Street Fight Daily: Groupon Launches POS, Visa Updates Rewards

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

screen-shot-2012-10-10-at-13-11-24Groupon Squares Up To Rivals With Groupon POS, An iPad App And Dashboard For On-Site, Mobile Payments (TechCrunch)
Groupon is once again expanding its portfolio of mobile payment services, putting it in closer competition with the likes of Square and PayPal’s here targeting local merchants: today it has released Groupon POS, which appears to be an iPad-specific version of its mobile payments service aimed at local merchants, working as a dashboard to make and track payments.

Facebook, Waze and the Falling Cost of Mapping Technology (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: A lot of digital ink has been spilled about why Facebook would want to snap up Waze — namely, the company’s 40 million mobile users. But the discussions also verify the once-unthinkable reality that a startup could scale a navigation and mapping service into a billion-dollar business in five years. A number of technological trends have set the stage for Waze and other mapping and navigation startups to compete. Here’s a look at a few of them.

Visa Updates Offers Rewards Scheme With Point-of-Sale Discounts and Personalized Cardholder Alerts (TheNextWeb)
Visa has updated Visa Offers, a rewards scheme that helps retailers and merchants offer exclusive discounts to Visa cardholders at the point-of-sale, with instant discounts, real-time analytics and support for third-party offer programs today. The idea is to remove the need both for physical rewards cards and purpose-built smartphone apps by tying the rewards scheme to the consumer’s existing credit or debit card.

8 Reputation Management Platforms for Merchants (Street Fight)
As customer review sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, and TripAdvisor proliferate, reputation management platforms are becoming an increasingly important tool in the local merchant’s arsenal. Nearly a quarter of small businesses now monitor their online reputations, according to BIA/Kelsey. Here are eight platforms that each tackle online reputation management in a slightly different way.

Bringing Social-Network Superpowers to the Real World (Wired)
Highlight CEO Paul Davison imagines ushering in a new form of publishing information about ourselves leveraging the increasingly powerful phones in our pockets, and the increasing number of connections we are making between each other. But rather than existing on some digital page on Facebook or LinkedIn, the publishing platform Davison imagines persists in the “air above our heads.”

Glympse Launches Its First API To Share Location Tracking In Any App Or Platform (TechCrunch)
Glympse has been in the news for its deals with the likes of Ford, Mercedes Benz and BMW/Mini to integrate its location-sharing and tracking technology into in-car systems on connected automobiles. Today it’s taking its expansion strategy one step further, with the release of a new software development kit, giving app developers and others the ability to include Glympse-powered location-sharing technology into their services with a few lines of code.

Advocacy Groups Pressure LivingSocial to Drop Events Mixing Guns, Alcohol (The Hill)
Gun control advocates launched a campaign this week urging LivingSocial, the popular daily deal company, to stop featuring events that mix guns and alcohol. The Gun Truth Project and MomsRising – say promoting deals that integrate shooting and drinking only encourages that combination at the threat to public safety.

5 Ways To Rank Outside Of Your Physical Location In Google Places (SearchEngineLand)
Andrew Shotland: One of the more desperate requests I get from clients interested in Local Search is wanting to rank well in Google for local queries when they don’t have a physical location in the searched city. But, more often than not, this can be an exercise in futility as setting a service area in a competitive industry doesn’t seem to be much help.

WunWun’s On-Demand Helpers Can Now Tackle Deliveries for Local Businesses (VentureBeat)
The New York City-based company is today launching Power, a platform for on-demand deliveries for stores that don’t yet offer any delivery service. Stores can also use Power for branded deliveries, giving customers more of a luxury delivery experience.

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