Street Fight Daily: Gannett Buys Rest of Cars.com, Angie’s List Struggles

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Cars.comGannett Buys the Rest of Cars.com for $1.8 Billion (Businessweek)
Gannett, which is in the midst of splitting its publishing and broadcasting businesses into separate companies, said Wednesday that it completed a $1.8 billion deal for sole ownership of Cars.com. When Gannett splits next year as planned, Cars.com will go with the broadcasting business, which will hold TV stations and job listing website CareerBuilder.

How to Maintain a Rational Social Marketing Strategy in a Confusing Landscape (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: Small business owners may find themselves perplexed by the variety of opportunities to engage socially with consumers. But there’s an advantage to be gained in keeping your marketing strategy attuned to the groups actively pursuing interests relevant to your business.

Why Angie’s List Is In Trouble (Time)
This week, a report surfaced that the company had hired investment bankers to explore the possibility of putting Angie’s List up for sale. Paid memberships at the local business review service Angie’s List have been rising for years, and the stock just took off. Even so, reviews of the company’s long-term prospects aren’t so hot.

After Spinoff, ReachLocal Founders Relaunch ClubLocal as Serviz (Street Fight)
Late last year, ReachLocal founders Michael Kline and Zorik Gordon parted ways with the company and spun off a still-nascent local commerce project, ClubLocal, that both helped develop. Today, the long-time executives have relaunched the project as Serviz, an application that builds on many of the services core functionality.

PayPal Taps an Outsider to Push It Into a New Era (New York Times)
Mr. Schulman, the newly-name chief executive at PayPal , is the biggest unknown in the mix, and his job comes with its share of challenges. Perhaps most of all, he must lead the company into a new era of using technology to make purchases, ushered in by the advent of the smartphone.

Conference Notebook: Location Is an Obvious Asset for Trulia (Street Fight)
At the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2014 SM2 Conference Wednesday, marketers from some of the nation’s largest brands talked about the evolving role of location in their marketing mix and the challenges in balancing an appetite for new technologies with the needs of an existing brand.

Ex-Livingsocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy Joins Graham Holdings as President (Washington Post)
Former LivingSocial chief executive Tim O’Shaughnessy has been named president of Graham Holdings, the conglomerate owned by his father-in-law and former Washington Post Co. chairman, Donald E. Graham. O’Shaughnessy will “help set a new direction for the company” as it sheds an identity that was once tightly entwined with this newspaper.

Home Design Site Houzz Raises $165 Million to Expand Globally (Mashable)
The remodeling website announced on Wednesday that it raised $165 million in a Series D round of funding led by Sequoia to accelerate its global expansion. “Houzz created an incredible product that transformed the $300 billion home-renovation industry in the U.S.,” Alfred Lin, partner at Sequoia, which invested in Houzz, said in a statement.

Capital One Debuts A New Mobile Wallet App, Designed To Work With Apple Pay (TechCrunch)
Just ahead of Apple Pay’s public release, a top credit card provider, Capital One, has rolled out a new mobile wallet app for cardholders that will work with Apple’s forthcoming mobile payments platform to provide users with detailed information on their Apple Pay transactions, in addition to balance rewards access, and other features.

Hotel Hatches a Plan to Get Into Peer-to-Peer Apartment Rentals (Skift)
The relationship between hotels and a growing peer-to-peer rental market has been wrought with confusion, fear and distrust from the start, making it seem unlikely that a positive relationship could ever come from the two parties. A new concept launched by Spanish hotelier Enrique Sarasola seeks to change that.

Thanks To A Partnership With Gimbal, Urban Airship’s Push Notifications Get Smarter About Location (TechCrunch)
Push notification company Urban Airship is announcing a partnership with Gimbal, the beacon technology company that spun out of Qualcomm earlier this year. The end result is a more precise approach to targeting promotional push notifications, one that uses Gimbal’s proximity beacons as well as Apple’s iBeacons.

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