Street Fight Daily: PayPal Guns For Square, Groupon’s Lefkofsky Speaks
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
PayPal Debuts iPad App, Furthering Rivalry With Square (AllThingsD)
PayPal on Wednesday served up its first iPad app, a version of its product intended to help small businesses process transactions. The app, which can accept PayPal and cash in addition to credit cards, is aimed at shops that want something more than an iPhone to swipe cards and don’t already have a dedicated point-of-sale system.
Village Soup Shows ‘Native’ Ads Can Work on Local News Sites (Street Fight)
With the recent push toward “native” advertising, we’ve learned (if we hadn’t known already) that ads can be “news.” In terms of local information value, ads-as-news may never trump the apartment-house fire that leaves several families homeless — but it has become clear that there’s room for both, especially in the local digital space.
Eric Lefkofsky’s First Interview As Groupon’s CEO (Fast Company)
The chairman and cofounder of the beleaguered company defends daily deals, opens up about its problems, and tries to redefine the service as a next-generation Costco. Lefkofsky is now the one accountable not just for how he communicates with the market, but also how he takes a large public company that has expanded well beyond its original model of daily deal emails and makes it one cohesive entity.
Case Study: N.J. Steakhouse Takes a More-Is-More Approach to Marketing (Street Fight)
At Franklin Steakhouse, manager Frank Oliver is always on the lookout for ways to enmesh his restaurant with the local community. In addition to tried-and-true tactics like partnering with neighboring businesses and hosting fundraisers, Oliver is taking a hyperlocal approach to digital marketing through platforms like Facebook and Yelp.
Study: 55 Percent Of Mobile-Search Driven Conversions Happen In One Hour Or Less (Search Engine Land)
According to an extensive new study from Google and Nielsen, the overwhelming majority (77 percent) of mobile search happens at home or work — even when there’s a PC nearby and readily available. And most of these users take some sort of near-immediate, follow-up action. In fact, the study found, 55 percent of mobile-search influenced conversions take place within one hour.
Greed is Groupon: Can Anyone Save the Company From Itself? (The Verge)
In a spring 2011 meeting, Marc Andressen, Mary Meeker, and Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz advised Groupon’s board to not take the company public. But together, Eric Lefkofsky, Oliver Sawmer, and Lefkofsky’s longtime partner Brad Keywell, controlled over 40 percent of the company and a larger percentage of the voting and pushed the company toward an IPO.
Social Movement Site Neighborland Gets a New Look (AllThingsD)
As groups grew into villages, towns and eventually cities, we’ve needed to cope with size by creating different, better ways to communicate. That’s the intent of Neighborland, a socially-focused site with a fairly simple goal: Helping community residents make their city better. It launched its latest iteration this week, giving its design an overall visual refresh along with a new “actions” feature.
Ahead Of PayPal And Square, Intuit Rolls Out Mobile Payments In Europe, Starting First In The UK (TechCrunch)
Intuit opened up its mobile device-based card payment service, Intuit Pay, for general availability in the UK – just a few weeks after PayPal announced that it would be bringing its own mobile payment service, Here, to the UK later this year. Square, Intuit’s biggest U.S. rival, has yet to announce any plans for Europe.
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