New Location-Based Services Are Poised to Enter the Mainstream

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To a surprising degree, the panels and presenters at Street Fight’s Local Data Summit last week in Denver emphasized a similar theme: we’re about to see a plethora of new technology-enhanced real-life experiences centering on ingenious uses of data. The signal feature this time around is an orientation toward experiences situated in a physical context. The question the new technologies will answer is this: “What do I need my technology to do for me now, in this place, at this time, under these circumstances?”

Street Fight Daily: Apple Rolls Out iBeacon Program, Square Picks Up In-Store

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.Apple Starts iBeacon Product Certification Under ‘Made for iPhone’ Program (Apple Insider)… Square is Testing a New App for Ordering Food: Square Pickup (Priceonomics)… Ford to Drop Microsoft From Car Systems (New York Times)…

Charting Consumer Behavior In the Real World

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At Street Fight’s Local Data Summit on Tuesday, LocalSEOGuide proprietor Andrew Shotland started off a morning panel discussion on charting consumer behavior in the real world by asking panelists how close the local data industry is to being able to collect and aggregate the location of consumers, and then sell that information directly to marketers…

#LDS14 As New Sensors Emerge, Risks and Rewards in Location Data

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The bulk of location data may come from smartphone’s today, but a new wave of sensors could open up a range of new possibilities for developers and businesses to interact with consumers a given place. During a panel at Street Fight’s Local Data Sumit in Denver Tuesday, speakers from Intel, Qualcomm, and KS Technologies discussed the way chip-level innovations are driving the local tech space, and how new sensors could open up a flood of consumer location data.

How Esri’s Amber Case Plans to Make Technology Invisible

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At the Street Fight Local Data Summit in Denver on Tuesday, Esri R&D Director Amber Case spoke about ‘calm technology’ and the future of location data. Case, who sold her startup Geoloqi to Esri in 2012, argued that mobile data should empower people and bring meaning to their lives by making interactions invisible…

How Online Reviews and Product Information Are Fundamentally Changing Local Marketing

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In a new book, “Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information.” Stanford professor Itamar Simonson and co-author Emanuel Rosen take a look at the impact that access to perfect information has on the way consumers make purchase decisions. The big finding is that more and more, the value of brand, and the type of awareness marketing aimed at keeping the brand top of mind, is quickly eroding…

As Offline Purchase Data Comes Online, Changes in Store for Local Marketing

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If exchange is the purpose of a marketplace, transaction data — information about who bought what from whom, and for how much — is its pulse. With 90% of transactions occurring offline, the growth of connected payments, and the subsequent ability for businesses and consumers to understand who’s buying what in the real-world, has deep implications not only for the local marketplace, but for the wider digital economy as well….

An Opportunity for Mobile in the Middle of the Marketing Funnel

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The mobile industry has struggled to find its place in a crowded marketing landscape, sandwiched between an entrenched television industry, which controls billions in branding dollars, and a formative paid search sector that dominates the ready-to-buy consumer. But Michael Hayes, the executive in charge of turning UberMedia into a profitable business, believes that the mobile industry could find its sweet spot selling to consumers in the middle…

Placemeter CEO: How ‘Computer Vision’ Is Making Our Cities Smarter

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Thanks to rapid developments in “computer vision,” a technology that uses machine learning to identify patterns in video streams, a small team of technologists at Brooklyn-based startup Placemeter have built a system that uses over 500 personal and private video cameras sited throughout Manhattan to measure everything from the crowd in Times Square to the line outside of Shake Shack…

What Obama’s 2012 Election Can Tell Us About Using Data to Build Communities

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The campaign’s technology team, comprised mostly of political newcomers, used data analytics to rethink the way television ads were bought, and where its army of volunteers were sent. One of the big breakthroughs, says Carol Davidsen, was in using data to navigate the twisted world of local television, finding audiences in unsuspecting — and often far less expensive — places…

Street Fight Daily: Apple Preps Mobile Payments, Starbucks Readies Order Ahead

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.Apple Pushes Deeper Into Mobile Payments (Wall Street Journal)… Starbucks is Getting Ready to Let You Order Coffee Before You Get to the Store (Quartz)… Care.com, The ‘Amazon Of Caregiving Services’ Popped 43% On Its IPO Day (Business Insider)…

With Perfect Information, Does ‘Awareness’ Becomes Obsolete?

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In a world in which information is finite and often inaccessible, the ability for a business to be top of mind — to carve out a little spot in a consumer’s memory — was a powerful competitive advantage, and one that drove the way businesses sold goods and services to local consumers. But thanks to the rapid adoptions of mobile devices by consumers and the emergence of inexpensive cloud-based operations software, that’s changing…

The Real World Is on the Verge of Its Own Data Revolution

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With nearly 9 billion devices connecting to the web today, the malls and main streets where consumers still spend 90% of their income are on the verge of their own data revolution. A world of connected devices — from smartphones and tablets to wi-fi routers and bluetooth beacons — are measuring the comings and goings of buyers and sellers locally, creating a new dataset that businesses, consumers and technology companies can use to create a better, more efficient local marketplace…

Placed CEO: In the Real World, It’s People — Not Places — That Matter

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There’s a broader effort in the technology community to chart consumer behavior in the real-world, using mobile devices to measure movement throughout the the world as marketers use cookies trace users as the browse the web. Street Fight recently caught up with David Shim, the chief executive at Placed, to discuss the ins and out of charting consumer behavior in the real-world…

Esri’s Amber Case: Why ‘Less Is More’ With Local Data

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As far as technologists are concerned, few in the industry are more familiar with the nuts and bolts of how location data is made than Amber Case. A self-proclaimed “cyborg anthropologist,” she sold her startup Geoloqi, which built positioning algorithms for developers, to Esri last year, and today, she heads up the 45-year-old mapping firm’s R&D center. Street Fight recently caught up with Case to discuss what we might expect from location data in the years to come…