Street Fight Daily: How Waze Will Scoop Up Driver Data, News Orgs Stick by Platforms

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

Waze Digs Into Your Car’s Dashboard (Wired)
The crowdsourced traffic and navigation app owned by Google is joining the SmartDeviceLink Consortium and working with automakers and developers on open source protocols for connecting smart phones to cars. This gives Waze — and therefore Google – a lot more data about you, your habits, and your car.

Survey: Merchants Gain Social Media Sophistication, Rate It Most Effective Tactic (Street Fight)
David Card: Over the past several years, Street Fight has seen these local merchants shift their marketing budgets away from traditional media like newspapers, print Yellow Pages, and local broadcast towards digital marketing and media. That trend continues in a new survey that we conducted earlier this year.

Report: Despite Monetization Concerns, News Orgs Are All In On Platforms (Nieman Lab)
News organizations may differ in how much they’re investing in platform-native publishing, but few if any are pulling out entirely. One winner is Instagram, which has become a popular publishing platform for news organizations.

Zuckerberg Raises the Right Questions — Local News Should Answer Them (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: Mark Zuckerberg posted a remarkable manifesto on Feb. 16 about our fractured communities and how to heal them. But why was Facebook’s founder and CEO saying this first? Why aren’t America’s news publishers, especially local ones, defining the crisis and offering their blueprints for solving it?

If Anyone’s Going to Buy Directly from a Chatbot, It’s Millenials (eMarketer)
There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding chatbots in retail, though this may be based more on hype than actual usage. But if there’s one particular group of adults likely to use chatbots for shopping-related activities, it’s millennials. 

Can See-Now-Buy-Now Save Department Stores? (Digiday)
Department stores are doing their part to make sure their available merchandise matches what customers are buying: Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Macy’s are all speeding up the production processes for their private labels, to get items on the sales floor faster.

Open Garden Launches MeshKit to Expand Peer-to-Peer Offline Smartphone Connectivity (VentureBeat)
“Offline is the new frontier,” said Paul Hainsworth, Open Garden’s CEO, in a statement. “App developers worldwide can now reach audiences even when they are disconnected from the internet to share rich media, enable offline transactions, and grow the number of their users in an unprecedented way.”

Who’s Afraid of Location Data? (MediaPost)
Offer Yehuda: With most brands now adopting mobile, it’s become essential to use location data to more effectively connect with customers. Location data doesn’t simply indicate where users are. It can be used to provide insights about audience segments and their preferences.

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