Street Fight Daily: Google Uses Image Search for Retail, Instagram’s Snap Clone Surpasses Snap in Users

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

Google is Trying to Turn Image Search into a Shopping Tool (Recode)
Google has added a new shopping feature in Image Search called “style ideas” that shows users perusing fashion merchandise what specific items look like paired with others.

Yext Shares Up Sharply In Initial Day of Trading, Portending Well for Local (Street Fight)
Yext’s shares jumped nearly 22% in the company’s initial day of trading, with the price rising as high as $14.25 per share before settling to $13.41 at close. The strong opening was a hopeful message from Wall Street for the local marketing industry.

Instagram’s Snapchat Clone is Now More Popular than Snapchat (Quartz)
In about eight months, Instagram Stories, the function of Facebook’s image-sharing social network that allows users to post images and short videos that disappear after 24 hours, has amassed 200 million daily users, it announced today. eMarketer: Should snap be worried about Instagram’s success?

Street Culture: Why Telecommuting Makes Sense for Many Tech Startups (Street Fight)
“If you have the right team, the right employees, then they don’t have to be there physically,” says Kristen Stiles, co-founder and CEO of babysitter-finding app Sitter.me. “If you don’t trust your employees to work at home, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place.”

The Weather Company Opens Its Data Trove to Marketers on Outside Platforms (Digiday)
Weather has a new product that allows marketers to use its location and weather data to make their own transactions on inventory outside of Weather’s properties.

How Brands Can Find the ‘Advertisable Moments’ They’re Missing (Street Fight)
Matthew Tilley: Advertisable moments exist in a range of digital and physical contexts beyond TV sets and even beyond desktop browsers — and if a brand wants to capitalize on all available moments (especially those proverbial micro-moments) it has to look for ad opportunities in unexpected places.

4 Ways to Connect Social to Your Business (AdWeek)
Leah Pope: Too often, social media is treated dismissively as a cursory marketing channel. In typical, high-level marketing dashboards, progress in social is measured as an increase in the number of followers or post engagement over time.

Will AI Make Email Marketers Obsolete? (MediaPost)
Loren McDonald: Forrester Research says intelligent agents (cognitive marketing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, chatbots, etc.) will eliminate 6% of U.S. jobs by 2021.  But machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are already making inroads in marketing areas usually reserved for humans.

GM Expands Self-Driving Car Operations, Adds Employees (NYT)
The automaker said on Thursday that it planned to hire 1,100 people and invest $14 million at a new development center in San Francisco that would spearhead the company’s work on self-driving cars.

Tiny Iowa-Owned Newspaper’s Pulitzer Win is a Reminder: There Are Fewer Family-Owned Papers Than Ever (Poynter)
The Pulitzer Prize win for the tiny Storm Lake (Iowa) Times was a great underdog story. But pull the lens back, as The Wall Street Journal’s Lukas Alpert did today, and it’s also a story of something that’s becoming quite rare — a family-owned newspaper.

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