This is huge news, both for Amazon and for the US Postal Service. Starting with LA and New York, Amazon Prime customers will now get package delivery on Sundays at no extra charge.

Amazon prime customers – who pay a $79 annual charge – will now be able eligible for free two-day shipping on millions of items, and can receive their packages on Sunday. The company announced on Monday that it has teamed up with the U.S. Postal Service and plans to roll the service out to a large portion of the U.S. in 2014 including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix.

USPS has really been struggling, with 7 consecutive quarters in the red.

The semi-independent government agency has suffered in recent years with the introduction of email and the drop in sales from stamps as well as a 2006 congressional mandate to prefund up to 75 years of its future retirees’ health care.

Earlier this year, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe made pleas to lawmakers to allow the financially troubled Postal Service to switch to a five-day delivery schedule for first-class mail in an effort to reduce costs to return the organization to financial stability.

Package deliveries – which was never part of this plea – continues to grow and Donahoe said in the press release on Monday that the Postal Service is very happy to offer shippers like Amazon the option of Sunday deliveries. Research on the websites of rivals FedEx and UPS suggest that the two companies do not currently offer a Sunday delivery service. Both were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

The internet and e-commerce have been tremendously disruptive to the Postal Service. This plan will help the USPS find a financial model that allows them to prosper instead of fade. A real win/win.

Ever since I read the book Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer, I’ve been fascinated by attempts to reach the peak of Mount Everest. Incredible how many people died trying to reach the summit or, having reached the top, died on the descent.

They are grisly, but these pictures are a part of the Everest story.

The engineer who oversaw development of Apple’s Siri technology is now at Samsung building an online service for linking together the “Internet of things.”

Luc Julia, a vice president at Samsung’s innovation lab in Menlo Park, California, demonstrated the project, called SAMI, or the Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions, at a conference north of San Francisco on Friday.

I don’t really know what to say.

Despite the incredible “power” of Office’s productivity, Microsoft’s own depiction of its software running on its hybrid tablet results in a $500 error. Charged with adding up just seven rows of numbers, Microsoft Excel running on the Surface comes up with a total of $9,000, as can be seen in the zoomed in detail below.

Frank Shaw’s head must have exploded.

I thought this was a great quote.

Last weekend at Garrison Bespoke, an upscale tailor shop in Toronto, a potentially lethal scene was unfolding in the back room, where employees were taking turns trying to stab Michael Nguyen, Garrison’s co-owner, with a hunting knife.

The latest technology improvements don’t always come in the newest phone.

Love the American Masters series.

Hear My Train A Comin’ traces the legendary guitarist’s remarkable journey from his hardscrabble beginnings in Seattle, through his stint as a US Army paratrooper and as an unknown sideman to R&B stars until his discovery and ultimate international stardom. With previously unseen footage of the 1968 Miami Pop Festival, home movies, and interviews with those closest to Jimi Hendrix.

This is one clever design. Take a bulky UK iPad charger and give it a twist so it folds flat. Perfect for travel. Terrific job.

Interesting infographic. Take a look, see if it all looks right to you, then read the comment below it.

Some breathtaking shots. My favorite is number 69, Invisible Reflection. Wow.

Many thanks to BlissList for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. BlissList is an iPhone app that enables you to buy from all stores in one central place, with just one account.

While social shopping hubs such as Pinterest and Wanelo do a great job of helping you discover products from different stores, they require you to go to each store’s site to buy those products. What stands between you and the perfect pair of jeans and shoes is that you have to go through a painful, multi-step checkout process at different stores. Not to mention, the inconsistent buying process between stores and the small canvas of a mobile phone make you want to tear your hair out. BlissList eliminates all these hassles by providing a centralized and convenient way for you to buy the products you want. With BlissList you can add any product from any store and securely check out in one place, so your credit card is not all over the web. Additionally, you can connect with your friends for social funding for your products. BlissList is free and there are no service fees or price markups. Buy your shoes and keep your hair. Download BlissList on the App Store.

A great article from Charles Arthur that delves into the differences between market share and installed base.

According to Reuters, BlackBerry’s board has had discussions with Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Lenovo and others about selling BlackBerry intellectual property, similar to the patent purchases from bankrupt Nortel back in 2011.

Allyson Kazmucha does a nice review of the Olloclip with lots of comparison photos. I’ve always wondered if these things were really worth it, but it looks nice.

Jim and Dan talk about the new iWork, iMac performance for recording, Universal Audio’s Apollo, guitar cabinets, IK Multimedia’s iLoud, MacBook Pro 13-inch keyboard and trackpad issues and a fix, desktops, Alfred and launch-bar style alternatives, and more.

Besides emphasizing Office, Elop would be prepared to sell or shut down major businesses to sharpen the company’s focus, the people said. He would consider ending Microsoft’s costly effort to take on Google with its Bing search engine, and would also consider selling healthy businesses such as the Xbox game console if he determined they weren’t critical to the company’s strategy, the people said.

Xbox is the only Microsoft product I currently use.

When Eddie Van Halen releases a new guitar and amp, people notice.

Everyone needs a beard.

Don’t worry it’s safe for work. I don’t know how this works and I don’t think I want to.

Lots of new features in the latest version for iPhone and iPad.

They did a pretty incredible job putting this together.

I loved listening to this one.

Eugene Wei worked for Amazon from 1997-2004. The linked blog post explores Amazon’s push for revenue growth while forsaking profits, at least for the short term.

Does Amazon lose money on sales of some individual items? For sure. The first Kindle ebooks that were priced at $9.99 when Amazon had to pay more than that per copy to publisher were one example. Giant, heavy electronics items that Amazon sometimes ships for free when the shipping cost is clearly non-trivial and cost more than the usual thin margins on such goods are another.

But those represent a tiny fraction of the whole:

The vast vast majority of products Amazon sells it makes a profit on. Over time, more of these products that inadvertently sell at a loss will be corrected so that no longer happens, and what remains will be products Amazon intentionally uses as loss leaders.

And then there’s Marketplace sales:

The platform of Amazon is profitable, too. When other people sell products on Amazon Marketplace the gross margin is huge. I sell a used book on Amazon, it takes a cut of the transaction, I am the one packing and shipping that item to the buyer. You don’t have to be a financial whiz to understand the cost of that transaction to Amazon is minimal.

If Amazon tends to make money on the vast majority of its transactions, why doesn’t it generate boundless profits?

Because Amazon has boundless ambition. It wants to eat global retail.

Given that giant mission, Amazon has decided to continue to invest to arm itself for a much larger scale of business. If it were purely a software business, its fixed cost investments for this journey would be lower, but the amount of capital required to grow a business that has to ship millions of packages to customers all over the world quickly is something only a handful of companies in the world could even afford.

Fascinating read.

Yes please!

If Apple is going to make inroads into the console gaming space, this is an experience they will have to exceed. The Kinect voice recognition has gotten better than on the 360 (as you’d expect), and more solidly integrates with the OS.

Voice controls are now a system-level process that runs in the background while you’re using an app or game. You can call out, “Xbox, snap friends” while playing a game to bring up your friends list on the side of the screen, without even pausing. Then there are the handy app-specific shortcuts activated by voice commands. “Xbox, watch Comedy Central” let me jump straight to watching the channel even from another app, for instance.

This is certainly a step towards the magical computer/living room holy grail of integration. Just a step, since this is not a desktop experience. You won’t be editing documents or creating emails on your Xbox One. But definitely a solid step forward.

Aside from voice, the most significant system-level feature enabled by the Kinect is the ability of the Xbox One to log a user in automatically based only on their visuals. The first time you set up the system, it takes you through a 30-second process where you log in to your Microsoft account. Kinect then builds a personal profile it will associate with that account based on facial recognition but also the camera’s basic skeletal model of your body. This process forms a unique biometric ID that the Kinect uses to automatically identify a user, logging them in to Xbox Live and bringing up a personalized menu that includes their recent apps and favorite items.

Another step forward. Touch ID works well on a phone and is a solid security solution. But it is still an active solution (meaning you need to take an action to achieve your goal). The ability to walk up to your Xbox One and have it automatically log you in is a passive solution. Remains to be seen how secure this form of biometric profiling is, but not so sure security is as big a requirement in the living room, where you have more control over physical access than you do with your laptop or phone.

The process of unlocking your device based on some form of biometric has lots of room for improvement and is a real opportunity for the company that gets it right. There are keyless deadbolts for your front door that allow you to unlock your front door remotely via a Bluetooth signal from your phone. There’s an app that lets you knock on your phone to unlock your computer, also accomplished via Bluetooth (read the comments before you buy).

Point is, this is a wide-open, wildly innovative field. Apple has a real opportunity here. The living room is like the Wild West. Still untamed, still full of possibility.

In Issue 14 of The Loop Magazine:

Jim Dalrymple reviews the new iPad Air and and then looks at which iPad—the Air or the iPad mini—is right for you; Victor Agreda, Jr. discusses “Magic and Creativity”; Alex Vollmer explains everything about using Audiobus in “Get on the Audiobus”; and Roy J. Moss reveals “What They Don’t Tell You About Being A Sysadmin”.

All logos should have a death metal version.

I use these cabinets all the time. If you play guitar and record, you have to try these.