Street Fight Daily: Yelp Adds Video, Verizon Sells Mobile Ads
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology
Yelp Is Adding A New Video Feature To Its Reviews (BusinessInsider)
Yelp is adding a new video feature to its app that will let users upload short clips in the same way that they would upload photos. The idea of the new feature is to help reviewers fully capture the atmosphere of a restaurant, store, or other small business, better than they could with photos alone.
Texas ‘Indie’ Pure Play Is Hog-Tying ‘Legacy’ Competitor (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: Tired of his four-hour commute between Dallas and San Angelo, Dallas Morning News ad salesman Joe Hyde applied to the San Angelo Standard-Times in 2009. He never heard back. Today, Hyde is the founder-publisher of San Angelo Live, an independent “pure play” that — in its eight months of existence — is already surpassing his Scripps competitor in key traffic metrics, and, since last month, operating in the black.
Verizon Looks to Target Its Mobile Subscribers With Ads (AdAge)
Precision Market Insights, Verizon’s data marketing arm, is expected to announce partnerships with a handful of ad technology companies. The firms will now sell its tool to advertisers for mobile ad campaigns that target Verizon’s massive subscriber base based on demographics, interests and geography.
Consumers Are Using Cash Less — And That’s a Good Sign for Digital Marketers (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: A report by Javelin Research found that in-store cash sales in the U.S. dropped from $874 billion in 2012 to $788 million last year — a 10% decline. Over the next five years, the report projects that consumers will spend $100 billion less with cash, opting instead to pay using credit and debit cards as well as still-nascent mobile payment systems.
Google Plans Low-Cost, High Quality Wi-Fi Networks For Small- And Medium-Sized Businesses (TechCrunch)
Google is apparently planning to offers subsidized, commercial-grade Wi-Fi hardware to small and medium-sized businesses alongside software to help greatly improve the quality of the Wi-Fi experience at places like doctors’ offices, restaurants, gyms and more. The plan is to get better Wi-Fi in the hands of these businesses in order to get more users working on Google apps and services.
Home Cleaning Startup Homejoy Acquires Competitor Get Maid (TechCrucnh)
Homejoy just announced its first acquisition — New York-based “Uber for maids” startup Get Maid. Since Homejoy raised $38 million in Series A and B funding last year, the company seems positioned to make more acquisitions like this, but a spokesperson told me there are no plans for such deals, with future acquisitions “evaluated on a case by case basis.”
Airbnb to Hand Over Anonymous User Data in New York (Wall Street Journal)
Airbnb reached a deal Wednesday with the New York attorney general that invites more regulatory scrutiny of its home-rental service in one of its largest markets and raises concerns about how it handles the private data of its users. The startup on Wednesday agreed to provide Attorney General Eric Schneiderman with anonymous data about all of its hosts in New York City over the next year.
Media Companies Must Engage Mobile Users With More Than News (IMNA)
Steve Gray: To capture a meaningful share of the time consumers spend on mobile, media companies need to figure out how they can help users complete the jobs they use their mobile devices to get done — such as interacting with local people, businesses, and information.
Founder: OpenStreetMap Already As Good Or Better Than Google Maps (SearchEngineLand)
In a conversation with Steve Coast, founder of Open Street Map, the now-Telenav employee asserted that OSM data will only continue to get better and richer and that it would be difficult ultimately for Google to match OSM’s local editors and the specificity and quality of OSM’s data.
Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.
