Street Fight Daily: Pinterest Opens Ad Platform to SMBs, Thumbtack Sees $1B in Local Services Spending
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Pinterest Fully Opens Its Ad Spigot to Every Small and Medium-Sized Advertiser (Adweek)
Pinterest ads are getting more pointed: After 18 months of testing a self-serve platform that lets brands buy ads, the site is opening the tool to all small and midsize brands in the U.S.
$1B in Local Services Spending Runs Through Thumbtack (LSA Insider)
According to Jonathan Swanson, co-founder and president of Thumbtack, the early days of starting the company’s marketplace for local service providers were intimidating. But today the platform sees around $1 billion in spending on local services, and millions of investor dollars are validating its entrance into the market.
UrbanSitter Leverages Online Connections to Ensure Trust in Childcare (Street Fight)
Who can you trust to babysit your 5-year-old? For parents, finding someone reliable and trustworthy can be daunting. Urbansitter CEO Lynn Perkins grappled with these issues of trust and referral in growing her local commerce service into a national vertical player.
Facebook ‘Amazed by Volume of Valueless Inventory,’ Abandons New Ad Buying Platform (AdAge)
It’s understood that the digital ad ecosystem is awash in ad fraud, the sorts of scams where sketchy websites serve real ads to fake traffic and charge marketers real money. But its extent has surprised Facebook enough for the company to kill an important project: a buying platform in Atlas, its ad server. Instead of pursuing the platform further, Facebook has rolled out product updates to better connect offline sales with online ads.
When Will We Be Able to Say That Cashless Payments Have Finally ‘Arrived?’ (Street Fight)
Maeve McKenna Duska: The ubiquity of smartphones, new payment technology platforms, and ease of use have clearly caught the eye of many technology innovators and consumers. Is this the year that cashless payments will go mainstream?
Google’s Satellites Will Now Do Much More Than Update Your Maps (The Next Web)
Google likes maps. To make better maps, it bought Skybox Imaging, which helped keep Google’s satellite imagery up-to-date. Now Skybox is looking toward “pioneering the search for patterns of change in the physical world,” rebranding under a new name: Terra Bella. Terra Bella will work with “a wide array of geospatial data sources” to “transform raw imagery into data to help people and organizations make more informed decisions.”
5 Staffing Marketplaces for On-Demand Vendors (Street Fight)
The on-demand economy relies on a stream of self-employed workers who are willing to trade steady paychecks for flexibility and autonomy. But as the number of on-demand platforms increases, it’s becoming more of a challenge for companies to hold on to qualified workers.
Amount of ‘Near Me’ Mobile Searches Rising by Triple Digits (GeoMarketing)
Maybe it’s the ethos of the on-demand economy, or maybe it’s simply that it’s never been so easy to satisfy a whim to discover what’s around you via a few taps of a smartphone; either way, the growth of consumers using mobile to search for businesses in close proximity is rising exponentially.
More Layoffs Hit Groupon’s Restaurant Software Unit (BuzzFeed)
Breadcrumb, a restaurant software company owned by Groupon, has laid off about 25 employees (or close to one third of its entire staff), following another round of cuts last August. Breadcrumb’s staff has been almost halved in well under a year.
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