Street Fight Daily: Delivery Hero Raises $30M, Groupon Looks To High-End
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Delivery Hero Tops Up Series D With $30M As Its Global Take-Out Service Heads For Profit (TechCrunch)
While others in the online food delivery space stumble, Delivery Hero is helping itself to some fresh Series D funding today: the online take-out ordering service has announced $30 million in additional Series D funding. The move comes amid some consolidation among other online food delivery giants — specifically GrubHub and Seamless merging in the U.S.
When It Comes to Mobile Local Search and SMBs: Mind the Gap (Street Fight)
Michael Boland: Mobile is inherently local and thus conducive to location-based, high-intent user engagement, all of which appeals to many SMBs. B ut mobile also exacerbates their paradox of choice. That’s why there is a big opportunity for third parties to help SMBs get there. That can be marketing or SEO consultants, but the real opportunity is for the local media organizations with deep roots and existing relationships with SMBs.
Groupon Makes Bid To Reach High-End Customers (USA Today)
Groupon continues to regroup — or at least give doubting analysts and investors a reason not to take a bat to its battered image. The company has unfurled Groupon Reserve, a tool that lets consumers book reservations at high-end restaurants in 10 cities — including Boston, New York, Los Angeles and here — with discounts of 20% to 40%.
Why Cars Could Be the Next Big Platform for Local Search (Street Fight)
Ali Alami: Amid praise and criticism of the flatter design of Apple’s newest mobile operating system, the company quietly introduced a potentially transformative feature in iOS7: iOS in the Car. Pedestrian-friendly cities like New York and San Francisco may prove a fertile breeding grounds for local discovery apps like Foursquare, but it’s the suburban car-bound consumer that presents the biggest opportunity for local technology companies today.
Here’s A Heavy Dose Of Reality For New Mobile Payments Startup Clinkle (ReadWrite)
The founder of Crinkle, the payments concept that just raised $25 million in seed funding, is optimistic about his odds of disrupting mobile payments. He’ll soon learn that it’s much more complicated than it seems.
Street Fight’s 5 Most Popular Stories From the First Half of 2013 (Street Fight)
The first six months of 2013 has brought a whirlwind of developments in local, from massive fundraising to exciting new products, and of course a few stumbles. What have readers been most interested in to date? Innovation around point-of-sale systems has been hot-hot-hot. Social media strategies for brands and SMBs are also highly evolving and therefore closely read. And it’s hardly a surprise that readers glommed onto our look into where investment dollars may lie. Enjoy this look back at the stories you loved (or may have missed!).
Foursquare Explore is Amazing. But Only For a Very Small Group of People (PandoDaily)
Erin Griffith: I’m quickly wising up to the fact that Foursquare has built something excellent with Explore, but I am not convinced it will be enough to save the company. However, this doesn’t mean Foursquare is going to succeed. There are two problems.
New Technology a Hard Sell To Local Shops (Boston Globe)
The year is 2013, but for many local businesses, it might as well be 15 years earlier. Some local shops still don’t have websites, and those that do often simply list their phone numbers and operating hours, with a few photos. And yet a new crop of enthusiastic entrepreneurs is trying to help local merchants defend their businesses, at a moment when online shopping is booming.
An In-Depth Look At Google’s Massive Global Mapping Operation (Business Insider)
Since 2005, Google has mapped 28 million miles of road in 194 countries. And it won’t rest until the whole planet is on its servers. Tom Chivers reports on the mammoth operation and asks: is it ruining the way we travel?
Why Startups Are Raking Social Networking Offline (The Next Web)
“Networking has done a full circle,” says Kate Jackson, founder of TableCrowd. “Pre-2004 (before MySpace and Facebook), the world was predominantly offline. Today, around 32 million people in the UK now have an online profile. The trend we’re seeing now is online communities moving towards offline activities for their members.”
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