Street Fight Daily: Behind Foursquare’s Founder, Thrillist Expands Local Coverage

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

headshot-dennisWill Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley Finally Get It Right? (Fast Company)
Austin Carr: Crowley has spent more than a decade pursuing his dream of building the world’s social GPS. Some now wonder if Foursquare’s true Achilles’ heel might be that Crowley’s bet, his life’s work, has been flawed from the start: Maybe users simply don’t like sharing their location the same way they love sharing a photo or a status update.

How Will Jeff Bezos Redefine the Newspaper? (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: Amazon has always been a virtual marketplace, where the location of the buyer has very little to do with a transaction. Bringing the Bezos vision to bear on a community-oriented portal could mean any number of things, but it certainly means the potential for services that bear some resemblance to traditional journalism but are remediated into a form that takes advantage of digital commerce and social media, while maintaining a sense of local community.

Thrillist Expands, Becomes a Blend of Frommer’s and Foursquare (AdAge)
Thrillist Media Group will expand its local coverage from its current 21 markets to more than 65 cities by the end of 2014, adding add Montreal, New Orleans, Sydney, Rome and Berlin in the next two weeks. In addition, it is introducing a new vertical Thrillist Travel to organize that content for the site’s on-the-go audience.

As Local Media Shed Staff, Personal Franchise Sites Could Fill the Void (Street Fight)
Terry Heaton: The independent voice of the individual can make “the news” more personal, more compelling, and more exciting. The nuances of the trade can be taught, but people planted within the community with knowledge and perspective offer something that traditional media companies can’t or won’t. And linking local bloggers together is a viable concept.

Seamless and the Online-Takeout Trend Makes Restaurants Queasy (BusinessWeek)
As it gets easier to sell things and offer services, some businesses find it harder to make money doing so. Several years ago, when Groupon was the fastest-growing company in the history of the Internet, concern rose that retailers couldn’t live in a world of perpetual discounting. On a smaller scale, thanks to companies like Seamless, this is now playing out in the takeout joints of New York City.

With New Yelp Partnership, ReachLocal Puts (Some) Eggs in SaaS Basket (Street Fight)
Less than a month after Yelp rolled out a partnership with Delivery.com and Eat24 to bring online ordering to the reviews site, the company announced on Tuesday the addition of ReachCommerce, ReachLocal’s newly launched booking software, to the Yelp Platform. The partnership will allow users to process book appointments with service providers, which use the ReachCommerce software, without leaving the Yelp app or site.

Nielsen: U.S. Smartphone Penetration Now 62% (i2G)
Nielsen revised slightly upward its smartphone penetration data for the US market. The percentage of adults owning smartphones grew from 61% in the first quarter of 2013 62% of American adults a quarter later, according to Nielsen.

For Mobile Payments, Women Use Starbucks App, College Kids Use Venmo (GigaOm)
Paying with a phone has a long way to go with mobile users. Onavo Insights shared some data it gathered from users of its app over the past year to give a picture of how the biggest mobile payment apps are doing.

On Location With Foursquare (Dashes)
Anil Dash: Simply being a person obsessed with a particular class of problem doesn’t always mean that someone will be the one who brings it to large-scale adoption — just ask Nikola Tesla. But my bet is that Foursquare cracks the code on this before anyone else. To understand why, let’s take a look at what Foursquare really does today.

Marissa Mayer Appoints Former Google Zagat Head To Lead Flickr (GigaOm)
Marissa Mayer announced on Tuesday evening that Bernardo Hernández would be joining Yahoo as the new head of Flickr. Hernández formerly worked at Google with Mayer, where he was the managing director of Zagat, and oversaw the integration of the service into various Google products.

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