Street Fight Daily: Uber Plans Delivery Platform, Foursquare’s Brain Drain
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Uber Is Quietly Testing a Massive Merchant Delivery Program (TechCrunch)
Uber is planning to launch a merchant delivery program that would allow online shoppers to get same-day delivery of goods through both UberRush couriers and Uber drivers. Sources say that Neiman Marcus, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s, Cohen’s Fashion Optical and Hugo Boss are all in talks with the Uber Merchant Delivery program.
The Secret to Nextdoor’s Billion-Dollar Valuation: Friction (Street Fight)
Nextdoor wasn’t the first company to build a local social network — but it was the first to make one work. We recently caught up with Dan Clancy, VP of product and engineering at Nextdoor, to talk about why a difficult on-boarding process helped the company set itself apart, how it plans to monetize and why the company is betting on the “local graph.”
Foursquare Has a New Problem: Employees are Checking Out (Mashable)
The company has lost more than two dozen employees over the last year — and several key members of its engineering team just in the last few months. “If an employee hasn’t left, it is mostly because they haven’t found the right next gig,” said a source familiar with Foursquare’s internal matters.
5 Predictive Analytics Tools for SMBs (Street Fight)
The idea of using predictive analytics for small business marketing is still in its infancy. But the market is growing as small business owners become more comfortable integrating these technologies into their business practices. Here are five vendors with predictive analytics tools that SMBs can use.
Most Shoppers Happy to Share Location Data with Retailers, But Want More Regulation on How It Is Used (Internet Retailing)
The majority of shoppers are happy to share their location data with third parties such as retailers, but almost all of them fear that companies are not taking adequate steps to ensure the responsible use of the data – and regulations are inadequate to police it.
The SMB Marketing Mix Is Social, Email and SEO — In That Order (Screenwerk)
Interestingly when asked about effectiveness paid search is not as far behind SEO as it when small businesses are asked about usage. Another observation: blogging and content marketing are fairly widely used but not thought to be particularly effective. Same with online yellow pages.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm a Week Later: Was It Really Mobilegeddon? (Marketing Land)
A week after the launch, has Mobile-geddon really been such a significant update? Thus far, not really. There are several SEO metric companies tracking the update and for the most part, they are not seeing huge shifts in the Google mobile ranking algorithm, just yet.
Behind the Scenes at Maple, the David Chang-backed, Delivery-only Restaurant of the Future (Fast Company)
The service, at first, sounds like any of the dozen or so apps that already promise restaurant delivery. But while Seamless simply conveys your order to a restaurant, and startups like Postmates and DoorDash dispatch delivery people to pick it up, Maple controls the entire process.
Google Now Becomes Way More Useful With Support for 70 More Apps (Mashable)
Google is expanding its Android-based predictive search service’s capabilities to include 70 more third-party apps, the company announced Tuesday. In adding more third-party services, Google’s Android app can now pull data from more than 100 different services.
The CEO of MCX, the Retail Group Behind an Apple Pay Competitor, Is Out (Recode)
MCX has a new CEO and the mobile payment app it is developing hasn’t launched publicly yet. The consortium of retailers, whose members include Walmart, Target and Kohl’s, announced on Tuesday that CEO Dekkers Davidson is being replaced by banking veteran Brian Mooney.
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