Last week, ReachLocal took its new commerce platform for home services, ClubLocal, off of its training wheels, expanding the program into the Bay Area. Pitched as an Uber for home services, the company aims to create a self-service platform to facilitate the booking of home repairs and plumbers — but its execution overlooks some of the dynamics that make some industries, like taxicabs, more fitting to the model than others...

A roundup of today's big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.... Checking Into Foursquare? Yahoo’s CFO Talks About Next Mobile M&A — Including Importance of “Localization.” (AllThingsD)... Pew: 61 Percent In US Now Have Smartphones (MarketingLand)... Yelp Eyes Shopping On Site (SocialTimes)...

In a fireside chat with Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs at Street Fight Summit West Tuesday, Gil Elbaz, chief executive at Factual, the location data company, said there’s a massive opportunity for startups to help digest and analyze the massive amount of data coming from mobile devices. The challenge, says Elbaz, is folding additional information into location data to help better understand the context of the user...

Earlier this spring, Andrei Hagiu, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, published a piece in the Harvard Business Review looking at why marketplaces fail. Based on recent research, Hagiu, and his co-author Julian Wright, broke down the various pitfalls of building a marketplace, concluding that on the continuum between multi-sided platform and reseller, most businesses fell closer to the reseller end of the spectrum...

During a panel at the Street Fight Summit West moderated by Mark Canon of IBID Strategic Consulting on Tuesday, Patrick Gauthier, Head of Product Strategy, Retail Services, PayPal; Square’s strategic partnerships chief Chuck Kimble, and Clover CEO Leonard Speiser took a deep dive into the delicate dynamics of bringing local businesses' payments into the cloud...

A roundup of today's big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.... 29% of Consumers Would Choose a Smartphone Over a Wallet When Going Out (MobileCommerceDaily)... Growing Consumer Interest for In-Store Delivery of Mobile Coupons, Says Study (i2G)...

A roundup of today's big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.... Facebook Acquisition Talks With Waze Fall Apart (AllThingsD)... Wikipedia Debuts ‘Nearby’ Feature to Find Pages Around You (VentureBeat)... As Software Trumps Hardware In The World Of Payments, VeriFone Partners With CardSpring For Card-Linked Services (TechCrunch)...

With 99% of co-op dollars spent offline, national brands are missing a massive opportunity to reduce marketing costs and generate leads for local affiliates, according to a new report by Marchex. The study, which analyzed data from past campaigns on the platform, found that by centralizing local marketing campaigns traditionally left to less-savvy local affiliates brands can dramatically improve the impact of their local efforts....

According to a new study from xAd and Telmetrics, mobile now accounts for one third of all retail activity online with 98 million shoppers using a smartphone in their retail experience. And the vast majority of those mobile shoppers end up making purchases in-store - not on Amazon...

As more consumers look to their smartphones to engage with business locally, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need to lay out a concise mobile marketing strategy. In a Street Fight webinar Tuesday sponsored by YP, Asif Khan of the Location-based Marketing Association, and YP’s David Williams discussed the trends that make mobile a must for SMBs, and highlighted a handful of first steps that local businesses can take to keep up with their smartphone-wielding customers....