Street Fight Daily: Square CFO to Lead Nextdoor, Breaking Down the Voice Ecosystem

TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING AND MEDIA

Not All Voice Assistants are Created Equal (Street Fight)
Mike Boland: Several tech giants are chasing voice search and assistant apps. They’re motivated by different factors—each seeing voice as a way to support, grow, and protect their unique core businesses.

Square CFO Sarah Friar to Become Nextdoor CEO (Recode)
If you ask people close to Dorsey how he’s able to run two publicly traded companies — he is also CEO at Twitter — Friar’s name is often tossed out as an example of the kind of strong leadership he has surrounding him at Square to make that work.

Why Facebook Is Putting Its Skin in Local News’ Subscription Efforts (Street Fight)
In this Q&A, Facebook’s Josh Mabry, who leads the Facebook Local News Partnerships team, talks about the mentoring, coaching, and other work in these off-platform initiatives and why Facebook is backing them up with millions of dollars in funding.

Google Has Appealed a $5 Billion Android Fine from the EU (Verge)
On Tuesday, Google filed an appeal of the European Commission’s nearly $5 billion fine after a regulatory body decided that the Alphabet Inc. company was knowingly violating antitrust laws, the company confirmed to The Verge.

Mobile Self-Checkout, Supported by Skip, Planned for 3,000 Stores (MediaPost)
Standard Market in San Francisco uses overhead cameras to track product and shoppers, who are charged via the Standard checkout app after they leave the store and Amazon has several Amazon Go stores already in operation, with rumors of more coming. They are not alone.

Can LiveRamp Go Beyond Advertising? (AdExchanger)
“We didn’t have the technology muscle before and we weren’t investing in R&D,” said Scott Howe, who went from CEO and president of Acxiom to chief exec of LiveRamp when the AMS deal closed on Oct. 2. “But now we’ve got a couple of billion dollars we can use to accelerate everything we want to do.”

Publishers See Subscription Growth in Tests with Amazon Pay (Digiday)
Amazon has pivoted away from selling content subscriptions on its own platform. But some publishers are turning to Amazon’s mobile payments product, Amazon Pay, to convert subscribers on their own sites and like what they’ve seen so far.

Snap Makes Big Announcement as Social Leads on Next-Gen TV (WSJ)
Snap is getting deeper into the crowded scripted-show market, teaming up with companies like Viacom and NBCUniversal on original content.