Street Fight Daily: Groupon Goes After Square, Apple’s New Retail Plan
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology
Groupon to Replace Nearly All of Its Merchants’ Cash Registers With iPads (Recode)
The new product, dubbed Gnome will offer a smoother coupon redemption and basic customer management tools into what is essentially a mandatory offering for tens of thousands of businesses. The move should also bring Groupon into closer competition with Square and other checkout software companies for small businesses.
At Westfield Labs, Rethinking Retail One Mall at a Time (Street Fight)
In 2012, the Westfield Group, one of the largest owners of indoor malls in the world, opened Westfield Labs, a division tasked with developing technology to improve the retail experience. Street Fight recently caught up with Nicholas Cabrera, the division’s SVP of product development, to talk about the role of technology in the physical shopping experience.
Angela Ahrendts’ Plan for the Future of Apple Retail: China Emphasis, Mobile Payments, Revamped Experience (9to5 Mac)
Three weeks into her tenure at Apple, the new retail chief is already reshaping the retail executive team, visiting stores, and holding calls with store managers. She has outlined a three-part vision for the future of Apple retail: an emphasis on China, mobile payments, and completely revamping the end-to-end Apple Store sales experience.
5 Platforms for Analyzing Customer Sentiment (Street Fight)
To help marketers gain a better understanding of what people are truly saying about their companies, a number of hyperlocal vendors are stepping in with tools that automatically analyze customer sentiment on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
PubMatic Acquires Mobile Ad Server Mocean Mobile (Adage)
PubMatic, a programmatic ad selling platform, is acquiring mobile ad-server Mocean Mobile in a bid to strengthen its ability to sell ads on phones, the company announced today. The deal comes on the heels of demand side platform MediaMath’s acquisition of cross-device targeting company TactAds. Simplytics, another mobile ad server, was snatched up by Integral Ad Science earlier this year.
Doctors Check Online Ratings From Patients and Make Changes (Wall Street Journal)
A growing number of doctor-review websites are aiming to change that by allowing people to rate physicians in much the same way they would a sushi dinner or haircut. The three big ones—Healthgrades, RateMDs.com and Vitals—all say they are seeing significant growth in terms of number of reviews and unique visitors.
YP Replaces Slogan ‘The New Way to Do’ with ‘Can Do That’ (Screenwerk)
Greg Sterling: Last week YP unveiled a new slogan, which the company says represents the next evolution of its positioning and branding efforts. The company is also more aggressively promoting MyBook, its personalization and favorites capability, which I believe holds great promise as an engagement and loyalty tool for the company.
Telenav Completes Its Migration to OpenStreetMap-powered Navigation (GigaOm)
After nine months of work, Telenav is waving goodbye to proprietary mapmakers in its Scout navigation app and relying solely on crowdsourced maps. The migration started last September with Telenav’s online mapping tools, but on Monday it began rolling out the updated map dataset to iPhone users and expects to have all iPhone Scout users in the U.S. on OSM by the end of the week.
Taxi Commission Official Plans to Join Uber (New York Times)
A top official at the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission, Ashwini Chhabra, is leaving for Uber, he said on Monday, becoming the company’s first head of policy development and community engagement. The move comes days after the commission approved an extension of a pilot program for street-hailing smartphone apps, including Hailo and Taxi Magic.
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