The Amazon Echo is having its mainstream moment

The little talking speaker that could, Amazon's Echo, is moving into the breakout phase of its success, according to data collected by analysts firm Slice Intelligence. The Echo is coming off a tremendously successful holiday shopping season, which saw not only a high volume of sales, but a key evolution in consumer demographics that's driving sales from a broader cross-section of buyers. Slice found that 50 percent of revenue related to Echo came from women, a trend which is a big change from the patterns at device launch, when overwhelming men tend to be the ones buying Echo. Slice identified this tendency originally around the launch of the first Echo, and now again during this most recent holiday season around the release of the new Echo Dot. That's not the only sign that Echo is going mainstream, however.