Street Fight Daily: Google Personalizing Maps, Square Aims High
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Google’s Plan to Personalize Maps Could End Public Space as We Know It (Slate)
In the near future, the maps we see will be dynamically generated and highly personalized, giving preferential treatment to the places frequented by our social networking friends, the places we mention in our emails, the sites we look up on the search engine. Conversely, the places that we haven’t encountered—or, at least, haven’t yet expressed any interest in encountering—will be harder to find.
Square Is the Shape of Things to Come, Says Jack Dorsey (Telegraph)
“The way to think about the simple card reader was that we wanted to let individuals take credit card payments, whether that’s roaming personal trainers or golf instructors, and then with the partnership with Starbucks we took the product to a much bigger level,” he says. “Now we’re looking at really high volume, big service restaurants and also even more bricks and mortar places.”
Why Waze Is a Hot Takeover Target (CNN/Money)
“What a lot of people don’t know about Waze is on the front end we’re an app, but we are also making our own maps. This is something very few people can do,” said Di-Ann Eisnor, vice president of platforms and partnerships for Waze. “The two [companies] that are really in front in real time mapping are us and Google, so we each actually have our own maps and people don’t know that.”
Local Viewpoints Tries to Make Reviews Almost Painless for Consumers, SMBs (ScreenWerk)
Greg Sterling: Having online reviews is imperative for small businesses. The burning question for merchants is how to get consumer reviews effectively and ethically. A new company called Local Viewpoints specializes in consumer satisfaction surveys and then uses an algorithm to build reviews from the responses to those surveys.
Are We Seeing the Resurgence of Internet Yellow Pages? (Clickz)
Gregg Stewart: Consumers’ satisfaction with local search on the portal search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) declined in 2012 while IYPs gained in terms of satisfaction with local business information. Additionally, the likelihood of returning to either an IYP or search engine portal was impacted positively for IYPs and negatively for portals.
Publishers Crave an Alternative to Google’s Adtech “Death Star” (PaidContent)
Rags Gupta: Google has systematically assembled an integrated tech stack in digital advertising on both the buy and sell sides, offering publishers the tantalizing prospect of working with just one partner. Google’s army of account managers will then try to cross-sell and up-sell all kinds of solutions as well as bundle in content distribution and monetization on YouTube and their other properties. Yet, perhaps ironically, Google’s early success in building out an integrated stack is driving the industry’s transition.
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