Rise and Shine is a regular morning roundup of links. Tips if you’ve got ‘em.
- Yelp, through a partnership with ReachLocal, will begin offering users the option to book services directly through its business listings, which may well only turbo-charge the debate over whether Yelp is something other than a neutral purveyor of reviews.
- A full dozen employees of the L.A. ad-tech firm Enplug live and work in the same house. “It’s a little bit cultish,” says the company’s CEO. “It is also extremely efficient.”
- Ann Arbor’s Selma Cafe continues the path from informal weekly breakfast salon to non-profit restaurant.
- Data from the early days of New York City’s e-hail experiment reveals that only 17 percent of attempted taxi-passenger connections were successful. The Wall Street Journal has a map. There’s a bit of a conundrum, though: digital hails seem to make the most sense in the under-served outer boroughs, but, as taxi commissioner David Yassky put it, “If there’s not an available taxicab, having a hailing app isn’t going to create one.”
- The D.C.-born OpenGov Foundation heads west to launch Operation Decode San Francisco, inviting locals tonight to start figuring out how to crack open that city’s (legal) code.
- British Peer-to-peer lender Funding Circle is taking heat over reports that it is in talks with Spanish bank Santander, relationship-building that some see as usefully extending the P2P model and others see as cavorting with the enemy.
- New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, doubling down on the bet that the city is hungry for a leader with new ideas, releases “Even More Keys to the City” — which includes a proposal for getting cops on the best to wear cameras, like has been tried in Rialto, California.
- The Collaborative Fund launches 1099.is ” to try and help you to understand your taxes in the Sharing Economy.” (via All Things D)
- A city-backed Raleigh business incubator is facing eviction from a city-owned building for which it pays a dollar a year in rent. Citing mismanagement, Raleigh is also withholding its financial support from the project. The judge in the case concedes that the dynamic makes her a stakeholder in the dispute, but says, “I can’t allow my personal feelings as a taxpayer … to affect my analysis of the law.”
- With San Francisco’s attorney general saying that airport vehicle sharing service FlightCar has an unfair advantage over traditional rental car firms, the company is making the ‘think of us as a tech startup’ argument that hasn’t worked so well for some of its cousin companies.
- Nelson Mandela’s family home gets an undeserved public debt notice from the city of Johannesburg. It’s not an uncommon occurrence, and a city official notes that “currently customer data is being cleansed and updated.”
- And how posting calorie counts does, and doesn’t, affect human behavior. (Plus, more evidence that transparency really does matter when it comes to eating.)
Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.