Street Fight Daily: Weather Channel Partners with Lyft, Alphabet Seeks Public Legal Fight with Uber

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

The Weather Channel Lets You Request a Lyft When Bad Weather Strikes (VentureBeat)
This integration syncs your calendar with the forecasts based on where you are to help make an informed decision on how to get to your next appointment — if it’s raining, you might want to use Lyft instead of walking, for example.

How Samsung’s Forthcoming Galaxy S8 Could Change Local Marketing (Street Fight)
The new smartphone promises increased opportunities to bring local marketers closer to consumers with a new “intelligent interface” for a more interactive mobile experience. Bixby, the phone’s voice assistant, has “contextually aware” capabilities that can help personalize location, retail, and other user experiences.

Alphabet Wants Its Lawsuit Against Uber to Play Out Publicly (Recode)
The company filed an opposition request late last night to Uber’s motion for arbitration. If the case went to arbitration, an alternate form for dispute resolution, it would remain in private.

CloudSponge: Soaking Up Your Contacts to Connect You Anywhere (Street Fight)
The startup is touting tremendous success for at least one company using their service: local (under the radar) giant, Nextdoor, has seen a significant uptick in growth since deploying CloudSponge’s technology. How? We talked with Jay Gibb, the company’s CEO, to find out.

Twitter is Expanding Its Video Measurement Partnerships to Help Marketers Gauge Ad Performance (AdWeek)
Twitter is adding more companies to its roster of third-party measurement partners, which it says will help brands better verify audience segments and video ad viewability.

Facebook Faces Increased Publisher Resistance to Instant Articles (Digiday)
Many publishers are deeply unhappy with the monetization on these pages, with major partners like The New York Times throwing in the towel and many others cutting back the amount of content pushed to the IA platform.

Conquering Mobile: What Marketers Should Master This Year (MediaPost)
Maggie Mesa: Marketers understand the importance of creating advertising that’s designed for mobile users from the start. Here are three more ways marketers should approach mobile to thrive in a mobile-first world…

Sprinklr Launches Major Push Into Customer Experience (TechCrunch)
Sprinklr, the unicorn startup with a valuation of $1.8 billion, announced a major update today, which shifts the company’s focus from a pure social signals platform to customer experience management. 

Retail is Dead! Long Live Retail! (LSA Insider)
Brett Knobloch: It wasn’t that long ago that most retail prognosticators were still talking about how small online was a percentage of total retail. So how did we get to the “retail is dead” narrative so fast? 

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