Street Fight Daily: Google Plans Uber Competitor, Layoffs at eBay and PayPal

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

google Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor (Bloomberg)
Uber faces an ever-growing cast of adversaries that includes dubious regulators, litigious drivers, and some well-funded rivals. But the most significant threat to the app-based transportation company may be much closer to home: one of its biggest investors, Google.

How Mobile Has Reshaped Google’s Product Strategy For SMBs (Street Fight)
James Croom, the head of marketing for Google My Business, spoke with Street Fight recently about why he believes small business adoption of the web has been slower than expected, and what he’s learned about building products for merchants.

Big Layoffs Begin at eBay and PayPal (Recode)
Some of the PayPal employees who lost their jobs held roles in the division that focuses on getting restaurants and small business retail stores to accept PayPal as a payment method. Another example: PayPal’s in-store beacon product, which was announced in September of 2013, still hasn’t launched widely.

Dstillery VP: Mobile is a ‘Programmatic-First’ Platform (Street Fight)
Street Fight recently caught up with Lauren Moores, vice president of analytics at marketing tech firm Dstillery, to talk about location data fraud, the role of location in programmatic, potential impact of Apple Pay and emerging attribution models.

Analyst Gordon Borrell Sees Local Digital Ads Soaring In 2015, But Not For Newspapers (Poynter)
Borrell, among the best known of digital advertising analysts, was predicting two years ago that the newspaper business would stabilize, with some companies growing their digital revenues 30 percent a year. Now he has reversed course, predicting another boom year for local digital advertising in 2015.

Foursquare Loses Its CTO Amid Flurry Of Other Departures (The Verge)
Employee number one at Foursquare, Chief Technology Officer Harry Heymann, has left the company. His departure comes soon after Foursquare’s long-standing spokesman Brendan Lewis quit, as well as COO Evan Cohen and head of business development Holger Luedorf.

Mobile Users Spend 80 Percent Of Time In Just Five Apps (Marketing Land)
A new report finds that smartphone owners “use an average of 24 apps per month but spend more than 80 percent of their time on just five apps.” Whether or not it’s literally five, this is directionally correct; consumer app time is concentrated in just a few popular apps.

Alibaba and Lending Club Partner to Give Loans to American Small Businesses (Recode)
Lending Club’s strategy for courting small businesses looking for a loan is becoming clear. Two weeks after the online lending platform announced a deal with Google to allow Google partners to secure loans on Lending Club, the company is unveiling a relationship with Alibaba that could appeal to American small businesses.

10 Common Mistakes to Avoid On Local Websites (Search Engine Land)
Now that Pigeon has rolled out to Canada, Australia, and the UK, it’s clearly here to stay, and the Pigeon posts are still crowding everyone’s news feeds. Business owners want answers, so they’re doing anything they can to figure out the “next best thing” for Local SEO.

How Uber, Foursquare, and Other Apps Might Look on the Apple Watch (Wired)
Tim Cook promises the Apple Watch will ship in April. A group of impatient indie designers couldn’t wait that long to offer a glimpse of what Uber, Foursquare and other apps might look like on the device.

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