Street Fight Daily: Seamless Eyes IPO, LivingSocial In 2014

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology

seamlessSeamless Eyeing IPO For 2014 (The Deal)
Barely six months after a merger with its biggest competitor, Seamless, the New York-based online food delivery service, is charting its course to public markets. Management of GrubHub Seamless, as the combined company is known, has had discussions about how, and when, it will go public, something that could happen in the latter part of 2014 or early 2015, according to several people familiar with the situation.

Handybook CEO: The Key To Scaling Local Is Great Service (Street Fight)
Mobile bookings services are on the rise as consumers look to use their smartphones to do more than find information about local businesses. Enter Handybook, a New York-based technology company that allows users to book household services on its site and app. Street Fight recently spoke with Umang Dua, Handybook’s co-founder, to find out more about the consumer services space and Handybook’s plans to impact the way customers book household services.

O’Shaughnessy: Ticket Monster Sale ‘Sets 2014 Up To Be Nothing Like 2013’ (Washington Business Journal)
LivingSocial Inc.’s $260 million sale of its South Korean subsidiary “sets 2014 up to be nothing like 2013,” CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy wrote in a memo to staff. The memo, obtained by the Washington Business Journal, follows an “all hands” meeting in which LivingSocial executives explained the sale of Seoul-based Ticket Monster to rival Groupon.

6 Tools to Track the Real World Impact of Online Ads (Street Fight)
The percentage of companies that analyze online-to-offline interactions is steadily growing — reaching 48% in 2013, according to Econsultancy. As interest grows, hyperlocal vendors are rising to the occasion and refining the metrics they provide. Here are six tools that businesses can use to track the real world impact of their online ads.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman Takes on Critics in Freewheeling Reddit AMA (Mashable)
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman dismissed critics, traded profanity and highlighted one of his favorite Yelp reviews in a freewheeling Reddit AMA on Friday. Stoppelman denied a claim that some Yelp salespeople call businesses and offer to plant good reviews and remove bad ones for money. “Absolutely not. Consumer trust is paramount,” Stoppelman replied. When a Redditor literally cried “Bullshit,” Stoppelman asked “What part of that is bullshit?”

Start-Ups Are Mining Hyperlocal Information for Global Insights (New York Times)
A picture of a pile of tomatoes in Asia may not lead anyone to a great conclusion other than how tasty those tomatoes may or may not look. But connect pictures of food piles around the world to weather forecasts and rainfall totals and you have meaningful information that people like stockbrokers or buyers for grocery chains could use.

Who Checks In Stores Before Buying Online? Everyone, Says One Study (Los Angeles Times)
Showrooming: it’s a tactic that 100% of consumers have used at least occasionally, according to a new study released weeks before the key Black Friday shopping scrum. In a recent study from CommerceHub, 43% of those people said they showroom once or twice a year, nearly 29% said they do it six times a year, 22% said they do it once a month and about 6% said they do it once a week.

More than Half of Mobile Phones Bought Worldwide Were Smartphones Last Quarter (AllThingsD)
Already the bulk of mobile phone sales in the United States, smartphones accounted for 55 percent of all new cellphone subscriptions globally, up from just 40 percent a year ago, according to a new report from Ericsson. Mobile broadband subscriptions (those on 3G and 4G networks) globally are expected to reach 2 billion this year and more than quadruple again by 2019.

Square Discontinues Monthly Flat-Rate Plan (AllThingsD)
Mobile payment startup Square has decided to discontinue its monthly pricing option on February 1, 2014. The company said its caps and rates weren’t working for their customers because businesses could only process up to $250,000 per year, after which they were required to pay the standard 2.75 percent rate.

Futurelytics Gets $800k From Index And More So That Small Enterprises Can Access Big Data, Too (TechCrunch)
Big data analytics has given large enterprises a way of analysing historical and real-time data to monitor their business’ performance, and to better predict what might happen next. Now, a startup out of central Europe called Futurelytics is hoping to be one of the leaders in the third piece of the big data puzzle: prescriptive analytics, or how to use the information gleaned from big data analysis to suggest what a company should change to improve performance.

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