Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Expands Deals, Visa Teams with Samsung
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Foursquare Opens Up Check-In Deals to More Kinds of Plastic (AllThingsD)
Aiming to beef up one of its longstanding revenue streams, Foursquare announced on Tuesday that it will now accept Visa, Mastercard and debit cards in conjunction with its check-in deals program. The program builds on Foursquare’s partnership with American Express, which allows Foursquare users to redeem special discounts and deals by checking in to local businesses after linking their Foursquare accounts to their credit card.
Just Another Chat With a Frustrated Patch Editor (Street Fight)
“We have had two conference calls in a row the last two weeks with the people at HQ excitedly talking about big ideas that are going to get us to profitability, but the ideas sound like bad ones, not to mention ones that they have already tried,” an editor told Rick Robinson, with a mix of frustration and exasperation in his voice. “They are getting farther away from the hyperlocal vision and really pushing generic SEO content to try and get unique visitors.”
Visa Teams Up With Samsung on Mobile Payments (New York Times)
The idea of paying for things with a phone is still foreign to most people, but now Visa and Samsung Electronics are working together to make mobile payments easier. The companies on Monday said that many new Samsung phones would incorporate Visa’s payments software, called payWave.
How to Ensure That Your Geofence Is Sized Correctly (Street Fight)
Michele Turner: Location-based push campaigns have a lot of upside, from satisfied customers to higher ROI. But it can be a thin line that separates a successful campaign from one that leaves mobile users extremely annoyed — so really honing in on how to deliver the right geofence to optimize your campaign is crucial.
With ClubLocal and New SaaS Tools, ReachLocal Wants to be the Amazon of Local Services (PandoDaily)
In the nine years since its launch, the now publicly traded company has lead the transition of local lead-gen spending away from yellow pages and onto the internet, with its business now on pace to generate $500 million in annual revenue. It’s from this market-leading position that the company today announced plans to launch its consumer-facing ClubLocal online booking service, and three small- and medium-sized business (SMB) focused SaaS products, ReachSite, ReachConvert, and ReachCommerce.
The Benefits of Groupon Therapy (Wall Street Journal)
A key risk for Groupon’s business model has always been that, for many users, its daily-deal emails quickly start to feel like spam. Critics have long argued that it would be better if users could search for deals they want. Changes Groupon made late last year have finally made that possible.
YP: Our Mobile Ad Network Second Only To Google (SearchEngineLand)
When the dust settles US mobile ad revenue will probably come in somewhere between $3 and $3.5 billion for 2012. Google is the clear market leader, but which company is number two? Facebook? Millennial Media? Twitter? YP said that it had “over $350 million in advertising revenue [in 2012] attributable to mobile, making it the number two company in the U.S. mobile advertising industry.”
Another Top Executive Has Left Square (Business Insider)
Jared Fliesler, Square’s vice president of user acquisition and business operations, has left the mobile-payments company, several people have confirmed to Business Insider. The company has seen considerable turnover recently, especially in its risk department, which manages fraud and merchant-account approvals, and its customer-support operations.
TomTom Nets Another Major Partner in Mobile Mapping Deal With Intel-owned Telmap (The Next Web)
Intel-owned Telmap is set to expand its navigation and location services after it announced a new deal with TomTom at MWC, with mapping company powering Telmap mobile apps and services on major smartphone platforms. Like Apple, Telmap will have access to TomTom’s POIs, 3D city maps and voice navigation services, providing app users with more contextual navigation and most importantly – highly accurate navigation and mapping data.
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