Street Fight Daily: Google Debuts Assistant, Investors Losing Interest in Delivery

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

Meet Google Assistant: A New Search Platform, Rather Than A Gadget or an App (Search Engine Land)
Think of it as Google 2.0. Google assistant is Google’s search smarts put into anything, no keyboard needed and conversations welcomed. Both the newly announced Google Home and Allo messaging app will bring along Google assistant smarts.

Investors Are Losing Their Appetite for Food Delivery Startups (Business Insider)
Grocery and restaurant delivery companies raised $609 million in the first quarter of the year, down from $2 billion for the final quarter of 2015. CB Insights’ data show that food delivery startups are set to raise half as much money in 2016 as they did in 2015.

Swirl Looks to Close the Digital Divide Between E-Commerce and Physical Stores (Street Fight)
Pushing back against a shifting tide and changing consumer behavior won’t be easy, but executives at in-store digital marketing technology provider Swirl believe they can change the way consumers shop. Hilmi Ozguc, Swirl’s CEO, says the key will be arming physical retailers with the same datasets as e-commerce giants.

Stop Thinking That Programmatic is the Future of Online Advertising (Recode)
Eric Holmen: Many say that programmatic reached a tipping point in 2015, because for the first time last year, programmatic transactions surpassed non-search digital ad spending. That’s an important milestone, but there’s still a big gap for marketers who want to automate the ad buying process. The customer journey — especially for considered purchases — rarely happens entirely online.

Pasadena Now: 20 Articles Daily and 75 Advertisers But Big Challenges As Well (Street Fight)
“We built an online community newspaper the old-fashioned way — with daily deadlines, plenty of shoe leather and a grueling schedule of personally attending dozens of community events every month,” publisher James Macpherson says about his 12-year-old local news site.

Zenly Proves That Location Sharing Isn’t Dead (TechCrunch)
When you open the app, you see a giant map with your location and your friends’ location. You can tap on a friend’s picture and see exactly where they are. Or you can just aimlessly swap through your friends and jump around the map. This is Zenly’s core feature.

You Can Now Use Android Pay to Get Cash From ATMs (Mashable)
Android Pay now supports card-free ATM transactions at Bank of America. The update puts Google ahead of its US competition — neither Apple Pay nor Samsung Pay supports ATM transactions yet, though both companies have announced plans to support the feature.

Google Just Launched a New Messaging App That ‘Learns’ About You as You Use It (Business Insider)
Allo works with Assistant. Users can simply message “@google” to chat with the smartbot in an existing conversation with a friend or just send a message to themselves to talk to it alone. For example, if users wanted to pick a place to go out to eat with a friend, they could ask Google Assistant to suggest local places.

What Leads Consumers to Shop for Groceries Digitally? (eMarketer)
Nearly a third of US grocery buyers said they would shop for more groceries digitally if the prices were better than they were in-store. But the same April 2016 research also found that almost a quarter of respondents said they would never shop online for groceries digitally.

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