Street Fight Daily: Selling Main Street, Mobile Payments Ease Cash Flow

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

smalltown1The Newsonomics of Selling Main Street (Nieman Lab)
Ken Doctor: Whether you call it marketing services, digital services, or something else, it’s the new point of emphasis for newspaper companies. Can it bust out of the “other” category of earning reports and become a key to financial sustainability?

Andrew Mason Out as Groupon CEO (Street Fight)
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason was fired by the company’s board Thursday, less than 24 hours after dismal earnings sent the company’s stock price into a tailspin. The board is currently looking for a replacement, and board members Eric Lefkofsky and Ted Leonisis will serve as co-CEOs of the company until one is found.

Payments Brighten Cash Flow for Small Business (Wall Street Journal)
Small business owners say they’re finding that mobile-payment devices and other technologies are making it easier for them to turn sales into working capital overnight. More of these companies are avoiding borrowing or tapping credit lines by turning to services like Intuit GoPayments, PayPal Here or Square Card Reader—payment applications that come with credit- and debit-card readers for mobile devices.

Openings & New Hires at Yahoo, Retailigence, Square, Patch, PayPal and more (Street Fight)
Kelly Benish: PubMatic keeps up a hiring spree; the Keith Rabois is-he-or-isn’t-he saga is over, but he’s not the only Square loss; Retailigence has a LOT of jobs on offer; and things are a-changing’ at YP. Plus, former Martha Stewart Omnimedia doyenne Susan Lyne leaves her post in hyperlocal before she even really got started, and if you’re working in sales, you won’t want to skip this lineup of listings that might work for you.

The Real Reason Why Google Is Dropping The Tablet vs. Desktop Distinction? It’s The User Context, Stupid! (Search Engine Land)
Larry Kim: Google’s enhance campaigns is built around the idea that user context matters because it helps determine what kinds of things people search for and what actions they take immediately after conducting a search. No longer an afterthought, search marketers must now think more critically about time, location and device from the get-go.

With 1M Users And $50M In Transactions, LevelUp Launches Its First API & SDK, “A Starter Kit For Mobile Payments” (TechCrunch)
This fall, LevelUp began rolling out new point-of-sale hardware that supports NFC payments and eliminated the transaction or “swipe” fees that cost merchants $50 billion each year in an effort to reduce friction on both the consumer and merchant side. CEO Seth Priebatsch now wants to help LevelUp transition from a product into a platform by way of public APIs and by offering an SDK for its white-label solution.

Dark Shadows: Why Homicide Watch Matters (Columbia Journalism Review)
Clay Shirky: Homicide Watch’s greatest contribution to crime reporting is a “just the facts” service that is part AP reporting style and part database feed, whose basic premise is that if someone is murdered in your city, it’s a story. If you want to see how radical this idea is, and how much race affects reporting, take a look at Homicide Watch’s hometown.

OpenTable’s New Facebook App Shows Where Your Friends Have Dined (Mashable)
OpenTable is continuing its efforts to get more social by releasing a new Facebook app Thursday that gives restaurant-goers a way to share their dining history with friends. The new app, called Places I’ve Eaten, lets users list and rate the restaurants they’ve been to, and those that they’d like to visit, as well as see the places that their friends have listed and rated.

Social Discovery App Sonar Gets New Investment From Bing Fund, Announces It Via Vine (TechCrunch)
Sonar, a social discovery service that was among the top apps at last year’s SXSW in Austin, is today announcing new investment from Bing Fund. Sonar’s app uses check-ins on Facebook and Foursquare, plus geo-tagged tweets, to show you lists of nearby people, ranking them first by friends you know, then showing you other relevant people nearby.

PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — Timbre (Street Fight)
Street Fight: In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan look at apps that can help you find street food; KLM’s social map; the girl scouts go all-in to sell you cookies; and questions about LivingSocial’s viability. Plus the resource of the week and special guest Mark Kasdorf, co-founder of location-based live music discovery app Timbre.

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