Street Fight Daily: Apple Pay Coming to Mobile Web, DoorDash Moves Into Yelp Territory
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Apple Pay Moving to the Mobile Web, Could Give Big Boost to Mcommerce (Marketing Land)
According to a recent report, fingerprint-enabled Apple Pay is coming to mobile websites. One popular angle on this news is that the move will potentially cut into PayPal’s leadership position, but the more important potential impact is the acceleration of mobile commerce more broadly.
DoorDash Takes On Yelp, Offers ‘Objective’ Restaurant Quality Scores (VentureBeat)
DoorDash has released a new feature, “Delight score,” that rates the food delivery quality of the restaurants it works with. While this differs from Yelp’s ratings — DoorDash’s are based only on the delivery experience — the system is designed to be superior to Yelp’s on several counts. The DoorDash score boils down to food quality, which is a good part of what Yelp is trying to get at.
Microsoft Tells Possible Yahoo Buyers It Would Consider Backing Bids With Big Bucks (Recode)
According to numerous sources, Microsoft execs have been meeting with private equity firms mulling over bids to buy Yahoo and telling investors the company might be willing to lend significant financing to their efforts.
Promotions and Vacancies at Amazon, Nuts.com, and Gorilla Logic (Street Fight)
Every two weeks, Geoff Michener covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. This week, an internal promotion at Amazon and some new personnel changes at Delivery.com and Gorilla Logic.
Invisible Ads, Phantom Readers (The Economist)
Marketers worry that their ads will linger unseen in obscure slots or worse, be served to robots posing as human consumers. Meanwhile, millions of real ones, fed up with online ads, want to block them. Among investors, enthusiasm for “ad tech” has waned. Digital advertising’s woes are not existential. Spending will continue to grow. But the current turmoil is likely to reshape the industry.
Raise Report: New Funding for DoorDash, Handshake, GoCardless (Street Fight)
Every two weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes new cash infusions for Marley Spoon, Mattermark, and Loverly.
Instacart Is…Generating Profits? (Fortune)
According to Instacart’s founder and its top data scientist, the company is now “unit economic profitable” in 10 of its markets, which means that it makes money on average orders in several of its high-volume areas of operation. Those profits in mean that Instacart recently turned gross margin positive, contrary to recent skepticism about its viability.
Foursquare’s Swarm Is Now a Handy Life-Logging App (The Next Web)
Foursquare’s spinoff app, Swarm, has learned some tricks that should appeal to people who don’t see the point of mayorships, coins, and leaderboards. A number of new features have launched, including a map of your check-ins around the world and ‘The Weekly Swarm,’ which summarizes where your friends have been in the past seven days (popular events, trending places, trips, etc.).
Macy’s to Test Beacon Messages Outside App, Explore Retargeting (GeoMarketing)
Macy’s arrived relatively early to the beacon party, initially deploying roughly 4,000 Bluetooth devices across its 850 stores in 2014. Now the department store giant is looking to expand that reach with push notifications outside of its app, using them as a retargeting platform.
Google Is Working On an Amazon Echo Killer (Mashable)
The Amazon Echo has every major tech company kicking themselves for not thinking of it first. Not happy with being beaten, Google is reportedly working on its own version of the Echo. The one thing the Echo lacks is in-depth knowledge — while you can ask it to tell you the weather and call up an Uber, it can’t search the Internet. Google’s version could potentially integrate all the power of its search engine.
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