Street Fight Daily: Pinterest Pins Location, Macy’s Integrates iBeacon
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Pinterest Does Location: Not Just Pin Boards, but Now Pin Maps (AllThingsD)
Pinterest on Wednesday launched Place Pins, where content can be saved with a location and then laid out on a map. The product from the buzzy social site is aimed to help users plan trips and create guides to their hometowns, both activities lots of them already tend to do. Now, instead of being displayed like other content on tiled boards, they’ll be shown on maps.
The Changing Economics of Dialing for Local Data (Street Fight)
Matrix partners, the Sand Hill Road firm that invested in startups like Hubspot and Care.com, has made a $4.2 million bet on Locality (formerly Centzy), a local search startup that uses a combination of technology and manpower to amass pricing and product information for local service businesses. The startup relies on an army of contractors to call up businesses across the U.S. and find out everything from hours of operation to product lineups and price structures.
Macy’s Is The First Retailer To Use Apple’s iBeacon For In-Store Presence (GigaOm)
On Wednesday, Shopkick announced a new service called ShopBeacon that uses Apple’s technology to track customers when they enter and move around in stores. Macy’s is installing iBeacon transmitters throughout two stores, NYC’s Herald Square and San Francisco’s Union Square. Those transmitters send encrypted signals to any iPhone with Bluetooth Low Energy capabilities and the Shopkick retail companion app.
Wonder Women Show Might at ‘Indie’ Hyperlocal Sites (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: Like old media, new media has its glass ceilings. But women are consistently shattering barriers to their advancement in the digital community news space. Of the 12 top revenue-producing community news sites, eight have a female editor-publisher-owner. So what do women bring to the community news space to produce so many winners?
Groupon Gets Into Coupons, Challenging RetailMeNot (USA Today)
Groupon is getting into coupons, a big shift in its business model and a challenge to RetailMeNot, a leader in the online coupon sector. The deals company unveiled Freebies on Wednesday, a new category on its online deals marketplace that offers digital coupons, promotion codes, giveaways and samples.
Case Study: Lenovo Uses Local Search Tactics to Drive In-Store Sales (Street Fight)
How does a brand without its own brick-and-mortar stores drive offline sales? That’s the question that Donna Bedford and Rick Medeiros have struggled with as they continue to develop Lenovo’s local search strategy. “We’re starting to think, how do we start becoming more hyperlocal? We’re a global company, so how do we develop that hyperlocal presence and really try to make sure that people clearly know who we are,” Medeiros says.
In Bid for Ad Revenue, Foursquare Opens Up Home Screen to Big Brands (AdAge)
In a bid to boost revenue, Foursquare will now let brands that don’t have a physical location advertise on its most prominent real estate: the app’s home screen. MasterCard is the first business without a brick-and-mortar presence to place an ad on Foursquare’s home screen as part of a month-long campaign that wraps up on Dec. 20.
eBay Debuts Shoppable Touchscreens And Digital Storefronts For Sony, Toms And Rebecca Minkoff In San Francisco (TechCrunch)
eBay is debuting a number of new, connected digital storefronts for shoppers today at the Westfield Mall in San Francisco. Similar to the marketplace giant’s shoppable windows in New York, this new partnership melds connected glass, mobile technology and digital payments to give shoppers the ability to buy from these digital storefronts.
Square Revamps Its Register App As It Continues To Simplify Processes Behind Its Payments Service (TheNextWeb)
Mobile payments company Square has overhauled the design of its point-of-sale solution Square Register today, as it seeks to further simplify the processes across its offerings. Square Register is a service, available as an iOS and Android app, that lets business owners monitor all purchases made through their register, giving them access to all of their sales statistics right from the app or online interface.
How to Fix Yelp Once and For All (PCMag)
John C. Dvorak: Over time the site has gotten worse and worse at recommending the good and the bad in my local San Francisco Bay Area, the home of Yelp. Grudge reviews that are pushed to the top, along with businesses that pay for higher placement, don’t help. The key is the aggregate. But what do these stars mean? And what do they imply?
Google Wallet Now Comes With a Debit Card (Mashable)
Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Google’s payments solution known as Google Wallet will let people use debit cards connected to their accounts. The debit card’s seamless integration with Google Wallet allows access to the cash in your bank account and funds in your Wallet account sent by friends. This integration also includes notifications on your phone after spending money using the card.
Profitable for Three Years, Apartment List Raises $15M Series A Round (AllThingsD)
Apartment List, which has aggregated some 600,000 rental apartment listings, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners. Unlike some other up-and-comers in the space, Apartment List never scraped Craigslist to boost its inventory. It avoided being a target of Craigslist’s cease-and-desist/lawsuit strategy and struck 100 data partnerships instead.
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