Street Fight Daily: Samsung’s Location-Aware Smartwatch, Hearsay Social Raises $30M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Samsung’s Galaxy Gear Is Location Aware, Sporting Glympse’s Friend-Finding App (GigaOm)
Samsung’s new Galaxy Gear will launch with 70 native apps, though the company highlighted only a handful of them at its big unveiling in Berlin and New York on Wednesday. Among those listed were exercise apps you’d expect in sporty wearables like MyFitnessPal and RunKeeper, as well as location-based apps like Glimpse, which allows you to temporarily transmit your location to anyone with an internet connection.
Is ‘The Road’ a Community News Model That Can Go the Distance? (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: What to make of the ambitious “The Road” project that C-Ville Weekly in Charlottesville, Va., presented last week on its website? Is this multimedia extravaganza a promising way for community sites to go in their Holy Grail-like quest for a news model that will engage users and attract advertisers — and make for a better community, to boot? Keep in mind that “The Road” consumed more than 300 hours of editorial and production time, but didn’t produce a single dollar of revenue.
Hearsay Social Raises $30 Million to Give Bankers an Online Presence (New York Times)
Hearsay Social, a startup offering for reaching sales leads and customers on social networks, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series C funding. The company has emphasized the idea of helping large companies manage the social media presence of their local branches, adding “dozens” of new customers including Raymond James, Mutual of Omaha, Bank of the West, Nationwide Insurance, Allianz Global Investors, Wunderlich Securities, and Modern Woodmen of America.
How to Find Great Salespeople for Your Hyperlocal Business (Street Fight)
Finding the right salespeople is one of the keys to success for any hyperlocal startup with plans to sell to local merchants, but identifying and hiring professionals with the right skillsets isn’t always as easy as it sounds. In an effort to bring some clarity to the issue, we checked in with five hyperlocal executives and asked about their strategies for finding salespeople who can effectively sell to local merchants. Here is their advice.
Mobile Close To 20 Percent of Internet Traffic Globally (MarketingLand)
According to data from StatCounter, mobile devices now drive almost 20 percent of all global Internet traffic. India is the most mobile-centric country in the world, with 61 percent of its Internet traffic coming via mobile devices, while Africa and Asia come in at 25% and 30% respectively.
Indoor Map Apps On the Rise as Aisle411 Raises $6.3M (Wall Street Journal)
A St. Louis startup with 15 employees, Aisle411, has just raised $6.5 million in Series A funding to help people find what they need in stores, especially at groceries, pharmacies, home improvement and big box retailers, says founder and Chief Executive Nathan Pettyjohn. In order to give directions to smartphone users in search of an item in stores, Aisle411 integrates with the inventory software used by retailers and uses proprietary data management systems and mapping engines.
Life360 Moves Beyond The Nuclear Family, Adding Social Features To Its Tracking App (ZDNet)
Life360 has always confined its location-sharing network to the family, but with a new feature called Circles, the company is opening your network up a broader group of friends and trusted users. Within those circles, members can send messages and check in to locations manually, but they don’t have automatic access to Life360’s core real-time location and geo-fencing features.
WunWun Opens To The Public And Begins Offering Free Deliveries From Any Manhattan Store (TheNextWeb)
WunWun, the startup that puts on-demand helpers at your service in New York City, has opened to the public and announced significant changes to its business model with the introduction of free delivery from any store in Manhattan. WunWun’s new pricing scheme is a bold one. Assuming it works, it’ll move the burden of cost onto vendors.