Street Fight Daily: GasBuddy’s Location-Based Strategy, Voice-Assisted Shopping On the Rise

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

GasBuddy Leverages Location-Based Marketing to Drive Purchases at Gas Stations (eMarketer)
Gas price comparison app GasBuddy made its name by saving consumers money at the pump. Now the company has turned to location-based marketing to extend its offers to gas station stores. 

Street Fight Staff and Friends Predict 2017’s Top Stories (Part One) (Street Fight)
As 2016 draws to a close, we’ve once again asked Street Fight staffers and columnists to look into their crystal ball and offer prognostications for what they think will be the biggest story (or stories) in local in 2017. We’ll be running their outlooks in two installments, the first today and the second tomorrow.

Mobile Shoppers Turn to Virtual Voice Assistants (MediaPost)
Within three years, 20% of all user interactions with smartphones will take place via virtual personal assistants, according to a new Gartner forecast.

Facebook, Google, Consolidation: What Drove Media Deals in 2016 (Digiday)
Media ownership is being overhauled as companies try to figure out their place in a world where 85 percent of digital dollars are going to two companies: Facebook and Google. Here’s a look at the key media deals that grew out of that tension this past year.

The Gannett-Tronc Bidding War Showed Why People Are Still Investing in Legacy Media (Poynter)
Rick Edmonds: Arguably the biggest newspaper business story of 2016 was Gannett’s failed (for now) bid to take over Tronc. What the broken deal says about the industry, however, is more than a little ambiguous.

Here Fought Off Uber to Hire Mapping Engineers from Failed Startup Karhoo (Business Insider)
Here, a mapping company owned by Audi, BMW, and Daimler, has hired several dozen former Karhoo employees, according to LinkedIn. “Most are PhD-level data scientists specialising in machine learning and data science, and they’re going to staff a new Here innovation center in Tel Aviv,” a Here spokesperson said.

Amazon Says Echo Sales Up 9 Times Over Previous Year’s Holiday Season (VentureBeat)
The Seattle-base company issued a press release today that indicates customers “gifted a record-setting number of devices from the Amazon Echo family, with sales up over 9x compared to last year’s holiday season and millions of Alexa devices sold worldwide this year.”

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