Street Fight Daily: News Corp Buys Move.com, Angie’s List Mulls Sale
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Rupert Murdoch Wants to Sell You Your Next Home (Time)
On Tuesday, the Australian billionaire’s News Corp announced it was buying Move, the real estate listings company that owns Move.com, Realtor.com, and other online listings websites, for $950 million. While Move is hardly the market leader among listing websites, it long claimed to be the most accurate.
Conference Notebook: Toyota Motors Turns to Location Targeting on Mobile (Street Fight)
It’s Advertising Week in New York, and that means the marketers from around the world come together to talk shop, make deals, and blow off some steam. At the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2014 SM2 Conference Tuesday, marketers from some of the nation’s largest brands talked about the evolving role of location in their marketing mix.
A Report Says Angie’s List Might Sell Itself And Now Its Stock Is Surging (Business Insider)
Shares of Angie’s List were up as much as 22% in pre-market trade on Wednesday after a report by The Financial Times’ Ed Hammond said the company has hired bankers to, “help it explore strategic options, including a possible sale of the business.” Year-to-date, shares of Angie’s List are down 57% excluding Wednesday’s pre-market rally.
SMBs Now Spend More Than 27% of Marketing Budgets on Digital Media (Street Fight)
A new report released by Borrell Associates paints a rosy picture for the immediate future of local marketing — as long as the industry can overcome a few barriers. The report, which drew from a survey of over 2,000 small businesses, found that they now spend more than a quarter of their budgets on digital media with robust growth in the social media and mobile advertising sectors.
The Real Reason PayPal Isn’t an Apple Pay Preferred Partner (BankInnovation)
Sources close to Apple and PayPal and in the financial services industry have confirmed that PayPal and Apple were indeed in talks for PayPal to be a “preferred payment process” for Apple Pay. However, PayPal pissed Apple off so much that Apple excluded PayPal from Apple Pay altogether.
Social Network Nextdoor’s Ideal New Users: Cops and Firefighters (Recode)
The social network added a new automatic sign-up tool Tuesday specifically for public agencies, including fire departments, police departments and local governments. The new tool means these organizations can sign up for an account online, a task previously handled by a Nextdoor employee who manually added each municipality.
Path’s Latest Messaging Perk: You Can Now Text Local Businesses (Recode)
Social network Path is putting its own spin on mobile messaging, and it might be just useful enough to work. Thanks to an update on Tuesday, Path Talk, the company’s standalone messaging app, now allows users to text local businesses. That means your barber, your bank or your favorite watering hole are all, in theory, just one text away.
Uber Improves Life, Economists Agree (New York Times)
When asked whether “letting car services such as Uber or Lyft compete with taxi firms on equal footing regarding genuine safety and insurance requirements, but without restrictions on prices or routes, raises consumer welfare,” the responses varied only in the intensity with which they agreed.
MMA: Mobile Spend Could Reach $220B Within Decade (MarketingLand)
Greg Sterling: Mobile trade group the MMA released a document today that argues mobile marketing spending could — indeed should — reach something like $220 billion within the decade, on a global basis. The US component of that would be roughly $70 billion under the formula used by MMA.
A Social Network For City Buildings, So Neighbors Can Organize (FastCompany)
Social platforms like NextDoor already cater to neighborhood-specific groups of people, and Craigslist does offer some hyper-local services. There’s also old-school list-serves or Google Groups. But one entrepreneur sees individual buildings as an untapped market.
Firechat Hits 200k Phones In Hong Kong as Open Garden Makes Its Chat App More Secure (GigaOm)
Open Garden’s smartphone app allows protesters to communicate without an internet connection, but it’s also being used to spread disinformation. With verified accounts and private chatrooms, Open Garden hopes to solve that problem.
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