Reuters 
By Narottam Medhora and Anya George Tharakan
(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O> launched a service on Tuesday that allows users to post videos and earn royalties from them, setting up the world’s biggest online retailer to compete directly with Alphabet Inc’s <GOOGL.O> YouTube.
The service, called Amazon Video Direct, will make the uploaded videos available to rent or own, to view free with ads, or be packaged together and offered as an add-on subscription.
By Lauren Hirsch
(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O> is investing between $250,000 and $500,000 in Bluetooth technology company TrackR to extend the reach of its Alexa virtual assistant, according to a source familiar with the matter
Alexa is the cloud-based system that controls the Amazon Echo, a speaker system launched by Amazon in 2014 that has emerged as a surprise hit. “Alexa” is the name the device responds to when users make requests, such as “turn on radio.”
(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc is set to open its first physical book store in Seattle on Tuesday, the company said. The brick-and-mortar store, Amazon Books, is a physical extension of Amazon.com with books being selected based on customer ratings and pre-orders on Amazon.com. Popularity on Goodreads and curators’ assessments are also considered for short listing … Read more
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Internet giant Alphabet Inc <GOOGL.O>, the new holding company for Google, expects to begin delivering packages to consumers via drones sometime in 2017, the executive in charge of its drone effort said on Monday. David Vos, the leader for Alphabet’s Project Wing, said his company is in talks with the Federal Aviation Administration and other stakeholders about setting up an air traffic control system for drones that would use cellular and Internet technology to coordinate unmanned aerial vehicle flights at altitudes under 500 feet (152 meters).
“Our goal is to have commercial business up and running in 2017,” he told an audience at an air traffic control convention near Washington.
(Reuters) – Walt Disney Co’s studio unit said customers of Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp’s video services will gain apps to their online movie service. Disney Movies Anywhere can now be accessed through its new app for the Microsoft Xbox 360 and for Amazon’s Fire tablets, Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. Walt Disney Studios added that it would launch the app on video streaming-device maker Roku Inc and Google Inc’s Android TV on Sept. 15, coinciding with the DVD release of “Cinderella.”
By Malathi Nayak
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Verizon Communications Inc will launch a trial version of its new mobile video service on Tuesday, aiming to prove that telecom players can compete with mobile ad industry titans Google Inc and Facebook Inc.
Verizon said its service, a mobile app dubbed “GO90”, will be offered initially to a select set of its own customers, with advertisements from well-known brands, which it declined to name, but without newly acquired ad technology from AOL, the media company it bought in June for $4.4 billion.
