Street Fight Daily: Facebook Readies SMB Push, Foursquare’s Nascent Asset

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

smalltownAs Small Businesses Become Tech Savvy, They Could Earn Big Ad Revenue For Facebook (TechCrunch)
Just 3 percent of small business ad spend goes online right now, but that’s going to change, and Facebook wants to become these merchants’ channel of choice. There are already 2 billion connections between people and small businesses on Facebook, and their Pages get 645 million views and 13 million comments a week, Facebook announced today.

Street Fight at Two: Looking Back, Looking Forward (Street Fight)
The Editors: When we first launched Street Fight in April of 2011, we saw a lot of energy coming together around consumer targeting by location, and over he past two years we’ve seen many companies in the hyperlocal space really starting to gain traction. We’ve really enjoyed the ride so far and we look forward to bringing you even more of the latest news, research and community around hyperlocal business in the coming years.

Why Foursquare’s Growth Story Is Better Than You Think (Forbes)
Jeff Bercovici: While not nearly as visible a part of the business as the consumer-facing app, Foursquare’s most valuable, yet still-nascent asset, is the company’s application programming interface, or API. And it’s only in the past few months that Foursquare has come to think of its API as a core part of its business and started strategizing ways to leverage it.

6 Ad Servers for Hyperlocal News Sites (Street Fight)
Selecting the right ad server for a local news site has both financial and functional implications. Although many first-time publishers manage ads within their CMS platforms using ad plugins, those tools can only scale so far. Here are six ad servers that work with hyperlocal sites.

Andrew Mason on How to Deal: From Founder to Ex-Groupon CEO (Fast Company)
Groupon’s journey from world’s hottest startup to most polarizing company in tech is delicious, disgraceful, and just plain weird. Inside its precipitous fall — and its audacious bid for redemption.

What Reviews Sites Need to Do to Prepare for Facebook’s Graph Search (Street Fight)
Ali Alami: It’s well known that reviews, ratings, and recommendations are a major factor in driving consumer decisions. Sourcing friends or people you know to provide advice holds even more weight when it comes to personalization and has an added benefit of trust. This is what makes the concept of Facebook’s new Graph Search so powerful.

Why Do People Who Won’t Eat Without Checking Yelp Ignore Their Doctor’s Ratings? (GigaOm)
Consumers turn to online reviews for plenty of big and small purchase decisions, but in health care their engagement continues to lag. According to a new report, 48 percent of the individuals surveyed said that they read health care reviews online, while just 24 percent have written a review. Of those that have read reviews, 68 percent said that they used them to choose where to get health care.

Test Run: What Mobile Payments Companies Can Learn From Chipotle (New York Times)
The lingering problem with mobile payments is that it’s usually no more convenient to pay with a phone instead of cash or credit card. But a recent trip to a franchise of Chipotle Mexican Grill in Manhattan was a rare and shining moment where paying with a phone was frictionless and actually sped things up.

Two Months After Acquisition, OpenTable Integrates Foodspotting into Its iOS App (TheNextWeb)
More than two months after OpenTable acquired restaurant discovery app Foodspotting for $10m, the online table-reservation service has finally integrated Foodspotting’s restaurant-finding and dish-sharing features into the iOS incarnation of its app. Now, you’ll be able to view the most popular dishes from Foodspotting on OpenTable’s restaurant pages, simply by swiping the gallery to browse the snaps, while you can tap them to see more information about each dish.

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