Street Fight Daily: Twitter Tests Local Discovery, Bing Aggregates Deals (Again)

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

twitter-bird-blue-on-whiteTwitter Testing New Local Discovery Features — And It’s About Time (AllThingsD)
According to multiple sources, Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location. The idea is to surface relevant activity based on where you are in the world, serving up tweets from others around you — whether you follow them or not.

What Hyperlocal Marketers Can Learn From Disney (Street Fight)
Matt Sokoloff: We talk a lot in the hyperlocal industry about what the future of offline marketing and commerce will look like. Mostly it would seem to involve taking the advantages of online marketing and shopping (customization, personalization, analytics, actionable CRM data, etc.) and bringing them into the real world of retail stores. Different players have been experimenting with different elements of this online-to-offline migration of technology, but the Walt Disney Company has really taken the ball and run with it.

Microsoft Quietly Shuts Down Bing Deals, Launches Bing Offers As A Replacement (TechCrunch)
The daily deals hype around Groupon, LivingSocial and all of their clones has markedly cooled down over the last few months, but that isn’t stopping Microsoft from launching Bing Offers, a new local deals aggregator for the U.S. market, today. Bing Offers, the company says, will aggregate deals from “a broad set of partners, including many of the leading local deal providers.

Openings & New Hires at Amazon, AOL, WebMD, Edmunds, Swipely and more… (Street Fight)
Kelly Benish: Ray King is an extremely clever and creative visionary in the space and as a graduate of M.I.T. majoring in computer science and later becoming the CEO of Snapnames. He is a perfectionist. His new company Top Level Design, seeks to capitalize on new “top-level” domains awaiting approval. Read about more hyperlocal execs on the move in this week’s Movers & Shakers column.

Belly Dance: Can Lightbank and Chicago’s Hot New Company Avoid Groupon’s Missteps? (PandoDaily)
Sarah Lacy: Belly is in the news today, because it is launching a new enterprise platform to bring more robust analytics to national retail chains, with several pilot programs already in place. The two conversations I’ve had with Silicon Valley insiders where loyalty company Belly has come up have both been effusive. But oddly enough, both have invoked the disaster that is Groupon.

Square Poaches SMB Maven Francoise Brougher From Google (Wall Street Journal)
Mobile payments company Square tapped Google vice president Francoise Brougher as its head of business, seeking to steady and beef up its operations. Brougher, who will carry the title “business lead” spent several years at Google, most recently leading the team responsible for acquiring and growing small advertisers.

LevelUp and Merchant Warehouse Launch $1m Fund to Encourage Developers to Build Mobile-Payment Apps (TheNextWeb)
LevelUp has partnered with Merchant Warehouse today to launch a $1 million co-sponsored development fund designed to encourage more developers to build apps leveraging its mobile payments platform. The various readers integrate a number of different transaction methods, payment types and customer loyalty schemes to give merchants a ‘one size fits all’ solution for accepting mobile payments.

Monolith Wants to be the Google Analytics of the Offline Advertising World in Retail Stores (ReadWrite)
Monolith aims to track what people are watching on TV or billboards, the offline advertising world if you will. Now, the startup is now working on both the software and the hardware for gathering data about shopper behavior in retail stores. The company has won a slew of startup awards to date, but most promisingly it has customers lined up already, including Nike as well as Johnson&Johnson, and is planning pilots with Bogner.

LBMA PODCAST: Tempo Founder Discusses Calendars as an OS (Street Fight)
Welcome to This Week in Location Based Marketing. In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan talk about Nike’s use of 3D holographs to sell shoes in Amsterdam; paying by sound in Beijing; K-Mart uses check-ins to promote the world’s largest bake sale. And special guest Raj Singh, founder of Tempo talks about the calendar as the operating system.

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