Street Fight Daily: Online Brands Go Brick-and-Mortar, Voice-Assistant Arms Race Escalates

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

Why E-Commerce Brands Are Opening Brick-and-Mortar Stores (Digiday)
Online brands, such as Warby Parker, Zappos and Bonobos, have been opening their own stores for the past decade, but not at the rate it’s happening now.

Foursquare Data Shows Up Today in More Places Than You’d Think (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: It’s remarkable to see how often Foursquare data is popping up today in the apps that garner the most consumer traffic and press attention. These votes of confidence would seem to solidify Foursquare’s position as the forefather of natively digital location data.

Amazon and Apple Escalate Battle of Virtual Assistants (WSJ)
Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are bolstering the teams that run their Siri and Alexa virtual assistants, part of a string of recent moves by technology giants to step up competition in an area seen by many as the future of computing.

6 Mobile Customer Service Platforms for Retailers (Street Fight)
Tech vendors are stepping in with mobile solutions designed to expand the ways store associates interact with customers. These solutions allow employees to do everything from checking inventory and processing transactions on smartphones to accessing real-time information about current promotions and customer purchase histories.

Tech Companies, Led by Amazon, Spend More Than Any Other U.S. Companies on R&D (Recode)
Spending on research and development is a key indicator for U.S. productivity, a measure of how well our economy is doing, and productivity has been decreasing lately. No one is really sure why, especially given all the advances in technology.

Study Suggests Ride-Hailing Companies Could Destroy Car Ownership in Cities (Business Insider)
Ride-hailing giants have said for years that their services will start to kill car ownership by giving urban dwellers a cheaper and more efficient way of getting around. A recent study supports that notion. Quartz: Uber’s employees say board needs to “grow up.”

The Daily News, a Distinctive Voice in the U.S., Is Sold (NYT)
Tronc, the publisher of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, announced on Monday that it had acquired The Daily News, the nearly 100-year-old tabloid that for decades set the city’s agenda with its gossip, sports and city coverage.

Content Marketing & SEO: Scalable Way to Be in Right Place at Right Time (Search Engine Land)
Marcus Miller: Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are both titans of modern marketing, yet they’re not spoken about in the same conversation often enough.

Technographic Data is the Next Frontier for B2B Marketers (AdExchanger)
Account-based marketing (ABM) may be the all the rage among B2B marketers, but technographic marketing is emerging as a complementary targeting tactic.

Which AI Technologies Matter for Marketers? (MediaPost)
Ted Shaw: Artificial intelligence is the single most-hyped trend of 2017. If you’re lived through big data and digital transformation, you may be skeptical that something else will come around next year, too. I don’t think so.

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