Street Fight Daily: Square Offers Flat Rate, Food Network Goes Local
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Square Offers Flat-Rate Plan for Small Businesses (New York Times)
On Thursday, Square, which offers a mobile payment service, said it would give small businesses in the United States — those that process up to $250,000 a year in transactions through Square — the option of paying a flat fee of $275 a month, rather than 2.75 percent per transaction. At that rate, the deal makes sense for businesses processing more than $10,000 a month.
Food Network Goes Local, Builds Its Own Meal Finder App (GigaOm)
Food Network is continuing its push into mobile media, this time with a new restaurant finder app called On the Road. The app isn’t Yelp or Urbanspoon. It draws its content and recommendation solely from FN’s TV programming, and that’s the way Food Network likes it.
Instagram 3.0 Bets Big On Geolocation With Photo Maps (TechCrunch)
Alexia Tsotsis: Almost like Instagram’s mobile-focused answer to Facebook’s Timeline, Photo Maps — available on both iOS and Android — is an attempt to provide narrative around the photos users have up until now uploaded with no real structure. Location data is used to create custom map of photos (hence the name), allowing users to tell more coherent stories about photos they’ve been uploading willy nilly.
Vamos Uses Social Graph to Power Local Event Discovery (GigaOm)
Where’s the party at? That’s the question Vamos is trying to answer with an iOS app that aggregates and overlays Facebook event data on a map, for real-time and hyperlocal discovery
EveryBlock’s Hype ‘Definitely Faded,’ Says Holovaty, But It’s More Popular Than Ever (The Verge)
“We got a lot of attention from journalism wonks,” says departing founder Adrian Holovaty. “I tried to make the most of it, but for a site that serves a limited number of cities, that kind of industry attention is helpful only to a point. If EveryBlock were a product sold to journalists, the buzz we got would’ve been fantastic, but it’s a product for city residents who may or may not care about the Future Of News.”
No More TBD.com (Washington Post)
Erik Wemple: TBD.com has died its third or fourth — but this time final — death. It launched in August 2010 to insane and silly fanfare, an editorial head count north of 30 and hope that maybe someone could make a living off a forward-looking news site that wasn’t just on the Web, but “of the Web,” as General Manager Jim Brady liked to say.
Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.