Street Fight Daily: Lyft Reportedly Rejected $6B Offer, Uber-Google Rivalry Heats Up
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Lyft’s $9 Billion Price Tag Was Too High for GM (Business Insider)
Lyft’s price tag may have been too high for GM to pay. That’s according to a new report by Amir Efrati at The Information, which claims that GM told Lyft’s board of directors it would be willing to pay $6 billion for the ride-hailing startup. Another person told The Information GM’s offer was closer to $4.5 billion plus Lyft’s cash on hand — about $1.4 billion.
Reserve and Deliver: Waitr Acquires Restaurant Booking App Requested (Street Fight)
Restaurant booking app Requested has announced that it has been acquired by Louisiana-based food delivery and restaurant management company Waitr. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Requested will keep its California office and its team will remain intact in the transfer.
Uber and Alphabet Rivalry Heats Up Over Self-Driving Vehicles, Mapping Tech, Ride Hailing (New York Times)
While Google and Uber had started off as partners — Uber counts GV, Alphabet’s investment arm, as an investor, and the ride-hailing company has long used Google’s mapping technology — they have become increasingly competitive with each other. Uber is moving into self-driving vehicle technology, for example, an area Google has long been working on.
Placing a Bet on Apps for Local Businesses, AdviceLocal Acquires Scanther Mobile (Street Fight)
Advice Interactive Group will acquire the app tech company founded in 2012 by brothers EJ and Austin Archuleta. Scanther’s team will join Advice as part of the deal, and the company will be rebranded as Advice Mobile and integrated within the Advice Local product suite.
Square Forges Relationships with Competitors to Expand its Business Opportunities (Recode)
Square, the San Francisco-based payments company, is continuing to develop new avenues for growth, including partnering with software firms that might have been competitors in the past.
Geoscape’s New Digital Platform, AudenTivity, Helps Brands Connect with Multicultural Shoppers (Street Fight)
The Miami-based company is dedicated to providing data and analytics systems centered around the U.S Hispanic population along with other “new mainstream consumers,” says CEO Cesar Melgoza. This includes consumers from various culture backgrounds, as well as age-based shoppers like millennials, and also the LGBTQ community.
Amazon Far Outstrips Competitors in the E-Commerce Market (Business Insider)
Baird estimates that Amazon sold $59 billion worth of products in the second quarter of 2016. The eight big box retailers on the list, including Walmart, Target, and BestBuy, sold roughly $10 billion worth of products in the same period combined.
How the Dallas Morning News Made a Millenial-Minded News App (Digiday)
A year ago, the Morning News revamped its free mobile app to be graphics-heavy, easy to navigate and customizable. The results: Overall readership is still small, at 40,000 monthly users, according to the paper, citing Google Analytics, but a big increase from 27,000. Sixty percent of the app’s users are now under age 34, up from 23 percent pre-redesign.
Why Getting Rid of Human Editors Won’t Solve Facebook’s Bias Problem (Fortune)
Mathew Ingram: The code that operates Facebook’s news feed and trending algorithms isn’t some kind of omniscient or ruthlessly objective engine, as technology analysts continually point out. It’s designed and programmed by human beings, and in most cases incorporates the biases of those human programmers.
Why Lead Generation Matters to B2B Marketers (eMarketer)
More B2B marketers are getting wise to the benefits of lead generation technology, with many noting the tools help them increase the volume of warm leads created, better segment those prospects and improve targeting efforts to reach them.
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