IN THE NEWS: AMAZON LINKS WITH TWITTER FOR SHOPPING
NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon and Twitter are teaming up for shopping. The online retailer is rolling out a service that lets Twitter users put Amazon.com products in their carts — without leaving the social media site. It’s the latest in a series of recent moves in which Amazon is expanding the products and services it provides to users. And it comes as Amazon tries to make social media a bigger source for sales. Under the program, users must link their Amazon.com account with their Twitter account. Once they add the hashtag “AmazonCart” in reply to a tweet that has an Amazon product link, the item gets “dropped” in their electronic shopping cart. Both sites will notify the user that the item has been added.
IN THE NEWS: TARGET CEO LOSES JOB AFTER HUGE DATA BREACH
NEW YORK (AP) — That massive data breach has cost the company’s top man his job. Target has announced that Chairman, President and CEO Gregg Steinhafel has agreed to step down — and resign from the company’s board of directors. The move comes five months after the retailer disclosed the breach — which has damaged its reputation among shoppers and derailed its business. Target is the nation’s third-largest retailer. And the changing of CEOs is seen as a sign that the company is trying to start anew, even as it continues to suffer fallout from the swiping of credit and debit card information on tens of millions of customers.
ON THE WEB: SMITHSONIAN ONLINE EDUCATION
CYBERSPACE (AP) — The Smithsonian Institution is taking a biggest step into online education. It has announced an agreement with The Great Courses for a new series of multimedia lectures. The 10-year deal will include at least a dozen courses, with the first of them to be available this fall. The first ones will be aimed at college-educated lifelong learners, but The Great Courses also provides help for college students, home-schoolers and others.
IN STORES: EA SPORTS NHL 15
REDWOOD CITY, California (AP) — The NHL action is heating up — as the eight remaining playoff teams are slogging their way through the second round of the four that someone will have to survive to win the Stanley Cup. While the action on the ice is dramatic, things are awfully tame for those who own the latest in video game systems. That’s because EA Sports didn’t do a game for either the Sony PlayStation 4 or the Microsoft XBox One. That left those who own those systems in the virtual penalty box — since neither of the systems let you play earlier version of the game. But EA Sports says there will be a new hockey game come fall. One key feature will be a revamped puck — with the virtual disk mimicking its vulcanized rubber twin in doing things like bouncing, fluttering and skittering along the surface, as it does at different times in a real NHL game.