Street Fight Daily: Amazon’s Deals, Groupon Told to ‘Grow Up’

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

Amazon Starts Bringing the Art of Recommendations to Daily Deals (AllThingsD)
Amazon is taking its first step in bringing the recommendation technology that the e-commerce site is known for to the daily deals space. The company is helping customers build a profile that lets them say what they like, dislike or are neutral about based on a number of categories.

Groupon Must Avoid Taking ‘Stupid Risks,’ CEO Says (Wall Street Journal)
Groupon’s Chief Executive Andrew Mason told the company’s employees on Wednesday that the daily-deals site needs to grow up, right after he apologized for drinking too much beer. “We’re still this toddler in a grown man’s body in many ways,” Mr. Mason said during the closed-door employee meeting.

Google Releases Playbook for ‘Winning With Mobile’ (TechCrunch)
As Google continues to push businesses to embrace mobile advertising, it’s trying to make that process a little less intimidating with a new publication titled “The Mobile Playbook: The Busy Executive’s Guide to Winning with Mobile.” It’s a nice distillation of how Google thinks businesses should build their mobile strategies.

Are Robots and Content Farms the Future of the News? (GigaOm)
Mathew Ingram: Newspapers like the Tribune that make use of a content-farm style approach need to be aware of what they are getting — asking for dozens of stories a day can tend to reduce the quality to an unacceptable level.

More Visibility on Local Search Numbers from Chitika (ScreenWerk)
Greg Sterling: In Chitika’s recent survey, 36% of search traffic driven by iOS devices is local (sometimes this was inferred by Chitika by looking at the nature of the query). By the same token, 28% of search traffic coming from Android devices carries a local intent. The iOS number is very close to Google’s 40% figure for mobile.

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