Street Fight Daily: Voice Takes Center Stage at CES, Pizza Hut Bets on Self-Driving Future of Delivery

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

Marketers Are Racing to Reach Rapidly Growing Audiences on Echo and Google Home (AdWeek)
Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home—with their rapidly expanding sets of AI skills and services—will be completely unavoidable for the 180,000 expected attendees at this week’s annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

6 Self-Service Location Intelligence Solutions (Street Fight)
By opening their platforms up as self-service solutions, location intelligence firms are hoping to provide clients with more open access and to inspire creativity in using existing tools in new and innovative ways. Here are six examples of vendors providing location intelligence capabilities to clients through a self-service model.

Pizza Hut, Toyota Team Up for Pizza Delivery in Driverless Vehicles (MediaPost)
In addition to the Toyota partnership, Pizza Hut became one of the founding members of a new ‘mobility services business alliance’ that also includes Amazon, Mazda, Uber and Didi, Uber’s Chinese rival.

Vox Media Takes a Measured Approach in Growing Its Programmatic Marketplace (Digiday)
Most ad tech platforms blindly chase scale when growing their business, but Vox Media is taking a more careful approach in expanding its programmatic marketplace.

Viacom Acquires WhoSay, Influencer-Marketing Firm Incubated by CAA (Variety)
Viacom has acquired influencer-marketing company Whosay, in a bid to bulk up its ability to sell social-media campaigns to advertisers and brands.

Facebook’s Virtual Assistant M is Dead. So Are Chatbots (Wired)
Erin Griffith and Tom Simonite: It’s difficult to remember now, but there was a moment in early 2016 when many in the tech industry believed chatbots — automated text-based virtual assistants — would be the next big platform. AdExchanger: How CollegeHumor created a successful Facebook Watch show.

Here’s Who Controls Uber After Its Megadeal with SoftBank (Recode)
Uber this month will consummate a series of changes to its power structure as it prepares to accept billions of dollars from the giant Japanese telecom, SoftBank.

August Access, In-Home Delivery Solution, Opens to All Retailers (TechCrunch)
The service — launching first in the US — is getting a new branding today, and a new platform open for business, but it is not completely new: it’s an extension of a service August first announced with Walmart in September, just weeks before its acquisition.

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Joe Zappa is the Managing Editor of Street Fight. He has spearheaded the newsroom's editorial operations since 2018. Joe is an ad/martech veteran who has covered the space since 2015. You can contact him at [email protected]