Street Fight: Amazon Responds to Walmart’s Shipping Challenge, Mobile Engagement Drops in Q4

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Amazon Strikes Back at Walmart’s Free 2-Day Shipping Offer (Business Insider)
Amazon is making it cheaper to qualify for free shipping. The retailer just lowered its free-shipping minimum to $35 from $49 for customers who aren’t members of its Prime membership program.

A New Era for Street Fight (Street Fight)
After nearly six years as a bootstrapped independent business, Street Fight has been acquired by Brandify — and we couldn’t be more excited. The pairing will provide resources to significantly expand Street Fight’s content, events, and research, and will allow us to launch new offerings to create greater value for the industry.

Mobile Engagement Sees Unprecedented Drop in Q4 2016 (MediaPost)
For email marketers, mobile engagement trended downward in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to fresh findings from Yes lifecycle Marketing. No footnote—that’s actually a first since the marketing services firm began tracking mobile click-to-open (CTO) rates.

Urban Outfitters Increases Conversion with Contextualized In-App Messaging (Street Fight)
Urban Outfitters has long used its brand-owned app to deliver messages to customers in the hope of driving conversions. What PlaceIQ and Appboy were able to do was heighten the value being delivered by in-app messaging, using a combination of location and customer activity data.

Why Facebook and Snapchat Are Spinning Off Mobile Incubators (AdWeek)
As competition heats up for gaining and retaining consumer attention on mobile devices, a growing number of agencies are betting on—and buying into—startups focused on emerging technology.

Deepening the Data Lake: How Second-Party Data Increases AI for Enterprises (AdExchanger)
Chris O’Hara: I am starting to see the emergence of peer-to-peer data-sharing agreements that help marketers fill their lakes, deepen their ability to leverage data science, and add layers of artificial intelligence through machine learning to their stacks.

UPS Is Testing Drones that Allow Its Delivery Trucks to Be in 2 Places at Once (Quartz)
UPS announced today that it has successfully delivered a package in Florida using an autonomous drone that launched from one of its delivery trucks. The test is the first step in what the company hopes could one day become a more routine use of drones for package delivery.

Google’s Waze Plans Expansion of Ride-Sharing Service (WSJ)
Google is planning to dramatically expand a carpool service on its popular navigation app Waze, setting the tech giant on a collision course with the ride-sharing industry.

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Joe Zappa is the Managing Editor of Street Fight. He has spearheaded the newsroom's editorial operations since 2018. Joe is an ad/martech veteran who has covered the space since 2015. You can contact him at [email protected]