Street Fight Daily: Uber Looks Beyond Taxis, Foursquare Launches Self-Serve Product
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
On-Demand Everything? Uber Might Steer In A New Direction (CNet)
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said Tuesday at the Fortune Tech Brainstorm conference in Aspen, Colo., that the company is thinking about offering more than on-demand private drivers. That’s why Uber has dabbled this year in delivering on-demand roses, helicopters, and ice cream trucks.
Digitas’ Leary: Brands Still Figuring Out ‘Right Level of Local’ (Street Fight)
For brands, mobile has become more than a medium for advertising; it’s an invaluable source of customer data. Brett Leary, VP of mobile at Digitas, talked with Street Fight recently about the need to analyze location in terms of “context,” brands’ budding interest in shopper analytics, and “the right level of local.”
Foursquare Launches Self-Serve Promoted Listings For Small Businesses (MarketingLand)
Foursquare has announced the launch of self-serve promoted listings for small businesses. The company started testing promoted listings with a handful of local New York City businesses in early June. The new ads don’t rely on user check-ins. Local businesses can promote their listings and offer specials to nearby users.
Centzy Brings Rich Content to the World Beyond Restaurants (Street Fight)
Consumers are looking to the web to make decisions about nearby services, but the data is often incomplete or absent entirely. A number of companies have emerged to solve the problem, but with only 10% of businesses posting information online, it’s still a pain point for consumers. One of the newer plays is Centzy, a year-old startup that is looking to bring pricing and store hours online via a self-built crowdsourcing platform.
Shopkick Adds In-App Purchases To Help Retailers Fight Amazon: ‘We Are The Anti-Amazon Coalition’ (TechCrunch)
Shopkick, the iOS and Android app that lets users search for products, find out where they are sold, and then automatically get checked in at retail locations for discounts to buy them in stores, is making another move today that widens its remit beyond simply driving more bricks-and-mortar business. The startup is launching in-app purchases, starting with 30 major stores that were already a part of the Shopkick’s product aggregation platform.
Hyperlocal Industry Leaders to Gather in NYC on Oct. 24-25 (Street Fight)
Street Fight, the leading voice of the hyperlocal industry, will host its third annual Street Fight Summit in New York in October, bringing together decision makers and influencers from key areas of local marketing and commerce. Topics will focus on the most dynamic areas of hyperlocal, such as indoor targeting, mobile payments, hyperlocal advertising models, and local commerce strategies.
Groupon Updates Its Breadcrumb Point-of-Sale So It Can, Well, Redeem Groupons (AllThingsD)
Groupon is releasing an updated version of its Breadcrumb point-of-sale app that will, among other things, have a Groupon redemption feature built into it that automatically tallies how many Groupon vouchers have been redeemed. The update also stores transactions for up to an hour in case a merchant loses its internet connection, and processes those transactions that happened offline when the connection is back up.
Stop Trying To Make Proximity-Based Social Networking Happen (TechCrunch)
Turn back the dial to 2009, and proximity social networking was buzzing, thanks to the launch of Google Latitude and the hype and oxygen burning around check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Such services promised that we were all going to be broadcasting our location to friends — and even strangers — so that life could be one big serendipitous cool-tastic, gamified hook up. Now, in 2013, it has to be said that the grand location-based vision of Latitude et al hasn’t happened.
Ruckus Starts Tracking Indoor Location With YFind Acquisition (GigaOm)
Ruckus Wireless has found another use for its Wi-Fi technology beyond providing fast connections to the internet. With the help of YFind, a Singapore-based location services startup, Ruckus is using Wi-Fi signals to triangulate a smartphone’s position indoors where GPS signals often can’t penetrate.
Artist Turns a Year’s Worth of Tracking Data Into a Haunting Record (Wired)
For a project called “Quotidian Record,” media artist Brian House turned a year’s worth of his movements into an 11-minute musical track and stamped it on a handsome piece of vinyl. In bleeps and bloops, the record follows House’s daily routine. Every revolution represents a single day. It sounds a little bit like Animal Collective.
Rethinking Coupon Engagement: DataSphere Launches LocalSaver (Local Onliner)
Can coupons be reimagined to spur more consumer engagement? That’s what DataSphere is working on. As part of this effort, the Seattle-based company, which sells and hosts marketing solutions to more than 20,000 SMBs under local TV and newspaper brands, has developed a network that can send coupons out to national website and mobile players such as Coupons.com, GeoQpons and CouponSuzy.
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