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Uber adds Zipline drones to its Eats delivery network

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Uber is investing in, and partnering with, drone delivery company Zipline with the goal of making one million deliveries per day using the startup’s drones by the end of 2029.

Zipline drones will make the first deliveries on the Uber Eats platform by the end of this year, the companies said on Monday. These deliveries will start in Zipline’s existing markets, and the companies want to expand into “dozens of U.S. cities.”

The companies didn’t disclose the investment amount.

Uber has been taking on multiple drone delivery partners as it looks for ways to keep growing Uber Eats. The ride-hail giant is replicating the early business model it’s adopted for robotaxis and other services built around autonomous vehicles, which is to essentially bring as many companies on to its platform as possible.

This approach has helped Uber stay at the forefront of these new technologies despite selling off its own programs like the aerial ride-sharing service, Uber Elevate, and Uber Autonomous Technologies Group, which was working on autonomous vehicles. Investments have been a huge part of the strategy, with Uber committing more than $10 billion to dozens of autonomous vehicle providers.

The strategy is not a panacea, though. Uber recently clashed with one of its highest-profile partners so far, Waymo, and the companies are now expected to walk away from each other when their contracts expire in 2028. Uber and Waymo are also on different sides of a growing fight over autonomous vehicle regulation.

The ride-hail giant had tested the waters of drone delivery when it still had its Elevate division. The company dipped back into the idea late last year when it announced a partnership with Israeli startup Flytrex, which also came with a minor investment.

Uber thinks Zipline’s drones can fulfill orders on Uber Eats within five to ten minutes. “Truly quick commerce is proving to be an even bigger market than the original food market was,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. “We think this can be an enormous tailwind for the next leg of growth for Eats.”

Zipline, based in San Francisco, recently closed an extended Series H funding round of $800 million, pushing its valuation to $7.6 billion.

“Every great transportation revolution has changed where people live, how businesses operate, and how economies grow,” Zipline co-founder Keller Cliffton said in a statement. “Together with Uber, we’re taking the next step toward building a world where getting what you need is as fast and effortless as sending a text, no matter where you are.”

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Dangote Cement suspends proposed London listing

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Dangote Cement Plc has put its proposed listing on the London Stock Exchange on hold, citing current market conditions and the company’s strategic priorities.

The company disclosed this in a regulatory filing signed by Edward Imoedemhe, the company secretary, following a meeting of its board of directors on Tuesday.

In May, Dangote Cement announced it was in early talks over a potential London listing, a move that would help widen its access to overseas investors and capital.

The company later, in July, explained that the faster and more practical listing process in the United Kingdom influenced its preference for London over Dubai for the secondary listing.

On Tuesday, the cement producer said it will not proceed with the secondary listing, noting that its shares remain listed on the Nigerian Exchange Group, and that the decision will not affect the company’s operations.

“The Company’s ordinary shares remain listed on the NGX, and this decision does not in any way affect the Company’s operations or business plans,” Dangote Cement added.

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READ ALSO: Dangote Cement’s nine-month profit jumps 31% as revenue hits N3.8 trillion

The company said it will remain focused on delivering sustainable value to its shareholders and building on its strong market position.

Dangote Cement is majority-owned by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, who launched the continent’s largest-ever initial public offering in September for his oil refinery.

Dangote Cement, with a production capacity of 55 million tonnes per annum, has a footprint in 11 African countries, including Cameroon, Ethiopia, Zambia, Tanzania, and Côte d’Ivoire, among others.

The corporation’s nine-month profit in 2026 jumped 31 per cent, while its revenue hit N3.8 trillion, boosted by improved revenue from cement and clinker sales.


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X launches its own clipping feature to spur influencer engagement

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Over the past few years, X has released a number of features to make itself a friendlier hub for influencers. The latest effort to attract social media talent? Its own clipping tool.

Clipping is the pivotal social media technique by which longer videos are spliced into TikTok-attention-span length “clips” and then strategically posted to engage as many eyeballs (and, thus, derive as much ad revenue) as possible.

On Monday, X announced the tool, which, from what we can tell, appears to be little more than a straightforward video-trimming feature that lets users edit videos and post them to X.

The site says that every clip includes a “Clip from” label that links back to the original video from which it was derived, allowing X users to see more about the creator and the creator’s content.

“Grab your favorite moment from any video, add your take, and post it without leaving X,” the company posted.

The platform added that both creators and clippers can “earn from views on the clip through Original Content Rewards,” X’s rewards program. The program is only available for eligible creators and pays out based on specific levels of audience engagement.

In many cases, influencers pay special firms to handle clipping for them. More and more large companies are also turning to such services to run marketing campaigns, and the technique has been used in political campaigns as well.

Over the last several years, X has tried to compete with other social sites by expanding the kind of content it supports. To take on sites like YouTube, X introduced long-form videos in 2022 (when the site was still known as Twitter), and they have since taken off on the platform. To be more like Substack, it long ago dispensed with the site’s traditional character limits and introduced long-form blog posts, which are available to premium subscribers.

X has kept at it this year. In March, it added a feature called “exclusive threads” that lets creators put parts of a thread behind a paywall so only subscribers can read them, and in July it launched a live-streaming studio and set aside $1 million for creators who go live.

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