Cyber Week changes the holiday shopping game

Welcome to the era of the Cyber Week. I'm Bridget Carey and this your CNet Update. [MUSIC] Cyber Monday is dead. We now live in a world with Cyber Week. Stores are stretching online deals throughout the next few days and actually online deals really kicked off last Thursday and haven't stopped. Black Friday is changing. Several reports indicate more people shopped online on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. In fact, Best Buy's website crashed on Friday from too much mobile traffic. Shoppers aren't rushing online for just one day any more. And why would you rush when stores are promoting continuous deals. Cyber Monday commercials now encourage people to go online and into the stores for sales. It's all blended together into one long shopping marathon, but if you're doing shopping at Amazon, the site has some new robot workers in time for the holiday rush. At a fulfillment center in California, we gotta look at Amazon's Kiva robots, which bring shelves of inventory to employees to pick. Instead of having the employees walk through to the aisles. These robots can lift up to 750 pounds, travel at about three to four miles an hour and are equipped with sensors so they don't run into each other. During last year's Cyber Monday, Amazon dealt with 426 orders in three seconds. This should speed things up. Amazon has a fleet of about 15,000 of these robots spread out across 10 Amazon warehouses. Speed is vital this year, as major retailers are offering same-day delivery. And also on the topic of Amazon, you may be interested to check out CNET's review of the Amazon Echo Smart Speaker. This elusive gadget can only be obtained if you get an early invite to buy the product from Amazon or if you buy it off Ebay for more than it's worth. Which is what we did because Amazon hasn't sent us a sample to review yet. The concept of the speaker is unique. It listens for your voice commands. Similar to Apple's Siri but it just sits on your counter like a plug in home assistant that you can talk to from anywhere in the room. It answers some basic questions from Wikipedia, gives you the weather, plays music via bluetooth from your phone. And you can ask it to add items to your shopping list or buy music from Amazon. There's no iOS app, there's only an app for Android and Amazon devices. The Echo is supposed to get smarter in time, but, for now, you may not find it to be smart enough to be worth the $200 price tag, or $100 if you're a Prime member. But there's another ground breaking, new technology that may just change all of our lives forever the Girl Scouts will let you shop for cookies online you have to first know a Girl Scout and she'll give you a link to her cookie website the program teaches girls about online marketing, how to use an app and e-commerce this is clearly the best news to ever come out of Cyber Monday. That's your tech news update from our studios in New York. I'm Bridget Carey. [MUSIC]