Street Fight Daily: Amazon Launches Grubhub Competitor, On-Demand and Google

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

2011_3_11_amazonAmazon Has Launched A GrubHub Rival For Food Takeout & Delivery (TechCrunch)
The Takeout & Delivery feature was quietly turned on over last weekend — when many were probably still working their way through Thanksgiving leftovers. Amazon has a bigger ambition to build out its local commerce services into a larger, physical extension of what it has built online.

Will The On-Demand Economy Loosen Google’s Grip on Local? (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: Over the past decade, Google has controlled the way we find and interact with local businesses with an indomitable grip. But will a shift away from the information-based businesses — namely, search and advertising — to more transactional models lead to a change? According to speakers at a BIA/Kelsey event yesterday, that’s a distinct possibility.

Uber Saw a Small Dip in Growth During Its Bad Press Week (Recode)
A firm that has access to anonymized receipts from millions of U.S. consumers showed that Uber’s growth decelerated by 3.6 percent during the week of November 17. That was precisely when news came out that an Uber executive had suggested investigating critical journalists to try to discredit them.

In Closing Privacy Loophole, Bluetooth Low Energy Solidifies Role of Beacons As Broadcast Technology (Street Fight)
“It’s an important change for the industry because it will help get people a lot more comfortable with keeping bluetooth on,” said Maya Mikhailov, executive vice president at GPShopper, a retail-focused mobile development company. “It was originally designed to be a broadcast technology, and it should be used like that — not as a read technology.”

Four Months After Acquisition, Square Launches iOS App For Food Delivery Service Caviar (TechCrunch)
Over the summer, Square purchased food delivery startup Caviar. Today, it’s making ordering on the service even easier with the launch of a mobile app. Caviar differentiates from most other food delivery services by partnering with highly rated, mostly fancy restaurants.

YP Study Touts the Effectiveness of Its Search Products (Street Fight)
Earlier this week, the company released new research that found adults who use YP to search online are more engaged in several key ways compared to other searchers. Street Fight spoke with YP’s CMO Allison Checchi recently, who said that the company’s deep roots in local search help drive that behavior.

Apple Mass Transit System For Maps Detailed In New Patent (Apple Insider)
A pair of patent filings uncovered on Thursday reveal what could be Apple’s answer to mass transit mapping, a highly requested feature since Google Maps was replaced in iOS by the first-party Apple Maps in 2012. the inventions describe a user-friendly interface for viewing various mass transit services, including buses, shuttles, trains, metros and subways, on an iOS device.

Target Turns Its Stores Into One Big Mobile Game for the Holidays (AdWeek)
For Target’s holiday campaign, Google helped create a mobile website with six mini-games.  The retailer will display promotional signs in its 1,800 stores featuring special three-digit codes that shoppers can use to unlock bonus content within the games, which involve activities like throwing virtual snowballs or maneuvering a sled down a mountain by swiping fingers across a screen.

Hunting Task Wabbits (Medium)
This past summer, before Adam started doing his handyman act, TaskRabbit zigged. It’s what Silicon Valley calls a pivot — start-up speak for retooling its business model — and it usually happens for financial reasons. What it meant in practice was a set of severe changes to the system’s mechanics that many of the taskers I spoke to said destroyed much of their freedom.

Mobile Study Suggests Geofencing Drives Awareness More Than Direct Response (Marketing Land)
Mobile advertising platform xAd released data from two studies in the UK with grocery chain ASDA and Starbucks. Among other things they suggest, counterintuitively, that geofencing may be a better branding tool than audience targeting and the latter may be a better direct response tactic.

Bing Adds Carousel For Local Searches After Google Drops The Feature (Search Engine Land)
Bing is now using a carousel format for their local search results user interface. If you search Bing for local related queries, such as pizza, you will see local results placed in a black bar, that you can navigation through, to find local pizza stores.

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