Street Fight Daily: Clinkle Raises $25M, Square Poaches AdSense ‘Godfather’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Silicon Valley Luminaries Bet on Clinkle, a Payments Start-Up (TechCrunch)
Clinkle, a new mobile payments start-up, may or may not have succeeded where so many other efforts have fizzled by inventing a practical way to replace credit cards with smartphones. On Thursday, Clinkle announced that it had raised $25 million in early financing from Accel Partners; Andreessen Horowitz; Intel; Intuit; Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com; Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal; and a long list of other investors with technology industry pedigrees.
Starcom’s Thompson: ‘Not One Client’ Is Not Interested in Hyperlocal (Street Fight)
“Across Starcom MediaVest’s portfolio, I cannot think of one client that is not interested in this space. You have consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) brands that are asking how location can help them best reach their audiences; you have auto manufacturers who want to reach people in real time at a given place; and you have travel companies that want to understand those audiences. Across the board, brands are curious about location. … They just don’t understand which technologies are out there, and how they can harness these signals and make sense out of them.”
Square Poaches Facebook’s Lead Ad Engineer Gokul Rajaram (AdAge)
Square has just made a key hire, poaching Facebook’s director of ad products Gokul Rajaram to be its product engineering lead. Mr. Rajaram, who had been at Facebook since September 2010 and played a critical role in spearheading the development of new ad products, will lead development for Square Register, a point-of-sale system for businesses, and other products.
Non-Profit Independents, One-Time Successors to Local Media, Face Funding Woes (Street Fight)
Pat Kitano: You think traditional broadcast media like TV and radio are struggling with depleted revenue models as audiences move to online screens? Consider those who were already depleted: Community broadcasters on cable access TV and local radio. These folks face even greater challenges with sparse audiences, a limited to non-existent revenue model, and funding from foundations drying up faster than fresh rain in the Mojave Desert.
Cramer: Macy’s Hyper-Local Strategy to Drive Sales (CNBC)
The Mad Money host thinks Macy’s has a tailwind that retailers such as Coach, Ralph Lauren and many others do not have. And according to Lundgren Macy’s is much more than a US focused retailer – it’s hyper local retailer, largely via an initiative called My Macy’s. That is, Macy’s has people living and monitoring 69 cities around the country, “and they’re guiding the decisions we make – they’re determining what we sell and how it varies location to location,” Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren said.
Yelp Sues To Take Down Paid Review Mill (Marketing Land)
Yelp has sued to terminate and collect damages from a site called BuyOnlineReviews.net. The site leads with Yelp but it promises to generate fake positive reviews for a range of local directories and social sites including Google +, Citysearch, InsiderPages, Local.com, SuperPages, Foursquare, Kudzu, YellowPages as well as Yelp.
FCC Says Carriers Must Protect Sensitive Customer Data Used To Improve Cell Networks (Verge)
The Federal Communications Commission has issued a declaratory ruling calling for wireless carriers to protect customer proprietary network information (CPNI) stored on end-user devices. The data in question includes call logs, duration, and a device’s location at both the beginning and conclusion of a call.
PayPal Beating Square At Its Own Game In UK (VentureBeat)
Rocky Agrawal: PayPal is leaping ahead with an EMV version of its PayPal Here reader, which is a better fit for many international markets. It’s a small but important step and shows that PayPal president David Marcus is intent on reforming the commonly held belief that PayPal is slow and bureaucratic.
For His Next Act, Ex-Groupon CEO Set to Release Album (Wall Street Journal)
For anyone wondering what former Groupon Inc. CEO Andrew Mason has been up to since his high-profile firing in February, the answer came on Thursday: Making music. Mr. Mason posted on his blog Thursday that he would release his debut album – aptly titled “Hardly Workin’” – on July 2, a seven-song collection of “motivational business music” targeted at new entrants to the workforce. He said he would release the album via “iTunes, Spotify, etc.”
LBMA Podcast: ‘Connected’ Cars and ‘Connected’ Homes (Street Fight)
In this week’s episode, Asif’s take on location in Singapore; SingleTouch launches their FollowMe service; uKnow partners with ESRI to help track your family; Gannett acquires Belo’s television stations and tries to go hyperlocal; Tred delivers your next new car test drive; Google’s Project Loon soars; The connected car is going to be big; Special guest Mike Soucie of Revolv on the connected home.
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