Given that Foursquare's user base isn't going to get as big as Facebook's or Twitter's (which is not necessarily a bad thing) and considering the pressure to justify its valuation, putting too much faith in a native ad model could potentially spell trouble for the company...

Groupon’s stock price soared Friday on speculation that Google, its onetime suitor, might make an offer for the troubled local commerce firm. It’s unfounded speculation, but an interesting thought experiment nonetheless: How could Google leverage Groupon's assets to solidify its local commerce offerings?

Earlier this week, General Motors announced plans to integrate iOS devices into its on-dash infotainment system, bringing Apple’s virtual assistant Siri to a handful of its smaller vehicles early next year. Siri integration mixed with maps and a rumored radio product could provide Apple with the necessary footing to make a dent in local advertising and finally turn around its inert iAd network...

It doesn’t look like Yelp has plans to push across the local marketing stack anytime soon. Responding to a question of whether Yelp planned to position itself as a local operating system for local business like Groupon, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said it was “hard to say what tangential businesses [Yelp would] get into” but “its safe to say we’re focused.”

Part of what makes the margin for Groupon’s local commerce business so high is that the marketplace already exists. The supply networks, fulfillment methods, and customer base needed to keep a market running are already in place. Groupon was merely an accelerant — a facilitator of commerce within a given structure. Goods pushed the company into the marketplace business, and the variable risks and liabilities associated with the upkeep of a market...

Foursquare bears tend to ridicule the check-in as a passing fad, but the check-in did two critical things for the company. It provided a mechanism through which the company could build and maintain its own dataset, and more importantly, it served as both an opaque piece of content (“Oh look, my friend checked-in here, it must be good.") as well as an actionable, and manipulable, piece of data that (unlike content) gains value as inventory scales...

We’re seeing an explosion of activity in the logistics space with a handful of key startups expanding; Walmart piloting a same-day delivery option; and eBay opening its own delivery service, eBay Now. What’s driving the resurgence however, is not the e-commerce framework that sunk Kozmo and continues to hinder Amazon's efforts. It’s a new push to improve connectivity, and transparency, within existing local marketplaces — not build new ones...

Capping off a summer-long push to lay the groundwork for Foursquare’s financial future, CEO Dennis Crowley pitched the service to brand marketers at an Advertising Week event on Monday. It’s a fitting conclusion to what has been a critical period of maturation and redefinition for the company, as it looks to transition from startup heartthrob to standalone business...

More data on a faster device means new opportunities for data-heavy hyperlocal developers, which should open up some new innovations by developers. And while the omission of near-field communications may dash the hopes of some who looked for Apple to push into payments, it does not diminish the potential impact of iOS6, the operating system announced in June, and its key feature — Passbook...

As the consumer's relationship with local information has shifted from search to discovery, so has their relationship with maps. The question for Google and Apple is whether 3D mapping is an innovation built to sustain, or disrupt, the search-based local web that Google envisioned when it launched Maps in 2005...