Yesterday, Alphabet's drone delivery company Wing announced it's launching one of the world's first drone delivery services in Canberra, Australia following regulatory approval. ✈️📦
How it works: Customers place an order for popular items — like food, coffee and medicine — through Wing’s app. Minutes later, a drone arrives with the goods at their doorstep. 100 homes have access to start.
Perhaps Wing took inspiration from Sliceline, the pizza drone from HBO’s Silicon Valley. 😉
Wing has reportedly been testing a pilot program (pun intended) for 18 months and has already made over 3K deliveries.
Wing's Australia launch also marks a significant achievement for Alphabet — beating Amazon to market. Jeff Bezos predicted his company would be making drone deliveries by 2018, but there hasn't been a commercial launch yet.
Beyond Amazon, a few others are throwing their hat into the last-mile delivery ring. In 2016, 7-Eleven partnered with drone maker Flirtey to deliver items from its store and UPS teamed up with drone startup Matternet this year to deliver medical supplies through the air. On the ground, there's also Serve from Postmates, SameDay Bot from FedEx, Starship, Robomart and Scout.
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