Street Fight Daily: Yahoo Faces Major Layoffs, Inside Uber’s ‘God Mode’ Privacy Battles

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

Yahoo Is Prepping to Lay Off 10% or More of Its Workforce (Business Insider)
Yahoo is working on a plan to cut at least 10 percent of its workforce, reducing its headcount by more than a thousand employees. While the cuts are expected to affect all parts of the company, Yahoo’s media business, European operations, and platforms-technology group could be hit particularly hard in the restructuring.

Uber Settles with New York Attorney General Over ‘God View’ Tracking Program (BuzzFeed)
Johana Bhuiyan: The New York Attorney General’s office is expected to announce the settlement its 14-month investigation of Uber’s privacy practices and the company’s use of a “God View” tool to track riders. The investigation was prompted by a series of BuzzFeed reports that revealed Uber New York’s general manager had used “God View” to track this reporter’s ride without permission.

‘Indie’ Local News Now Finds Profitability in Affluent-but-Challenging D.C. Market (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: 2015 was a big year for independent community news publisher Scott Brodbeck and his Local News Now sites in metro Washington, D.C. We checked in with Brodbeck to see what allows him to succeed in the tough business of community news.

GoButler, the Messaging-Based Personal Assistant, ‘Pauses’ Operations in Germany to Focus on U.S. (TechCrunch)
GoButler, the messaging­-based digital personal assistant that combines AI with human assistants to let you request anything on-demand, has exited the German market where it launched and relocated to New York to focus exclusively on U.S. expansion. Beyond the fact that the U.S. presents a larger market, this could be a recognition of the ongoing development of a big competitor: Facebook’s digital assistant, ‘M’.

Groupon Just Got a New Kind of ‘Star’ in Its Firmament (Chicago Business Journal)
Groupon is adding a new portal through which it will be able to access millions of potential customers. The company said its entire marketplace of local deals will now be available to drivers in General Motors cars that have OnStar, the in-car safety, security, navigation, and connectivity service.

5 Self-Service Predictive Analytics Platforms (Street Fight)
Vendors with business intelligence software are introducing more self-service platforms. Many of these platforms include predictive analytics capabilities that business owners can utilize to make smarter marketing and operations decisions.

Assist Has No App. It’s a Free Travel/Shopping Chat Bot for SMS and Facebook Messenger (TechCrunch)
You don’t care who delivers dinner or drives you home, as long as it gets done fast. That’s the idea behind Assist, a chat bot that aggregates APIs to let you text to interact with GrubHub, Eat24, Postmates, Uber, Lyft, OpenTable, StubHub, and more. The startup believes it can become a convenience layer between you and every on-demand service and product with an API.

After Two Years, Local Media Consortium Reaches 133M Uniques (GeoMarketing)
The Local Media Consortium, a group of more than 1,600 local media outlets, is telling national and regional advertisers that it can target a collective 133 million uniques a month, which amounts to 51.4 percent of the total U.S. population.

Ad Tech Is Merging with Mar Tech, But Who’s in Charge? (AdExchanger)
Ray Kingman: If technology is driving the union between marketing and advertising, who will end up steering the car? In a macro sense, data will be unified to the point where advertising will become a function of the marketing stack.

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