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New Plymouth business owner Craig Macfarlane thinks losing Womad, the biggest weekend of the year in Taranaki, will hit industries hard.
The loss of Womad 2021 may have broken the hearts of regular festival visitors, but it has left many Taranaki businesses facing a tough year ahead, a hospitality guru has warned. “People rely on the spike that Womad brings,” Craig Macfarlane said. “It could be quite a different winter because of it.” Macfarlane, who owns a number of hospitality businesses across New Plymouth, said the festival, which usually takes place in March, is the biggest weekend of the year for the region.
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Amazon executives this year considered launching a new service that would compete with Shopify.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was directly involved in the talks, as Amazon executives have grown defensive about Shopify s massive growth in recent years, a person familiar with the matter said.
The company previously shut down a similar service called Amazon Webstore in 2015.
While Amazon and Shopify are not direct competitors, they effectively fight over the same merchants who want to sell their products online.
There s been a scramble among Amazon executives to assess Shopify s growing threat as a competitor, including talks of launching a competing service, Business Insider has learned.
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