Street Fight Daily: Lyft’s Impact on Hyperlocal Commerce, Facebook’s Ad-Counting Troubles Persist

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

Lyft Touts Its Benefits for Hyperlocal Commerce (VentureBeat)
In a survey of more than 38,000 passengers and 15,000 drivers in 20 major U.S. cities this year, the on-demand ride service said it has helped to put $750 million back into the local economy.

Building the Essential Digital Marketing Bundle for Local Businesses (Street Fight)
“Last time we identified our essential digital bundle for small businesses,” says David Mihm to Mike Blumenthal. “This week I thought we might tackle how agencies and media companies might go about building and selling that bundle — and why there seem to be so few who are actually doing it.”

Facebook Reports New Issues with Ad-Counting Tools (New York Times)
One of Facebook’s biggest appeals to advertisers is its wealth of data on the millions of people who use the site daily. On Friday, Facebook announced it was fixing three of its ad-measurement tools after it found that several methods it used to describe audience numbers to advertisers were inaccurate.

Local’s Next Hurdle: The Impressionable Use Fallacy (Street Fight)
Michael Boland: No matter how good the targeting, creative, and “right person, right place,” the vast majority of our time contains urgencies that render us immune to push-based mobile ads. It’s basically a question of how often we’re actually idle, and therefore impressionable to being rerouted from a deliberate course.

In Smart Home Race, Microsoft, Google, Amazon Vie to Be ‘Hub of Everything You Do Online’ (Wired)
This week, at an event in China, Microsoft trumpeted the arrival of Project Evo, a sweeping plan to build hardware devices that work a lot like Google Home or the Amazon Echo. If they can put this technology not only in your living room, but in your pocket and elsewhere, they can become the hub of everything you do online.

The Weather Company Extends Access To Its Ad Targeting Platform Weatherfx (MediaPost)
The Weather Company, a unit of IBM, on Monday announced it’s  expanding off-property access to its proprietary automated ad targeting platform, Weatherfx.

Moijo Raises $7 Million for Connected Car Platform, Plans to Leverage Alexa (TechCrunch)
Mojio wants to use Alexa to give its platform access to Amazon’s larger personal assistant platform. “With this investment, the Alexa Fund is helping fuel the development of Mojio’s second generation Alexa Skill, which will harness the vast amount of automotive data being collected by Mojio’s open platform and bring new capabilities to Alexa,” Mojio writes in today’s announcement.

The Daring Moves Amazon Made By Opening Its Grocery Store (Business Insider)
While Amazon Go’s cashier-less technology may have grabbed all the headlines, the real surprise is the startup-like approach Amazon is taking with its grocery retail business.

Airbnb, User, Snap Aim to Show They’re More Than One Hot Product (Wall Street Journal)
As IPO talk swirls, tech startups seek to demonstrate to investors they have a vision for long-term growth.

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