Thursday, November 6, 2014

• Amazon is experimenting with (i) deliveries by taxi in the US, and (ii) tying up with newspaper vendors as pick-up locations at scale in the UK: US Taxi-Delivery Experiment: Amazon.com Inc is testing deliveries via taxis in San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to the Wall Street Journal, as the Internet retailer explores alternative modes of delivery to speed up shipments while restraining cost. Amazon is using the taxi-hailing mobile app, Flywheel, to ship parcels via licensed cabs, studying the feasibility of using taxi fleets more broadly as a delivery avenue, the Journal cited people familiar with the matter as saying. In its latest test, Amazon summoned cabs through Flywheel to distribution centers, from where they picked up as many as 10 packages bound for the same location at about $5 per package, the Journal reported. The deliveries usually took place early in the morning, when taxi traffic was low and the competition unlikely to notice, the paper cited the people as saying. UK Tie-up with news wholesaler for in-store pick-up: In October 2014, Amazon announced a partnership with Smiths News, a leading UK newspaper and magazine wholesaler, to offer customers same-day pickup service via the newsagent’s new subsidiary, Pass My Parcel, which will deliver Amazon packages to its select retail locations. Pickup locations are available in more than 6,000 locations throughout the UK, but same-day service is available for only 500 of them. During online checkout, buyers may see a "Pickup is Available — Choose from XX Locations Near You” message, which lets them select a delivery and pickup site. With the Pass My Parcel delivery service, the delivery process is expedited through Smiths News’ twice-daily distribution schedule. Orders made by 11:45 a.m. can be available for same-day pickup at 4 p.m., and orders made by 7:45 p.m. can be available for pickup by 6:30 the next morning in these select retail locations.

• ~5% Audience Engagement: That's what GoPro, Disney have on Instagram: The most successful brands on Instagram get up to 5% audience engagement. GoPro, for instance has 3.3M followers, 163K likes, and 2K comments: the study defines audience engagement as total user actions (likes + comments) as % of follower base. The highest benchmarks were set by advertisers in Consumer Electronics and Travel; Leaders in Retail (Foot Locker) and Fashion (NYX Cosmetics) had engagement of 2.5%; Autos (Mercedes Benz) stood at 2.9%.

• Twitter completes one - not very successful - year as a public company tomorrow: Twitter Inc. (TWTR) is celebrating its one-year anniversary as a public company tomorrow with a stock that’s soared 55 percent from its debut. Its performance by many other measures is less stellar. After jumping 73 percent to open at $45.10 on its first trading day, Twitter’s share price today is lower at $40.37, and the company currently has a record-low enterprise value of 19.4 times trailing 12-month sales, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The San Francisco-based company also continues to bleed money, with losses widening faster than sales gains. Twitter’s profitability has been pushed out to 2017 from 2015 at the time of its initial public offering, according to analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The data underline how Twitter has fallen short as the rocket-ship growth stock it billed itself as during the run-up to last November’s IPO. The microblogging service touted its global reach and potential during its pitch to investors, asking them to focus on monthly user numbers that ended up slowing. Now Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo is dealing with the backlash, even as the company’s digital-advertising business booms. The disconnect between what people thought would happen with Twitter’s trajectory and what actually happened make this one of the bigger “misfires” in technology stocks, said Francis Gaskins, research director at financial-media site Equities.com. “It’s been a round-trip ticket.” Jim Prosser, a spokesman at Twitter, declined to comment. Twitter went public last Nov. 6 at $26 a share.

• Audience-targeting reaches HR; used to predict attrition, budget overspends: Workday, a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations, has announced it is putting into its products the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you. One version of the Workday predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. In another instance, expense reporting software can predict which employee populations are most likely to exceed their budgets.