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Amazon's same-day delivery service Prime Now, which is today available in more than a couple of dozen U.S. metros, is experimenting with another type of service that goes beyond traditional purchases: it's offering consumers the ability to test drive cars. Specifically, Amazon has partnered with Hyundai to offer test drives of the 2017 Elantra through a new program called "Prime Now. Drive Now."

Analysts don't know how many Kindle Fires have been sold any more than you do. Sometimes, though, they do cool stuff like an analysis (PDF) of their family's Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Prime usage-or, in the case of a new Citigroup report released today, a survey on Kindle usage and Prime membership.

calling Amazon Prime the "modern day loyalty program" ShopRunner is a competitor to prime that lets users get free shipping for an annual fee from a number of retailers e-commerce sites

Prime time in mobile is shaping up to look a lot like TV: Working stiffs turn to their phones after they've logged off their computers for the day and plopped down on the couch at home. Users surf the mobile web and apps on phones most during the early evening, between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., and keep usage up through the night, according to a recent study from third-party ad server MediaMind. Looking at billions of mobile ad impressions across devices, carriers and operating systems, mobile ad click-through rates are also highest between 7 p.m. and midnight, with clicks reaching a peak at 8 p.m. MediaMind serves global campaigns for advertisers and agencies in all digital media, including mobile.

News that Amazon is building a set-top box to rival offerings from Apple, Google, and Roku arrived today as a surprise - but not a shock. In the past several years, all of its biggest competitors have made their own plays for customers' living rooms. The simplest explanation for Amazon's entry into the set-top box space is that the company has to.

"Using addressable ads, marketers can predetermine the type of consumer who will see their commercials. In this case, Allstate is taking consumer data widely available from firms such as Experian, Epsilon and Axicom, along with subscriber information from Dish and DirecTV, and using all this to pinpoint renters. In other words, if the subscriber is a homeowner, the commercial is not supposed to appear on the TV screen. By using both DirecTV and Dish, Allstate's new-technology commercials will reach about 15 million households."

"Hulu, the online aggregator of repurposed TV content and subscription video-on-demand, continued its apparent slide by failing to rank among the Top 10 U.S. online video sites in September, according to new data from comScore. Reston, Va.-based comScore found that Amazon, which includes Amazon Prime Instant Video and Amazon Instant Video (transactional VOD), ranked 10th with more than 31 million unique viewers who watched nearly 107 million videos at 12.8 minutes per viewer."

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