Street Fight Daily: Google Adds Paid App Search, Ford Eyes On-Demand

Share this:

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

946985_290541897748665_884893214_nGoogle Brings Ads to the Google Play Store (Recode)
Google is bringing one familiar feature of Web search to its Google Play store: Paid search results. The company said it will begin testing what it calls “sponsored” search results within its app store in the coming weeks.

What Programmatic Advertising Means for Local Media (Street Fight)
Street Fight caught up with Frost Prioleau, chief executive officer at Simplifi, a Dallas-based programmatic advertising platform that specializes in localized campaigns, to talk about what programmatic advertising means for local marketers.

Ford Is Experimenting With Its Own Uber-like App — And A Vehicle To Go With It (Washington Post)
The rise of Uber does not bode well for car-makers. That’s why Ford is trying to develop its own Uber-like “ride-sharing” app with a twist that only an automaker can bring to this rapidly shifting market — Ford is also working on a vehicle to go with it.

Sponsored: Choosing the Right Bid Strategy in a Pay-Per-Call Campaign (Street Fight)
In order to build efficient pay-per-call campaigns, businesses have to decide on the bid strategies most suited to their industries and goals. Some of these may be borrowed from pay-per-click approaches, but there are additional ways to optimize for pay-per-call success.

WeddingWire Ties the Knot with Spain-based Wedding Planner (Wall Street Journal)
The website, known as the Yelp of the wedding industry, includes reviews and tidbits about the key components of a wedding. The company announced it acquired Wedding Planner, the Spain-based version of WeddingWire that has websites in 12 countries in Latin America and Europe.

Openings and New Hires at GrubHub, Boostability and Delivery.com (Street Fight)
Every two weeks, Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, new jobs and hires at Time Inc., Green Banana SEO, Cox Target Media, and MLive.

The Man Who Mapped The World (Mashable)
Citymaps announced on Thursday that it has expanded globally and now lets users create, share and search through maps with 80 million “points of interest” around the world. To help with its continued expansion, Citymaps has raised $6 million in funding from Coatue and Nokia Growth Partners.

Stock Market Darling New Media Investment Keeps Growing, Books Small Profit (Poynter)
Acquisitive New Media Investment Group reported its fourth quarter results today and tallied the score on $538 million spent buying newspapers over the last year and a half. New Media targets smaller papers that have been less affected by digital competition than metros.

Google & Reviews Snippets – If It Can Go Wrong It Will Go Very Wrong Category (Blumenthals)
Mike Blumenthal: Last year Google added review snippets that represent general sentiment to the Knowledge Panel. Like all Google algos sooner or later they screw up and in inimitable fashion Google is unwilling or unable to fix it.

Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.

Tags: