Dive Brief:
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Amazon is working with taxi-hailing startup Flywheel to deliver packages in San Francisco and Los Angeles, sources have told the Wall Street Journal.
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The pilot, similar to Uber's "UberRush" package delivery service in New York, has been in place since the fall, the sources said.
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Flywheel is an app that works much like Uber in terms of being able to call, locate, track, and pay for a ride, except that it hails traditional medallion taxis rather than independent drivers.
Dive Insight:
This latest shipping venture by Amazon isn’t its most outlandish, or even its most original — UberRush is covering this same ground. But it does fit with the e-retailer’s laser focus on speeding up fulfillment, to the point where it could be aiming for a “same-day delivery algorithm,” to have various delivery options to choose from at any time of day, Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru told the Wall Street Journal.