Street Fight Daily: Amazon Guns for Square, Uber and Lyft’s Street Fight
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology
Amazon Takes Shopping Offline With a New Mobile Credit Card Reader (Wired)
Amazon is launching a new piece of hardware today, but it’s not for reading or watching or even buying things from Amazon. Instead, it’s for buying stuff in the one place Amazon doesn’t sell: Offline.
Accusations Fly Between Uber and Lyft (New York Times)
This week, Lyft, a San Francisco-based ride-sharing start-up, said that many Uber employees had tried to sabotage drivers working for Lyft. Then, Uber lobbed its own bold accusations, saying that these actions were taken after Lyft’s investors urged Uber to buy the company.
Study: Facebook Is Most Effective Social Media Site for Small Business (Street Fight)
A new study from G/O Digital, the digital marketing wing of Gannett, finds that consumers tend to use Facebook for product research more than any other social media outlet. The study found that 68% of respondents prefer checking reviews of Facebook, compared to 11% on Twitter and 12% on Pinterest.
Yahoo Acquires ‘Pandora For Places’ App Zofari (TheNextWeb)
Yahoo has picked up a dizzying number of startups since its Tumblr acquisition in May 2013, and today it added one more with Zofari. The startup has built a recommendation app that uses machine learning to extract information that matches you the user up with places you might enjoy visiting.
Uber Is About To Launch An API (TechCrunch)
Josh Constine: Uber wins when you hit the “Request A Ride” button, so shouldn’t it try to put that button everywhere? It seemed like a smart plan, so I did some digging and now sources confirm to me that Uber plans to launch an API soon.
6 Real-World CRM Tools for Merchants (Street Fight)
Retailers with brick-and-mortar stores are struggling to compete with e-commerce giants like Amazon, but the fight will never be fair as long as online-only outposts have access to superior technology. Here are six real-world CRM tools that retailers are using to level the playing field.
UK Stores Start Putting Iconeme’s Shopper-tracking Beacons In Mannequins (GigaOm)
Three British retail outlets have begun using a technology called VMBeacon in their store mannequins, so that shoppers with the appropriate app can check details about the clothes that the mannequins are wearing, and the stores can learn more about their shoppers.
Retailers: Don’t Get Stuck in the Deep Discount Dilemma (AdAge)
In every sector, from apparel to electronics to groceries, retailers are afraid of becoming the 40%-off brand. Shoppers are so trained to wait for discounts that the slippery slope has become an avalanche. Here are five digital strategies retailers can use to wean shoppers off discounts.
Shift Is Developing A Debit Card That Lets You Spend Digital Currency, Loyalty Points And Regular Money (TechCrunch)
Shift payments has developed a debit card that lets them pay with bitcoin and ripple, and, in the future, regular money and loyalty point. The Y Combinator-backed startupwants to make it as easy to spend digital currencies and loyalty points as it is to spend regular, fiat money.
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