Street Fight Daily: Discover Pushes Paypal In-Store, Twitter Opens Self-Serve Ads

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

paypalDiscover Pushes PayPal’s In-Store Service as First Data Holds Out (Wall Street Journal)
Discover is making headway in its efforts to bring eBay online-payments service to physical retailers, even as one of the country’s largest merchant processors has opted not to support the service. Discover said Tuesday it has deals with 50 merchant acquirers, which handle card transactions for retailers, to offer eBay’s PayPal service as a payment option at checkout counters.

In Tomorrow’s Retail Universe, the Destination Is ‘You’ (Street Fight)
Doug Stephens: Based on clues we can see all around us, it is my belief that retail, as we’ve known it for at least the last two millennia, is coming to an end. It won’t end tomorrow or next week. In fact, it will likely take at least a decade or two. But it’s very clear to me that we are coming to a tipping point and data, processing power and connectedness lie at the center of it all.

Twitter Opens Up Self-Serve Advertising Platform to All Businesses (GigaOm)
Self-serve advertising on Twitter will now be widely available to all users rather than invite-only, the company announced Tuesday. The move, while not surprising, formally opens the doors for Twitter to make more money on its advertising platform and demonstrates that the company is now ready to sell ads on a larger scale.

The Web Isn’t a Local Broadcast Channel, It’s a Listening Post (Street Fight)
Terry Heaton: Let legacy media be legacy media — but get used to the idea that, in a connected world, the ability to carve out new local news niches and profit centers is based, in large part, on our ability to listen. This is not a skill widely held among those who only “distribute,” but it’s one of the keys to a successful tomorrow in the network.

Won’t You Be in My Nextdoor Network? (AllThingsD)
Nextdoor launched in 2011 and is now running in every state, in over 11,500 neighborhoods. It adds about 40 or so neighborhoods each day, according to its co-founder and CEO, Nirav Tolia. The company plans to release an app for Apple’s iOS devices within the next month and an Android app sometime this summer. Nextdoor currently works as a website only, which can be accessed on mobile browsers.

Using Social Media to Make Offline Products More Meaningful (Fast Company)
With Google Street View, Yelp, Foursquare and a host of other location-aware technologies, we have successfully uploaded the world onto the Internet. It’s not enough, though, to have achieved augmented reality–the hyped tech trend that developers and entrepreneurs enthused over back in 2009. Now, as we stream the human experience 24-7, through our mobile devices and social services like Facebook and Instagram, the process is being, yet again, flipped on its head.

Why ‘SoLoMo’ Isn’t Going Anywhere (Mashable)
For the partners at Kleiner Perkins, the goal of coining the term SoLoMo was largely to declare an area of interest for future investments. But within a few months, the term started to pop up in lectures and articles debating how marketers and startups should best capitalize on the changing habits of consumers.

Google News Sources Grow 15% In 2012 & Continue To Climb With Patch.com In The Lead (Search Engine Land)
After seeing a 15 percent increase in Google News sources last year, a recent study conducted by SearchMetrics discovered that a majority of the News integrations displayed in Google Universal Search results are coming from AOL-owned Patch.com. After analyzing several hundred thousand keywords, the study found that Patch.com made an appearance in the News integration results 4,352 times.

Apple Looking for Deeper iOS Integration into Cars (GigaOm)
Apple doesn’t just want the iPhone to be along for the ride via its already announced Siri Eyes Free feature: Apple wants parts of iOS to be in your car. That’s according to a new report from 9to5Mac, which says Apple is working with car manufacturers on updated in-car hardware for the iPhone and methods of displaying Apple Maps on the car’s dashboard.

RetailNext nearly doubles funding with $15m round from StarVest, Nokia and others (TheNextWeb)
Software company RetailNext, which helps brick-and-mortar retailers analyze how shoppers behave inside their stores, has raised $15 million in a Series C round of funding led by new investor StarVest Partners. RetailNext posits that its platform brings e-commerce style analytics to physical retail stores, enabling retailers to collect and correlate data from a set of sources that includes video cameras, point-of-sale systems, Wi-Fi devices, and time and attendance apps.

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