In today’s Bulldog wrapup of science and technology news:

  • Starbucks launches voice ordering via app, Amazon’s Alexa
  • Japanese arcade pioneer and ‘Father of Pac-Man’ has died
  • Russell Simmons’ RushCard company being sold to Green Dot
  • Nintendo’s third quarter profit jumps on Pokemon game sales
  • New Indonesia tsunami network could add crucial minutes

The details:

  • Starbucks launches voice ordering via app, Amazon’s Alexa

Amazon’s Alexa is now able to order up a latte.

Starbucks says it’s partnering with Amazon’s voice platform to offer what it calls “on command” ordering. Starting Monday, anyone who has an Amazon device with Alexa, like the Echo smart speaker, is able to place a Starbucks order by just using their voice.

[VIDEO: Watch a report from CNET about the app at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C6qVqwy5TA ]

Starbucks is also launching a beta test of voice ordering through its iPhone app. The Seattle-based coffee giant says the feature is being rolled out to a limited group of 1,000 people nationwide Monday. It plans to expand the feature later this year.

Starbucks chief technology officer Gerri Martin-Flickinger says in a statement that the company expects to “learn a lot from both of these experiences and to evolve them over time.”

  • Japanese arcade pioneer and ‘Father of Pac-Man’ has died

Masaya Nakamura, the “Father of Pac-Man” who founded the Japanese video game company behind the hit game, has died. He was 91.

Nakamura founded Namco, part of Bandai Namco, in 1955. It started out as just two mechanical horse rides on a department store rooftop but went on to pioneer game arcades and amusement parks.

Pac-Man, designed by Namco engineer and video game maker Toru Iwatani, went on sale in 1980, at a time when there were few rival games.

  • Russell Simmons’ RushCard company being sold to Green Dot

RushCard, the prepaid debit card company founded by hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and known for its troubles, is being bought by rival Green Dot for $147 million.

Green Dot said Monday it will buy UniRush, the parent company of RushCard as well as the Rapid! payroll debit card. Simmons started RushCard in 2003 as one of the first prepaid cards to focus on minority customers and charge lower-than-average fees.

But RushCard is perhaps best known for a software upgrade that went haywire in 2015, cutting off more than 400,000 customers from their funds for days and even weeks.

  • Nintendo’s third quarter profit jumps on Pokemon game sales

Japanese video game maker Nintendo Co.’s third-quarter profit more than doubled from a year earlier on healthy sales of Pokemon game software, the company said Tuesday.

Nintendo, which makes Super Mario games and will start selling the Switch console March 3, reported a better-than-expected October-December profit of 64.7 billion yen ($569 million), up from 29.1 billion yen in the same period of 2015.

Kyoto-based Nintendo raised its full year profit forecast to 90 billion yen ($792 million) from an earlier 50 billion yen ($440 million). That would mark a more than five-fold increase from what it earned the previous fiscal year.

It kept its sales forecast unchanged at 470 billion yen ($4.1 billion). Nintendo’s quarterly sales slipped 21 percent to 174.3 billion yen ($1.5 billion).

Nintendo’s bottom line also was helped by a relatively weak yen, which lifts the overseas revenue for Japanese companies like Nintendo that do much of their business abroad.

  • New Indonesia tsunami network could add crucial minutes

Indonesia’s tsunami detection system, made up of seafloor sensors that communicate with transmitting buoys on the surface, has been rendered useless by vandals and lack of funding. Now Indonesian and U.S. scientists say they’ve developed a way to dispense with the expensive buoys and possibly add crucial extra minutes of warning for vulnerable coastal cities.

The prototype, nearly four years in the making, is designed to detect so-called near-field tsunamis and has been tested off Padang on the western coast of Sumatra. It awaits a decision on government funding to connect it to disaster agencies on land.

A tsunami triggered by a Dec. 26, 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean that killed or left missing nearly 230,000 people, a large share in Indonesia, raised the urgency of ensuring communities have the fastest possible warnings.