Street Fight Daily: D.C. Taxis to Replace Meters with Square, Instagram May Allow Search by Location

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

Square Will Replace Meters in D.C. Taxis, Potentially Fueling Data Collection and Local Commerce (Bloomberg)
D.C. is enlisting Square’s help as its taxi commission tries to help the city’s cabs compete with Uber drivers. By the end of August, all of the taxis in Washington have to tear out their traditional meters and start using smartphones or tablets, in what the city government has been describing as a complete reimagining of how the cab system works.

PlaceIQ Rolls Out LandMark Location Insights Product to Track Consumer Changes (Street Fight)
CEO Duncan McCall says that with LandMark his company can now tell clients where they are losing customers and who they are losing them to. The idea is to make sense of location and movement data in ways that advertisers can use.

Instagram May Allow Users to Search Publicly Shared Stories by Location (AdWeek)
“For a long time, I’ve felt like we’ve had these location pages—it’s been almost this hidden gem part of Instagram,” said Kevin Weil, head of product. “If you want to know what restaurant to go to in the evening, you can go and look at what people have posted from any given restaurant around you if it has a place page on Instagram.”

How SMB Networking Is Driving More Referral Marketing (Street Fight)
Many small businesses have picked up on referral marketing options, but word-of-mouth referrals are an ancillary benefit of networking with other local business owners. “The entire business community needs a way to connect and have ongoing dialogue,” says Ro Prakash, co-founder of Townsquared.

Web-Retail Startups Turn to Bricks and Mortar for Growth (WSJ)
Casper Sleep Inc. rattled the mattress industry with a bed-in-a-box that is sold only online, shipped free and comes with a 100-night guarantee. But after three years of robust sales as it lured customers through Facebook ads and podcast sponsorships, Casper is finding it can no longer shun the storefront. 

LevelUp Bags $50 Million from JPMorgan Chase and Others for Mobile Payments (Xconomy)
Today the Boston-based mobile payments firm announced a $50 million funding round, which includes $37 million in equity funding and $13 million in debt financing, according to an e-mailed statement attributed to Alex Shuck, LevelUp’s director of marketing and analytics.

Coming Soon: Amazon Echo Push Notifications (VentureBeat)
Amazon Alexa-enabled device like the Echo will soon be able to deliver news, weather, or health-related alerts with notifications from their Echo smart speaker. The move would make Alexa the first among companies like Google and Microsoft whose third-party voice apps can proactively send notifications.

Local News Outlets Find Unlikely Ally in the Duopoly (Digiday)
Talk to a big publisher about Google and Facebook, and you’ll hear the strains of a dysfunctional relationship. But there’s one publishing sector that’s surprisingly having a bit of a honeymoon period: local news.

Measuring Content Performance is Top Priority for Nearly Two-Thirds of Marketers (eMarketer)
For almost two-thirds of US marketers, content performance is the most important consideration for measuring campaign success, according to new data from marketing analytics provider TrackMaven.

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