Street Fight Daily: How Ford Uses Location Data, Radius Raises $13 M

Share this:

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

Ford-cuts-in-car-texting-risk-with-talkback-Sync-feature-FordSync_1How Chrysler, Ford, GM, Others Use Auto Location Data (AdAge)
The government’s research arm found that data-hungry in-car location services could use some improvement in the privacy and consumer notification departments. The report, released publicly this week, evaluates the practices of ten firms that enable location-based services for vehicles, including six auto manufacturers: Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Nissan and Toyota.

Placed CEO: In the Real World, It’s People — Not Places — That Matter (Street Fight)
There’s a broader effort in the technology community to chart consumer behavior in the real-world, using mobile devices to measure movement throughout the the world as marketers use cookies trace users as the browse the web. Street Fight recently caught up with David Shim, the chief executive at Placed, to discuss the ins and out of charting consumer behavior in the real-world.

Palantir Co-Founder Chases New Data Source: Small Businesses (Wall Street Journal)
Radius Intelligence, a startup that just got backing from Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, via his firm Formation8 Partners, plans to use the new $13 million investment to amp up its fight for market share against a large publicly traded competitor, Dun & Bradstreet. Both companies collect and analyze information on small businesses, a part of the market that’s of interest to lenders, insurers and service providers.

With Privacy Debate in Rear View, Euclid Looks to Make Offline Analytics Mainstream (Street Fight)
The clamor that erupted last year after the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream outlets reported that some big retailers passively tracked users in their stores has waned in recent months, opening the door for an emergent offline analytics sector to become a mainstay retail industry. Euclid is making its core tracking technology free this morning in an attempt to lure in the millions of smaller, more apprehensive retailers across the country.

In an Economics Experiment, Uber Cuts Prices in 16 Cities (Businessweek)
The company is cutting prices anywhere from just a few percent in some markets to 34 percent in others. The six markets that will see the deepest cuts are Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Orange County. The largest discounts are designed to be temporary, while some of the more modest ones will likely be permanent, according to the company.

Nomi Adds In-store Messaging to Offline Measurement (Street Fight)
The New York-based startup is moving deeper into the proximity marketing business by adding in-store messaging capabilities to its existing measurement and analytics products. The proximity marketing product, Nomi Mobile, uses a Bluetooth LE beacon to enable retailers to send notifications, rewards, and other messaging to customers on their existing mobile applications as they walk through the store.

Court to Yelp: Reveal Names of Negative Reviewers (CNet)
A court in Virginia has insisted that Yelp name seven reviewers who posted their dissatisfactions about a carpet cleaning company. The Virginia Court of Appeals declared that Yelp comments weren’t covered by the First Amendment because the posters weren’t customers of Hadeed Carpet Cleaning. Yelp insists that Hadeed Carpet Cleaning hadn’t justified its need to know the posters’ identities.

Retail, Electronics See the Highest Mobile Ad CTRs Among Verticals (eMarketer)
In December 2013, DG MediaMind analyzed some 2 billion mobile ad impressions served between January and November of 2013 in order to glean insights into how consumers were interacting with all of these newer mobile ads. Broken down by sector, DG MediaMind found that mobile ads in the retail and electronics categories had the highest clickthrough rates (CTRs), at 0.52% and 0.41%, respectively.

IBM’s New ‘Presence Zones’ Help Retailers Transform In-Store Experience (Forbes)
At the National Retail Federation event next week, IBM IBM -0.31% will showcase a new technology that merges in-store, online, and mobile shopping into a single customer experience. The technology helps retailers give shoppers a 360 degree experience that connects every touch point to deliver smarter, more personalized promotions.

LBMA Podcast: Vodka-Powered Smoke Signals (Street Fight)
On the show: Strongbow embeds RFID chips in bottle caps; Moto X gives print a dose of interactivity; Tata taps your smartphone for usage-based insurance. The app of the week is Openbay; the resource of the week deciphers why customer service is more important than advertising. Special guest is David Rush, founder of Earshot.

Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.

Tags: