Street Fight Daily: Walmart Tests In-Store Pickup, LivingSocial’s Future

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.

walmart+logoWalmart Begins Testing Online Grocery Shopping With Local Store Pickup Option In Denver (TechCrunch)
Walmart To Go, the retailer’s on-demand shopping service offering home delivery of general merchandise is expanding its test in the Denver market today to also include a local pick-up option. Denver area customers will now be able to order their groceries online, then pick up at a nearby store – without having to set foot inside the store.

How the Internet of Things Could Spawn a New Kind of Analytics (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: A new set of technology companies are working to help transform the way businesses understand consumer behavior in the real world. Powering these new technologies is a burgeoning web of connected devices — from smartphones and thermostats to wireless routers and traffic cameras — that constantly collect a river of information about their surroundings.

Despite Its Woes, CMO Barry Judge Sees A Future For LivingSocial (Forbes)
A consumer shift away from the once-hot daily-deals market, financial losses, layoffs, office closings and executive departures — most recently the announcement that CEO Tim Shaughnessy would be leaving — had left LivingSocial reeling. But Judge is hopeful that the past year’s work to reset the company and its marketing, as well as a cash infusion, has righted the company on a path for growth.

As Online Shopping Booms, Will Amazon End Up Supporting SMBs (Street Fight)
Patrick Kitano: Amazon and the other large e-tailers and big box chains that have squeezed smaller retailers need to demonstrate a commitment to sustaining local retail as a community service. Amazon has won over the consumer, their next challenge is to win over the small business community simply by helping them making more money.

Google’s Newest Secret Weapon For Local Ads (Digiday)
Unlike other recent billion-dollar Google acquisitions, crowdsourced navigation app Waze has potential to be a near-term moneymaker. After spending 2013 convincing brands to run test campaigns on its platform, Waze’s head of U.S. sales Jordan Grossman is spending the first part of 2014 locking them in for extended ad deals with the promise that it can often drive people right to a marketer’s doorstep.

Pew Study Shows Local TV news Still the ‘Top News Source’ (Poynter)
Local TV news continues to be the leading news source for Americans, according to a study released Tuesday by Pew Research Center, with almost three out of four U.S. adults watching local television news, compared with 65% viewing network newscasts and 38% cable news over the course of a month.

Battle of the Local-Mobile Ad Networks (Screenwerk)
Greg Sterling: 2014 will see some the mobile-local ad networks be acquired as various players in the market try and consolidate their positions. Mobile ad revenue, which was around or just exceeded $7 billion in the US last year, is becoming critical to all the major internet companies, as are cross-platform ad and analytics capabilities.

Automatic’s Smart Driving Assistant Can Now Turn Your Car Into An iBeacon
 (TechCrunch)
Automatic‘s smart driving assistant, which combines a small piece of hardware with powerful mobile apps, was designed to provide vehicle owners with new tools to understand how they can get more out of their car’s performance. It recently added iBeacon functionality, which could fundamentally change the way users and their cars interact with other things around them.

Apple Could Own Mobile Payments  (Inc.)
Tim Cook knows a good opportunity when he sees one and has the resources to take on the wildly lucrative mobile-payment industry. Square and other startups have just been put on notice.

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