Street Fight Daily: DoorDash Can’t Reach $1B Valuation, Facebook Preps for Commerce
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
DoorDash May Be Latest Example of Valuation Pushback (Silicon Valley Business Journal)
DoorDash is reportedly close to raising more than $110 million in new funding, but not at the $1 billion valuation it wanted. According to sources, the pre-money valuation of the food delivery startup — which excludes the new money raised — is about $600 million. That’s the same valuation the business had when it last raised funds in March 2015.
How SMBs Can Use Data to Become More Efficient Marketers (Street Fight)
Without data to back up their performance claims, many vendors struggle to maintain a positive reputation. Here are six ways that small and mid-size businesses should be using data to improve their marketing efforts.
Why Facebook Believes It’s Ready for Commerce (eMarketer)
In the past year, Facebook has introduced a series of tools within Messenger and Pages that allow businesses to communicate one-to-one with customers and even process transactions. Here, an interview with Benji Shomair, director of product marketing for Pages, about these changes.
You Thought Uber Was Already Everywhere, But Just Wait (The Verge)
Uber’s first five years of existence were defined by its fights with government regulators. Now CEO Travis Kalanick said the next move will be to play nice with its former municipal foes. “There are a lot of ways cities can be planning better and benefiting from this kind of data,” he said. “The burden is on us to see how we can partner with cities. This will be an offshoot and something I expect to see a lot more of that in 2016.” But how these new partnerships will look remains unclear.
News and Ad Industries Eye Sweeping Realignment With Users — Part 2 (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: The Reynolds Journalism Institute and its collaborators believe the Information Trust Exchange is a systematic and entirely feasible improvement over the present patchwork identity processes that are ruining relationships among news publishers, advertisers, and users.
Shopify Debuts Shopkey, an App That Puts a Product Catalog in Your iOS Keyboard (TechCrunch)
A growing number of ecommerce businesses are assisting their customers over SMS and mobile messaging. Shopify is aiming to help its merchants better serve their customers via mobile messaging with the launch of a dedicated keyboard app, Shopkey, that offers instant access to product catalogs.
Retailers and Shoppers Are Pushing the Right Buttons on ‘Remote Control’ Commerce (GeoMarketing)
Following deals with OpenTable and Uber, Foursquare is diving deeper into the on-demand space by partnering with Delivery.com on a Postmates-like in-app courier service. The common denominator in these alliances is mobile loyalty and payments platform Button.
How Hyperlocal News Outlets Are Taking Shape Across the U.S. (American Press Institute)
Natalie Jomini Stroud: Recent research on hyperlocal outlets provides some interesting takeaways, including: banner ads are a mainstay of revenue, followed by grants; nonprofit outlets cover the news differently than for-profits; user-generated content is helpful, but separate. Keeping tabs on this evolving form of news can help us understand how local communities are being served.
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