Hyperlocal companies rely on the data that consumers knowingly share in order to build profiles and serve them with the most relevant information — but would consumers still assent to this sharing if they truly understood everything that is being done with their digital data?

It’s been nearly a year since Yext announced a massive round of funding and SinglePlatform sold to Constant Contact within a week each other, and the value proposition for a real-time data and content network continues gain steam. As both firms put that capital to use, a third company, Locu, is trying to carve out its own share of the market with a similar model and sizable — albeit smaller — stack of cash...

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...

There’s a not-too-quiet rivalry brewing between Square and PayPal over offline payments, and this week saw the unofficial opening of an important new theatre: the SMB point of sale (POS). It’s perhaps the stickiest problem for both companies to solve in order to make payments work, and their respective announcements demonstrate a strategic skism similar to what we’ve seen in desktop computers and mobile phones..

The flood of new loyalty and payment startups that littered last summer’s newscycle has dried up, with only a handful of companies - namely, Square, Belly, FiveStars and LevelUp - making it to a meaningful second or third round of funding. Add Marqeta to that list. The maker of a branded and white-labeled prepaid loyalty card announced that it closed a $14 million series A round led by Greylock Partners this morning, and revealed that its technology underpins the Facebook Card, the social network’s most recent stab at gifting...

A lot of digital ink has been spilled about why Facebook would want to snap up Waze — namely, the company's 40 million mobile users. But the discussions also verify the once-unthinkable reality that a startup could scale a navigation and mapping service into a billion-dollar business in five years. A number of technological trends have set the stage for Waze and other mapping and navigation startups to compete. Here’s a look at a few of them...

“The changes in the next five years in retail will be more profound and transformational than the last 100 years in retail have been because largely because of mobile,” said Cyriac Roeding, CEO of Shopkick. “I don't think people will go [to stores] because they need something. I don’t even think they’ll go because they want something. I think they’ll go because they want to feel better.”

Just six weeks into the year, we’ve already seen a spike in hyperlocal industry acquisitions (not to mention well-founded rumors). Here's a quick look at four major players who may be in the hunt for locally focused acquisitions and what each might be looking for...

The introduction of SaaS POS has broad implications, not only for payment firms like Square, but also a host of other loyalty and lead generation start-ups that have worked to tie into the point of sale over the past 18 months. It brings scalable access to real-time data on nearly every inch of local retailers' operations, not only accelerating existing sectors like loyalty and rewards but opening new opportunities for key services like live inventory search...

Does Foursquare need to be "fun" anymore? I’d say no. "Fun" means fighting an ever-diminishing battle over consumer mindshare on mobile — a fight Foursquare is losing. It’s also contrary to what Foursquare is trying to build with its Explore functionality...