Street Fight Daily: Yelp Partners with Curbside, Foursquare Check-Ins Evolve with Location Tech

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

Yelp Partners with Curbside to Add Order Pickup to its App (TechCrunch)
Curbside, a startup powering same-day shopping experiences for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, including CVS, is today announcing a new partnership with Yelp that will allow consumers to shop in Yelp’s app, then pick up their items locally.

How Brands Can Use Location to Ace Back-To-School Ad Campaigns (Street Fight)
Michael Buttigieg: Brands could be throwing their back-to-school ad dollars to the wind if they are only taking a standard location approach. In fact, the study found that brands could wasting more than 80 percent of their back-to-school media on the wrong audience if location data isn’t used correctly.

Foursquare May Have Grown Up, But the Check-In Still Matters (Wired)
The company has evolved beyond being a social media app broadcasting your friends’ favorite sandwich shop to become a bonafide location data firm that sells its rich dataset to anyone seeking fine-grained information about how people spend their time and money.

Facebook Talks About Its ‘Shared Future’ With Local News Publishers (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: In recent sessions, many publishers – most of them focused on local news – are learning best practices of digital publishing that have helped Facebook attract an audience of more than 2 billion subscribers and pull in $25 billion annually from advertisers, many of them retailers at your local shopping center.

Google Reboots Display Network, Gives Advertisers More Control (MediaPost)
Google plans to change the options it gives advertisers for excluding site categories for the Display Network in AdWords. Several site categories are being eliminated, while a few are being added. Others are rolling up into a more concise name.

Birchbox Held Acquisition Talks with Several Retailers, Including Walmart (Recode)
One potential acquirer who has spoken with the beauty subscription startup is Walmart, these people said, with conversations taking place between Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce chief Marc Lore and Birchbox co-founder and CEO Katia Beauchamp.

Blue Apron Surges After Beating Expectations on Revenue (Business Insider)
The company said it earned $238.1 million in revenue, topping analysts’ forecast for $235.8 million according to Bloomberg. It posted an adjusted EBITDA loss of $23.9 million, or $0.47 a share, less than the expectation for a loss of $24.3 million.

GM Expands Its Car-Sharing Service for Uber and Lyft Drivers (The Verge)
Maven Gig, the car-sharing service for gig economy workers owned by General Motors, is expanding to a few more cities. Starting today, the service is available in Los Angeles. Later this fall, it will launch in Boston, Phoenix, and Washington, DC. And Baltimore and Detroit will follow soon after.

To Turn Around Sales Decline, Pizza Hut Steps Up Digital Ordering and Delivery (Digiday)
Ordering pizza doesn’t mean calling Pizza Hut anymore. You can go to the company’s website or download an app, then track your delivery. You can speak your order to Amazon Echo by saying, “Alexa, ask Pizza Hut for a pizza.” You’ll soon able to do the same on Google Home.

Ritz Taste-Tests Branded Voice Activation on Amazon Echo (AdExchanger)
“As a brand, we’re about celebrating people getting together and providing inspiration to make those get-togethers even richer,” Sella said. “It felt like the perfect marriage of technology and what we’re trying to do.”

Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.