Street Fight Daily: Urbantag Acquired, OpenTable Optimizes Mobile
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Social Network Tagged’s Fifth Acquisition: Location-Based Mobile Discovery App Urbantag (TechCrunch)
Social network Tagged is acquiring location-based mobile discovery app Urbantag, and adding co-founders Andrew Hoag and Emma Van Niekerk to its team. Urbantag produces a mobile app for discovering and sharing different local venues by allowing users to bookmark and curate real-world places, creating a type of social recommendations system for its users.
OpenTable Helping Restaurants to Lift Last-Minute Reservations on the Phone (AllThingsD)
Starting today, OpenTable will be reaching out to thousands of restaurants with free tools to optimize their sites for mobile. But if restaurants don’t act fast, OpenTable will start charging around $100 for the service after Jan. 31.
A Waze Ahead of Apple in Map Race (AdWeek)
In the days after getting the Apple plug, Waze was adding 100,000 users a day and now has 28 million consumers using it for turn-by-turn navigation and to report traffic conditions. Waze will bank on that growing user base next month when it launches its U.S. ad platform, which will allow brands to place virtual coupons onto its maps, looking to entice users to drive to a nearby brick-and-mortar location.
Facebook Offers Are A Viral Hit: Friend-To-Friend Sharing Drives 3/4s Of Popular Coupon Redemptions (TechCrunch)
David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of marketing and business relationships, says that among the 100 most popular offers on the social network, three-fourths of the claims came not from the people who had been initially targeted with an offer, but instead from someone they had shared it with. In other words, Offers seems to be a genuinely social product, with redemptions driven by sharing — as opposed to just another deal that happens to be delivered on Facebook.
Map Search on PCs “Eroding,” Shifting to Mobile (SearchEngineLand)
According to comScore, map-based search on the PC has now peaked and is starting to erode. By contrast mobile usage of mapping applications is growing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
BuzzMob Banks $2 Million for Its Social Events App (AllThingsD)
Los Angeles-based BuzzMob announced on Tuesday a new round of funds, securing $2 million in a funding round lead by Craig Cogut of Pegasus Capital Advisors. Originally launched on iOS last year, BuzzMob is a location-based social app centered specifically around events.
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