Street Fight Daily: eBay Spins Off PayPal, Waze Crowdsources Places
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology]
EBay to Spin Off PayPal With New CEOs for Two Publicly Traded Companies (Recode)
After resisting activist shareholder pressure to do so earlier this year, online commerce giant eBay said it plans to separate its eBay e-commerce business from its PayPal payments unit, creating two independent publicly traded companies. CEO John Donahoe will step down as the company’s top operating executive and join one or both of the boards of the two new companies.
At GoDaddy, CEO Searches for a New Domain (Street Fight)
Blake Irving has an ambitious plan to turn GoDaddy into a much larger, and more profitable, company. The strategy begins with the company’s 12 million domain customers and ends with a constellation of concentric services intended to serve an increasingly entrepreneurial, and distributed, global economy.
With Places (and Your Help), Waze Mapping Gets Smarter On Android And iOS (GigaOm)
Taking the same crowd-sourcing approach it applied to traffic, the Waze mobile app is going to improve the quality of information about local businesses and residences. The app has a new feature called Places which gathers crowd-sourced data to help the community, and likely Google Maps too. The idea is that if everyone adds details about the places they visit, the whole community benefits.
How Y Combinator Grad Estimote Plans to Turn Beacons in a Big Business (Street Fight)
When Estimote graduated from Y Combinator in July of 2013, the startup was riding one of the hottest trends in tech: beacons. By the end of the year, the company had raised $3.1 million to turn its fist-sized adhesive proximity beacons into an “operating system for the physical world.”
Yelp and Tripadvisor Launch Joint Campaign Against Google (Financial Times)
Yelp and TripAdvisor have launched a joint assault on Google, as the rivals step up lobbying efforts against the technology group in Brussels. The two US internet companies are behind “Focus on the user”, a campaign to be launched on Tuesday aimed at highlighting how Google links to its own reviews and recommendations.
United’s Deal With Uber Raises Concerns (New York Times)
United Airlines has been reprising its old advertising slogan about the “friendly skies.” But some airports think the airline was a bit less than friendly when it formed a partnership with the ride-sharing company Uber without seeking airport input.
‘Smart Cities’ Should Mean ‘Sharing Cities’ (Time)
Julian Agyeman: When the smart city movement focuses on technology rather than people, smart quickly becomes stupid, threatening to exacerbate inequality and undermine the social cooperation essential to successful cities. We’ve concluded that truly smart cities will be those that deploy modern technology in building a new urban commons to support communal sharing.
Startup Brings URL Shorteners to Physical Addresses (Wired)
Head abroad, and the list-like names combined with the language barrier can make tracking down your location just a bit more challenging. Locname, created by three Egyptian entrepreneurs, wants to solve such problems with a service that is essentially a URL shortener for your physical address — be it your home, or place of business.
WI-FI Tracking: When Sniffing Becomes Snooping (Huffington Post)
Joe Ross: The practice of Wi-Fi Sniffing is something we expect to see more of in the coming years. It will be interesting to see how legal and ethical privacy issues develop around this practice and whether companies and consumers will find a balance between honoring privacy and the benefits associated with knowing what a consumer wants.
SMB Social Headache: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Now Ello? (Local Search Insider)
Ello is hot right now (partly because of scarce invitations) and could gain additional momentum in light of the re-launch of Atlas, Facebook’s newly revamped ad-serving platform that promises better targeting and measurement for advertisers. The larger point is that Ello could become yet another social network to pay attention to over the course of the next year.
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