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IS UPS Gearing Up For Fight With Amazon.com?

UPS ( UPS ) has acquired a stake in same-day delivery startup called Deliv, shifting it into competition with e-tail giant Amazon.com ( AMZN ). Palo Alto-based Deliv delivers products from brick-and-mortar retailers to shoppers at their nearby homes — attempting to figure out an efficient solution to the most expensive part of delivery: the last mile. The $28 million of announced funding brings Deliv’s total haul to $40.5 million from funders such as Upfront Ventures, RPM Ventures and mall operators such as General Growth Properties ( GGP ) and Simon Property Group ( SPG ). The Wall Street Journal reported that its valuation was unavailable. Deliv has struck deals with Alphabet ( GOOGL ) subsidiary Google for its Express delivery service, among other clients including several startups. “Same-day is absolutely the new standard. That’s exactly what’s happening in the market. Look what Amazon is doing,” Deliv CEO Daphne Carmeli told IBD. As part of the funding arrangement, UPS will gain a seat on the Deliv board — an opportunity to gather intelligence about a business and market it doesn’t operate in. Currently UPS only offers same-day delivery for high-margin sectors such as health care. Next-day delivery is available for evening pickups — customers generally place orders online in the evening when returning from work. “I struggle to understand what it is that I need in less than a few hours,” Rimas Kapeskas, head of UPS’s Strategic Enterprise Fund, told the Wall Street Journal . UPS is specifically interested in Deliv’s software that connects it directly with a retailer’s website. UPS and Amazon have an uneasy relationship. At the moment Amazon.com is UPS’s largest customer but as the e-tailer’s delivery costs continue to soar, the company has begun to seek alternatives and is widely rumored to be building its own freight operation. Amazon.com offers free two-day shipping and other perks via it’s loyalty program Amazon Prime. The e-tailer offers same-day delivery service via its Prime Now app. On the company’s Q4 earnings call, executives characterized the speedy delivery options as very difficult and expensive but said customers love it. To support its various shipping options Amazon has entered the ocean freight shipping business , is rumored to be flying several flights a day from an airfield in Ohio to locations near its fulfillment centers, has bought a fleet of truck trailers, and is leasing a number of Boeing 767 cargo aircraft. But, it’s still unclear who is going to crack the code on same-day delivery. It’s a complex and expensive business with low margins. Others, such as San Jose-based eBay ( EBAY ) tried  to launch in the U.S. but ultimately ended the pilot program. CEO Devin Wenig said at the time the company had “mixed results” for the delivery service.

Google Fiber Heads To San Francisco; Faster Search Service Coming

Google Fiber, the super-fast Internet-access service spearheaded by Google’s parent firm Alphabet ( GOOGL ), is about to become available in San Francisco. Google Fiber’s Internet access will soon reach “some apartments, condos and affordable housing properties” in the tech-drenched Northern California city, using existing fiber networks rather than one built from scratch, wrote Michael Slinger, Google Fiber’s director of business operations, in a blog post on Wednesday. Using San Francisco’s existing fiber network will make the startup of the service come about more quickly, but it also means the service won’t be available everywhere in the city. Still, it’s a boost for tech-innovation hub San Francisco, where homes and businesses largely don’t have Web access that’s any better than in other parts of the country. Google Fiber started six years ago in Kansas City and the company has “committed to bring Fiber to a total of ten metropolitan areas,” said Slinger in the blog post. “To date, we’ve focused mostly on building fiber-optic networks from scratch. Now, as Google Fiber grows, we’re looking for more ways to serve cities of different shapes and sizes. That’s why we’re working with Huntsville, Alabama to tap into the city’s planned municipal fiber network.” Speed Needed For Mobile Web In other news, Google is also widening use of a technology that loads Web pages more quickly while consuming less data — in an aim to make it easier for people to navigate the Internet using their mobile phones. Google said Wednesday that it will display relevant pages in the Top Stories section of search-results pages that are built with its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology. AMP is similar to efforts underway by Alphabet-rivals Facebook ( FB ), and its Instant Articles, and Apple ( AAPL ), and its Apple News service, which also aim to speed up how quickly articles load on mobile devices. Pages built with Google’s new technology load about four times faster and use 10 times less data than typical pages, Google said. The AMP technology improves how ads are seen. Stopping ads from slowing-down readers’ access to online articles could help deflect one of the main threats that the industry says could be facing digital ad companies — the growing use of ad-blocking software. AMP works by having developers rewrite their pages in a slightly simpler and more limited language, and hosts the pages on Google’s infrastructure, according to a Bloomberg report . “No matter how many ads you put on the page the content comes first,” Bloomberg quoted David Besbris, a Google vice president of engineering for search, as saying. “If a user taps on something they will get the content immediately.” Alphabet stock closed up 0.5% in the stock market today , at 720.90. Facebook stock and Apple stock both rose more than 1%. Image provided by Shutterstock .

Facebook Looks Beyond ‘Like’ With ‘Angry’ Button, A Brand Strategy

Facebook ( FB ) has unveiled a new feature that lets its users show how they really feel about posts or ads on the site. Instead of a plain vanilla “Like” in reaction to a post or ad, users of Facebook’s new Reactions feature can add faces that emote “Like,” “Love,” “Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad” or “Angry.” The move adding more expressive emojis comes as Facebook is competing against Apple ( AAPL ), Google parent Alphabet ( GOOGL ), Microsoft ( MSFT ), microblog Twitter ( TWTR ) and others to attract more advertisers. Advertisers and brands have said that extending a wider range of reactions will give advertisers a better understanding of what Facebook users think. Armed with that knowledge, brands can improve targeting and deliver better ads. “They’ll provide greater feedback,” J.R. Rigley, president and CMO at packaged-goods company J.R. Watkins, said about the expanded sentiment options last fall, according to AdWeek . “We will know more about how viewers feel about the brand, which could be helpful to us. The con is that they might not like the content. But some of that could be good, too.” The Reactions sentiment-options feature had been in testing since October in Ireland and Spain, and was made available to all Facebook’s 1.59 billion users globally on Wednesday. “We’ve been listening to people and know that there should be more ways to easily and quickly express how something you see in News Feed makes you feel. That’s why today we are launching Reactions, an extension of the Like button, to give you more ways to share your reaction to a post in a quick and easy way,” wrote Facebook product manager Sami Krug in a blog post on Wednesday. To add a reaction, users must hold down the “Like” button on their mobile device — or hover above the “Like” button on a desktop computer to see the reaction image options — then tap buttons to add one of the expanded range of emojis. Early this month, Facebook announced that it had doubled the length of video ads on Instagram to 60 seconds, and Wednesday revealed that it has over 200,000 advertisers on the photo- and video-sharing service. Facebook derives more than 96% of total revenue from advertising, with video ads deriving a premium price. Facebook has about 2.5 million advertisers overall, of which 75% are outside the U.S. Facebook stock lifted from a morning dip to close up 1.4% in the stock market today , at 106.88. Apple stock closed up 1.5%. Alphabet and Microsoft rose fractionally and Twitter stock dropped 1.6%. A top-rated big-cap tech stock, Facebook carries the highest IBD Composite Rating of 99, putting it among the top 1% of all companies across key metrics such as revenue and earnings growth and stock-price gains.