sales holidays over the same period of time, itnot quite the same thing to compare a shorter sale to a longer one. (Last yearPrime Day was 30 hours, for example.)

Still, ita remarkable showing on Amazon part. So much so that Amazon has taken the unusual step of actually providing some numbers around how much people bought. Though it still declines to talk sales dollars, as per usual, it did say that Prime members worldwide purchased over 100 million products, with small and medium-sized businesses on Amazon &far exceeding& $1 billion in sales this year.

It was unclear, however, if Amazon was counting sales at Whole Foods & which did participate in Prime Day for the first time & when calculating this 100 million products sold figure, or its &best day ever& statements. We asked the company to clarify this, and confirmed that Whole Foods sales werenot being included in those calculations.

That said, Amazon says that Prime members &saved millions& at Whole Foods during Prime Day, where the top buy was organic strawberries.

Prime Day 2018 was also the biggest event ever for Amazon devices, the retailer noted.

This can be, in part, chalked up to the fact that Amazon put its devices on sale 12 hours before Prime Day even began, which allowed people more time to buy them at the reduced prices.

Its best-sellers worldwide included theFire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote and the Echo Dot.

The Dot was a top seller in 2017, too. Itthe most affordable of the Alexa-powered speakers, and was this year marked down $20 to $29.99, making it a good deal.Fire TV devices, Kindle e-readers had their best day ever on Amazon globally on day one of Prime Day, July 16, 2018. Prime Day was also the biggest sales event for Echo Show and Echo Spot.

Amazon didn&t provide numbers for any of these sales, but said &millions& of Fire TV devices were sold worldwide.

In the U.S., July 17 was the biggest day for smart home devices in history, with over a million devices sold, and Ring had its best day ever on July 16, with the Ring Video Doorbell Pro selling out. The Amazon Cloud Cam also became the best-selling security camera in Amazon history.

Outside of Amazon devices, other U.S. top sellers included the Instant Pot and LifeStraw water filters.Members purchased more than 300,000 Instant Pot 6 Qt 7-in-1 Multi Use and 150,000 LifeStraw Personal Water Filters, the retailer said. Back-to-school items did well, too, with millions of pencils and pens sold.

Different countries had their own best-sellers, which tended to include smart home items, electronics, gaming systems, tools, and other items for the home.

Above: Top sellers by country

Among Amazonown brands, top sellers included the Stone - Beam Ceramic Geometric Table L-Presto! Ultra Soft Toilet Paper; Daily Ritual WomenJersey Short-Sleeve V-Neck T-Shirt Dress and AmazonBasics Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet.

The company said that a record number of Prime members shopped Prime Day in 2018, but this, too can be explained partly by expanded access to the sale & Prime Day went live inAustralia, Singapore, the Netherlands and Luxembourg for the first time this year. In total, 17 countries had access to Prime Day sales.

More importantly to Amazonbottom line was the increase in Prime membership sign-ups. In the end, the actual sales are just icing on the cake & Prime Daylarger goal is increasing the number of subscribers for its now $119 per year Prime membership program. Turning online consumers into paying subscribers not only increases Amazonsubscription revenues, it boosts overall sales as those consumers begin to shop Amazon more often to take advantage of its free, 2-day shipping and other premium services & like Amazon Channels, audiobook subscriptions, on-demand music, and more.

The retailer in April announced Prime had exceeded 100 million subscribers, and Amazon didn&t update that number today.

Itnotable that Amazon Prime Day went well, given how badly it began & glitches caused shoppers to lose the ability to even see the deals or complete checkout at the beginning of the sale, potentially resulting in millions of lost sales. One estimate from Internet Retailer is even putting that figure at $72.4 million in lost revenue from U.S. consumers.

&Prime Day offers us a unique opportunity to thank Prime members with our best deals,& said Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer, Amazon, in a statement. &Extending Prime Day to a day and a half this year allowed us to further reward members with unbeatable deals, access to exclusive new products and unforgettable experiences that highlight the many benefits of a Prime membership. All of this was made possible because of our many valued associates & the global team that continues to make Prime Day bigger and better.&

The launch is scheduled for 11:00 am EDT on July 18, 2018.

Blue Origin is about to preform a critical rocket test. For the first time Jeff Bezos& rocket company will send send its New Shepard rocket to its red line at the edge of space and then fire the escape motor on the capsule that will carry passengers. If this test goes well, Blue OriginNew Shepard program could become operational as early as this year.

This is the ninth mission for the New Shepard program and the third time this reusable rocket was used.

About 20 seconds (and 100 feet) after the New Shepard booster and the crew capsule separates, the motor on the capsule will fire with 70k foot pounds of thrust, sending the capsule 50,000 km higher than it has gone before. After the motor fires, parachutes will hopefully deploy allowing the capsule to return safely to solid ground. Separately, the booster will hopefully return to Earth and land so it can be reused again.

Inside the capsule is a crash dummy loaded with instruments to measure the forces of the rocket launch. Bezos dubbed the dummy &Mannequin Skywalker& because even the richest man in modern history is a nerd. Mannequin Skywalker will experience around 3Gs during the launch, a Blue Origin representative said.

Kik made waves last year after a successful $100 million ICO. Now the company has released its first beta product related to its Kin token. Called Kinit, ita simple wallet that enables users to earn, store, and spend its tokens.

&Kinit is a fun, easy way to earn Kin, a new cryptocurrency made for your digital life. Earning Kin is just like playing a game, only better, because you get rewarded for completing fun daily activities like surveys, quizzes, interactive videos and more,& reads the Google Play Store description. You can download the app for Android here.

The Kin token is unique for a few reasons. First it is not a traditional ERC-20 token and is instead uses Ethereum for liquidity and the on the Stellar network to improve transaction speed. Further, the company is spending a great deal & about $3 million & to get developers to develop on the token through its KinEcosystem site. The Kinit app is the first effort to get normal users to adopt the tool.

The app makes it possible for users to generate a few dollars in value per day and then exchange those dollars for gift cards and perks. According to CCN, Kik has created a product without a business model and instead it wants to drive the adoption of the token through giveaways.

&Kinit is the first publicly available app dedicated to Kin. Our goal with Kinit is to get Kin into more consumers& hands. Ita major step towards making crypto truly consumer-friendly through fun and engaging experiences, and we plan to learn and iterate based on real-world user behavior. We&re excited to get even more people earning and spending Kin — all on the Kin Blockchain,& wrote Rod McLeod, KikVP of communications. The app currently asks you to complete surveys in order to get discounts and gift card codes for products.

With the rise of the product-less ICO itclear that Kik has the right idea. By encouraging usage they drive up the token price and token velocity and by launching a general beta full of cutesy imagery and text they are able to avoid the hard questions about developer adoption until far into the future. While the KinIt app is probably not what most Kin holders wanted to see, itat least an interim solution while the team builds out sturdier systems.