Street Fight Daily: Twitter Buys ZipDial, Porch Nabs $65 Million
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Twitter Buys Indian Mobile Marketing Startup (Time)
The Bangalore-based ZipDial allows consumers interested in a company’s services to dial its number and hang up before connecting. The so-called “missed call” marketing means users aren’t charged for the service, because their initial call never connects.
Lowe’s-Backed Porch Raises $65 Million to Target Angie’s List (Street Fight)
The Seattle-based startup has raised a $65 million round of funding to beat out a set of cash-rich startups vying to help people manage their next kitchen remodeling. The speed at which the company has raised capital — over $100 million in sixteen months — is at once remarkable, predictable and necessary.
SoftBank Emerges As The Biggest Challenger To Uber (TechCrunch)
A new, less obvious, force has emerged out of Asia to offer Uber its stiffest competition yet: and surprisingly it is a telecom company. For SoftBank, Ola appeared to be just one of a number of deals in India — while that is true, it also turned out to be the first of an expensive set of investments in companies rivals that rival Uber.
Marketers Claim to Be More Mobile Than We Might Think (MediaPost)
While social media was the top area for expanding budgets in 2015, according to a recent report, mobile took up the rear. Only 58% of those surveyed said they actually had a dedicated mobile marketing team, but at the same time a surprising 71% claimed mobile marketing is core to their business.
Why Chilean Hyperlocal Network Mi Voz Succeeds Where Patch Failed (Street Fight)
Daniela Gerson: Over the past decade, the Chilean community news network Mi Voz has transformed the way news is produced, consumed, and sustained in the often neglected small cities and towns outside of the country’s capital, Santiago. In the process, it has also proven that a local news network can be profitable.
This Small Business Redesigned Its Website & You Won’t Believe What Horrible SEO Thing Happened Next (Search Engine Land)
Andrew Shotland: In these days of Google penalties, thin content warnings, and UGC spam warnings, it’s often tempting to take a site that has been hit hard, toss it in the garbage and start over again. The challenge is that if you don’t think through the SEO issues, you are more than likely going to speed up your race to the bottom.
Tastebud Acquires SocialCrunch In All-Stock Deal To Further Its Mobile Push Into Physical Retail (TechCrunch)
Tastebud has combined the most popular part of StyleSeek — its game to help you discover your fashion tastes — and the quiz tools of SociaCrunch, creating a mobile, white label-friendly product that it intends to sell to physical stores to help them track consumers, discover their tastes and offer them on-site deals.
Meet Yelp’s Small Business Evangelist (Fortune)
Darnell Holloway, who leads outreach to small businesses for review service Yelp, figures he’s spoken with thousands of entrepreneurs across North America in his nearly six years with the online company. And there’s always more to do.
Planet Labs Gets $95 Million More to Photograph the Whole Earth Every Day (Recode)
In what is probably the most ambitious attempt at global surveillance ever, Planet Labs, a space imagery startup, wants to take a daily picture of every angle of the earth at a resolution of five meters or less. To do so, the company needs 150 satellites in orbit.
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