Street Fight Daily: FTC Zeroes In On Google, Postmates Updates
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Google Under Crosshairs for Antitrust Allegations, Case Expected (PC Mag)
New reports released late Friday by Reuters indicate that the FTC is focusing its laser-like sights on Google for a possible antitrust case – and by possible, we mean, “most assuredly likely.” The issue at hand stems from allegations that Google artificially punishes competitors’ search results in its own listings, causing audiences to be more likely to flock to Google’s own products – like, say, Google-based reviews of local businesses instead of a site like Yelp.
Postmates Updating Its App To Go After The Grocery Market With Deeper Supermarket Integration (TechCrunch)
Postmanes is expanding to also help users feed themselves at home, with an update to its app that provides fast delivery of groceries as well. Postmates users can already request delivery of grocery store items through its existing app, but there’s a catch — you have to actually know what you want before placing an order.
No More Daily Deals, New Digital Newspaper Focus for Trinity Mirror (Paid Content)
He quit HMV’s digital turnaround. Now new Trinity Mirror CEO Simon Fox says the UK news publisher must become leaner and abort its new Groupon clone to fund better apps and websites for its newspapers.
Why OpenStreetMap will beat Google and Apple (Venture Beat)
Marcus Thielking: Apple (hey now), Wikipedia (of course), and Foursquare have recently integrated Open Street Map into their services, and it’s a trend that will only continue with Google charging high-volume users of its Maps APIs (Google has walked this back a bit, though, hoping to preclude defections). OpenStreetMap is, as they say, the future.
Gannett: Changing the Game in Online Ads (NetNewsCheck)
Media companies need to think beyond the banner and focus on ads that become part of the content in users’ experience, according to David Payne, chief digital officer for Gannett, where the focus is shifting away from banners and direct response to full-screen video and rich media and the power of branding.
Will hyperlocal content save us? Not by itself (INMA)
At the INMA Audience Summit in Chicago in early October, two speakers underscore the idea that hyperlocal isn’t the end in itself. Rather, it’s hyper-relevance — wherever that happens to be geographically.
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