Street Fight Daily: Groupon Pays Up, Yelp Shines in Apple Maps
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Groupon Promising Merchants “Lowest Cost” Payments Service (And It’s Using an iPhone) (AllThingsD)
Groupon is rolling out a new payments service today, which it hopes will create new reasons for merchants to continue using the Chicago daily deal provider. The service allows merchants to accept credit and debit cards by swiping them through a card reader attached to an iPhone or iPod touch.
You May Hate Apple Maps, But the Yelp Integration is Something to Love (Venture Beat)
In iOS 6, released Wednesday, Yelp’s business reviews are cooked into the controversial Apple Maps experience, and these are now instantly accessible to hundreds of millions of iOS users. Yelp data in Apple Maps is both fetching and functional; the marriage of maps and Yelp-enriched business listings makes for a stunning experience that pumps up the volume on the usefulness of Yelp’s service. Google+ Local mobile business pages, by comparison, appear drab.
How Better Location Data Could Mean More-targeted Mobile Ads (GigaOm)
Targeting consumers with relevant ads on their mobile devices is still an inexact science, but new data sources should make the process much more accurate. Knowing precisely where users shop and whether ads influenced their purchases could help everyone get what they expect from mobile ads.
Four Years Later, The Ann Arbor Chronicle is Still Weird and Wonky — And It’s Growing (Nieman Lab)
Handed an opportunity by the closure of the Ann Arbor News, two married journalists have built a small business on the kind of civic-minded reporting that isn’t supposed to work online. On a busy day, the Chronicle posts three stories; on a slow day, it posts nothing.
Aisle411 Buys Indoor Geo-location Firm WiLocate’s Technology Assets (The Next Web)
Mobile retail navigation service provider aisle411 today announced that it has acquired the indoor positioning technology assets and certain patents pending of geo-location company WiLocate. The company’s positioning solution leverages a building’s existing Wi-Fi infrastructure and sensor information from mobile devices, such as data provided by the gyroscope and compass, to deliver precise location information without the need for any specialized hardware or additional infrastructure.
SeeClickFix: Crowdsourced Local Problem Reporting as Community News (Knight Digital Media Center)
SeeClickFix began life about five years ago as a website where people could report problems in their communities, such as potholes or graffiti, and then connect with neighbors and local governments to get them fixed. Zack Beatty of SeeClickFix explains how hyperlocal news sites can use a free web widget to illuminate local issues, spur community discourse, and spark story ideas.
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