Street Fight Daily: 11.07.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
Combined Urban Airship + Simple Geo Take $15 Million in Funding (Uncrunched)
It looks like Simple Geo may have made a solid bet after all. Last week the company was acquired by Urban Airship in an all stock transaction that was actually part of a much larger financing, Urban Airship’s Series C round of funding. The new round brings in $15.1 million from new strategic investors Salesforce and Verizon and existing investors Foundry Group and True Ventures.
Kevin Rose’s Oink: Stop Rating Places – Rate the Stuff Inside Them Instead (SiliconFilter)
The big difference between Oink and Foursquare or Yelp is that Oink doesn’t focus on places so much as on the things inside them. Instead of rating a local restaurant, for example, you would rate the pizza you had there. While it uses your location to make it easier for you to tag your discoveries, it doesn’t bother you with pointless check-ins.
Survey Shows That Many Small Businesses ‘Hate’ Groupon (Daily Deal Media)
A new survey released by iContact asked businesses — both small and those with more than 250 employees — to rate social media sites such as Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+. The sites were ranked on a 12 point scale from love to hate. Almost 70 percent of small businesses said they “hate” Groupon.
Do We Really Need Another Daily Deals Site? (ReadWriteWeb)
DailyDeals.com seems like another accidental conflation of the social graph (“this is who I know”) and the interest graph (“this is what I like”). The social web is still evolving, and for now it’s better to pick one or the other. That’s exactly what DailyDeals.com is not doing.
Poorsquare Uses Foursquare to Find Freebies Wherever You Are (The Next Web)
Founded by Columbia Journalism School alumni Jeff Novich and Pinz Pinzler, Poorsquare is a simple Web app with a simple mission: to point you to the free stuff in your neighbourhood. It leverages Foursquare’s location, places and deals databases to achieve its purpose in life.
Booted for Plagiarism, California Columnist Finds His Patch (Poynter)
A writer who lost his newspaper column after plagiarizing has explained himself on the local Patch site, where he’s now a blogger. Why? Nicole Charky, Patch editor for the towns of Montrose and La Crescenta, says the reason she welcomes Dan Kimber is “pretty simple: Patch is a forum for the entire community.”
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