Street Fight Daily: Glympse Invades the Dash, LivingSocial Settles Suit
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Glympse Brings Its Location Sharing to BMW and MINI Vehicles (New York Times)
Glympse is part of a wave of smartphone apps breaking free of small screens to get onto dashboard displays so they become a bigger part of people’s lives. BMW’s effort to integrate Glympse into its cars, a deal being announced this week in New York, is a good example of how car and app makers are working together.
6 Things I Learned About Local By Failing in Local (Street Fight)
Luke Stangel: I remember the bright-eyed conversation I had with Ed Lucero that sparked Tackable. It was 2009, and Instagram was being born somewhere else. The iPhone was brand new, and developers were racing to build apps that captured the power of local information. There are two worlds out there, I told Ed, the physical world and the digital world. Overlay the two, and things get interesting.
LivingSocial Ordered to Pay $4.1 Million To Settle Class Action Suit (Fast Company)
The judge in a class-action suit against LivingSocial ruled the single payment settles claims of 11 million customers that the daily-deals site violated federal and state law. The suit claimed that a LivingSocial deal would be announced, exceed sales expectations, the business would be overwhelmed by customers, and it would become impossible to redeem the deal in the weeks or months allotted.
Case Study: Walmart Expands Mobile Efforts With Scan & Go App (Street Fight)
The retail giant isn’t trying to dissuade customers from using their smartphones while they shop. In fact, the retailer is beefing up the carrier signals inside its stores to make it easier for customers to get online. Instead, the company is combating the threat of showrooming by encouraging customers to fill their screens with its own mobile application.
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New Yelp Revenue Estimate Feature Misleads Merchants (CoPilot)
Eli Chait: Recently, Yelp started to estimate the value of this activity by guessing the average revenue per lead for the business and multiplying it by the number of leads generated by the Yelp page. Unfortunately, this revenue estimation feature grossly overestimates the value of Yelp.
Walmart to Test In-Store Locker Service (AllThingsD)
Walmart will soon install lockers for in-store item pickup in a number of its physical locations, joining a number of major companies in combining online shopping with brick-and-mortar establishments. The move follows a larger trend of trying to bridge the divide between digital and physical, aiming to better capture the portion of the general public who continue to shop online and don’t necessarily enjoy the in-store browsing and shopping experience.
About those ‘Glory Days of American Journalism’ (Columbia Journalism Review)
Steven Waldman: Matt Yglesias has more or less conceded that there is a flaw in his argument—that we are living in the “Glory Days of American Journalism,” as the headline of his piece in Slate put it last week. “Ignore the doomsayers,” the subhead advised. “The news-reading public has never had more and better information at their fingertips.” The boo boo was that he forgot about state and local coverage.
Sometimes You have to Smother Your Hubris to Succeed — Just Ask Yelp (Fast Company)
Back in 2003, Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons were in an enviable position. They were junior members of the Paypal Mafia–think Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin. More than that, they had a great idea for changing the way people discovered awesome stuff around them–a site called Yelp–that would capture the way we naturally make recommendations. Then their users fled. Here’s what they learned in the process.
Start Me Up! A profile of Grafetee (eConsultancy)
Launched last year, Grafetee is a mobile app which enables anyone to create a location-based service in minutes for web and mobile devices. eConsultancy caught up with founder Juha Huttunen to discuss the products evolution and its plans to dominate the market.
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