This undated image provided by Amazon.com, Inc. shows an Amazon Fire TV Cube. Watch whatever you want, whenever you want. All you have to buy is one little box, and the monthly subscriptions are up to you. After decades of flipping through TV channels, many of us find the promise of internet-based television too miraculous to pass up.

If you don't consider yourself to be tech-savvy, it can be hard to find a good tech gift for the more electronically minded folks in your life, especially since the products themselves are constantly changing. So to figure out which tech gifts and electronics are actually worth the splurge this holiday, I spoke with Ben Arnold, senior director of innovation and trends at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which has produced an annual report on consumer technology holiday purchasing patterns for the last 25 years. According to its research, 66 percent of U.S. adults are planning to purchase a tech product as a gift this year, so to help you buy the actually nice gadgets before everyone else catches on, here are 13 electronics and appliances that are bound to be popular this holiday season. Voice speakers, or smart speakers, have been big sellers over the past couple of holiday seasons, and Arnold's research leads him to believe that they'll be popular once again, "especially since Amazon released several new products a couple of weeks ago." He anticipates that smart displays--"which is a screen with all of the smart-speaker features built into it"--are going to be especially popular, like the newest iteration of the Echo Show.

Last week, we featured sales on gear from outdoor retailers who were hoping to get a jump on the creeping monolith that is Black Friday. Many other manufacturers and retailers are hoping to entice you into checking out their wares before you fall into a post-turkey stupor. If you're in the mood--or if you have better things to do on your holiday weekend than shop--we've rounded up more than a dozen of our favorite deals to check out. It may not be as beautiful as the Nest, but the Ecobee4 was our smart home thermostat of choice when we reviewed it last year. Temperature sensors ensure that the far reaches of your house remain unbaked (and unfrozen).

We've found the best Kohl's Black Friday deals of 2018 (Photo: Kohl's) If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. Kohl's sales are always worth the wait with their deep discounts on a huge variety of products and the Kohl's Cash that makes the next shopping trip just as fun. Kohl's has released its Black Friday ad, and there are some serious deals to be had this year. We test and review products constantly, and we're tracking the best Black Friday deals, so we can say with certainty which of these deals are worth your time.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has warned staff not to be complacent, claiming the firm'is not too big to fail' At an all-hands meeting last Thursday in Seattle, days before the firm announced the winners of its HQ2 contest, Bezos was asked about the recent failures of giant retailers like Sears. 'Amazon is not too big to fail,' Bezos said, in a recording of the meeting CNBC said it had heard. 'In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.' Bezos told the meeting the key to survival is to'obsess over customers'.

The Walmart pilot initially will use human-driven vehicles operated to simulate how a self-driving vehicle would behave, Ford said. Ford has said it expects to launch commercial production of automated vehicles by 2021. Ford and its partners are using Miami as a testing ground for automated delivery service ideas and automated vehicle technology. The new pilot project will offer customers delivery by Postmates of goods ordered at Walmart stores. Brian Wolf, an executive of Ford's autonomous vehicle unit, wrote in a blog post that the companies will work over the next "couple of months" to figure out what goods can be delivered successfully, especially perishable groceries.

Facial recognition has been widely adopted at airports, stadiums, traffic intersections and even some schools. Now, experts say retail is the next industry to become a target of the technology, pointing to a growing number of suppliers and companies willing to put it in their stores. U.S. retailers are expected to begin using facial recognition to stop shoplifters or spot criminals, but many are eyeing it for much broader uses - including customer tracking or loyalty programs, according to Biometric Update. The move has already attracted scrutiny from privacy advocates who fear shoppers may be unaware that retailers are keeping track of their faces. The makers of this facial recognition technology view it differently, however, believing that it would lead to a better consumer experience.

Is there a'New Normal' looming on the horizon for how food and beverage decisions are made? Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to SteadyServ Technologies? A: The mission of SteadyServ is to provide a clear understanding of the best decision options available for retailers and suppliers to grow beverage sales and profitability. Today's retail environment is a chaotic and rapidly changing environment in which competition and costs are increasing at an astounding rate. Consumers and what they expect shifting faster than retailers are used to. Because of this some are beginning to use smarter digital tools to capture the maximum share of wallet of a consumer.

The online retailer is putting together a Toy Book containing the hottest items of this year and all the retro playthings that will make your nostalgia kick in. If you're in New York City, eBay is also opening up an interactive storefront called Toytopia where kids can come in and play with the toys. While Amazon's catalog shows the best toys of this year, eBay has the best toys of any year as long as price is no object for you. If you have some fat stacks of cash you're just waiting to burn through, eBay has a 1967 DC Justice League Games Set -- which includes Aquaman, Flash and Wonder Woman games -- for $6,000. Jump up to the $100,000 price range and you can get a Magic: The Gathering Alpha Black Lotus card.

One employee traveling for work checked his dog into a kennel and billed it to his boss as a hotel expense. Another charged yoga classes to the corporate credit card as client entertainment. A third, after racking up a small fortune at a strip club, submitted the expense as a steakhouse business dinner. These bogus expenses, which occurred recently at major U.S. companies, have one thing in common: All were exposed by artificial intelligence algorithms that can in a matter of seconds sniff out fraudulent claims and forged receipts that are often undetectable to human auditors--certainly not without hours of tedious labor. AppZen, an 18-month-old AI accounting startup, has already signed up several big companies, including Amazon.com Inc., International Business Machine Corp., Salesforce.com