Street Fight Daily: Retailers Disable Apple Pay, Yelp Buys German Competitor

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

Screen Shot 2014-09-11 at 6.36.12 PMApple Pay Is Disabled by Rite Aid and CVS as a Rival Makes Plans (New York Times)
Over the weekend, Rite Aid and CVS disabled Apple Pay from working in their stores nationwide. Analysts said disabling acceptance of Apple Pay was a way to favor a rival system that is not yet available but is being developed by a consortium of merchants known as Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX.

Yelp Buys Restaurant-Kritik To Expand Its Presence In Germany (TechCrunch)
Yelp has boosted its presence in Europe after announcing the acquisition of Restaurant-Kritik, a restaurant review service in Germany. Restaurant-Kritik claims to have over 330,000 reviews of more than 94,000 restaurants across Germany.

Is Apple Pay Set to Power On-Demand Local Services? (Street Fight)
Mike Boland: Apple Pay’s value as a conduit for local on-demand will be determined by how many apps consumers transact with daily or weekly. If the answer is many, its value as a single entry point to all those apps and services will be validated.

Openings and New Hires at CivicScience, Urban Airship, Gimbal (Street Fight)
Every two weeks, Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, new jobs and hires at Manta, Stubhub, PLaced, and Colony Logic.

Why NFC In The iPad Air 2 Is A Big Deal For Small Businesses (GigaOm)
Apple has declined to bring in-store Apple Pay to the iPad, although considering the newfound NFC chip it’s certainly theoretically possible. Using an iPad for mobile payment checkouts could even look sillier than using a tablet as a camera.

A Data Lab Rat in the Big City: Why Trackers Couldn’t Trap This City Dweller (AdAge)
Kate Kaye: I asked companies that handle offline and online data to assist in a three-week tracking experiment. After three weeks during which five companies tracked my loyalty cards, mobile location and other information, it became clear that these dark data corners are especially abundant in crowded cities, like the one I live in.

Livingsocial CEO Says The Deals Company Is Rich In Assets, But Lacks Direction (Washington Post)
In his first interview since taking over the struggling deals purveyor, Thakar described LivingSocial as a company rich in assets — talented employees, millions of customers, engaged merchants and money in the bank. What it lacks, as outsiders have long observed, is direction.

The Cost Of Loyalty (AVC)
Fred Wilson: In the local transportation market, we now have lots of options in addition to mass transit. Here in NYC, we have taxis, Lyft, and Uber. In SF and LA, we have taxis, Sidecar, Lyft, and Uber. In a new post, a project calculated the “cost of loyalty” to one just one app.

How Weather Forecast Predicts Walmart’s Sales Outlook (AdAge)
Walmart has been basing decisions on weather data for years in obvious ways, such as putting up umbrella or snow-shovel displays in advance of rain or snow. But now, the Earth’s largest retailer is delving far deeper into sometimes unlikely correlations between weather and store sales on a Zip Code level.

Review Sites Can Now Legally Manipulate Reviews For Cash. But Should They? (VentureBeat)
Yoac Schwartz: Manipulation is an artificial representation of the community’s sentiments, and crucially, it destroys the basic foundation of trust that a user expects when she reads a review online. If Yelp can manipulate reviews on its site, and is now protected by the court in doing so, what’s to stop Yelp from simply fabricating reviews?

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