Recode Daily: Amazon is coming for UPS and FedEx with its own delivery service for businesses

You may have noticed that today’s Recode Daily newsletter arrived in your inbox a bit later than usual. That’s because Recode’s East Coast team of reporters and editors has flown west to join the rest of us today and tomorrow for Code Media in Huntington Beach, Calif. We’ll be back to our usual delivery time later this week.

Amazon is launching a delivery service for businesses — getting ready to compete directly with UPS and FedEx. Shipping with Amazon, a.k.a. SWA, is expected to roll out in Los Angeles soon with third-party sellers that sell goods via its web site; Amazon plans to undercut the incumbent delivery services on price. [Laura Stevens / The Wall Street Journal]

Comcast may try to stop the Fox/Disney deal, by reviving its own bid for Fox. Comcast originally floated a price that was 15 percent more than the one Disney ended up paying for Fox. Fox said it took the Disney deal because it was more likely to be approved by regulators. Alternate theory: Comcast doesn’t really want Fox — it wants Disney to give up a piece of Fox, like its stake in Sky, to make it go away. [Amol Sharma, Shalini Ramachandran / The Wall Street Journal]

Apple shipped about eight million Apple Watches in the holiday quarter — more than the entire Swiss watch industry sold last quarter. The comparison shows the accelerating sales growth of Apple’s smartwatch platform. [Kif Leswing / Business Insider]

Nearly half of American online shoppers have monthly paid subscriptions to streaming media services like Spotify and Hulu. And 15 percent have subscribed to at least one e-commerce delivery service like Blue Apron or Dollar Shave Club in the past year. [Rani Molla / Recode]

Here are two deep dives that will keep you busy until Code Media starts this afternoon: Wired interviewed more than 80 people with intimate knowledge of Facebook, including 50+ former and current employees, about the company’s “two years in hell,” as it learned the myriad ways its platform can be used for ill. And Bloomberg Business week goes inside North Korea’s hacker army — the regime in Pyongyang has sent hundreds of programmers to other countries. Their mission: Make money by any means necessary. [Nick Thompson and Fred Vogelstein / Wired]

Top stories from Recode

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This is cool

Here’s what Intel’s 1,218-drone light show for the Winter Olympics opening ceremony was supposed to look like.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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