Street Fight Daily: Nokia’s New Chief, New York’s ‘Smart’ Bar Crawl
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology
Nokia Announces New Strategy and Chief Executive (New York Times)
The Finnish technology company Nokia announced a new strategy on Tuesday and named the head of its services division, Rajeev Suri, as its new chief executive. Under the new strategy, Nokia said, it will continue to invest in its two other business units, which focus on digital maps and on developing the company’s research and intellectual property teams.
At Microsoft, a Renewed Push for Small Business (Street Fight)
Over the past year, Microsoft has managed to grow Bing’s market share — albeit, marginally — while investing in expanding its advertising presence among small business. Part of the effort is to use its search business as a springboard to bring advertising to a host of other platforms, many of which have never before been a home to ads.
New York City Bars to Use Apple’s iBeacons for App-Driven ‘Pub Crawl’ Promotion (AppleInsider)
Companies continue to find new and interesting ways of implementing Apple’s iBeacon technology, with one New York City event planning to direct participants on a Lower Manhattan “pub crawl” via location-based notifications sent to their iPhones. The upcoming “BeaconCrawl” plans to “gamify” the experience of a pub crawl — a social event where attendees traverse as a group from one bar to the next for drinks and conversation.
6 Tools to Add Menus to Mobile Apps (Street Fight)
Online menus drive more traffic to restaurants than coupons and giveaways combined, with 33% of consumers in a 2014 JiWire survey saying they’re more influenced by seeing menu information in a mobile ad than special offers or the location of an establishment. Here are six tools that restaurants can use to add integrated, mobile-friendly menus to their websites and apps.
The Decline of Newspapers Hits a Stunning Milestone (Slate)
At the American Enterprise Institute’s Carpe Diem blog, Mark J. Perry finds that print ad revenues are now the lowest they’ve been since 1950, when the Newspaper Association of America began tracking industry data. Again, that’s 1950, when the U.S. population was less than half its current size and the economy was about one-seventh as big.
Investor Fred Wilson Comes to the Defense of Airbnb (AVC)
Fred Wilson: You can attack Airbnb for all sorts of things. But consider the alternatives. Do we want hosts putting their apartments on Craigslist instead of Airbnb? Do we want tourists who only have $150/night to spend on housing in NYC to rent a room in a flophouse or the apartment of a photographer who is away for a few weeks on a photo shoot?
TomTom Posts First Quarter Profit (Wall Street Journal)
For the first time in more than three years, Dutch navigation system maker TomTom was able to grow its revenue while it swung to the black in the first quarter as a result of a tax gain. The company has been struggling with falling demand for its satellite-navigation devices as prices come down and customers increasingly used mapping applications on smartphones.
Travis Kalanick is a Sociopath and Socialism and Anarchism are on the Same Spectrum, Apparently (Pando)
Tim Worstall: Seattle seems blessed with a new group of Uber haters who were out on the streets of that fair city on Saturday night allegedly “detaining” some ten cars and their passengers from the service. All of this is prompted by the assertion that Travis Kalanick is a sociopath, that Uber itself is evil.
Yelp Now Lists Businesses That Accept Bitcoin (CNet)
Shoppers can check into the reviews site to see whether restaurants, shops, museums, and other establishments accept digital currency payments. The company announced Monday that it has started listing whether or not businesses accept Bitcoin.
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