Street Fight Daily: eBay Aims at Angie’s List, Isis Expands Nationwide
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
eBay Debuts New Angie’s List Competitor And Local Service Provider Marketplace, eBayHire, In The US (TechCrunch)
After a test in the UK, it looks like eBay is launching its new local service provider marketplace eBayHire in the U.S. Through eBayHire, service providers can sell their services to eBay users in their neighborhood. You can find traditional service providers like plumbers, movers, contractors, drivers and more; but you can also access more specialized providers like photographers, coaches, those who specialize in antique valuations, upholstery cleaners and more.
What Closed Circuit TV Can Tell Retailers About Customers (Street Fight)
Prism Skylabs, a San Francisco-based startup, has built software that analyzes video streams, measuring everything from overall store traffic to heat maps illustrating the way in which customers move through a store. The company, which closed $15 million round in October, also provides retailers with remote access to surveillance feeds, allowing businesses to replace some of the costly quality assurance testing
Carrier-Backed Isis Mobile Payment System Rolls Out Nationwide (Verge)
After more than a year of tests in select cities, the NFC-powered technology can now be used at a variety of retailers, pharmacies, restaurants, and other locations across the US. Isis is a joint venture between Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile, and the carriers are hoping that their pay-with-your-phone solution will find more mainstream momentum than previous attempts at a digital wallet from Google, Square, and PayPal.
Scale Still Elusive for Hyperlocals, But Hope Springs Eternal (Street Fight)
According to BuzzMachine blogger and author Jeff Jarvis, AOL’s Patch did hyperlocal scale all wrong: “What they should have been was a sales network for local sites,” he said during a conversation with CBS Local Digital Media President Ezra Kucharz at Street Fight Summit last month. “If that existed, other local sites would have been able to start. It would have led to mass opportunity.”
Flush with Cash, NextDoor Adding 100 Neighborhoods a Day (Screenwerk)
Greg Sterling: Following its massive $60 million funding round I caught up with Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia over the phone to get an update on the site’s progress. Tolia explained that in the first year Nextdoor only had 175 neighborhoods, butt now the company is adding 75 to 100 neighborhoods a day. Tolia added that Nextdoor has a presence in 24,000 neighborhoods across the country, which he said represented “one out of seven.
Big Retailer Is Watching You: Stores Seek To Match Online Savvy (TechCrunch)
As retailers get more sophisticated and link the data they collect to loyalty card schemes, shoppers are starting to sign up to schemes that follow their movements in return for targeted discounts and apps that help them find products. German fashion house Hugo Boss, for instance, is using heat sensors to help place premium products while Godiva has installed meters to count shoppers so it can match staffing to peak hours and measure the draw of window displays.
Meet Coin, A Startup Creating A Universal Credit Card (GigaOm)
Coin, a startup out of Y Combinator that has built a prototype of a card that it claims can store all of your credit, debit and loyalty card information on one Coin card that can be used to pay on mainstream point-of-sale systems. Connect a dongle to your phone and swipe whatever credit, debit and loyalty cards contain a stripe and are swipe-able to load them onto the Coin card.
SumAll Inks MasterCard Partnership As Both Companies Aim To Deliver Big Data To Small Businesses (PandoDaily)
Today, the New York-based startup announced a new partnership that will give it access to thousands more such small businesses. SumAll is announcing a deep integration with MasterCard under its Simplify Commerce SMB-focused cross-platform, mobile and online payments platform. The two companies, although dramatically different in size, actually make a wise pair and seem likely to drive real value to one another and to their mutual customers.
LBMA Podcast: Decawave, Drinks4You, and Opterus’ Janet Hawkins (TechCrunch)
On the show: Tesco face-scans and targets ads in 450 gas stations in the U.K.; Amazon payments brings location-based ads; AutoTrader partners with Chatmeter to help marry social and local; and L’Oreal hopes to sell product in the subways of New York City.
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