Street Fight Daily: Facebook’s 40M SMBs, Secret Shuts Down

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

Facebook Says There Are Now 40M Active Small Business Pages (TechCrunch)
Facebook is announcing some new programs today for small businesses, particularly ones that advertise. At the same time, the company’s also arguing that plenty of businesses find out value on the social network without buying ads.

GrubHub CEO Thinks Data — Not Content — Is the Future of Restaurant Discovery (Street Fight)
Investors sold off shares of GrubHub Thursday on slimmer profits, but the rest of the metrics look solid. Meanwhile, CEO Matt Maloney says the company wants to put its data about hundreds of millions of orders to work to help pick your next meal.

A Founder of Secret, the Anonymous Social App, Is Shutting It Down (New York Times)
Secret’s trajectory illustrates the flash-in-the-pan nature of Silicon Valley’s current technology boom. Even as a handful of start-ups rise to stratospheric valuations and take in billions of dollars in financing, other privately held companies cannot sustain their following.

Yelp Learns the Hard Way: Small Talk Matters When Selling to SMBs (Street Fight)
Shares of the reviews site plummeted in after-hours trading Wednesday after the company reported weaker-than-expected revenues and sluggish user growth. The decline in revenues was driven in part by a botched reorganization of its sales force, company executives said during an earnings call Wednesday evening.

Retailers Too Focused on ‘Hyped’ Tools (RetailDive)
A new Forrester report hints that location technologies, mobile payments, and delivery disruptions are no more than overly hyped distractions keeping retailers from addressing more pressing issues and more useful tools like dynamic pricing, and more transformative technologies like remote customer service and biometrics.

Street Culture: Booker CEO on Interviewing for Fit and Creating Company Values (Street Fight)
“Think through the values you have as a company,” said Josh McCarter, chief executive at Booker. “As you bring new people on board who have similar values, the people you already have are reminded of some of those things that your company stands for. Skills and competency and willingness to learn, those all come after fit.”

Survey: Millennials Want In-Store Mobile Payments, Not Human Cashiers (Marketing Land)
A new survey indicates there’s a pent-up desire to pay with mobile devices or at a minimum to streamline the in-store checkout process. When retailers start to realize the benefits implementing mobile payments (i.e., reduced costs, improved customer experience and loyalty, more data) they will embrace them.

Orlando International Airport Hops on Beacons Bandwagon with New App (Mobile Marketer)
Orlando International Airport is joining the trickle of airports integrating with beacon technology to offer travelers directions to important locations such as ticket counters, baggage claim and gates by teaming up with Aruba Networks to leverage its “blue dot” GPS navigation and wireless network.

Instacart’s Bet on Online Grocery Shopping (New York Times)
Instacart shows great promise — its founders and investors believe it could improve the reach and financial prospects of small and large physical grocery stores and eliminate the drudgery of grocery shopping. Yet its success may rest on some unproven assumptions about the market.

Mobile Activity In Cities Vs. Suburbs In Massachusetts: What Marketers Can Learn (Search Engine Land)
With a traditionally young and on-the-go population, it may come as little surprise that big cities drive more mobile device usage than suburban areas. For marketers, these differences are critical to informing a campaign strategy that understands the usage variances between urban and suburban areas.

Waze Will Now Tweet Unusual Traffic Alerts Through Localized Twitter Accounts (The Next Web)
Waze is a great tool for checking real-time traffic to and from your destinations, but this information was always limited to users who’ve downloaded the app. Today, Waze wants to make its data public by pushing unusual traffic alerts to Twitter.

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