Street Fight Daily: Uber’s Financials Leaked, Intuit Buys Docstoc
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.
Leaked: Uber’s Internal Revenue and Ride Request Numbers (ValleyWag)
Valleywag has obtained detailed internal financial information indicating that Uber, the e-hailing app that has spawned a hundreds of half-baked pitches, is making a lot more money than its investors had anticipated. The image shows raw numbers, including revenue, signups, active clients, and ride requests versus ride completions for the self-stylized bad boys of Silicon Valley between mid-October and mid-November of 2013.
Buttry Sees Progress for Digital First’s ‘New Model’ for Community News (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: Steve Buttry, the digital transformation editor at Digital First Media, began his career in community newspapers more than 40 years ago in Columbus, Ohio – as a teenage carrier. In the years since, he’s been a reporter, editor, and teacher of journalists around the world. These days, Buttry’s job is to complete the “print-to-digital transformation” of two slimmed-down “legacy” news media companies, Journal Register and MediaNews Group.
Intuit Acquires Docstoc To Broaden Its Offering To The Smallest Of Small Businesses (AllThingsD)
Intuit has acquired Docstoc, the electronic document service aimed at the sale and storage of a wide variety of documents for businesses. While the well-known Silicon Valley-based business-software company did not disclose the price it paid for the Los Angeles-area company, sources close to the situation said that it could reach $50 million, although it’s not clear if that price includes earn-outs to the staff of 50 Docstoc employees who will be joining Intuit. The unit will remain in Santa Monica, Calif., for now.
Watch Out Intuit — Booker Guns For Demandforce With New CRM Tools (Street Fight)
Eight months after raising a massive Series A round, Booker is making its push into a new, and potentially massive, market: CRM. Today, the New York-based company, which began selling booking and business management software to service businesses, rolled out Promote, a Demandforce-like product that allows businesses to tie email messaging and social media campaigns to the goings-on of their business.
NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide, Snowden Documents Show (Washington Post)
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency is gathering a massive amount of data about the location of millions of cell phones all over the world. The news, which contradicts the agency’s claims that it had only experimented with tracking but then abandoned the efforts, is likely to fuel the ongoing scandal over the U.S. government’s surveillance of phone and internet activity.
5 Keys to Making Location Work for Mobile Marketing (Street Fight)
Smartphones generate billions of bits of location data every day, creating an unprecedented opportunity for marketers to understand and engage with local consumers at scale. In a Street Fight webinar Wednesday sponsored by YP, Patrick Dolan of the IAB joined David Petersen of Sense Networks and YP’s Luke Edson to discuss the trends that make location data a must for mobile marketing, and outline a handful of ways advertisers can use big data to unlock local relevance in their campaigns.
iBeacons Used To Deliver Location-Based Access To iOS Newsstand Publications (TechCrunch)
iBeacon, Apple’s hyperlocal trigger tech in iOS 7, is an innovation that holds a lot of promise, and that will probably continue to make waves in the retail industry for a long time to come. One London-based company is using it in a slightly more novel way, employing them to help sell subscriptions to digital magazines.
Why Twitter Should Focus On Even More Local Features (TheNextWeb)
Jonathon Barouch: While Twitter has experimented with location-based features in the past, we haven’t seen many new features to support location in the last 12 months. In the future though, this is most certainly going to change. Location adds a rich layer of content and data to Twitter which it can’t ignore. Here are a few areas where location can impact Twitter.
‘Story First, Maps Second’ (New York Times)
Caterina Fake, a co-founder of the websites Flickr and Hunch, tells this one about her new venture, Findery, a location-based website that lets users post notes, photos and videos of the places they have visited. As Findery introduces its mobile app globally early next year, Ms. Fake said she hopes that people will flock to it not only to record their memories of places but also to learn new stories about them.
AmEx Now Allows You To Apply Your Reward Points To Everyday Purchases Via Your Mobile Phone (TechCrunch)
AmEx has made a fairly significant improvement to its points redemption system, via the financial institution’s mobile app. So all those points that AmEx users rack up when swiping their card or making online purchases, can now actually be automatically used right after the transaction for a designated purchase.
Clinkle Nabs More Former Netflix Execs For Leadership Roles (GigaOm)
Clinkle, a mobile payments startup that remains perhaps the most high-profile company in Silicon Valley with an unreleased product, has done it again: After tapping former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy for a COO role in October, the company has added Netflix’s erstwhile Qwikster head Andy Rendich as VP of Operations and HR hotshot Allison Hopkins as VP of Talent.
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