Street Fight Daily: Facebook Offers, Groupon Editor Exits
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Facebook Adds Barcodes, New Ad-Buy Rider To Its Offers Coupon Product (TechCrunch)
Offers, a free couponing service launched by Facebook back in May to beef up its commercial profile with businesses, is getting an update. From today, and gradually rolling out globally, Facebook is adding some new features — one to enhance the product for businesses, with a new e-commerce option; and another to enhance the product for Facebook itself, in the form of more ads.
Groupon Loses Managing Editor to Sun-Times Parent Wrapports (Romenesko)
Brandon Copple, who left Crain’s to join Groupon as managing editor in 2010, has been hired by Sun-Times owner Wrapports to oversee a new venture that will create sports and business media products. At Groupon, Copple oversaw the writers and editors “who produce brilliant, hilarious descriptions of more than 100 Groupon deals every day.
Trulia Stock Pops on Opening Day (Wired)
With real estate showing some sustained signs of a rebound in the United States, the 5-year-old company priced its stock at $17 per share, above the expected range of $14-$16. The stock opened Thursday morning at $22.10 per share and jumped to a peak of $25.07 in the afternoon before closing the day at $24 even, a 41% jump.
Nokia Cashes In on Apple Map Flap (Wall Street Journal)
While Google dominates smartphone navigation, Nokia owns one of the most widely used digital mapping platforms after it acquired Navteq—a company that provides the underlying digital mapping information used by GPS navigation devices and Internet services—in an $8.1 billion transaction four years ago. In a post on its official blog, published shortly after consumers around the world started complaining about Apple’s new mapping service, Nokia provided a benchmark test, comparing the location apps of the coming Windows-running Lumia 920 smartphone, to the Google-powered maps of the Samsung Galaxy S III and Apple’s new mapping service.
Walmart’s 3,500 Local Facebook Pages Gain Just 2m Fans (Econsultancy)
In terms of the sheer number of Facebook fans, Walmart is one of the top performing brands with more than 21m ‘likes’ to its name. But nearly a year later analysis by Recommend.ly shows that the focus on local content hasn’t exactly paid off for Walmart. In fact it looks like it’s failed.
Foursquare’s Crowley wants to take on Yelp, Google and Harry Potter (GigaOm)
Dennis Crowely of Foursquare has a big goal of creating an ambient-aware location service that will recommend people, places and events happening nearby, but the hardware isn’t quite up to snuff yet. In the meantime, he’s using location data to take on Yelp and Google.
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