Street Fight Daily: DoorDash and Postmates Test Robot Delivery, Lighting Tech Helps Retailers Sharpen Location Data
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Postmates and DoorDash Test Delivery by Robot with Starship Technologies (TechCrunch)
Not even flexible, freelance jobs in the on-demand economy will be saved from the siege of automation. Food delivery startup DoorDash and courier marketplace Postmates are beginning pilot tests with Starship Technologies’ delivery robots in Redwood City, Calif. and Washington, D.C. respectively.
Post in the Machine: How Blockast is Taking a Shot at Local New Collection (Street Fight)
Rick Robinson: The local news automation camp keeps graduating hopefuls. One of these is a four-year-old startup spawned from the mind of a former Microsoft-Amazon engineer who faced a very common problem: “how do I find out what’s happening outside my home right now?”
Retailers Leverage Lighting Communication System to Sharpen Location Data (MediaPost)
The location of shoppers with smartphones in stores is getting much more precise thanks to LED lighting with tracking technology built in. The connected lights already are installed and being used in a Carrefour hypermarket in France and are on the way to stores in the U.S.
Near CEO: Bad Data Remains a Big Challenge for Location Platforms (Street Fight)
Near enables brands and businesses to “visualize, engage and analyze audience data including their location and behavior for data-driven decisions.” Street Fight recently caught up with Near’s founder and CEO, Anil Mathews, to talk about location intelligence in 2017 and what types of new use cases we may soon see.
As Alexa Becomes Ubiquitous, Amazon Must Craft a Consistent User Experience (Wired)
Liz Stinson: “The next couple of years is going to be a lot of talking objects,” says Mark Rolston, former creative director of Frog and co-founder of studio Argodesign. The rules that dictate how you’ll interact with all your connected devices, and how those devices will interact with each other, are not yet codified. Developing norms and standards will take time — and experimentation.
Social Native Gets Authentic Fans to Create Social Media for Brands (VentureBeat)
Social Native has created a marketplace for connecting brands with content creators who can create authentic social media assets that promote those brands. The startup is positioned for the era known as the “creator economy,” a term coined by Paul Saffo to describe our shift from consumers of content to creators of content.
The New York Times Releases 2020 Report, Outlining Progress on and Goals for Digital (Poynter)
The report, which clocks in at 37 pages, describes a newsroom that has made major strides to fill the gaps outlined three years ago: The Times’ digital audience is growing rather than shrinking; the newsroom has embraced data and analytics; there’s a clearly defined digital strategy.
In Age of Digital Media, Bad Press Can Sink a Brand (AdWeek)
Increasingly, how a customer regards a brand is a function of all the chatter out there: advertising messages, sure, but also news and buzz (good or bad) piped through traditional and social-media channels. Need proof? Chipotle, Wells Fargo, Samsung, and Trump Taj Mahal were among YouGov’s worst-perceived brands in a recent report.
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