Street Fight Daily: Samsung’s Apple Pay Competitor, Foursquare Partners With Twitter

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

samsung_galaxy_s5_officialSamsung in Talks to Launch Apple Pay Competitor (Recode)
Samsung has discussed a deal with a payments startup that would help the smartphone maker unveil a wireless mobile payments system in 2015 to rival Apple. The technology would allow people with certain Samsung phones to pay in the vast majority of brick-and-mortar stores by waving their phones instead of swiping with a credit card or cash.

Serviz CEO: Uber-like Service Providers Will Begin to Displace Local Search (Street Fight)
The on-demand service that was spun out from ReachLocal last year has snagged another $12.5 million in funding to expand beyond Los Angeles. We spoke with CEO Zorik Gordon to talk about the investment climate for local commerce and the implications of these innovations for the local search community.

Twitter And Foursquare Are Partnering to Improve Location in Tweets (Business Insider)
Twitter and Foursquare are planning to partner together in 2015 to power location in tweets, a source familiar with the deal tells Business Insider. Twitter also recently hired a geo lead from Foursquare, David Blackman, and it has six other geo-engineering job listings on its website.

Can Mobile Help TV Networks Track In-Store Visits? PlaceIQ Thinks So (Street Fight)
Marketers still spend billions on television advertising, and brands expect little measurement or performance in return. But that’s changing, and the big advertisers — often, the large retailers who sell mostly offline — now increasingly want proof of value.

Next for Yext? Digital Presence Service Buys Dutch Startup InnerBalloons (Recode)
Yext has made its first international purchase, snapping up a Dutch startup called InnerBalloons for $8 million. Like Yext, InnerBalloons syncs location data across local Dutch platforms for 15,000 small businesses in that country and will become the hub for Yext in Europe.

Ebay Expands Local Pilot Program Offering Same-Day Delivery, In-store Pickup In Brooklyn (TechCrunch)
Ebay’s testing of “last-mile” delivery hasn’t been totally shelved, it seems. The company, distancing itself from its earlier eBay Now initiative, announced today that it’s expanding its eBay Local pilot program in Brooklyn with the addition of 80 small businesses.

Google’s ‘Physical Web’ Answer To Apple’s Ibeacons Gets First Hardware Partner (Apple Insider)
Google’s early-stage “Physical Web” project — an attempt to displace Apple’s iBeacons with a similar, open-source framework — is beginning to take shape, as Turkish hardware firm Blesh is now offering the first Physical Web-compatible Bluetooth beacon hardware.

Baidu to Buy Uber Stake in Challenge to Alibaba in China (Bloomberg)
Baidu agreed to invest in Uber Technologies Inc. to expand competition with Alibaba in China’s car-booking market.Baidu will connect its map and mobile-search features with Uber’s service, the two companies said in a statement today.

Dozens More Companies Sign Up for Apple Pay (New York Times)
Apple announced that in recent weeks the company had signed up dozens more banks, retail stores and start-ups to adopt Apple Pay, the company’s new e-commerce product, which allows customers to buy things with little more than a wave of their iPhone.

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