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telecommunications

Tile finds another $45M to expand its item-tracking devices and platform

Tile — the company that makes popular square-shaped tags and other technology to help people keep track of physical belongings like keys and bags — has made more recent moves to link up with chipmakers, helping it expand to wireless headsets and other electronic and other connected items as part of a wider smart home strategy. Now, Tile is announcing a round of funding of $45 million to double down on those strategies and fulfill a plan to have its technology in millions of devices by the end of this year.

The growth equity is being led by Francisco Partners, with participation from previous investors GGV Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners and new backers Bryant Stibel and SVB Financial Group.

CJ Prober — who joined as CEO last year in part to develop Tile’s newer areas of business — said in an interview that the funding will help the startup be more aggressive in doubling down on these new opportunities.

“We’re seeing great business momentum, with the first embedded partner products from our strategic initiatives coming out this year,” he said. It now has partnerships with five semiconductor companies, including Qualcomm and most recently Nordic, which they integrate Tile functionality on to their hardware, he added. “All this is now paying off with great momentum.”

Prober would not comment on the company’s valuation with this round, except to say that it was definitely an up round. A spokesperson described the Series C as having “opened” with this $45 million commitment, which implies that there may be more funding coming, but Tile has declined to specify any more detail on this front. The startup had previously raised rounds in stages — as you can see by this timeline in PitchBook. For some more context, Tile’s last noted valuation (also in PitchBook) was around $166 million, but that was now more than two years ago, before the various initiatives and other changes at the company.

Tile is not disclosing any metrics on its market share or how many of its devices are now in use, but it typically is rated as the largest of a crowded market for item-tracking devices (with others in the space including TrackR (Adero), Chipolo, and more).

But it notes that its European business (a relatively new area of focus for Tile) has grown by 160% in the last quarter. That’s coming from a small base, though: Prober confirmed that the U.S. is still by far its biggest market in terms of sales and users.

And it also had a strong Prime Day on Amazon this year, doubling its unit sales (but didn’t provide hard numbers for comparison). It said it has exceeded projections for sign-ups for its Premium tier, which provides free battery replacements, 30-day location history, smart alerts (prompting you, for example, when you’ve left your keys somewhere), customer support and more for $30 for the year, or $3 per month.

The company has been planting a lot of seeds, and some of them have yet to sprout. Last year, Tile announced that it would take an investment from Comcast to help it develop new products for its wider connected consumer strategy.

Prober, however, described this as still in the “roadmapping phase” and would not get into specifics except to say that there are a number of different initiatives in the works. There also was a partnership with Google unveiled at the most recent I/O that will see its home devices also being able to be tracked by the Tile platform.

I asked Prober if he worries ultimately about whether large tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and the rest — which all want to “own” connected home customers and the ecosystem of hardware and services that they may use — are seen as opportunities or threats for Tile, given that it’s piggy backing on their platforms and devices. His and the company’s fundamental feeling — one that should be supported in the spirit of competition and consumer choice — is that having a cross-platform option is the way to go.

“Our customers have different devices, products from different companies and it’s our job to ensure that Tile works well across all of those,” he said. “We see ourselves a little bit like Switzerland, which is also something that our customers and partners appreciate.”

While we’re seeing a surge of new communications technologies and protocols — 5G being perhaps the one we are hearing about most at the moment — Tile is sticking to Bluetooth for now.

“We love what Bluetooth enables for our customers in terms of the form factor, the cost and profile of the device and the power consumption,” said Prober. “We’re constantly evaluating different alternatives, and if there is an alternative we would consider that, but in our view that doesn’t exist right now.”

It’s a choice that its investors are also supporting.

“Tile pioneered the smart location category,” said Andrew Kowal, partner with Francisco Partners, in a statement. “With Bluetooth technology projected to be included in nearly 30 billion devices shipping in the next five years, Tile is poised to deliver an embedded finding solution for a rapidly expanding market. We are extremely excited to be partnering with Tile as the company enters the next chapter of its growth story.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/24/tile-finds-another-45m-for-its-item-tracking-platform/

telecommunications

TwelveSouths StayGo is the last USB-C dock youll ever need

The TwelveSouth StayGo is a new USB-C dock from a company that makes a ton of great and unique Mac and iOS device accessories. True to the company’s track record, it offers a slightly different take on a popular accessory category — and ends up excelling as a result.

The StayGo’s unique twist is a short USB-C to USB-C cable that slots right into a dedicated compartment on the dock, offering portable connectivity without any awkward stubby permanently attached cord. It also avoids the problem that direct USB-C dock connectors have, where they stick out and can potentially get damaged in your bag or scratch other stuff. There’s a second, three-foot cable included in the box, too, which you can conveniently just plug into your Mac at home if you switch between a desktop and a MacBook, or a Mac and an iPad.

It seems like a pretty simple thing, but having these two cables instead of just one, and the stowable short cable, make this far more convenient for anyone who travels or who does any out-of-home work at all. I’ve used a ton of these things, and StayGo is my clear favorite after having used it on a couple of trips over a month or so of testing.

I haven’t even talked about the ports yet — TwelveSouth nailed the right mix there, too, with three high-speed USB 3.0 ports, an Ethernet port, a USB-C connector (with pass-through charging at up to 85W), a 4K 30Hz HDMI port and both SD and microSD slots (which support UHS-I transfer speeds, and which can operate simultaneously). That’s just about everything a traveler or working photographer today needs, and nothing they don’t — all in a space-saving design that never makes you choose between it and other gear when you’re packing even the smallest bag.

In terms of performance, so far it’s been rock solid. There’s nothing worse than random unmounting of memory cards when you’re trying to transfer photos from a shoot, and the StayGo is definitely able to deliver solid, uninterrupted performance there. If I had any complaints, it’s that video output isn’t 60Hz, but that’s not really a necessary requirement for something that I’ll be using primarily to supplement my external monitor needs when I’m on the road, instead of a dedicated video connection for a video editing setup, for instance.

The StayGo can get a bit warm when operating, but it’s never been actually hot, and the aluminum case construction helps ensure it can shed excess temp quickly.

At $99.99 it may be a bit more expensive than some of the hubs you can pick up on Amazon, but in terms of reliability, specs, port load out and its interesting approach to blending portability and at-home convenience, TwelveSouth is more than justified in setting that price point for the StayGo.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/twelvesouths-staygo-is-the-last-usb-c-dock-youll-ever-need/

Credit Cards

Hack Brief: A Card-Skimming Hacker Group Hit 17K Domainsand Counting

You may not recognize the name Magecart, but you’ve seen its impact. A set of sophisticated hacking groups, Magecart has been behind some of the bigger hacks of the past few years, from British Airways to Ticketmaster, all with the singular goal of stealing credit card numbers. Think of them as the ATM skimmers of the web. And thanks to poor security hygiene, they’ve managed to hit 17,000 domains in the past few months alone.

A new report from threat detection firm RiskIQ details how Magecart hackers have found a way to scan Amazon S3 buckets—cloud repositories that hold data and other backend necessities for sites and companies—for any that are misconfigured to allow anyone with an Amazon Web Services account to not just read their contents but write to them, implementing whatever changes they want. Like, say, inserting code that steals credit card numbers from ecommerce sites.

The Hack

RiskIQ has tracked the activity as far back as early April; it first noticed the technique after seeing several internet supply chain companies get compromised in May. Rather than the typical targeted attacks that Magecart groups had deployed in the past, though, these turned out to be part of a new “spray and pray” technique. The Magecart hackers were casting the widest possible net, altering the code of countless sites that had no ecommerce function at all, in hopes of catching enough sites that do process credit cards to make its efforts worthwhile.

“It’s still ongoing as we’re talking right now,” says RiskIQ threat researcher Yonathan Klijnsma. “All these guys are doing is just en masse trying to find S3 buckets that have been misconfigured. And their skimmers are getting everywhere.”

Specifically, once the hackers find a properly misconfigured S3 bucket, they run a scan to identify any JavaScript files. Because the bucket’s permissions let anyone write code to it, the attackers simply tack their Magecart malware onto the file, then overwrite the script that had been there. Imagine if a bank were to leave incontrovertible instructions to its tellers on a chalkboard. If you also have chalk, and can find a little room, you can cause a lot of trouble.

Who’s Affected?

It’s a more complicated question than it sounds. The easiest answer is: 17,000 domains and counting, including, RiskIQ says, some that are among the 2,000 biggest sites in the world.

But many of those sites don’t process credit card transactions at all, rendering the Magecart code moot. It's also unclear how many actual S3 buckets are affected, since multiple domains can link back to the same one. So the actual answer, the one that matters, sits in the center of the Venn diagram formed by “domains linked to aggressively misconfigured S3 buckets” and “domains that process credit card payments.” Or more to the point, anyone unfortunate enough to pay for something on one of those sites before the attack is resolved.

Which could take awhile. RiskIQ is working with Amazon to alert the affected administrators to their exposure, but wrangling 17,000 domains takes time. As does making the necessary backend adjustments.

How Bad Is This?

The issue of compromised ecommerce sites, however many there actually are, will have obvious ramifications. But the bigger problem stems from the method of attack itself.

Amazon S3 buckets are secure by default. Companies run into trouble when they actively change those permissions, either somewhere in the development process or when they hand off cloud work to a third-party contractor. Those Amazon S3 bucket misconfigurations have caused plenty of problems before. The fallout, though, was usually limited to the exposure of personally identifiable information, huge databases of usernames and passwords and birthdays and Social Security numbers that wind up for sale, or for free, on the dark web and elsewhere. That’s because those goofs typically give read permission to interlopers, but not the ability to write code. The Magecart hackers figured out a way to scan for misconfigurations that do both—and now they know 17,000 vulnerable domains.

“This is a whole new level of misconfiguring,” says Klijnsma. “These buckets are pretty much owned by anybody who talks to it, which is on a different scale, a different type of data leakage. Pretty much anybody can do anything in those S3 buckets, and the reach of those is quite big.”

The Magecart hackers have a singular focus: credit card skimming. But it’s not hard to imagine a group that thinks bigger, or at least with a more anarchical bent. With the same technique, you could append all sorts of malware to the same sites.

Amazon has developed tools to help its cloud customers forestall this type of attack, including an essentially one-click "block public access" option that it rolled out last fall. Tweak that one setting, and this problem goes away. But clearly, demonstrably, thousands of domains still haven’t locked down their infrastructure, with potentially devastating consequences.

“Nobody seems to have noticed this,” says Klijnsma, “and it’s still going on at such an insane rate.”

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/magecart-amazon-cloud-hacks/

Credit Cards

Step raises $22.5M led by Stripe to build no-fee banking services for teens

The smartphone revolution has well and truly disrupted the world of banking. A wide range of startups have cropped up that have completely removed the need to make visits to physical branches to open accounts, make deposits, pay for things, and ask for loans: you can now do all of these on the go by way of a simple tap on an app.

Now, in the latest development, a new startup is leveraging that progress to create a new service targeting one of the most avid demographics when it comes to smartphone usage. Step, which builds mobile-based banking services for teenagers, is today announcing a round of $22.5 million led by Stripe.

“Schools don’t teach kids about money,” CJ MacDonald, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. “We want to be their first bank accounts with spending cards, but we also want to teach financial literacy and responsibility. Banks don’t tailor to this, and we want to be a solution teaching the next generation of adults to be more responsible with money in the cashless era. It was easy with cash to go to the mall but now everyone is using their phone for Uber and more.” (MacDonald has a track record in mobile commerce applications: his previous startup, mobile loyalty card app Gyft, got acquired by First Data.)

Step’s first market will be the US, where it’s estimated that there are just under 50 million teenagers in the population.

MacDonald said the aim with the funding will be to use it to bring Step’s first product — banking accounts with payment cards attached — to market, in partnership with Mastercard and Evolve.

Step actually launched in January this year (when its card partner was actually Visa) but only to unveil a waitlist. Since then, it has amassed 500,000 names of interested would-be users — likely one reason why it attracted this funding, and the attention of a pretty high-profile set of investors, including several who know a thing or two about the youth market.

In addition to Stripe, the round includes Will Smith’s Dreamers fund, Nas, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Wndrco, Ronnie Lott, Matt Rutler, Kevin Gould, and Moat founders Noah and Jonah Goodhart. Previous investors Crosslink Capital, Collaborative Fund and Sesame Ventures also participated. (It’s raised just under $30 million to date. Valuation is not being disclosed.)

Step is not wading into unchartered territory by building a banking service targeting teens. Banks have been offering people the ability to open accounts for their kids under the umbrella of their accounts for many years. And other startups that have built banking services for this age group, who already have products out in the market, include teen debit card and bank app Current, and Greenlight, which makes a debit card for kids. (And that’s before you consider the likes of Chime, which don’t target teens specifically but might be used by them.)

And nor will Step be the last: there have also been rumors that Amazon has been working on its own service offering bank accounts to teens.

MacDonald said there are differences between what Step and these others are offering. First and foremost, its primary point of engagement is the teenager him/herself, with the aim being to give the account holder full autonomy (or at least the feeling of it: parents can still monitor and put controls on an under-18 account, as well as pay funds into it).

To that end, Step has been marketing directly to its future users, doing viral things like incentivizing sign-ups by giving users a dollar towards their bank accounts (when they come online) for each person that gets referred and also signs up using a person’s code. Teenagers under 18 will even be able to sign up for accounts without parental or guardian consent — although these accounts with be very limited in their functionality.

Another key difference will be the business model around which Step is built. As with any company that provides card services, Step gets a cut from card transactions, but unlike others in this space (and unlike most banks), Step is launching with a no-fee model for the basic account. This is because the idea will be to grow with the users, and over time to offer them services that will collect fees, when they are needed.

“As teens grow up we want to grow with them,” MacDonald said. “We will start offering products when they go to college, for example lending money to get books or computers.”

Stripe’s investment for now appears to be mainly a financial one in terms of the services that will be coming in the first wave of Step’s rollout this year. Behind the scenes, it’s actually strategic, too: the company has been quietly building interesting inroads into developing services for card issuers, alongside the services for merchants that you might already know. That’s included the acquisition of Touchtech earlier this year.

Step’s service will be very dependent on building out, and using, robust APIs to let parents and companies pay into their accounts, and for people to be able to use their Step accounts to pay for things, and part of that will involve using and implementing card issuing APIs.

“We are working with Stripe on its issuing API and on developing the issuing side of its business,” MacDonald said. “That is something that we are excited about.” More generally, he said their goals are aligned. “They want to grow the GDP of the internet and grow businesses online. Part of what we are trying to do is to make young people participate responsibly in the online economy, and I think that mission is in line with Stripe’s.” 

Stripe’s head of corporate development, Jordan Angelos, is joining the board of Step with this round.

“Stripe is committed to searching for new ways to remove barriers to commerce and broaden economic access to more people,” Angelos said in a statement. “Step will help teenagers responsibly participate in a financial system that’s moving online, and teach money management skills through direct experience. We’re thrilled to support their efforts.”

The bigger opportunity also seems to be that much larger and more incumbent organizations will tap into what Step is building so that it can make sure to remain relevant and a part of whatever shape financial services take for so-called “generation alpha.”

“Today’s young people are digitally savvy, having grown up with technology as a mainstay in their day-to-day lives. As a result, we also need to ensure that they become familiar with the unique aspects of digital payments including providing education about the various finance and payment products available,” said Sherri Haymond, EVP Digital Partnerships, North America for Mastercard, in a statement. “Step has taken a thoughtful approach to developing an offering for teens and families that provides that first step in educating and acclimating today’s youth to help them gain confidence and awareness around their finances.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/06/step-raises-22-5m-led-by-stripe-to-build-no-fee-banking-services-for-teens/

ecommerce

Walmart’s latest grocery experiment involves stocking your fridge when you’re not home

Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Walmart is now offering to stock your fridge for you—even if you’re not home. 

The big-box giant is teaming with a smart lock startup called August Home to test a service in which workers would use a temporary door code to deliver groceries straight to your kitchen.

“Think about that—someone else does the shopping for you AND puts it all away,” Walmart vp Sloan Eddleston wrote in a blog post announcing the test. “This may not be for everyone–and certainly not right away–but we want to offer customers the opportunity to participate in tests.”

SEE ALSO: Walmart is getting hip, but it’s keeping it a bit of a secret

The deliveries will be monitored by security cameras provided by the startup, and customers will have the option of watching the process in real-time via an app. The couriers—contracted through the startup Deliv—will only let themselves in if no one answers August Home’s smart doorbell, which triggers a smartphone notification when pressed.

The trial is currently limited to a small group of August Home customers in Silicon Valley.

Walmart’s been doubling down on sometimes-quirky experiments like these as it looks for new ways to challenge Amazon’s dominance of the online shopping market. The online grocery market has been one of the most cutthroat fronts of that battle, especially since Amazon took over Whole Foods in a blockbuster deal this summer.

Some of its other tests include a service in which its employees drop off online orders on their way home from work, a giant grocery vending machine in the parking lot of some stores, and drive-thru store pick-up. It also announced this week that it will begin accepting food stamps for online grocery orders for the first time.

Despite its vast potential, online grocery still only makes up about one percent of the total market, and surveys show most Americans still aren’t very comfortable with online grocery shopping altogether. So if the idea of delivery people shuffling through people’s kitchens does catch on, it probably won’t be anytime soon.

WATCH: Amazon’s new meal kits are already available to select Prime members

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/09/24/walmart-smart-lock-grocery-delivery/

ecommerce

Amazon launched Prime Now in Singapore and sold 3 times the volume that it did in Seattle. Here’s how.

Amazon staff in Singapore at the Prime Now warehouse
Image: victoria ho/mashable

People were surprised when Amazon launched its two-hour delivery service, Prime Now, in Singapore last month. Unlike other countries where it launched Prime Now, the e-commerce giant didn’t have a retail presence here to begin.

So going from no Amazon at all to the ultra high pressure two-hour Prime Now delivery service certainly raised eyebrows.

SEE ALSO: Amazon’s new Prime Now warehouse in Singapore is absolutely massive

Customers responded by calling for an avalanche of orders on launch day, July 27. Singaporeans were so enthusiastic, Amazon’s first day here closed three times the order volume in this tiny island, than it did when it launched in its home city of Seattle in 2015.

And as the orders piled up, the app started showing delivery was “unavailable” within the day as Amazon ran out of physical delivery folks to fulfill orders.

But because it was relying on multiple third party logistics services, instead of running delivery itself, it could ramp up capacity over the next day by requesting for more help.

The company was so serious about making good on its two-hour promise, it sent off some of its warehouse officers in Ubers and cabs to make deliveries, too, confirmed Henry Low, director of Amazon Prime Now for Asia-Pacific.

With that, Amazon pulled off its biggest Prime Now launch in its history.

Amazon closed three times the order volume in this tiny island than it did when it launched in its home city of Seattle in 2015.

Singapore packs its 5.5 million people into a metropolis of just 710 square kilometers (274 square miles), with most of its residents living in high-rise apartment buildings. Amazon serves the country out of a single warehouse — its largest Prime Now facility yet, at 100,000 square feet. 

Seventy-nine of the 80 postal districts that cover Singapore have made orders in the month since Prime Now launched.

How Amazon did it: data, data, data

Amazon had already offered two-day or next-day delivery in the U.S., UK, and Japan, which has allowed it to iron out its processes in the lead up to offering Prime Now.

In Singapore though, it had to come out with a bang and go straight into two- and one-hour delivery, without the luxury of testing it out in real life.

To get it right, the secret was Singapore’s fairly unique postal code system, Low said. Each six-digit number corresponds to an individual building — and not a broader district, as it does in other countries.

This gave the company sufficient granularity to run in-depth simulations on delivery routes right to a customer’s doorstep. It could also develop more sophisticated models, with data it had on what customer sets would likely order from Prime Now, and when.

In addition, Amazon has years of historical data on Singaporean buying patterns on Amazon (the slow, non-Prime Now way). All of this helped its predictive systems see into the future, providing a picture of how the real day would likely play out, Low explained.

Local goods on the warehouse shelf.

Image: victoria ho/mashable

And what are Singaporeans buying? The top five items in its first month of operation are toilet paper, green tea, fresh milk, hot and spicy potato chips, and — curiously — broccoli.

Apart from groceries, Amazon has also delivered a toy flamingo set, and a car transmission cooler here.

Low said Amazon is keen to be in Singapore, despite its small size, because the country’s tech-obsessed citizens are super connected and “love shopping.”

Plus, Amazon hopes to plug into the talent pool here, he added. “The business environment allows us to experiment with various innovations like new payment services, that we haven’t before.”

All well and good, but our only question is, who’s ordering all that broccoli? 

WATCH: Amazon’s new meal kits are already available to select Prime members

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/09/21/amazon-prime-now-singapore-one-month-later/

expense manager

Nestl acquires a majority stake in Blue Bottle Coffee at a valuation north of $700M

Blue Bottle Coffee, one of Silicon Valley’s favorite coffee projects, is selling a majority stake to Nestlé in a big semi-acquisition this morning that’s no doubt going to validate a lot of interest in the potential of coffee markets.

Nestlé is acquiring a 68% stake in the company, and it t looks like the leadership of the company isn’t changing as part of this deal. The Financial Times is reporting that Nestle is paying up to $500 million at a valuation north of $700 million, which we understand is in the right ballpark.

The company has opened up shops in San Francisco, New York, and Tokyo among other cities, and the experience is kind of like walking into an Apple Store. The opportunity there is that if Blue Bottle were to open up a store across from every Starbucks and acquire a customer with more value than one looking to get in and out of the shop as quickly as possible, it could potentially create a pretty substantial coffee business — even if it captured only a fraction of Starbucks’ market.

“Blue Bottle Coffee is the biggest brand in specialty coffee in America and Japan today,” Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi said in a statement. “Their success is a testament to James and Bryan’ genius and ability to create a unique sense of value that’s translated into a large, loyal following. It’s the power of the Blue Bottle brand that attracted us to invest early on, and it’s been incredibly gratifying to watch them build an enduring company.”

Coffee shops have been a favorite pet project of Silicon Valley investors, which have poured a ton of money into operations like Blue Bottle and Philz. This also isn’t Nestlé’s first big effort in coffee, as it owns the Nespresso one-shot coffee machine that’s a competitor to the Keurig, as well as the Nescafé brand. Blue Bottle has also been a prolific product producer (say that three times fast) by rolling out little cartons of its coffee and placing them in retail outlets, much like Starbucks does.

Ironically, we noted a little while back that Amazon should try picking up a coffee shop like Blue Bottle or Philz based on the market opportunity against a competitor like Starbucks and the opportunity to expand its Prime footprint. Nestlé has plenty of coffee brands in its portfolio, but a deal of this scale just shows that these coffee startups maybe shouldn’t still be treated as experiments — though they may require a well-capitalized parent (like Amazon or Nestlé) to expand to the level of Starbucks.

Independently, Blue Bottle raised more than $100 million, and we had actually heard some whispers that it might be checking into potential financing about a year ago — though, at the time, the company outright said this wasn’t happening and that it had not held any conversations with investors at any point about additional financing since the previous round. Either way, a year is quite a long time for a story like Blue Bottle to play out, which hopes to have opened 25 new cafes by the end of the year.

A representative from Blue Bottle said they would not comment on the specifics of the deal or the valuation of the company.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/14/nestle-acquires-a-majority-stake-in-blue-bottle-coffee/

expense manager

A Donald Trump tweet knocked $6 billion off Amazon’s value

Image: alex wong/Getty Images

Donald Trump knocked $6 billion off of Amazon before most of the country was awake.

In a tweet sent at 6:12 a.m. EST, Trump claimed Amazon was “doing great damage to tax paying retailers,” resulting in the loss of jobs.

SEE ALSO: The number of tweets Donald Trump has sent since becoming president is downright shocking

That immediately sent Amazon shares down sharply, resulting in a decline of around $6 billion of the company’s market capitalization in a matter of minutes.

Image: Google finance

Such is the power of Trump’s tweets.

The move isn’t life threatening for Amazon, which is still worth in excess of $460 billion. It does, however, highlight growing concern that Trump may be willing to target Amazon, which has already stirred rumblings about the need for greater regulation to limit the company’s growing power.

Amazon began to draw Trump’s ire in late 2015 due to CEO Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, which aggressively reported on the Trump campaign.

Trump went after Bezos, claiming that his ownership of the Post was so that he could reduce Amazon taxes. This wouldn’t work, since the Post and Amazon are two entirely separate companies.

That was just the beginning. Since then, Trump has on three other occasions launched tweets at Amazon, including the time the president threatened Amazon with an ‘internet tax.‘

Trump’s latest tweet on Wednesday appears to have been spurred by a Washington Post editorial published Tuesday night entitled “The nation can only weep,” which calls out Trump’s response after Charlottesville.

“That car in Charlottesville did not kill or wound just the 20 bodies it struck. It damaged the nation. Mr. Trump not only failed to help the country heal; he made the wound wider and deeper,” the Post editorial wrote.

WATCH: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s nephew drops the mic on cultural appropriation

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/08/16/donald-trump-amazon-tweet/