Street Fight Daily: TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs, Charting A Future for Local News
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise (TechCrunch)
TaskRabbit, the San Francisco startup that runs a marketplace for outsourcing errands and temporary work projects, has laid off a number of staffers as part of a larger restructuring, TechCrunch has learned. One person who was laid off said the announcement was made on Monday of last week, and that 13 people — 20 percent of the 65-person headcount that TaskRabbit reported in May – were let go with one month’s severance.
With New Products, Factual Aims to Make ‘Big Data’ Smaller (Street Fight)
After five years of ingesting, cleaning and packaging the world’s information, the startup is focusing exclusively on local, improving its geo-fencing product and moving up the data stack to build out a location analytics business. The company announced this morning that it has launched a new line of services aimed at helping mobile developers, publishers, and marketers make sense of the reams of location data collected from consumers.
Charting a Locally Owned, For-Profit Future for Community News (Nieman Journalism Lab)
Dan Kennedy: At this early stage of online news, nonprofits like the New Haven Independent are often able to raise more money more quickly than for-profits. But not every community can support a nonprofit. Thus it is vital for the future of news that entrepreneurs like Howard Owens, and his work at The Batavian, figure out the for-profit side.
6 Reasons to Opt for Card-Linked Loyalty Programs (Street Fight)
Customer analytics have become an integral part of the local merchant’s marketing toolbox, and digital loyalty providers are increasingly leveraging their own data to help clients make more informed business decisions. Hyperlocal vendors with loyalty programs that are linked to credit cards or debit cards are especially well positioned to take advantage of this trend. Here are six reasons why loyalty providers should consider structuring their programs to connect with customer’s credit or debit cards.
Why Investors Who Got Burned By Groupon Might Still Snap Up An IPO From RetailMeNot (Quartz)
The world’s largest online coupon marketplace by the number of visitors, RetailMeNot, has set a $20 to $22 a share range for its upcoming IPO, according to a US government filing submitted today. It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to the company’s public offering, given the disappointing performance of another online coupons firm, Groupon.
Are Marketers Making The Most Out of Location-based Services? (eConsultancy)
By combining the use of mobile apps and also location-based services, marketers are able to reach out to their customers to send them more targeted content. There are a lot of companies who have seen great success from the location-based marketing campaigns and below are a few of examples of the favourite ones we have seen.
On Clinkle (Johnny Startup)
John Valentine: Clinkle just raised the largest seed round in Silicon Valley history. Some will chuckle at the raise and make immediate comparisons to Color, but the one thing this investor group smartly realizes is that the mobile payments war is not going to be won by a small, scantly-funded startup making the likes of PayPal, Square, Apple, and Google sweat. The mobile payments war is going to be won by a company with a war chest. $25MM qualifies.
Foursquare’s API Means It Can Be Much More Than “Maps With People In Them” (PandoDaily)
Tom Limongello: I view Foursquare as a combination of three core concepts: friend stream, explore and lists, which owe their existence to a powerful and highly developed API, although that has been both a blessing and a curse. This provides a foundation to Fousquare’s potential second coming, if the company plays its cards right, and it involves maps, but not necessarily with people in them.
Mapping Giant Esri Adds Real-Time Traffic Information From Nokia’s Here (TechCrunch)
While Nokia continues to plug away at picking up more consumer users of its new Windows Phone-powered smartphones, it’s also looking for more licensees for its Here location data business. Today the company announced one such deal, in which Here’s real-time traffic information will get integrated into mapping software from Esri, whose geographic information system technology is used by some 350,000 organizations worldwide.
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