Street Fight Daily: Staples Ditches Bricks, Flickr Founder Goes Hyperlocal
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology
Staples to Close 225 Stores as Sales Move Online (New York Times)
Staples has become the second major chain to announce the mass closing of stores this week, providing the latest evidence of how the retail landscape is being remade by shifts in American shopping habits. The nation’s largest office-supply company said Thursday that nearly half of its sales are now generated online, and it is working aggressively to cut costs and become more efficient.
Control Group, a Dev Shop for the Real World, Rethinks Subway Navigation (Street Fight)
The agency is one of a handful of development and marketing companies to carve out a niche in bringing the web to the physical world. These companies are helping retailers, restaurants and a range of other organizations with a stake in a physical place to use connectivity to rethink the way we engage with the world around us.
Flickr Co-Founder Seeks Another Hit With New Findery App (Reuters)
Findery, a map-based social networking service started by the co-founder of popular photo-sharing site Flickr, launched a mobile app on Thursday. Caterina Fake, Findery’s founder and Chief Executive, is hoping there’s room for a specialized service that appeals to a different set of Internet users’ sensibilities.
Yahoo Rolling Out Indoor Maps (SearchEngineLand)
Greg Sterling: Yahoo has started to integrate indoor maps into its newly upgraded mapping product. Even though Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer didn’t want to go head to head with Google in “local” (read: maps), Yahoo has been improving its mapping and local search user experiences of late.
The Creep Factor: How to Think About Big Data and Privacy (O’Reilly Radar)
Tim O’Reilly: Because data is so useful in personalizing services for our benefit, any attempt to prohibit its collection will quickly be outrun by consumer preference. The right way to deal with data redlining is not to prohibit the collection of data, as so many misguided privacy advocates seem to urge, but rather, to prohibit its misuse once companies have that data
Flare-Up Over Food-Delivery Fees Has South Koreans Debating The Marketplace Model (TechCrunch)
The flare-up over food-delivery fees is only one part of the story of local apps and how they are changing the character of food here in Seoul. We are seeing a split between the most and least popular stores, with some of the more commonly reviewed stores receiving prominent billing, while others with fewer reviews are placed further down the rankings.
Boston Globe Lays Off Hyperlocal Your Town Correspondents (Boston Business Journal)
The Boston Globe is laying off the remaining half-dozen correspondents who provide its Your Town local coverage tracking life and government in Massachusetts cities and towns, sources confirmed today. The paper plans to retain its Your Town sites, which also aggregate news from local sources, a person familiar with the cuts said.
As Google Upgrades Google Maps Business Listings, Conflicts Happen Including Duplicate Listing Issues (SearchEngineLand)
Google has been automatically upgrading Google Place listings from the old system to the new Google Places dashboard. The latest conflict is that there are duplicate listing issues and Google needs you to step in, fix the issue and then complete the upgrade process.
How Rating Your Weekend Can Help Keep Creativity Brewing (FastCompany)
Noah Weiss, Foursquare’s VP of product management, divulges the numberic system he uses to rate his weekends and ensure peak creative output. The product manager for Foursquare aspires to “awesome,” which to him, means balance: a mixture of social activities sprinkled with some relaxation and maybe even some work.
LBMA Podcast: Square, LevelUp, and Thinknear’s Eli Portnoy (Street Fight)
Top stories of the week include Square and Bookfresh, CommuteStream, LevelUp and Foodler, Muber, SounderPoster 3.0, Amtrak, Caribou Coffee, IMGuest.com, Mastercard and Syniverse and Stylinity.
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