Street Fight Daily: Daily Voice Layoffs, Google Preps Same-Day Delivery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Daily Voice Closes Mass. Sites, Lays Off Some in Connecticut and New York (The Hour)
The daily voice, a local news site that first launched under the name Main Street Connect, said it would shutter its doors in Massachusetts and laid off some in Connecticut Monday. Several other reporters of the Daily Voice in Connecticut reached by The Hour Monday, said they were fighting for their jobs and would know more soon, or had been laid off.
Conference Notebook: Rethinking the Local ‘User Experience’ (Street Fight)
After four years of slowed growth, local advertising spend has finally rebounded to pre-2008 levels with digital revenues up 31% in 2012. Speaking at the Local Online Advertising Conference in New York Monday, Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, said that local online marketing spend will reach $24.5 billion by 2016, driven largely by growth in non-advertising marketing services.
Google Is Building A Same-Day Amazon Competitor, “Google Shopping Express” (TechCrunch)
Google is stealthily preparing to launch an Amazon Prime competitor called “Google Shopping Express.” According to one source the service will be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime, so $69 or $64 a year and offer same-day delivery from brick-and-mortar stores like Target, Walmart, Walgreens and Safeway (though no specifics were mentioned by our sources).
6 Post-Couponing Tools for Merchant (Street Fight)
Customer return rates on traditional coupons are notoriously low. So rather than saying goodbye to the customers they fought hard to acquire, SMBs are increasingly offering follow-up deals, known as “post-couponing.” Post-couponing platforms give businesses a way to drive incremental revenue by providing additional value to customers who have redeemed mobile coupons. Here are six platforms that provide post-couponing tools for businesses of all sizes.
These People are Likely Contenders to be Groupon’s Next CEO (Quartz)
Online deals site Groupon has to find itself a new CEO after firing Andrew Mason last week. And it will probably look for someone who is well versed in both overseas operations to manage (and probably cut) Groupon’s sprawling international team, and in e-commerce, to focus on the kind of business that probably lies in Groupon’s future.
Online Data Errors Cost US groups $10 Billion (Financial Times)
Missing listings, wrong telephone numbers, incorrect addresses and other mistakes in online information about businesses are costing US companies about $10.3bn in sales a year. Listings for about 14 per cent of all US businesses are completely missing from the internet, according to a joint study by Yext, a location marketing company, and internet analysts Mr Sterling and Andrew Shotland.
Navigation: Are We There Yet? (Economist)
Car navigation has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past few years—thanks, in large part, to the digital map-making skills of firms like NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas and especially Google. But it is social networks like Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter that have had the most pervasive influence on navigation of late.
FoodPanda, Rocket Internet’s Answer To GrubHub, Now Delivering Food In 25 Emerging Markets; Launches First Mobile App (TechCrunch)
Rocket Internet-backed FoodPanda, an online platform for aggregating and delivering food from take-out restaurants, has expanded into two more emerging markets and also launched its first mobile app on Android and iOS. The FoodPanda delivery service apes the likes of GrubHub in the U.S., or Just-Eat or Delivery Hero in Europe but in classic Rocket Internet style it’s taking the model to emerging markets.
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