Street Fight Daily: 06.02.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
Hyperlocal network Main Street Connect has rolled out 32 community-based news sites in Westchester County, N.Y., in its biggest launch to date. The move comes a few weeks after MSC added CentralMassNews, which owns ten local news sites in central Massachusetts, to its network. (Paid Content)
Groupon, as everyone knows by now, is growing like crazy. How crazy? CEO Andrew Mason revealed at the D9 technology conference that he now employs 8,000 people, which is up from 1,500 a year ago. Approximately half of these employees are in sales. (TechCrunch)
Where are people checking into on Facebook Places? Well, seven big U.S. airports, Disneyland, Times Square and Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. Think of it for a minute: 700 million global users, and Facebook HQ is among the top 10. (AdAge)
Groupon and LivingSocial plan to battle in the New York market with competing local instant deals services. Groupon’s expansion, which started Wednesday, builds upon the May 20 debut of Groupon Now in Chicago. LivingSocial, meanwhile, plans to introduce its Instant Deals platform in New York on June 8. (Mashable)
LivingSocial just acquired a majority stake in Dealissime, a French daily deals startup. The startups aren’t commenting on the value of the deal and shooting down rumors but two industry sources put the value of the deal at $5-7 million. (Business Insider)
Google Places is brazenly borrowing reviews from Yelp on their iPhone app and they are not even bothering to link back or attribute. Yelp and Google have a love-hate relationship. Yelp loves when its listings and reviews show up in search results, but they hate it when Google scrapes their reviews to populate its own local listings. (TechCrunch)
Groupon and Expedia, the travel planning and reservation website, have announced that they are teaming up to launch a travel deals service called Groupon Getaways expected to launch sometime this month. (Daily Deal Media)
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