Street Fight Daily: Samsung’s ‘Passbook’ App, PayPal Co-Founder’s Payments Play
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Samsung Takes a Page from Apple’s Passbook With New Wallet App (Verge)
Samsung took the wraps off of its new Samsung Wallet app, which is designed to let users store things such as event tickets, boarding passes, membership cards, and coupons in one central location, much in the same fashion as Apple’s Passbook app for iOS. In addition, Wallet offers time and location-based push notifications (again, just like Passbook) to alert users as to when they are able to use the passes stored in their account.
With Mobile Growing, WPP Sees Opportunity to Make Billboards Smarter (Street Fight)
The agency’s Spafax Networks has announced a new partnership that will bring PlaceIQ’s audience data to its DOOH buying process. Like PlaceIQ’s channel partners in the mobile space, Spafax can use the latitude-longitude data associated with its inventory to target media by audience segments like “middle aged moms” or “business travelers” in vendor and geography.
PayPal Co-Founder Levchin Launches New Payments Startup, Affirm (AllThingsD)
High-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneur Max Levchin is launching a new mobile payments startup today called Affirm. While it might seem at first as if Affirm is in direct competition with other mobile payments-focused companies such as Square and Stripe, it seems to be aimed at another layer of the payment value chain in an effort to improve conversion for mobile payments.
LocalVox Turns to SMB Seminars to Drive Leads in New Markets (Street Fight)
New York-based LocalVox is expanding from New York and Boston to Washington D.C. The move is a small-but-significant step in the company’s grand plan to replace legacy players like ReachLocal as the marketing platform of choice for local businesses. LocalVox’s product allows small business to publish content across their own email, social, and web properties, as well as to a host of listing sites and other media properties from a single touchpoint.
Apple Patents Situational Awareness And Location Information Sharing For Mobile Devices (TechCrunch)
Apple was issued a patent that could make an iPhone aware of changes in a user’s situation, and alter phone settings accordingly. That would make for a mobile phone that might be able to automatically switch to silent mode when in a movie theatre, for instance, or which could wake from sleep upon being pulled out of a pocket.
Yelp: We Compete With Print — Not Google or Facebook (CNET)
“Today, we’re really competing with print, radio, and television,” Geoff Donaker, Yelp’s chief operating officer, said Tuesday when speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom conference. Donaker is sure the pair will compete with Yelp in the local advertising arena eventually — the battle will “play out in a decade or so,” he said.
Former Square Executive Keith Rabois Joins Khosla Ventures (Businessweek)
Former Square COO Keith Rabois plans to announce Tuesday morning that he’s joining Silicon Valley venture firm Khosla Ventures beginning in March as an investor. Rabois left Square after allegations of sexual harassment that surfaced in January.
Obama CIO: Location, Location, Location (and Personalization) Will be Key to Next Campaign (GigaOm)
2008 was about social networking, 2012 about big data and analytics and 2016 could well be about personalization and location, says Michael Slaby, former CIO of Obama for America.
Former Gowalla Chief Revisits the ‘Check-in Wars’ (Medium)
Josh Williams: We were the younger, prettier, but less popular sister of foursquare. And even that had changed. In time, foursquare had dramatically improved the design & experience of it’s service. This was no longer a defensible platform for us as a company.
Finally a Profitable Example of Hyperlocal: AmericanTowns (Screenwerk)
Greg Sterling: Hyperlocal may be on life support but here’s an example of one company in the segment that’s profitable: AmericanTowns.com. Ted Buerger, who is Chairman of AmericanTowns.com, told me in an email yesterday that the site has been profitable for the past three years.
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