Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Takes On Yelp, Glassmap White Labels
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Foursquare Takes On Yelp With New Homepage Search Box (Search Engine Land)
This afternoon Foursquare is rolling out a new PC homepage for users who aren’t logged in: it prominently features a search box. In doing so Foursquare takes aim at Yelp as its chief rival in the local space and, in some ways, the move completes Foursquare’s evolution from a more narrow and novelty oriented friend finder, game and check-in app to a genuine local search utility with much broader “mainstream” ambitions and appeal.
Location-Based Mobile Startup Glassmap Goes White Label: Lets Business Target Customers With Personalized Offers (TechCrunch)
Glassmap, the YC-backed location startup launched at the beginning of the year as something of a “Find My Friends” app for Facebook users, is today introducing a new vertical for business customers. With the debut of “Glassmap Business Solutions,” as the system is being called, both brands and local brick-and-mortar retailers can take advantage of the technology Glassmap built in order to better target customers on an individualized basis.
Amid Layoff Rumors, PayPal’s Mok Oh Out as Chief Scientist (Xconomy)
Mok Oh, who joined PayPal after the latter company’s $135 million acquisition of Boston-based Where, has left his post as chief scientist of PayPal as of last week. Since late last week, we’ve been hearing about impending layoffs at PayPal, the payments division of San Jose, CA-based eBay.
Guardian’s N0tice Adds Location-Based Curation Tool (Journalism.uk)
Online noticeboard n0tice, a project that grew out of a Guardian hack day, has had a major update, adding an Android app, updating its iPhone app and introducing a new location-based curation tool called FeedWax. The website has also been updated, a campaign to “celebrate or change” high streets across the country has been launched, and this morning n0tice moved from Google Maps to open source platform Open Street Maps.
Square Officially Ends Its New York Taxi Pilot (GigaOm)
Square’s test of mobile payments in New York taxis has officially come to an end. The startup is terminating its memorandum of understanding with the city because it said it wants to pursue a different hardware and software combination.
Lettuce Raises $2.1M to Prove the Viability of SMB Software (PandoDaily)
Los Angeles-based Lettuce, which offers SMBs a SaaS solution for order management and fulfillment, is today announcing $2.1 million in seed financing from Crosscut Ventures, 500 Startups, and other strategic investors. Its platform connects the backend systems of its clients, including CRM, accounting, inventory, payment processing, and shipping, to eliminate the need for duplicate data entry and thereby reduce the time to process each order, often by a factor of ten or more.
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