Street Fight Daily: Facebook Home’s Local Angle, Why Yelp Needs Help
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Facebook Home: The Local Angle (Screenwerk)
Greg Sterling: Facebook has announced a new app called Facebook Home that replaces your standard Android’s homescreen with an immersive Facebook experience featuring full-screen photos, status updates, and notifications. Eventually that will include Local Search — I’m confident. The logic is inexorable. Once that happens — if there are millions of users — it could divert some high-value local traffic from Google and Google Maps to Facebook.
Why the Commoditization of Local Information Is an Opportunity for Journalism (Street Fight)
Matt Sokoloff: Some have seen this shift of local information — from something that was unique to newspapers to a commodity that is available from a variety of sources — as the end to local news. But I actually think it presents a great opportunity for journalists to do what they do best: put information into context and tell us why it matters.
Why Yelp Needs Help (PCMag)
John Dvorak: Yelp’s decay becomes more and more apparent by the day as the user reviews that once made Yelp so powerful are now clouded with system noise. There seems to be no way of filtering out the racket.
Retailers Leveraging Smartphones to Deliver Hyperlocal In-Store Advertising (Mobile Commerce Daily)
As more consumers shop bricks-and-mortar stores with a smartphone in hand, retailers are looking to offer location services such as indoor mapping tied to local inventory and, ultimately, their own in-store mobile advertising networks. In the short-term, retailers will look to leverage indoor location technology to find out more about their customers.
Why Facebook Home Bothers Me: It Destroys Any Notion of Privacy (GigaOm)
Om Malik: Facebook Home’s deep integration with Android presents a a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.
Map Data: Stick a Pin on It (Economist)
MapBox sells access to interactive street and satellite maps that may be embedded in websites and apps in the style pioneered by Microsoft and Google, and emulated (with problems) by Apple. It counts Foursquare, a popular location-sharing service that publicly defected from Google a year ago, among its clients.
PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — Beergram (Street Fight)
In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan discuss the Singapore government’s plan to roll out location-based services; Google’s Niantic Labs gets into book publishing; Locu uses big data to track Pabst Blue Ribbon consumption (and identify the Hipster density). Plus special guest Andrea Sanchez, founder of Beergram.
After Ditching The Groupon Model, Zozi Lands $10M To Build Out Its Marketplace For Celebrity-Guided Adventures (TechCrunch)
Zozi launched in 2010 to become the go-to destination for those looking for an (affordable) excuse to take break from the daily grind by offering daily deals on a wide range of local adventures. However, after fighting it out in the crowded daily deals space for two years, Zozi shifted its focus to offering high-end, exclusive adventures and get-aways. Today, the startup announced that it has raised $10 million in growth capital and debt as part of a Series B1 round.
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