Uber Pledges to Fight California Contractor Bill
Uber and Lyft are already losing billions of dollars, and long-term concerns about whether they will ever hit profitability have endured, making for relatively weak runs on the public market. If the companies cannot come close to profitability with cheap labor forces without benefits, having to treat drivers as employees could pose an existential threat. At the very least, it may require Uber and Lyft to slow down expansion and rein in their ambitions, suggesting that the heyday (or hallucinatory days) of Web 2.0 could be coming to a close.
5 Cannabis Payroll Platforms
Growers, dispensaries, and other businesses that operate in the legal cannabis industry are caught between federal and state regulations, which make banking and payroll a challenge. Despite marijuana being legal in many states, cannabis businesses are still on shaky ground at the federal level, and banks in particular are skittish about partnering with the industry. Without solid banking partners, local cannabis businesses can have trouble keeping up on payroll. So what’s the solution?
Rather than waiting for Congress to make a decision on potential regulations that would shield banks from federal punishment for maintaining accounts for cannabis businesses, more dispensaries and growers are moving toward using web-based cannabis payroll platforms designed specifically for their industry.
Hyperlocal Social Firm Nextdoor Closes $170M Round, Adds Meeker to Board
The company seems well positioned to address the ills of social network and platforms plagued by negative user-generated content in general these days. That’s because it actually verifies the identities of its users and puts people in touch who live near each other in the physical world, definitely not eliminating all risk but limiting the chance that people use digital anonymity to harass each other without repercussions.
The Number-One Reason Consumers Will Delete Your App
It’s easy to get your app deleted from consumers’ phones at a time when every businesses has its own mobile property and social notifications are wearing consumers down. If you want to get deleted, just message your customers all the time, a new study by messaging platform Leanplum found.
The most common reason consumers deleted mobile apps is too many irrelevant notifications, Leanplum’s survey of 1,000 US mobile users found. This held true for all generations, from Gen-Z to Baby Boomers. More than 75% of the crucial millennial generation said they delete apps due to excessive notifications.
Mobile Far Superior to Desktop for DTC Advertising
DTCs are notoriously effective in courting young shoppers, including millennials and emerging Gen-Z consumers. This is likely because younger shoppers, growing up in the digital age and native to its conventions, gravitate toward convenience and are less tied to the longstanding preferences that legacy brands carefully crafted through decades of advertising. Mobile, which is tied to identity and location and offers quick digital purchasing options, is the platform where these trends are most exaggerated.
Gimbal Innovates to Track Consumer Trends in the Physical World
For years, marketers have used Google Trends to uncover insights based on search data. Now, executives at the advertising and marketing automation platform Gimbal are hoping their newest product will serve the same purpose for the physical world.
Built on top of an independent location data set, Gimbal Trends has been designed to provide marketers with a comprehensive view of consumer behavior in the real world. The product was released this morning, and already Gimbal is seeing interest from companies in the entertainment industry that are interested in leveraging the data to optimize their decision-making processes about upcoming events.
7 Indoor Mapping Platforms for Retailers
More than half of shoppers (57%) have used a retailer’s mobile app while in-store. In order for their apps to provide the greatest amount of value, retailers need to tap in to location features, including indoor mapping. When Street Fight first wrote about indoor mapping tools back in 2013, the technology was still relatively young. Now, the market has had time to mature and retailers looking at integrating indoor mapping technology into their mobile apps have an even wider array of vendors to choose from.
Here are seven companies with indoor mapping solutions for retailers.
6 Recruiting Platforms for the Marijuana Industry
Cannabis startups are struggling to recruit job candidates who understand the cannabis market, which is opening the door to an entirely new vertical for technology firms with recruitment platforms. With the market itself still in its infancy, a handful of key players are vying to become the go-to recruiting sources for the cannabis industry as they work to match employers with job seekers who understand the state-by-state rules and regulations that govern the marijuana market.
Google Being Investigated for Antitrust Violations by Slew of States
More than half of US state attorneys general are investigating Google for antitrust violations, the Washington Post reported. Officials anonymously told the Post that the probes are expected to be announced on Monday.
This marks a serious escalation in mostly recent government efforts to increase regulation of the giant tech firms that have become the most powerful private enterprises in the world, squashing competition in their home industries and disrupting adjacent ones. The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are already looking into the potentially anticompetitive power of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.
Klos Founders See Opportunity in Social Messaging Market
Like so many other startups, Klos is being marketed as a solution to a problem. In this case, the company’s founders see the problem as social media being inherently anti-social. Original broadcast sharing on legacy social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is on the decline. Messaging services like WhatsApp and iMessage are incredibly popular, but they don’t help people expand their social networks. While there are existing services, like Tinder and Bumble, that combine messaging and network expansion, they almost all fall into the dating app category.
A Return to Contextual Advertising?
Digital advertising and marketing have long been positioned as “the future” of advertising. But with the rapid changes in media and information technology of the past two decades, the future has arrived. Google recently promoted the idea that “we’re now in an era where digital marketing is just marketing.” But as the industry advances and as new protective regulations around personal data privacy are introduced, it’s also possible that some of the change could involve relying more on previously established methods. Specifically, it is possible that we are on the verge of a return to contextual advertising as the dominant form of online ads.
How VR and AR Are Changing the Car-Buying Experience
New cars are incredibly expensive, and most people don’t feel comfortable picking a vehicle based exclusively on two-dimensional images and whatever data they can pull up on the Kelley Blue Book website. Consumers don’t want to go into dealerships, either, so they end up delaying their purchases for as long as possible.
RelayCars thinks it has a solution.
The company has put together a program that uses augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to help consumers research new cars and trucks. Getting a realistic view of a vehicle from their own homes helps users narrow down their selections and decreases the time shoppers need to spend test driving multiple cars.
Digital Advertisers Look to Connected Cars to Push Industry Forward
As the industry continues to evolve, Geopath’s Kym Frank predicts that two-way communication between cars and advertisers will become even more commonplace and OOH strategies that involve connected vehicle data will be the norm among major brand advertisers.
“The car itself can communicate with digital displays to trigger optimal creative, and the billboard can communicate with the dash to trigger in-app ads,” Frank says. “We are at the very beginning of seeing what is possible and measuring those impacts.”
Report: Location Targeting Ecosystem Suffers from Inaccuracy
Location Sciences analyzed 500 million digital location-targeted impressions in the US and UK in the first half of 2019. It concluded that for every $100,000 spent on location targeting, $29,000 fuels targeting outside the desired geographic range, and $36,000 in targeting does not produce strong enough signals to ensure accuracy.
6 Automotive Data Services Platforms
In order for consumer-facing companies and outside technology firms to take complete advantage of the data that’s being generated by automakers, the data coming from today’s connected vehicles needs to be aggregated and normalized.
Automotive data services platforms are stepping in with technology designed to take connected vehicles to the next level. By ingesting and cleansing data from connected cars, these platforms are helping minimize the development work that’s needed to launch a wide variety of third-party apps and services.
Here are six companies that are innovating in the space.
Waymo Releases Data Set to Catalyze Autonomous Driving Research
Why should local search specialists care about autonomous vehicles? The same way mobile, with its natural on-the-go use cases, has become the hub of “near me” searches that lead consumers into local businesses, cars will become the next mobile device, catalyzing the next wave of “near me” queries. Self-driving cars are not tangential to the future of local; they are central to it.
4 Major Takeaways About Consumer Privacy Concerns
Location data firm Factual commissioned a study conducted by the University of Southern California applied psychology master’s program to take the pulse of consumers on data privacy. Unsurprisingly, not all consumers demographic groups share the same levels and types of concern. Here are four major takeaways from the survey of 1,002 smartphone users aged 18 to 65.
By Unlocking Vehicle Data, Car Rental Companies Help Build Smarter Cities
As operator of three of the most recognized brands in the industry — Avis, Budget and Zipcar — Avis Budget Group represents a mobility ecosystem of more than 11,000 locations in approximately 180 countries. The company recently partnered with the connected-car data firm Otonomo to manage its connected cars on Otonomo’s automotive data services platform. Otonomo will help ABG derive insights from its large connected vehicle fleet, including anonymizing, standardizing, and delivering data from Toyota, Ford, Peugeot and GM vehicles.
The deal between ABG and Otonomo is expected to generate more than 4 billion road miles of data this year, and 7 billion road miles of data by 2020, with much of that data being used for predictive maintenance, smart city planning, and streamlining of the rental process.
5 Business Models for On-Demand Delivery
In the on-demand food delivery vertical alone, revenue is expected to reach $94 billion this year. Other verticals, like beauty, parking, health, shipping, and marijuana, are seeing significant gains, as well. Although the space is maturing, investors are still seeing great growth opportunities. Any number of on-demand delivery startups has the potential to take over the space if it continues to grow as its current pace.
To understand where that growth might occur, we need to take a step back and examine which business models are proving most successful in the on-demand delivery space and how startups are implementing those business models for financial gain.