Street Fight Daily: Kayak to Debut Restaurant Search, How Brands Can Use Chatbots Effectively
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Kayak to Launch Restaurants, Tours, and Activities Comparison-Shopping Features (Skift)… Can Brands Turn Real-Time Facebook Messenger Chats into Meaningful Engagements? (Mobile Marketer)… Ride-Hailing Start-Ups Compete in ‘Uber for Children’ Niche (New York Times)…
The Good and Bad of Local Discovery on Our Summer Road Trip
Greetings from a summer road trip in the Pacific Northwest. Amid games of twenty questions and alphabet animals, we have faced the typical needs of the traveler: shelter, food, gas, and fun. Naturally, we’ve turned to local search, just like the other 31% of leisure travelers (up from 18% in 2010). I’ve written mainly about local search on the homefront and travel is another kind of use case entirely, one that in many ways has been “solved” by existing services — but has it? In our experience, you often have to be creative to get what you need…
BiteHunter Launches In-App Payments for Restaurant Deals
BiteHunter, the year-old dining deals aggregator pitched as a “Kayak for restaurants,” has updated its mobile application with an in-app payment platform and a rehashed user interface. In early March, the company effectively dropped its web offering, focusing its product exclusively on the mobile experience…
CityMaps Releases Mobile App, Wants to Be Kayak for Places Info
After spending three months in a web-only beta, social mapping service CityMaps is making its move to mobile. The New York-based company has released its first mobile app on iOS this morning and has announced its expansion to San Francisco and Austin. The service is essentially a Kayak for local information, aggregating local signals from sites like Yelp, Twitter, and Foursquare as well as commerce companies like OpenTable, Fandango, and handful of daily deal sites…